[The Weeping Angel]

[davidjay]

Balance only ever goes one way.

[Abernathy]

Tim Montgomerie on Newsnight again now appears to be displaying symptoms you’d associate with a neurological condition such as cerebral palsy. He is still fairly coherent and articulate, however, he appears very different to how he did, say, 5 or 6 years ago.

[Andy McDandy]

BBC news 24 is fucking shit. Stuck in garage waiting for car to be repaired, and it's on the waiting room screen.

Interview with Swedish MEP about EU and tariffs cut short so the presenter can offer useless commentary on the former South Korean president moving house. No insight or analysis, just repeating the same few sentences over and over.

Economics reporter does report, first half being mainly about himself.

[Boiler]

It's got much worse since the cuts to integrate the domestic service with the international service.

It's a service that we simply don't need any more - I'd rather they axed it and used the savings to give to Arqiva to buy a modern solid state transmitter for Droitwich.

[Andy McDandy]

It was just the way they went from quite relevant to who cares (apologies to anyone interested in South Korean politics but the ex-president leaving the presidential mansion is not that important), purely because they had some footage. No thoughts to go with it, mind.

Also, breaking news that Trump's special envoy has arrived in Moscow, followed by - look, I get that they're trying to be vaguely neutral, but don't say he's there to bring about peace, and then say that Ukraine is excluded from whatever they're discussing.

The presenter clearly had someone shouting in their ear, and looked really uncomfortable.

[Boiler]

Without wishing to defend the indefensible, this is what happens when you try and combine a domestic service with an international one. What you saw would have been more suited to the former BBC World, which just doesn't work for the domestic market and once again underpins the folly that is 24 hour rolling news.

Despite the BBC being a PSB (and not a "State broadcaster", as many BTL muppets claim), it still pursues viewing figures to justify the licence fee.

[Abernathy]

Heard someone the other day - might have been James O’Brien - describe Mishal Hussein as the finest current affairs an politics journalist in the country, bar none, whom the BBC must have been crazy to let go.

I think there was a heavy implication that a large part of the reason for her departure was the decision to favour Kuenssberg ahead of Hussein for the Sunday morning politics show gig, a decision I agree looks inexplicable.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Not if you consider the composition of the BBC senior management team.

[Boiler]

Foreign aid cuts, apparently.

David Lammy is asking BBC bosses to draw up tens of millions of pounds’ worth of cuts to the World Service as part of the spending review, as the fallout continues from Keir Starmer’s decision to slash the aid budget.

Sources have told the Guardian the Foreign Office has asked the BBC to draw up a budget of up to £70m a year lower than bosses say it needs over the next few years, and well below inflation.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/ ... et-slashed

[Tubby Isaacs]

The World Service get some funding from the license fee and some from direct from the government. So there may be some jockeying between the two rather than a nailed on budget cut. The government grant went up quite a lot last year.

But it would be bad if the overall budget went down by a lot this time. It's stuff like this, and everything else really, where you realize that a £2.5bn hole in the OBR budget caused by reducing immigration like the white paper implies is quite a lot of money,