THE announcement of "a new TV Scotland" by BBC Director-General Tony Hall is mere smoke and mirrors designed to distract Scots from the central decision that is that we are going to go on to get our main news on TV at 6pm and 10pm as "British" news (usually mainly English news). The option of Scottish news at 9 pm when it will be up against prime-time TV programmes from all other channels is a recipe designed to fail.
The supposed bonus of an extra £20 million for Scottish programmes is another sop, just as is the allocation of programmes made for UK audiences to have a nominal base in Glasgow, but in reality the vast bulk of the production costs are spent in England.
The truth is that of the £325m raised in Scotland through the licence fee less than £100m is actually spent in Scotland. As Denmark and Sweden and even Iceland have recently proved with their high quality programmes it is possible to be a small country and have good public broadcasting, but you first you need to control your own budget.
We don't just need a Scottish Six, we need a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation.
Hugh Kerr,
Wharton Square, Edinburgh.
NICOLA Sturgeon has tweeted regarding the BBC announcement “it doesn’t deliver everything that everyone wanted”. Wrong. I didn’t want a Scottish news programme at 6. If you were to take the SNP’s argument to its conclusion you could argue that viewers in Edinburgh don’t want to know about every event in Glasgow as those don’t affect them. Where does it stop?
Alan McGibbon,
108 Corsebar Road, Paisley.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel