For those of you who’ve grappled their way into a media career and managed to stay in Devon and Cornwall, the proposed cuts at ITV to halve its budget for regional local programming – a move that would merge ITV West in Bristol with ITV Westcountry in Plymouth – is worrying.

They are coming under the gaze of the South West TUC on Saturday, January 12.

Here’s what we pulled from the TUC: “The NUJ believe that this will have an adverse effect on people’s right to know, giving journalists the same time (half an hour) to cover twice as much news. It threatens to provide a regional news service with no relevance to local communities, but it would also see journalists covering a region in which it takes longer to drive from one end to the other than it does from London to Carlisle.

“The NUJ points out that as a Public Service Broadcaster, ITV is given its right to broadcast by Act of Parliament. In return it is required to fulfil special obligations. If ITV’s proposals go ahead, these commitments will not be met.”

Stay tuned to D+CFilm for any new developments.

Posted by Cptn

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Local, News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.