The planet’s ongoing game of “Major Media Company Staff Cuts Roulette” landed on the BBC this week, as Variety reports that the state-funded media organization is set to eliminate something on the order of 2,000 jobs in coming weeks—representing roughly 10 percent of the organization’s total staff. The cuts are reportedly the largest reduction in staff that the BBC has faced in 15 years.
News of the cuts was delivered to staffers on Wednesday, and has been timed to happen before the corporation’s new director-general, Matt Brittin (a former business executive for Google) is set to take up his post in May. The cuts come as part of a general cost-cutting initiative that the BBC laid out in February; at the time, the corporation made it clear that the $815 million in cuts would “result in jobs losses alongside the reduction in some programming,” although, from an outside perspective, this has been the first major move on that score.
The BBC is publicly funded by the people of the U.K., largely through its license fee, which charges citizens roughly $230 a year for their TV watching. (Less if you have a monochrome TV, which apparently 0.015% of licensees in the country still do.) Although the BBC also makes money by selling its programs abroad, the licenses themselves have been declining in recent years, having hit a peak of 26.2 million back in 2018.
Layoffs have been a constant refrain in the media over the last few months; just a few days ago, incoming Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro celebrated his new gig by laying off 1,000 employees, joining Sony, Epic Games, Amazon, and more in a recent push to cut costs by terminating employees. The BBC specifically has had a fractious time of it in recent months; the organization got sucked into Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to control all journalism, everywhere, after he claimed he was going to sue them for allegedly cutting one of his speeches in a “deceptive” fashion for a documentary.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.