Exclusive: Anxious BBC won’t disclose costs of cutting orchestras
NewsA freedom-of-information request, seeking to clarifyb the cost savings yielded by the BBC’s plans to cut its performing ensembles, has been met with a straight bat and a very nervous suited smile.
Here’s the BBC’s reply: If held, the information you requested is held for the purposes of ‘art, journalism or literature’. The Act provides that the BBC is not obliged to disclose this type of information.
Don’t you just love ‘if held’? Unhappy insiders keep leaking the orchestra plans which the upper echelons pretend might not exist.
Upstairs at Broadcasting House is a parallel universe where truth is an infrequent visitor.
The statement that such information is ” held for the purposes of ‘art, journalism or literature’ ” is a blatant lie . The BBC is sinking so fast that it is hard to see it surviving until the Charter renewal
Norman, what will you do to support the BBC employees who speak out if they end up losing their jobs over this reporting?
I think you’ll find that whistleblowing in the public interest* is protected by law.
The BBC would be very unwise to do that.
(*when in the public interest, particularly with relation to the misuse of public money in pursuit of hastening the financial imbalances required to fulfill a predetermined asset stripping/commercial downgrade strategy)
But who gets to define what is in the public interest? Recent judgements from UK judiciaries against whistleblowers such as Julian Assange, Craig Murray, &c. suggest that the establishment’s concept of “public interest” is rather unintuitive.
If they lose their jobs, reporting the facts, as they are and without bias, will have nothing to do with it
Everyone is losing jobs in normal real life, not just musicians in the BBC. If people have no spare money then can’t go to concerts, and can’t pay the television licence either. Many just refisung to pay it anyhow and getting away with it. Cost of living crisis is real for the majority. My heating bill alone went up £90 a month over the winter but not my pension to meet the cost. Still only 4C today in the north. So where is the spare money? A vicious circle and no holidays either.
we could do without the heads of departments and their ridiculous salaries for the very little work they actually do… Tim Davie getting his six figure base pay to look good and do nothing, the rest of us behind the scenes cleaning up after his crappy decisions, yet WE are the ones unable to pay our bills whilst this guy reports to us once a year from his mansion.
In other words, the BBC is denying its funders (i.e., the licence payers) access to the books. Is this legal? Probably so, sadly!