, the BBC is getting a reputation of its own for prevaricating over Freedom of Information requests to the BBC by and on behalf of the tellytaxpaying public.
Not content with its infamy (and sheer hypocrisy) for spending hundreds of thousands of tellytaxpayer pounds on legal action to withhold the Balen Report from the scrutiny of the public who paid for it, the BBC’s now doing its utmost to cover up whether or not its presenters are being paid for their work on Children in Need, the BBC’s annual charity telethon.
The Belfast Telegraph reports, Do they get paid for Pudsey?, that:
The corporation was forced to disclose within the past year that Sir Terry Wogan received an “honorarium” for anchoring the network-wide sections of the annual charity extravanganza.
But it has turned down a similar Freedom of Information (FoI) request from this newspaper relating to presenters on the Northern Ireland wing of the show.
Read the rest of the article for more details on the BBC’s machinations. Hat tip to Tony Sharp for posting Accountability BBC style on his blog, The Waendal Journal.
Andrew
Not content with its infamy (and sheer hypocrisy) for spending hundreds of thousands of tellytaxpayer pounds on legal action to withhold the Balen Report ….
There is nothing infamous or hypocritical about the BBC’s actions in defending itself over the Balen report.
I am not sure of the present position regarding costs, but I’d hope that no ‘tellytaxpayer’s pounds’ will have been spent in the end.
The BBC did, after all, win its case, so normally one would expect the loser in a civil action to be accountable for legal costs.
The main issue was whether the Balen Report was subject to release under FoI.
According to the law, documents concerned with ‘journalism, art or literature’ are not covered by FoI.
In the Balen case, I understand, it was conceded that the report was originally concerned with journalism (and therefore not liable to release) but because it had then been circulated among senior managers it had somehow ceased to be a ‘journalism document’ and become a ‘management tool’ (and therefore liable to be released).
Clearly the BBC was right to challenge something that would set a really weird precedent whereby any document produced by journalists that was subsequently shown to managers could be made public.
One obvious result of such a precedent would be that secret information about the identity of say, whistleblowers or sources could not be shared with managers.
That would be nuts.