After a period of constipation and reflection, the BBC has produced online minutes of its Board meeting in June. A reminder - the BBC pledge "The Board usually meets monthly and the minutes from these meetings will be published on this section two months after they have been approved by the Board, which usually happens at the next Board meeting."
So it's taken six months for these minutes to appear. They are, of course, sanitised to exclude most specks of useful information. There's no mention of a row over US Election coverage as discussed by Michael Prescott and David Grossman at the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, two weeks earlier. We do learn that both non-exec Shumeet Banerji and CEO News Deborah Turness had something more important to do. Eleven turned up, plus a huge rolling maul of 24 guests.
There's one admitted redaction, in the minutes of the discussion of the Charter Review process. There's note of an 'update' on the East Bank studios. It would be a reasonable guess that it's 'late'. Completion was scheduled for 2025, and I think we'd have heard about that by now.
What's the point of them publishing minutes at all if they're just going to lie? Because omitting a discussion or argument from the minutes IS a lie: it's saying "this is a summary of what was said" when it isn't any such thing. How can an editorial standards committee pass judgement on the accuracy and journalistic ethics of the Corporation's programme-makers when it can't even acknowledge to the public that pays for it what the committee itself talked about?Christ, the BBC knows how to cover itself in ignominy.
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