[leewilliams]

Also LBC may be a commercial operation but it's accountable to its listeners for its performance and radio presenters as always enjoy a pretty unique bond with their audience.

Again, this view is fundamentally flawed - and James O’Brien neatly explained why shortly before midday today:

CALLER: I think there should be no censorship (dump button used to remove on-air reference to Sangita Myska):

O’BRIEN: Unfortunately like every other presenter on LBC I stand and fall by my listening hours, by my ratings, and when my contract comes up for renewal, the first thing that management will look at is my listening figures and you’ve just listened to two hours of very, very robust criticism of Israel. Nobody has ever lost their job on this radio station for their coverage of the Israeli-Gaza conflict, no matter how much stuff you’ve read on the Internet. That is categorically the case, so Internet conspiracy theories are almost impossible to get ahead of but I just want you to rest assured that my job is safe until my listening figures come down regardless of how I cover this issue. And speaking of silence, there’s only one person that’s silent in this conversation - and it’s not you and it’s not me. I completely respect any former colleague’s right to say nothing about the situation in which they find themselves even as all sorts of nonsense and lies move into the public space and cause enormous upset and difficulties for the people who are being accused of all manner of things from the top of this company down. None of the things you’re reading on the Internet have happened.

CALLER: That’s great, I think that should be clarified from the top…

O’BRIEN: Doesn’t need to be, because we all know what’s happened, we’re respecting the silence of a former colleague who’s chosen not to set the record straight.

This is on Myska now - if she wants to challenge the narrative and explain why *she* thinks her contract wasn’t renewed, then she should do so. Instead, she’s liked a couple of tweets in the last 24 hours claiming the talk around falling audience figures is a smokescreen (when as the Deadline article linked earlier in this thread shows, management’s concern was about her hours, not the headline reach figure) and allowed some of her ex-colleagues to take huge amounts of online abuse, which they’re understandably now no longer willing to put up with:

x.com 

There was clearly an audience for Myska’s show but in terms of presentation skills and working round the basic on-air furniture, people like Vanessa Feltz are simply better at it (remember Sangita was a correspondent by trade, not a presenter, and it showed in her on-air performance). I can obviously understand her disappointment in not having her contract renewed, but she’d have been far better writing a gracious social media post thanking LBC for the opportunity and listeners for their support. Now, she looks like she’s stringing out the silence to win sympathy from the online army that have rowed in behind her - to the detriment of other Global staff who’re being abused unnecessarily - and that is not only irresponsible but would make me, as a senior manager in a media business, strongly doubt whether she’s a suitable employee for future ventures.