[interestednovice]

Oh dear, that’s a failure of leadership however you look at the rest of the affair!

To be honest, if the BBC was to be under any kind of investigation, it shouldn’t be for this. It should be for things like whether it was justified in cutting the news channel or not - and Davie himself gave evidence to a Commons Select Committee where he denied the channel was closing and said it was going to be “one channel, two streams”. Meaningless buzzwords arguably deliberately designed to mislead MPs - and never interrogated by the Committee because it’s always stuff like this that gets the attention. It does all seem so much like W1A in real life!

Davie could end up being the next George Entwistle (remember him?) at this rate.

Just to add to the select committee line. To be fair, the DCMS select committee did quiz Tim Davie quite heavily about the changes to the BBC News channel in an evidence session last year around the time of the announcement about merging World News and the News channel.

Julie Elliot who was the chair raised the point that she thought that the changes in output would require a consultation by Ofcom and the BBC weren't going to ask for a watering down of the broadcast licence as well as how domestic Breaking News would be impacted with only a small live team available.  John Nicolson also raised the point that World News viewers wouldn't be interested in the rainfall in Carlisle. Tim Davie couldn't explain how the streams would work or how the breaking news live team would work in any great detail.

Back to Linekergate...

Yes, that’s a fuller explanation and apologies for going off the topic with the thread. My point really was that they quizzed him on that one appearance, got what amounted to a worrying set of non-answers (as you say) then didn’t investigate further. Because politicians of all types don’t get hugely exercised about preserving the unique aspects of the BBC’s output, it seems. They mostly just want to “encourage” it to do the right thing on its own, and they made clear that they were not in favour of the plans. Davie was never called back to explain himself or even, as far as I know, provide further clarify with additional letters after his appearance (common at Select Committees).

Presumably the concerned MPs could also have raised their points with Ofcom formally to ask them to ensure that BBC News output did not suffer unduly.

Anyway, I’ll leave that particular aside there as I don’t want to go off topic - just wanted to finish the thought as it pertains to wider BBC oversight and management issues in my view, so has a roundabout relevance to many of the topics discussed in this thread.