Carmarthenshire Council has been accused of wasting taxpayers’
money on a
“propaganda tool” after it announced plans to
launch an internet TV station at a cost of £30,000 a year.
The Labour-Independent council, which already publishes a
bi-monthly newspaper, has suffered heavy criticism from councillors
who slammed the TV station as “self-promotion”.
“This is something that concerns me greatly,” said
councillor Huw Lewis at a recent meeting
reported in the Carmarthen Journal.
“We are in a
recession and vital and essential services are having to suffer
cuts.
“Are we going to spend money on communication or building
relationships with people? We have to invest our money in people
and not in technology.
“What we don’t need at all is a computer programme which
is simply a propaganda tool.”
Plaid Cymru leader councillor Peter Hughes Griffiths said he
was concerned and pointed to alleged one-sided reporting in
Community News.
“There is a view about Community News in the community
that it is very, very one-sided,” he said. “That’s a
concern about the way we provide information.”
A provider and funding for the channel, which could be similar
to Kent County Council’s, are currently being discussed.
Carmarthenshire Council is planning to drop one issue of its
Community News magazine to pay its share of the start up
costs.
The majority of the funding will be provided by the Welsh
Assembly which brought forward the bilingual TV channel as a
12-month pilot project.
Mr Price said: “I am quite astonished that the county
council would think it is appropriate to spend thousands of pounds
of taxpayer's money on a TV channel and self promotion at the same
time people in the county are struggling to make ends
meet.
“It is amazing that while the Labour-Independent group
leading the council complain that they do not have enough money,
even though they received one of the best local government
settlements in Wales, they consider self-promotion through a TV
channel as an acceptable expense.”