Nick Pollard, a former BBC reporter who went on to lead one of the BBC’s chief competitors, the commercial Sky News channel, led the inquiry. The trust that supervises the BBC asked him to determine whether the broadcaster’s management erred when its flagship public affairs program, “Newsnight,” abandoned an investigation of accusations against Mr. Savile, once one of the BBC’s biggest entertainment stars.
Mr. Savile died in October 2011 at age 84. The “Newsnight” investigation was nearly ready for broadcast in early December 2011 when it was called off. In the weeks after the decision was made, several BBC holiday broadcasts paid tribute to Mr. Savile’s decades of stardom without mentioning allegations against him that had circulated for years.
Mr. Pollard’s report will be a watershed moment in what the chairman of the BBC Trust, Chris Patten, has called the biggest crisis in the public broadcaster’s 90-year history.
The scale of the allegations against Mr. Savile, including accusations that he abused some of his under-age victims on BBC premises, has shocked the British public and sharply eroded confidence in the BBC. The broadcaster has been a mainstay of British life, admired at home and abroad for its impartiality and high journalistic standards — and financed by license fees paid by anyone in Britain who owns a television.
Making matters worse, after another rival, ITV, broadcast a report about the cancellation of the “Newsnight” investigation, “Newsnight” went ahead with another program reporting false claims that a prominent retired politician, Alistair McAlpine, abused minors at a children’s home in North Wales in the 1970s and ’80s.
The BBC later repudiated the claims and agreed to pay Mr. McAlpine nearly $300,000. ITV separately agreed to pay Mr. McAlpine more than $200,000 for a program of its own that inculpated him. Both settlements were ratified at a high court hearing in London on Tuesday, where lawyers for the two broadcasters apologized.
“The disgraceful allegations should never have been aired,” David Attfield, a BBC lawyer, told the court. He said the broadcaster “accepts it cannot put back the clock and wishes to express its genuine remorse for the harm it has caused” Mr. McAlpine.
A preliminary report into the McAlpine debacle by Ken MacQuarrie, the director of BBC Scotland, concluded that the editorial management of “Newsnight” had already been weakened by suspensions and other disruptions caused by the Savile affair. A fuller version of Mr. MacQuarrie’s report is scheduled to be published together with the Pollard report on Wednesday.
As Mr. Pollard has been looking into what happened at the BBC, a parallel police inquiry has been trying to establish what Mr. Savile did, and has received a torrent of allegations against him. The police inquiry, called Operation Yewtree, broadened into a wide-ranging investigation of sexual abuse allegations in the broadcasting, entertainment and pop music worlds of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the milieu in which Mr. Savile gained fame.
Police spokesmen say they have tallied more than 500 complaints in the Yewtree inquiry, more than 30 of them involving allegations of rape. An “unprecedented number” of those complaints involve Mr. Savile personally, a spokesman said. Others involve Mr. Savile’s associates, and still others involve people unconnected with Mr. Savile. So far, the police have arrested and questioned six people in the matter, but no charges have been filed.
One of those arrested was Max Clifford, perhaps Britain’s best-known publicist, who grew wealthy representing leading entertainers, politicians, sports stars and other celebrities. Mr. Clifford, 69, has denied any wrongdoing. He has said that many of his clients were “frightened to death” by the police investigation and by the risk of a “witch hunt” into a time when sexual mores were notoriously uninhibited in the entertainment world.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/world/europe/pollard-report-bbc-jimmy-savile-sexual-abuse-inquiry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss