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BBC Inquiry Blames Rigid Management for Mishandling Sex Abuse Scandal

December 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a former head of the Sky News channel who began his broadcast career as a BBC reporter, traced in detail what it described as “a chain of events that was to prove disastrous for the BBC.” Among other things, Mr. Pollard blamed a “rigid management system” that had “proved completely incapable of dealing with” the crisis that followed the program’s cancellation.

While much of the report centered on the interplay between journalists and their superiors as the allegations against Mr. Savile were investigated, its central conclusion appeared to be that confusion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision to drop the Savile program. Mr. Savile died at 84 in October 2011, weeks before the “Newsnight” program was scheduled to be broadcast.

“The efforts to get to the truth behind the Savile story proved beyond the combined efforts of the senior management, legal department, corporate communications team and anyone else for well over a month” after the crisis broke, precipitated by a program earlier this year on ITV, Britain’s leading commercial broadcaster, the report said. “Leadership and organization seemed to be in short supply.”

Mr. Pollard dismissed one theory that was widely circulated in recent months, that BBC News executives or their superiors, reluctant to have the BBC reveal a dark passage in its past, pressured the “Newsnight” team to cancel the Savile segment. Critics who took this views have played down the reason Peter Rippon, the program’s editor, cited to his staff. Mr. Rippon said he considered the team’s conclusions about Mr. Savile had not been adequately substantiated.

“While there clearly were discussions about the Savile story between Mr. Rippon and his managers,” Mr. Pollard said, he did not believe that they had exerted “undue pressure on him.”

The report was strongly critical of several news executives who were directly involved in the decision to cancel the Savile exposé, including Mr. Rippon and the two top executives in the BBC’s news division to whom he reported, Helen Boaden and Stephen Mitchell, all three of whom were suspended from their posts during the nine-week Pollard inquiry.

But it adopted a largely sparing tone in its review of the role played by the broadcaster’s former director general, Mark Thompson, who stepped down after eight years in the job in September and became president and chief executive of The New York Times Company last month.

The report’s criticism appeared to be aimed mainly at the broadcaster’s complex management systems, not on the actions — or absence of them — by Mr. Thompson and other top executives who presided over the BBC, its $6 billion annual budget and its 23,000 employees.

Mr. Thompson has said that he was not briefed about the “Newsnight” investigation before its cancellation, was not involved in canceling it, and did not know about the allegations of sexual abuse against Mr. Savile until the report about the cancellation appeared on ITV, a commercial competitor of the BBC.

The report does not dispute Mr. Thompson’s public statements that he did not know about the Savile investigation until it had been killed.

It cited, without criticism, Mr. Thompson’s account of an episode when he was asked about the “Newsnight” cancellation by a BBC reporter at a social gathering. The report quoted Mr. Thompson as having testified that he subsequently asked BBC News executives about the matter and “received reassurances” that the program had been killed for “editorial or journalistic reasons.” After that, Mr. Thompson said, according to the report, he “crossed it off my list and went off to worry about something else.”

While the scuttled program became the subject of media stories in London beginning in January — some of which, BBC officials have said, were included in press summaries prepared for Mr. Thompson — Mr. Pollard concluded: “Mr. Thompson told me that the various press stories which followed passed him by. I have no reason to doubt what he told me.”

Matthew Purdy contributed reporting from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/world/europe/pollard-report-bbc-jimmy-savile-sexual-abuse-inquiry.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Report on BBC Inquiry Into Sex Abuse to Be Released Wednesday

December 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

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

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BBC Director Quits in Furor Over Coverage of Sexual Abuse

November 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Entwistle’s sudden departure as the BBC’s chief executive was prompted by outrage over a report last week on “Newsnight,” one of the network’s flagship current affairs programs, that wrongly implicated a former Conservative Party politician in a pedophile scandal involving a children’s home in Wales.

Mr. Entwistle said the report, broadcast on Nov. 2, reflected “unacceptable journalistic standards” and never should have been broadcast.

That broadcast has only compounded the problems facing the network since the revelation last month that a longtime BBC television host, Jimmy Savile, was suspected of having sexually abused perhaps hundreds of young people over the course of decades, sometimes on the BBC premises. The network has been accused of covering up the accusations by canceling a Newsnight report on Mr. Savile last year, when Mr. Entwistle was a senior executive at the network.

Mr. Entwistle was barely two months into the director’s job, heading one of the world’s largest media organizations. His departure followed the suspension in the past month of a number of senior producers as the BBC has struggled to find a path through what many commentators have described as its greatest crisis in decades.

A 50-year-old career broadcaster who rose through the ranks of BBC producers, Mr. Entwistle made his announcement on the steps of the BBC’s new billion-dollar headquarters in central London. With the BBC’s chairman, Chris Patten, standing gloomily beside him, Mr. Entwistle said that resigning was “the honorable thing to do.”

“The wholly exceptional events of the past few weeks have led me to conclude that the BBC should appoint a new leader,” he said. He added that the intense public scrutiny of the BBC that has resulted from the pedophile scandal should not lead people “to lose sight of the fact that the BBC is full of people of the greatest talent and the highest integrity.”

His statement that he was “responsible for all content” came after weeks of what the BBC’s harshest critics have described as obfuscation and evasion by the broadcaster’s management in the face of demands for explanations of how the fiascoes over the two “Newsnight” programs had been allowed to happen.

As of late as Saturday morning, Mr. Entwistle was holding to the position he had taken for weeks, that he had not known about the Nov. 2 “Newsnight” broadcast ahead of time because of the BBC’s longstanding tradition that the director general not interfere with details of how programs are made. “I found out about this film after it had gone out,” he said. “In the light of what has happened here, I wish that this was referred to me, but it wasn’t.”

His resignation, barely 12 hours later, suggested that the BBC’s trustees had concluded that the argument that the network’s top brass was insulated from responsibility for programming decisions by a lack of prior knowledge was not sustainable.

That argument was similar to the one advanced by Mr. Entwistle’s predecessor, Mark Thompson, who was the BBC’s director general when the “Newsnight” expose on Mr. Savile was canceled. Mr. Thompson, who left the BBC in September and will become the president and chief executive of The New York Times Company on Monday, said he had not been aware of the report until after it was canceled.

Mr. Patten, the BBC chairman, said that Tim Davie, 45, the BBC’s director of audio and music, would become the network’s acting director general.

Mr. Patten, whose own position may now be imperiled, did not attempt to disguise the gravity of the situation, alluding to the “unacceptable mistakes, the unacceptably shoddy journalism” that had culminated in the Nov. 2 “Newsnight” program.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/world/europe/george-entwistle-resigns-as-head-of-bbc.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Ex-Official Threatens Suit in Pedophile Scandal

November 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

A lawyer for the politician, Alistair McAlpine, said his client would have “no choice” but to file suit to clear his name of the accusations, which Mr. McAlpine dismissed as “wholly false and defamatory.” It was not immediately clear who would be the target of the suit, but the lawyer, Andrew Reid, indicated that the BBC could be one defendant when he said that the state-owned broadcaster had played a part in encouraging the Internet speculation about Mr. McAlpine.

The allegation stemmed from a report last week by the BBC program “Newsnight,” which has been under fire for canceling an investigative segment late last year on accusations of a long history of child sexual abuse, some of it on BBC premises, against Jimmy Savile, the host of wildly popular BBC programs from the 1970s to the 1990s. Mr. Savile died at 84 in October 2011.

The “Newsnight” report contained an interview with a man, Steve Messham, who said he had been taken to a local hotel from a children’s home in the North Wales town of Wrexham in the 1980s and abused more than a dozen times by a man he identified as a senior Conservative politician from the years when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in power. The “Newsnight” segment fueled widespread speculation on the Internet as to the identity of the politician involved.

But then The Guardian newspaper posted an article on its Web site on Thursday night saying that the man most prominently named on the Internet, Mr. McAlpine, was “a victim of mistaken identity.” It quoted a local council member as saying that a member of the McAlpine family who lived locally might have been mistaken for the former Conservative politician.

With that, Mr. McAlpine went public, condemning the “media frenzy” and innuendo that he said had led to the accounts on the Internet that he was the man implicated in the “Newsnight” segment and giving a point-by-point rebuttal of Mr. Messham’s account. Mr. McAlpine said he had “never been to the children’s home in Wrexham, nor have I ever visited any children’s home, reform school or any other institution of a similar nature.” He said he had never stayed in a hotel in or near Wrexham, never owned a Rolls-Royce, never had a “gold card” or a “Harrods card,” and never wore after-shave — all features cited by Mr. Messham.

On Friday, Mr. Messham apologized, saying the actual Mr. McAlpine bore no resemblance to the man in the photos shown to him by the police in the 1990s.

“Newsnight” on Friday evening featured a broad apology to Mr. McAlpine by the management of the program and the BBC, coupled with an announcement that all investigative reporting by “Newsnight” was being suspended indefinitely.

Alistair McAlpine, heir to a construction fortune, was Conservative Party treasurer when he was named to the House of Lords by Mrs. Thatcher in 1984. He is now 70, in poor health and living with his third wife in southern Italy. The McAlpine relative who lived near Wrexham, said in his obituary to have had a large collection of vintage cars, has been dead since 1991.

It was another twist to a scandal that has sent shock waves through the BBC and the police, as well as hospitals, children’s homes and other institutions where children are said to have been systematically abused over decades. Allegations that it is fomenting a wave of public hysteria with unsupported accusations have been aimed at “Newsnight,” the flagship BBC program.

Mr. Cameron warned against a hysteria that threatened to drag innocent people into the fray.

“There is a danger if we are not careful that this can turn into a sort of witch hunt, particularly about people who are gay, and I’m worried about the sort of thing you are doing right now,” he said on Thursday when he was handed a list of conservative politicians alleged to have links to pedophilia that had been downloaded by the host of ITV’s “This Morning” program.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/world/europe/ex-official-threatens-suit-in-pedophile-scandal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Former Judge Opens Inquiry Into Savile Abuse Case

October 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The inquiry by Dame Janet Smith, a retired appeals court judge who once led an inquiry into a notorious serial killer, came as a senior police commander said Mr. Savile’s behavior might have gone unchecked for decades because different British institutions, including local police forces, failed to collate the evidence they had against the flamboyant personality who was seen as a philanthropist and a national treasure.

At the same time, the former head of a BBC children’s charity, Children in Need, said that, even a decade ago, suspicions about Mr. Savile were so prevalent that “we didn’t want him anywhere near” the organization.

Dame Janet’s inquiry is one of two that the BBC has commissioned into the scandal. It began on the first anniversary of Mr. Savile’s death at age 84, and a day after the British police arrested a former pop star, Paul Gadd, better known as Gary Glitter, in the widening scandal. Mr. Gadd has been accused of abusing a teenage girl on BBC premises.

The scandal has exploded since ITV, a BBC rival, broadcast a documentary this month about Mr. Savile and his alleged abuses, opening a floodgate of complaints. The police now say 300 potential victims have come forward.

Much soul-searching and public anger have focused on how Mr. Savile’s misconduct appears to have been widely known among colleagues and police officers who did little or nothing to restrain or prosecute him. Sharpening the questions about the BBC’s conduct, one of the network’s current affairs programs, “Newsnight,” began and then canceled an investigation into Mr. Savile late last year.

Bernard Hogan Howe, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said on Monday that though Mr. Savile was accused a number of times while he was alive, police forces in different parts of Britain never put the picture together.

Much attention has focused, too, on why successive heads of the BBC have said they were unaware of the rumors about Mr. Savile within the organization.

They include the current director general, George Entwistle, and his predecessor, Mark Thompson, the incoming president and chief executive of The New York Times Company. Mr. Thompson was the organization’s head when the “Newsnight” investigation was canceled, a time when other BBC departments were planning holiday tributes to Mr. Savile.

The extent of the mistrust surrounding Mr. Savile emerged from a BBC interview on Monday with Sir Roger Jones, a former BBC governor and the head of the Children in Need charity, who said that he had suspicions more than a decade ago, according to an article on the BBC Web site.

“I think we all recognized he was a pretty creepy sort of character,” Mr. Jones said in the article. “We took the decision that we didn’t want him anywhere near the charity, and we just stepped up our child protection policies — which again would have put him at risk if he tried anything.”

Still, he acknowledged that the charity had only suspicions against Mr. Savile. “If you’re going to go on the attack and make claims against him, then you’d need evidence, hard evidence that simply wasn’t there,” Mr. Jones was quoted as saying.

The other inquiry, led by Nick Pollard, a former head of a rival network, Sky News, is looking specifically into the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of the “Newsnight” investigation.

Compared with the public inquiries into the behavior of tabloid reporters and editors in Britain in the phone hacking scandal, which have unfolded in a glare of publicity, the inquiries into the Savile matter at the BBC seemed more opaque. A BBC spokesman and a person representing Dame Janet each said her inquiry began on Monday, but they declined to say who would go before the inquiry, where it was being conducted or whether it would operate in public.

In response to a reporter’s questions, Dame Janet’s representative, Carolyn E. Pepper of the law firm Reed Smith, released a statement saying: “Dame Janet’s view is that it is not appropriate for her to give interviews or provide comment regarding the review at this time. Press information will be issued in due course.”

Her inquiry is meant to gather testimony from people who have accused Mr. Savile of abusing them or who have raised concerns about his activities. It is also supposed to examine “the extent to which BBC personnel were or ought to have been aware of unlawful and/or inappropriate conduct by Jimmy Savile on BBC premises or on location for the BBC,” the BBC said.

She is also supposed to determine whether the BBC’s child protection and whistle-blowing policies are adequate. The BBC has also said it is looking into nine more recent cases related to a variety of sexual harassment and abuse cases, but it has not said who was involved in them.

Both her inquiry and Mr. Pollard’s investigation are supposed to be independent of BBC control, although both were appointed by BBC supervisory bodies.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/world/europe/bbc-opens-inquiry-into-savile-sex-abuse-case.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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