Emily Bell outlines the existential crisis the BBC suddenly finds itself embroiled in:
[BBC director general George] Entwistle’s resignation on Saturday was directly linked to a report broadcast by Newsnight on November 2 that misidentified a public figure allegedly involved in a child abuse scandal. The report, connected to an already broiling scandal, did not make things any worse, theoretically, for Thompson. But the BBC he left is now facing a very serious challenge to its future and independence.
The turmoil at the BBC started with a revelation involving a now-dead TV presenter and public figure, Jimmy Savile, who is accused of molesting possibly hundreds of children. US commentators have tried to explain Savile to the domestic audience, but there really is no parallel here. […] The allegations against Savile were being investigated by Newsnight last year, but its editor, Peter Rippon, decided not to run the investigation on the grounds that the evidence was not sound enough. Subsequently, rival broadcaster ITV pulled together a documentary carrying the allegations against Savile, making the BBC’s decision not to run the original piece seem both flawed and possibly compromised. Just as Entwistle succeeded Thompson as director general, the story of how the BBC had shelved its piece broke.
[. . .]
The most preposterous and fitting denouement to the whole horrible affair happened when, in an attempt to prove itself institutionally robust, Newsnight commissioned a second piece into another child abuse scandal. The show broadcast its investigation on November 2, conducted with the London-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism. Including details about an alleged pedophile, the report led to the misidentification of a former member of a Conservative government as being involved in a North Wales care-home scandal after the central witness interviewed misidentified his abuser. Failing to conduct a sufficiently thorough cross-checking of the victim’s evidence, or even to show him a picture of the former politician, were basic journalistic errors. To make matters worse, the Bureau’s editorial head, Iain Overton, had foreshadowed the “exclusive” by tweeting about it earlier in the day. So in scrambling to address the perception that it was timid in breaking stories about pedophilia, Newsnight’s overcompensation has led to a potentially ruinous situation of the BBC creating false rumors.
There are two separate issues in play with all this that have become toxically intertwined. One is the existence of an endemic culture of child abuse in a number of British institutions, and the other is about the editorial independence and journalistic future of the BBC.
