BBC Abuse Scandal Report Finds ‘Chaos’ but No Cover-Up
By JOHN F. BURNS and STEPHEN CASTLE
LONDON — A report into the sexual abuse crisis that has shaken the British Broadcasting Corporation was strongly critical on Wednesday of the editorial and management decisions that led to the cancellation of a broadcast last year that would have exposed decades of sexual abuse, some of it on BBC premises, by Jimmy Savile, who had been one of Britain’s best-known television personalities.
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, he blamed a “rigid management system” that had “proved completely incapable of dealing with” 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 aired.
“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 downplayed 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 expose, 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 officer 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 Pollard report, examining and quoting from testimony given by Mr. Thompson in London earlier this month, appeared not to directly challenge his account.
Challenged repeatedly by one reporter during a news conference to give his verdict on Mr. Thompson’s version of events, Lord Patten, the chairman of the BBC Trust, said: “I have no reason at all for disbelieving Mark Thompson.”
Mr. Pollard said that the decision to drop the Newsnight investigation was "clearly flawed" but done in good faith and that "it was not done to protect the Savile tribute program." Nevertheless Mr. Pollard, who said he examined 10,000 e-mails and 40 personal statements, said the debacle had led to "one of the worst management crises in the BBC’s history," adding that when leadership was needed at the BBC it was "in short supply."
At one point, Mr. Pollard reviewed a sequence of events that involved a freelance reporter for The Sunday Times of London e-mailing questions to Mr. Thompson’s corporate address earlier this year seeking access under Britain’s freedom of information law to any communications involving the canceled Savile program between Mr. Thompson, Ms. Boaden and other BBC News executives — a point at which Mr. Thompson’s critics have said he should have learned about the allegations against Mr. Savile that were at the heart of the “Newsnight” investigation.
Mr. Thompson has said that the request was handled by members of his staff who had access to the e-mail account, and that he was not involved in the BBC’s rejection of the reporter’s request, which was referred by his staff to the BBC’s press office. Mr. Pollard accepted the explanation, saying in the report: “Mr. Thompson told me that he had no knowledge of this request. I accept this.”
The report described “a level of chaos and confusion” in the decisions that led to the program’s cancellation in November 2011, and in the events that followed, which culminated in the resignation last month of George Entwistle, who succeeded Mr. Thompson as the broadcaster’s director general in September.
Mr. Entwistle quit after less than two months in the job amid the furor that erupted when “Newsnight” broadcast a program that wrongly identified a former politician, Alistair McAlpine, as a pedophile who abused boys at a children’s home in Wales in the 1970s and 1980s.
In his conclusions, Mr. Pollard held out an olive branch to the BBC, where morale has slumped over the Savile crisis. “The BBC’s news and editorial management needs to be reviewed,” he said. “It is certainly not the caser that everything in BBC News management needs repair”.
He added: “There have been two immensely damaging failures in Savile and McAlpine, with the first paving the way for the second, but BBC News has continued to do outstanding work and I do not suggest that it needs to be torn down brick by brick. But it must be right to understand and repair the parts that have let the whole down.”
Mr. Pollard’s chronicle of the BBC’s mistakes in handling the Savile affair included a decision to proceed with several tribute programs dedicated to the entertainer that the BBC broadcast during the 2011 holiday season. The tributes ran without any mention of the allegations of sexual abuse and rape involving Mr. Savile in the decades when he became a household name in Britain for shows that were among the BBC’s biggest audience attractions.
While much of the report centered on the interplay between Mr. Rippon, the “Newsnight” editor, his superiors in the BBC’s news division and the “Newsnight” reporters who investigated the allegations against Mr. Savile, 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.
The report cited what it described as a “silo mentality” in the BBC management that insulated top news executives from program makers, and executives in the BBC News division from one another, and concluded: “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 “Newsnight” cancellation, it said.
Mr. Pollard was appointed by the BBC Trust, to lead the inquiry and determine the origins of the broadcaster’s failure.
Mr. Pollard’s represents a watershed moment in what the chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord 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 Mr. McAlpine, abused minors at a children’s home in North Wales.
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 looked 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.
One purpose of Mr. Pollard’s inquiry, conducted behind closed doors, was to assess how the BBC handled information it possessed that would have been of interest to the police or other relevant authorities concerning Mr. Savile and others. But much of his work seems to have been devoted to another question, that of the role played by senior BBC executives in the decision to cancel the “Newsnight” segment on Mr. Savile.
Among those who appeared before the inquiry for questioning was Mr. Thompson.
Mr. Thompson has said 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.
The BBC has said that the report will be published in full “with the exception of any legally required redactions.”
A separate investigation is being conducted by Dame Janet Smith into the culture and practices of the BBC in the years when Mr. Savile worked there, and into the effectiveness of its child protection and whistle-blowing policies. Yet another inquiry is being conducted by the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, the panel that held hearings last year into the scandal involving phone hacking and other illegal practices by tabloid newspapers.
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