Unable to communicate properly, the broadcaster has been reduced to rival factions and shouting matches
When Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and the man appointed by the government to monitor the behaviour of the BBC, sat down to lunch with journalists three weeks ago, he waved away the plate of food he was offered with a grim face. "I didn't think I'd come here to eat," he said. The business of the day was too serious. Sir Jimmy Savile, it was now clear, had been guilty of a chain of sexual crimes during his years as a BBC star and no one at the corporation had done anything about it. What's more, key information about the crimes had been kept back from the public for almost a year.
Yet Patten, a veteran political heavyweight, was in confident mood. He scorned any suggestion that a Newsnight investigation into Savile had been suppressed and argued that the BBC's failure to report the presenter's abuse was mirrored by the laxity of the press. The whole affair was "a cesspit", but one he felt he was viewing from a safe distance.
This weekend both he and his director general, George Entwistle, are sitting amid what Patten has since described as "a tsunami of filth". Far from separating the BBC from the criminal activities of a dead paedophile, the revelations about Savile contained in ITV's Exposure documentary on 3 October, and in the BBC's subsequent episode of Panorama, have lifted the lid on a publicly funded broadcaster ruled by fear and caution to the point of dysfunction.
Twenty days later Patten has now exchanged terse letters with the culture minister, Maria Miller, who has questioned the soundness of BBC governance. A shadow of doubt also hangs over the future of Entwistle and his news chiefs, while Newsnight editor Peter Rippon has "stepped aside" after giving a flawed account of his team's work in a semi-official blog posting. The dark cloud has even spread across the Atlantic, where the BBC's former DG, Mark Thompson, who was in charge while Newsnight was pursuing its investigation, is about to take up a well-paid job as CEO of the New York Times.
So the confident stance of that lunch on 10 October has gone. On Thursday Patten gave a series of TV interviews in which he accepted that he and other BBC chiefs had put out "misleading" information. "What I signed up to is a blog which didn't turn out to be absolutely accurate," he said.
It is bad luck that this scandal broke only 11 days into Entwistle's new job. The fact remains, though, that the toxicity of the Savile revelations has grown because of exactly the hierarchical "silo mentality" inside the organisation that Entwistle and Patten had both promised to tackle.
Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust until Patten took over in April last year, argues that concern about the BBC's behaviour is distracting from the key issues raised by Savile's offences: "Why do we allow powerful men and powerful celebrities to behave like this? I don't think I heard the name of Jimmy Savile when I was at the BBC, nor any allegations. He was just a bit of history," he said.
But Lyons had warned in May that the trust needed to search outside the BBC for a successor to Thompson. His comments underscored a belief that there had been a failure to plan a proper succession and Entwistle had not been given enough time to develop into a public figure. Shortly afterwards Entwistle failed to respond publicly to the outcry over the botched BBC coverage of the jubilee river pageant, though he went on to win Patten's backing as director general, beating Caroline Thomson, chief operating officer of the BBC.
Naturally enough, public interest in how the BBC Trust works as an in-house regulator is limited – and the DG's job security is not the stuff of conversation in the bus queue. But the issue of prolonged sexual abuse on BBC premises, however historic, is of great public concern. More than five million people stayed up to watch Panorama last Monday. Such high ratings are shaming when it is probable that if ITV had not taken up the Savile story it would still be filed away in Newsnight's drawer. Most damaging of all, according to many of those inside the BBC, the slow corporate response has revealed a lumbering management structure where commonsense inquiries about the work of other departments are discouraged. These factors mean the Newsnight debacle now sits beside other great BBC dramas. These, notably, are 28 January 1987, the day Marmaduke Hussey, new chairman of the BBC, ruthlessly dismissed his DG, Alasdair Milne. His move followed long-standing tensions between the BBC and the Thatcher government, culminating in Special Branch raiding BBC Scotland. John Birt was hired to impose a radical restructuring of news and current affairs.
Then, in January 2004 Greg Dyke was forced out of the BBC when chairman Gavyn Davies resigned over the criticisms of Andrew Gilligan's report debunking government claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Queengate followed, when edited footage in a programme trailer falsely showed Her Majesty throwing a strop, then in 2008 Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand made lewd jokes at the expense of actor Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter. Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas resigned within days and the notorious "programme compliance" rules were strengthened.
At least one former top BBC television executive believes these crises have left a dangerous legacy of caution and defensive behaviour. "People increasingly make decisions based on making as few waves as possible," he said.
Before internal inquiries report, three crucial mistakes remain evident to outsiders. First, Savile tribute programmes were broadcast at Christmas when the corporation already had testimony that he was a serial sex offender. Second, evidence of historic offences carried out at the BBC was not handed over to the police, delaying the current investigation by almost a year. Certainly, some sources say, senior figures knew details – perhaps Steve Mitchell, the deputy director of news and Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. Third, the BBC appears to have hesitated before putting out an accurate version of events that had been misrepresented in Rippon's original blog about the dropping of his team's investigation. It was posted online on 2 October, after he had shown it to Mitchell. Yet, although it seems that producer Meirion Jones had pointed out its errors immediately, it was corrected only on 22 October. This meant the BBC chairman and other executives, including Entwistle, were relying on faulty information. It also provoked the culture secretary's interventions last week.
According to Simon Albury, retiring chief executive of the Royal Television Society, the BBC is mired in its "worst ever crisis" that "calls into question the BBC Trust as its governance structure". The former World in Action journalist has run the industry body for 12 years with discretion. Now free to speak, he said: "Lord Patten appeared foolish. He's not a foolish man, so it must be because he's chairman of an organisation that has been tested and cannot work."
Albury went on to say that an independent inquiry should have been announced straight away, instead of waiting for the all-clear from the police. "The BBC Trust is like a carnival horse, facing in two directions at the same time, and it has failed," he said.
Meanwhile, a leading TV executive in the independent sector and a leading BBC presenter both argue that Patten is too close to Entwistle, one even going so far as to say that the DG is "Patten's creature". Others, including a former BBC executive, suspect that Entwistle and Patten's jobs are both safe because the crisis has occurred so early in the DG's tenure. Patten's cheerleading for the BBC, this observer feels, is welcome in such a beleaguered corporation.
Internally, the crisis has clearly created rival factions, with household names quietly lining up behind Rippon, Boaden or Entwistle. Those who support Boaden say she "will not fall on her sword" and did everything she could to alert the DG to the dangers of the Savile tributes, given strict BBC conventions about not trespassing on the realm of fellow managers. Boaden herself has said Rippon's standing aside "does not reflect on his journalism". Defenders of Rippon point out that the case against Savile remained sketchy before Christmas. The BBC inquiry may glean more from Newsnight reporter Liz MacKean's email about her editor's "latest panic attack" and his fear that the Savile investigation would involve a "long political chain" of executives. Others who have worked for Newsnight now cast aspersions on Rippon's track record, suggesting he had been brought in from radio and "was not up to the Newsnight role". Most publicly, 5 Live's Victoria Derbyshire has tweeted her concerns, asking on Twitter: "If BBC journos/Eds make a poor editorial call, (& most of us hve at some point), will they be treated by mgemnt like Peter Rippon has been?".
Former BBC executive Jane Root, the first woman to control a BBC channel, suspects the Newsnight editor was worried about the tone of the investigation. "I suspect there may have been a feeling too that it was not quite right for Newsnight; a bit sleazy and all about a dead old celebrity. What I wonder is why the information they had was not passed on to Panorama before now," she said.
John Bridcut, an ex-Newsnight executive, who conducted an impartiality report for the BBC across the range programmesin 2007, said that, while Rippon had "made a poor decision and editors had to stand or fall by them", he feels sorry for him. "He is being hung out to dry. He's been made the complete fall guy, when the bigger story is what on earth was going on back then in Light Entertainment. Helen Boaden was also entirely proper in saying that the Savile investigation should not scrimp on journalistic standards."
Like others still inside the BBC, Bridcut adds that if the corporation had accused Savile and been shown to be wrong "all hell would have broken loose about how they were trashing the reputation of a wonderful philanthropist – in fact, the complete obverse of what is happening now."
One Newsnight insider blames the lame response to the crisis on the BBC's rigid and "lethal" hierarchy, modelled, he says, on the principle that the more senior a person is, the more reliable they are. This led Patten and Entwistle to issue inaccurate statements as the scandal unfolded.
The same "top down" culture seems to have prevented heads of Light Entertainment in the 1970s and 1980s from acting to stop Savile. All those contacted say they knew nothing, perhaps for fear of moral and legal culpability. Despite earlier references to Savile's illegal activities in a Louis Theroux documentary, in the cult comedy of standup Jerry Sadowitz, and in the Sunday Mirror and the Oldie magazine earlier this year, current leading executives also claim to have known nothing until newspaper reports heralded the ITV Exposure documentary this autumn.
So a 10-second exchange between Boaden and Entwistle at an awards ceremony on 2 December last year, in which she warned him about Savile, does not seem to have piqued the future DG's interest. This is either because he was keeping a disciplined distance, or because he knew the rumours and did not need to ask. He told a parliamentary select committee last week that it was the former: "I absolutely did not want to do anything that demonstrated excessive interest."
Senior BBC sources have told this newspaper it is "inconceivable" that Entwistle and the then DG, Thompson, did not learn of, or read, detailed press coverage in January and February. Nevertheless, Patten also told a radio interviewer last week that he had not seen any reports in his press cuttings.
The latest unseemly episode in this fiasco saw three key players shouting at each other in a BBC newsroom last Wednesday. After appearing on Radio 4's Media Show to apologise for misleading the public, the BBC's head of editorial policy, David Jordan, bumped into Jones and Rippon. Accusations flew, with Jordan alleging that Jones had behaved despicably, and the producer saying Jordan had lied for the BBC. Rippon, say witnesses, then tried to get Jordan to apologise. On air, an embarrassed Jordan had discovered that Jones had revealed the existence of a confidential meeting between the two on 5 October about Rippon's blog.
Resemblance to farce does not end there. Far from disbanding its "silo mentality", since 17 October the BBC has put up a series of Chinese walls to prevent staff involved with the Savile inquiry from reporting on the issue. Those "recused" include Entwistle, Boaden, Mitchell and Rippon, who has been forced to stand down. In an unprecedented move, untainted executives have been moved in – Tim Davie, deputising for Entwistle, Peter Horrocks, the head of World Service, for Helen Boaden, and Fran Unsworth, head of newsgathering, for Mitchell.
So the ironic result of problems caused by a lack of communication is that extra obstacles have been erected. Patten, who was at the centre of one famous tearful farewell when he handed Hong Kong over to Chinese authority, could soon preside over another set of emotional departures. Reported by guardian.co.uk 18 hours ago.
When Lord Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and the man appointed by the government to monitor the behaviour of the BBC, sat down to lunch with journalists three weeks ago, he waved away the plate of food he was offered with a grim face. "I didn't think I'd come here to eat," he said. The business of the day was too serious. Sir Jimmy Savile, it was now clear, had been guilty of a chain of sexual crimes during his years as a BBC star and no one at the corporation had done anything about it. What's more, key information about the crimes had been kept back from the public for almost a year.
Yet Patten, a veteran political heavyweight, was in confident mood. He scorned any suggestion that a Newsnight investigation into Savile had been suppressed and argued that the BBC's failure to report the presenter's abuse was mirrored by the laxity of the press. The whole affair was "a cesspit", but one he felt he was viewing from a safe distance.
This weekend both he and his director general, George Entwistle, are sitting amid what Patten has since described as "a tsunami of filth". Far from separating the BBC from the criminal activities of a dead paedophile, the revelations about Savile contained in ITV's Exposure documentary on 3 October, and in the BBC's subsequent episode of Panorama, have lifted the lid on a publicly funded broadcaster ruled by fear and caution to the point of dysfunction.
Twenty days later Patten has now exchanged terse letters with the culture minister, Maria Miller, who has questioned the soundness of BBC governance. A shadow of doubt also hangs over the future of Entwistle and his news chiefs, while Newsnight editor Peter Rippon has "stepped aside" after giving a flawed account of his team's work in a semi-official blog posting. The dark cloud has even spread across the Atlantic, where the BBC's former DG, Mark Thompson, who was in charge while Newsnight was pursuing its investigation, is about to take up a well-paid job as CEO of the New York Times.
So the confident stance of that lunch on 10 October has gone. On Thursday Patten gave a series of TV interviews in which he accepted that he and other BBC chiefs had put out "misleading" information. "What I signed up to is a blog which didn't turn out to be absolutely accurate," he said.
It is bad luck that this scandal broke only 11 days into Entwistle's new job. The fact remains, though, that the toxicity of the Savile revelations has grown because of exactly the hierarchical "silo mentality" inside the organisation that Entwistle and Patten had both promised to tackle.
Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust until Patten took over in April last year, argues that concern about the BBC's behaviour is distracting from the key issues raised by Savile's offences: "Why do we allow powerful men and powerful celebrities to behave like this? I don't think I heard the name of Jimmy Savile when I was at the BBC, nor any allegations. He was just a bit of history," he said.
But Lyons had warned in May that the trust needed to search outside the BBC for a successor to Thompson. His comments underscored a belief that there had been a failure to plan a proper succession and Entwistle had not been given enough time to develop into a public figure. Shortly afterwards Entwistle failed to respond publicly to the outcry over the botched BBC coverage of the jubilee river pageant, though he went on to win Patten's backing as director general, beating Caroline Thomson, chief operating officer of the BBC.
Naturally enough, public interest in how the BBC Trust works as an in-house regulator is limited – and the DG's job security is not the stuff of conversation in the bus queue. But the issue of prolonged sexual abuse on BBC premises, however historic, is of great public concern. More than five million people stayed up to watch Panorama last Monday. Such high ratings are shaming when it is probable that if ITV had not taken up the Savile story it would still be filed away in Newsnight's drawer. Most damaging of all, according to many of those inside the BBC, the slow corporate response has revealed a lumbering management structure where commonsense inquiries about the work of other departments are discouraged. These factors mean the Newsnight debacle now sits beside other great BBC dramas. These, notably, are 28 January 1987, the day Marmaduke Hussey, new chairman of the BBC, ruthlessly dismissed his DG, Alasdair Milne. His move followed long-standing tensions between the BBC and the Thatcher government, culminating in Special Branch raiding BBC Scotland. John Birt was hired to impose a radical restructuring of news and current affairs.
Then, in January 2004 Greg Dyke was forced out of the BBC when chairman Gavyn Davies resigned over the criticisms of Andrew Gilligan's report debunking government claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Queengate followed, when edited footage in a programme trailer falsely showed Her Majesty throwing a strop, then in 2008 Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand made lewd jokes at the expense of actor Andrew Sachs and his granddaughter. Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas resigned within days and the notorious "programme compliance" rules were strengthened.
At least one former top BBC television executive believes these crises have left a dangerous legacy of caution and defensive behaviour. "People increasingly make decisions based on making as few waves as possible," he said.
Before internal inquiries report, three crucial mistakes remain evident to outsiders. First, Savile tribute programmes were broadcast at Christmas when the corporation already had testimony that he was a serial sex offender. Second, evidence of historic offences carried out at the BBC was not handed over to the police, delaying the current investigation by almost a year. Certainly, some sources say, senior figures knew details – perhaps Steve Mitchell, the deputy director of news and Helen Boaden, director of BBC News. Third, the BBC appears to have hesitated before putting out an accurate version of events that had been misrepresented in Rippon's original blog about the dropping of his team's investigation. It was posted online on 2 October, after he had shown it to Mitchell. Yet, although it seems that producer Meirion Jones had pointed out its errors immediately, it was corrected only on 22 October. This meant the BBC chairman and other executives, including Entwistle, were relying on faulty information. It also provoked the culture secretary's interventions last week.
According to Simon Albury, retiring chief executive of the Royal Television Society, the BBC is mired in its "worst ever crisis" that "calls into question the BBC Trust as its governance structure". The former World in Action journalist has run the industry body for 12 years with discretion. Now free to speak, he said: "Lord Patten appeared foolish. He's not a foolish man, so it must be because he's chairman of an organisation that has been tested and cannot work."
Albury went on to say that an independent inquiry should have been announced straight away, instead of waiting for the all-clear from the police. "The BBC Trust is like a carnival horse, facing in two directions at the same time, and it has failed," he said.
Meanwhile, a leading TV executive in the independent sector and a leading BBC presenter both argue that Patten is too close to Entwistle, one even going so far as to say that the DG is "Patten's creature". Others, including a former BBC executive, suspect that Entwistle and Patten's jobs are both safe because the crisis has occurred so early in the DG's tenure. Patten's cheerleading for the BBC, this observer feels, is welcome in such a beleaguered corporation.
Internally, the crisis has clearly created rival factions, with household names quietly lining up behind Rippon, Boaden or Entwistle. Those who support Boaden say she "will not fall on her sword" and did everything she could to alert the DG to the dangers of the Savile tributes, given strict BBC conventions about not trespassing on the realm of fellow managers. Boaden herself has said Rippon's standing aside "does not reflect on his journalism". Defenders of Rippon point out that the case against Savile remained sketchy before Christmas. The BBC inquiry may glean more from Newsnight reporter Liz MacKean's email about her editor's "latest panic attack" and his fear that the Savile investigation would involve a "long political chain" of executives. Others who have worked for Newsnight now cast aspersions on Rippon's track record, suggesting he had been brought in from radio and "was not up to the Newsnight role". Most publicly, 5 Live's Victoria Derbyshire has tweeted her concerns, asking on Twitter: "If BBC journos/Eds make a poor editorial call, (& most of us hve at some point), will they be treated by mgemnt like Peter Rippon has been?".
Former BBC executive Jane Root, the first woman to control a BBC channel, suspects the Newsnight editor was worried about the tone of the investigation. "I suspect there may have been a feeling too that it was not quite right for Newsnight; a bit sleazy and all about a dead old celebrity. What I wonder is why the information they had was not passed on to Panorama before now," she said.
John Bridcut, an ex-Newsnight executive, who conducted an impartiality report for the BBC across the range programmesin 2007, said that, while Rippon had "made a poor decision and editors had to stand or fall by them", he feels sorry for him. "He is being hung out to dry. He's been made the complete fall guy, when the bigger story is what on earth was going on back then in Light Entertainment. Helen Boaden was also entirely proper in saying that the Savile investigation should not scrimp on journalistic standards."
Like others still inside the BBC, Bridcut adds that if the corporation had accused Savile and been shown to be wrong "all hell would have broken loose about how they were trashing the reputation of a wonderful philanthropist – in fact, the complete obverse of what is happening now."
One Newsnight insider blames the lame response to the crisis on the BBC's rigid and "lethal" hierarchy, modelled, he says, on the principle that the more senior a person is, the more reliable they are. This led Patten and Entwistle to issue inaccurate statements as the scandal unfolded.
The same "top down" culture seems to have prevented heads of Light Entertainment in the 1970s and 1980s from acting to stop Savile. All those contacted say they knew nothing, perhaps for fear of moral and legal culpability. Despite earlier references to Savile's illegal activities in a Louis Theroux documentary, in the cult comedy of standup Jerry Sadowitz, and in the Sunday Mirror and the Oldie magazine earlier this year, current leading executives also claim to have known nothing until newspaper reports heralded the ITV Exposure documentary this autumn.
So a 10-second exchange between Boaden and Entwistle at an awards ceremony on 2 December last year, in which she warned him about Savile, does not seem to have piqued the future DG's interest. This is either because he was keeping a disciplined distance, or because he knew the rumours and did not need to ask. He told a parliamentary select committee last week that it was the former: "I absolutely did not want to do anything that demonstrated excessive interest."
Senior BBC sources have told this newspaper it is "inconceivable" that Entwistle and the then DG, Thompson, did not learn of, or read, detailed press coverage in January and February. Nevertheless, Patten also told a radio interviewer last week that he had not seen any reports in his press cuttings.
The latest unseemly episode in this fiasco saw three key players shouting at each other in a BBC newsroom last Wednesday. After appearing on Radio 4's Media Show to apologise for misleading the public, the BBC's head of editorial policy, David Jordan, bumped into Jones and Rippon. Accusations flew, with Jordan alleging that Jones had behaved despicably, and the producer saying Jordan had lied for the BBC. Rippon, say witnesses, then tried to get Jordan to apologise. On air, an embarrassed Jordan had discovered that Jones had revealed the existence of a confidential meeting between the two on 5 October about Rippon's blog.
Resemblance to farce does not end there. Far from disbanding its "silo mentality", since 17 October the BBC has put up a series of Chinese walls to prevent staff involved with the Savile inquiry from reporting on the issue. Those "recused" include Entwistle, Boaden, Mitchell and Rippon, who has been forced to stand down. In an unprecedented move, untainted executives have been moved in – Tim Davie, deputising for Entwistle, Peter Horrocks, the head of World Service, for Helen Boaden, and Fran Unsworth, head of newsgathering, for Mitchell.
So the ironic result of problems caused by a lack of communication is that extra obstacles have been erected. Patten, who was at the centre of one famous tearful farewell when he handed Hong Kong over to Chinese authority, could soon preside over another set of emotional departures. Reported by guardian.co.uk 18 hours ago.