The Bbc's Real Crime over Jimmy Savile Was to Act like the Catholic Church

By Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
October 26, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/26/bbc-jimmy-savile-catholic-church

BBC director general George Entwistle leaves Portcullis House after giving evidence to MPs over the Jimmy Savile scandal. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

There is a tide in the affairs of men and this one has gone in and out and back in again. The first wave brought horror at the alleged crimes of Jimmy Savile, revulsion at a deception that had been perpetrated on the British public over four decades: hoodwinked by visible good deeds, so that we wouldn't see the darkness beneath.

The next wave saw that fury turned on Savile's longtime employer, the BBC, for failing to reveal the truth about him when it had a clear chance, by binning a Newsnight investigation a year ago – a decision the programme's editor made, we now discover, a day after the corporation had published its Christmas schedule, a lineup that included not one but two fawning tributes to the presenter. That BBC-focused rage reached a peak at the start of the week, when Panorama tore into its sister programme as George Entwistle prepared to take a pasting from a House of Commons select committee.

Since then the tide has headed in the reverse direction, with both commentators and politicians insisting it is wrong to obsess over BBC management practices when the real issue is the sexual abuse of children. "The voices of the victims seem to have been completely ignored," the Tory MP Claire Perry told Question Time, because "the BBC is doing too much navel-gazing".

So what is the right way to approach this unfolding tale of sorrow and wickedness? Where should we be directing our rage and where should we be looking for blame, for answers or both?

Instinctively, I want to side with those who regard the tormenting of the BBC as displacement activity, the product of an all too natural urge to find a living target to attack, given that the real culprit is dead and beyond justice's reach – and perhaps the product too of a desire to avoid staring such soul-sapping depravity in the eye. How much easier to study Newsnight internal emails than to contemplate the testimony of a nine-year-old boy – now a man too ashamed to show his face – led into a dingy BBC side room on the promise of a shiny badge, only to be molested.

I too want to applaud a corporation that criticises itself as fiercely as it criticises anyone else – if anything, more fiercely. Few media organisations, few institutions of any kind, would expose themselves to such treatment. Imagine if the Times had led the charge against phone hacking at the News of the World and you see how rare a bird the BBC is.

Since we're speaking of News International, I'm also aware that many of those now skewering the BBC are longstanding enemies of the corporation and of the very idea of publicly funded broadcasting. As a repeat defender of the BBC – full disclosure: I present The Long View, an occasional series on Radio 4 – I know that plenty of the loudest critics have been itching to put the knife in, if only as revenge for the intense coverage of the hacking scandal.

And now they have their chance. It's equally true that some of Entwistle's Commons inquisitors were guilty of absurd grandstanding, posing and preening to ensure it was they who appeared, in full Watergate inquiry mode, on the teatime news.

I know all this and yet I cannot bring myself to exonerate the BBC fully, nor even to join the chorus saying it's time to drop the media introspection and focus narrowly on Savile and his victims.

That's not because I concede Entwistle came over as weak and hesitant, his voice strangled by the BBC's distinct brand of corporate management-speak, all "divisional directors" and "referring up". Though he did. Nor is it because Entwistle failed to learn the lesson of Greg Dyke's fall over the David Kelly affair. Remember, Lord Hutton faulted the then director general not for the initial Today report but for his later failure to get a full grasp of the facts before defending the broadcast. Entwistle made that same mistake, allowing the Newsnight editor to post a flawed account of events before he himself had all the facts.

Nor is it even the original Newsnight decision that holds me back. Sure, it was a bad journalistic call to drop the Savile story, a view that is clearer with hindsight. But it does not, by itself, justify the mighty storm currently breaking over Broadcasting House.

What I struggle to forgive is not the journalistic judgment, but rather the human one. Mark Thompson, the then DG, now admits that he "formed the impression" last December that Newsnight was investigating "allegations of abuse of some kind" relating to Savile. Forget the editorial decision that had to be made. Put aside what the BBC should or should not have broadcast. At that moment a five-alarm warning should have sounded. For Savile was the creature, if not creation, of the BBC. His professional career was conducted entirely on the BBC's airwaves and, crucially, on its premises. Much, if not most, of that work involved children.

The BBC bosses should have been gripped that instant by a terrible dread: here was the possibility that Savile had abused children under the BBC's roof, children who had been entrusted into the BBC's care. That possibility did not end with the airing or not of Newsnight's report. For the BBC had a duty – a duty of care – to get to the truth of those allegations, to find out what had happened and to make sure the victims were heard, if not right away by a TV audience then at least by the BBC and the police.

Instead, even though they knew these horrendous allegations had been made, they let them go uninvestigated, sitting in a drawer from December until ITV stepped in this month. Theirs was the reaction of the Catholic hierarchy to reports of predatory priests: let's hope the whole nasty business goes away, after all we only have the boys' word for it. Or, as the Newsnight editor put it, we have "just the women".

This was the great failing and it goes far beyond journalism. Indeed, to raise it is to shift the focus away from media high politics and back on to the victims and their needs. For this is what past, current and, heaven forbid, future victims of abuse need to know: that if they are abused under the roof, literal or metaphoric, of an institution that was meant to protect them, they will be heard. That is the case the BBC needs to answer. And that is why this crisis could ultimately be more serious than the Hutton episode. Back then the public broadly took the BBC's side against an aggressive government prosecuting an unpopular war. This time it can count on no such sympathy.