UNITED STATES
Seeking Alpha
David Warsh
Scandal over the tendency of organizations to shield sexual predators sometimes concealed in their ranks, the public investigation of which began with the Catholic Church, spread to Penn State University college football, and the Boy Scouts, recently has stained the British Broadcasting Co. The story of the late Jimmy Saville, a one-time coal-miner turned British celebrity whose television presence over fifty years loosely resembled that of American Bandstand host Dick Clark (with more than a touch of W.C Fields thrown in), would be just another strange tale of Old England, except for one thing.
The New York Times Company (NYT), which, through its Boston Globe subsidiary, started the media’s sustained attention to the issue ten years ago with a painstaking investigation of the Boston Roman Catholic archdiocese, recently hired the BBC’s Mark Thompson to be its chief executive officer. Now it turns out that a program that would have documented both Saville’s history of preying on adolescent girls and his systematic enabling over the years by the authorities (including the BBC), was quietly scrubbed during the period that Thompson served as the BBC’s director general. The New York Times own public editor has urged the paper not to “pull its punches” in considering whether Thompson is the right person for the job, “given this turn of events.”
It was at a juncture something like this one that a famous old attorney, now long retired from the courtroom, listened in a private conference room as his colleagues waxed furious at demands that the other side had made during a negotiation: Outrageous! Preposterous! Unconscionable! After a long and thoughtful pause, the counselor intoned, “Friends, it is time to rise above principle.” The deal was done and everyone went back to work.
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