U.K. Politicians Attack BBC for ‘Culture of Cronyism’ | Variety U.K. Politicians Attack BBC for ‘Culture of Cronyism’ December 16, 2013 | 04:44AM PT 'BBC's governance model is broken,' says U.K. Parliament's Public Accounts Committee LONDON — A powerful committee of U.K. politicians has made a stinging attack on the BBC ’s management and trustees, claiming that a culture of “cronyism” had developed at the pubcaster. The U.K. Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, which monitors the use of public money, has been investigating the high level of severance payments for departing BBC execs. In the three years to December 2012, the BBC gave 150 senior managers severance payments totaling £25 million ($40.8 million) as part of an effort to cut the number of senior managers from 624 to 445.

PAC concluded that “the BBC paid more salary in lieu of notice than it was obliged to in 22 of the 150 severance payments for senior managers in the three years to December 2012, at a cost of £1.4 million ($2.28 million).” PAC, which is chaired by Member of Parliament Margaret Hodge, concluded that “cronyism was a factor that allowed for the liberal use of other people’s money.” The committee reprimanded the BBC Trust, the network’s governing body, headed by Chris Patten (pictured, above left, with BBC director-general Tony Hall ), for not challenging the payments, which it said was symptomatic of a wider malaise at the pubcaster. PAC said: “Our examination of severance payments exposed a dysfunctional relationship between the BBC executive and the BBC Trust that casts doubt on the effectiveness of the BBC’s governance model.” It concluded that there had been a “breakdown in the relationship between the BBC Trust and the executive. At present the governance model is broken.” The BBC last week revised the rules of engagement between the executive and the Trust in the hope that it would improve its effectiveness and transparency.

PAC warned that “The Trust and the executive have a limited amount of time to demonstrate that the current governance model can be made to work.” The BBC was contrite in its response, stating: “We greatly regret that license fee payers were let down by this episode. They are entitled to expect that their money is spent wisely.” It pointed to a decision last year by Hall to impose a $245,000 cap on severance payments. Hall became director-general in April. He replaced George Entwistle, who departed after a furor over the BBC’s handling of the Jimmy Savile pedophile scandal. Q&A: BBC pay-off scandal - BBC News Q&A: BBC pay-off scandal 9 September 2013 Close share panel Image caption Lord Patten and Mark Thompson are at loggerheads over BBC pay-offs The BBC has been criticised for paying £25m to 150 outgoing senior executives between 2009 and 2012 - some £2m more than their contracts stipulated. Executives, including former director general Mark Thompson and BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten, are being questioned by politicians over the payments.

Here's how the situation arose, who is involved and what might happen next. What prompted the investigation into BBC pay-offs? MPs took issue with director general George Entwistle's severance payment following his resignation in November 2012 in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal. Mr Entwistle received £450,000, after spending 54 days in the job. The figure amounted to one year's salary rather than the six months he was entitled to under the terms of his contract. Chairman of the BBC Trust, Chris Patten, issued a letter explaining the trust's decision, saying the amount was "justified and necessary". What happened next? The National Audit Office (NAO) asked if it could investigate Mr Entwistle's severance pay, but the BBC said a broader look at severance packages was more appropriate. Around the same time, it was disclosed that redundancy payments at the corporation had doubled to £58m between 2010 and 2011. The figures came to light as part of a Freedom of Information request by the Telegraph .

The biggest pay-off was awarded to Mark Byford, the former deputy director general, whose total severance package amounted to £1,022,000. What did the investigation find? In its report, published in July , the NAO found that the BBC had paid £25m in severance payments to 150 senior staff. Furthermore, it showed that the BBC had paid 14 staff more than it had been contractually obliged to. The top 10 payments amounted to £5,298,900 - 20% of the total. They included the £1,022,000 paid to Mr Byford in 2011 and a payment of £670,000 to the former chief operating officer, Caroline Thompson, who left in September 2012. The NAO also discovered instances in which departing managers were given large pay-offs even after they had found work elsewhere, and examples of staff who were offered consultancy roles at the time of their departure. "The BBC has breached its own policies on severance too often without good reason," concluded the report, published in July .

"Weak governance arrangements have led to payments that exceeded contractual entitlements and put public trust at risk. Severance payments for senior BBC managers have, therefore, provided poor value for money for licence fee payers." How did the BBC respond? "Deeply worrying" and "unacceptable" - that's how BBC trustee Anthony Fry described the NAO report in July. Called in front of the Public Accounts Committee, BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten called the payments a matter of "shock and dismay". Both men suggested they had been misled by Mark Thompson, the BBC's former director general, about the scale of severance payments to executives. Lord Patten told the committee he would "be as interested as you are why we didn't know". Mr Thompson was not present at the hearing, but denied the accusations. In a submission to the committee , leaked in early September, he accused Lord Patten and his counterpart of giving "fundamentally misleading" testimonies. "The insinuation that they were kept in the dark by me or anyone else is false and is not supported by the evidence." The BBC Trust has denied Lord Patten had been fully briefed and described Thompson's statement as "bizarre".

Lucy Adams, the outgoing director of human resources at the BBC, also appeared before the committee. She said Mr Byford's £949,000 payout had been part of "custom and practice" at the time. When asked about why there had been overpayments, she said: "The overwhelming focus was to get numbers out of the door as quickly as possible." Were any criminal proceedings launched as a result of the report's conclusions? Police received allegations of misconduct and fraud but said an assessment of the material found "insufficient evidence of dishonesty or criminal misconduct". It said no further action would be taken in relation to the payouts. What happened next? The Public Accounts Committee asked the NAO to make a more detailed report, looking at all senior staff pay-offs from 2009 to 2012. Its analysis of 90 settlements showed eight managers received more than they were contractually entitled to, costing more than £200,000. Added to the figures in the previous report, it meant the BBC had given out £1.4m more than it needed.

The BBC also commissioned a separate report by auditors KPMG, looking into severance pay between July 2006 and December 2009. It found over-spending of £1.5m on another 30 cases. In total, it means £2.9m was overpaid in 2006-12. Have BBC redundancy policies changed as a result? In April, the BBC capped severance pay for senior staff at £150,000, or 12 months' salary, whichever is lower. "We have to limit the size of these payments," said the new director general, Tony Hall. "This isn't something done lightly, but I think it responds to the public mood out there." "These are difficult economic times for people across the country and the BBC is not immune from them. The financial settlements of the past cannot be justified in the future." The £150,000 cap was extended to all staff in September. Was any money recouped? Some of it. Roly Keating, previously the BBC's director of archive content, decided to give back his severance payment in June, after helping the NAO compile its report.

Mr Keating, who left the BBC in 2012 to become chief executive of the British Library, said in a letter to Tony Hall: "You will understand that as a matter of principle I would never wish to benefit from a payment that could not be demonstrated to have been fully and appropriately authorised." The BBC also clawed back a £687,333 redundancy payment it had made to Jana Bennett in 2012. Ms Bennett had been director of BBC Vision, putting her in charge of the BBC's licence-fee-funded TV channels, but moved to a new role at the BBC's commercial operation, BBC Worldwide, in 2011. When she was made redundant the following year, the BBC thought it was obliged to pay her redundancy and met the cost - unbeknownst to Ms Bennett. It later reconsidered, and recouped the money from BBC Worldwide, which does not derive its income from the licence fee. Did the BBC lose the plot? Mark Thompson says not. The former director general - who is now chief executive of the New York Times newspaper - was called to give evidence to MPs on 9 September.

He said the reason for the large severance payments while he was director general was that he was cutting senior staff to reduce costs. The "savings were so large" that one month's delay would have cost £1m, he argued. However, MP Margaret Hodge, who chaired the hearing, said the impression had been created that "a small elite of senior managers" got "the most generous" redundancy pay-offs but "ordinary" staff did not. She also criticised the BBC Trust for not challenging the sums involved, which she described as "grossly excessive". Former BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons acknowledged that the payments looked "eye-watering" to the "ordinary person in the street", but argued they matched those in the civil service and private sector. His replacement, Lord Patten, took a stronger line, saying: "The way we've been running this system has been unfair." "This is a reflection, not just of having to manage things occasionally by spraying money over people [but of[ a cultural issue," he said. "We have to grip it." Could this spell the end of the BBC Trust? The Trust oversees the operation of the BBC and is meant to represent the voice of the licence fee payer.

Reports in certain newspapers suggested ministers were planning to axe the body and hand responsibility for governing the BBC to media regulator Ofcom. Speaking at the September 9 meeting of the Public Accounts Committee, MP Richard Bacon said the case for changing the BBC management setup had been "overwhelmingly proven". "The bicycle is not working properly and it needs fixing now," he added. Lord Patten responded by saying he believed the Trust and the executive would "have a different and good relationship" in coming years. However, he conceded, "You may well have to look at how a supervisory body is more involved in remuneration." Any change to the BBC Trust would require new legislation and would only take effect from the start of the BBC's next charter, which begins in January 2017. Ofcom already regulates the BBC on matters of obscenity, privacy and harm, but the corporation has maintained its independence on questions of editorial impartiality.

100 BBC executives on six-figure salaries despite pledge to curb pay | Daily Mail Online comments More than 100 BBC executives are earning six-figure salaries, despite pledges to curb top pay and offer viewers better value for money, New figures have revealed that more than 100 of the corporation's top earners make at least £100,000 a year, and 80 of them are on salaries of £150,000 or more. According to an official BBC register of elite staff, 13 executives were also given a pay rise of up to 10 per cent, at a time when the broadcaster is facing cuts to its spending. Value for money: Since Lord Tony Hall took over the post of BBC director general in April last year he has been trying to cut the percentage of executives from 2.5 per cent of the workforce to one per cent It also follows last year's severance pay scandal in which the National Audit Office found that the BBC handed over £1.4million more in pay-offs to senior managers than it needed to.

Since Lord Hall took over the post of director general in April last year he has been trying to cut the percentage of executives from 2.5 per cent of the workforce to one per cent. And although more than 25 senior managers have left the broadcaster since his tenure began, the number of serving managers required to declare their income as more than £100,000 has risen from 100 to 102, according to the Sunday Times . RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share The BBC said that the loss of these 25 senior figures had led to savings to the pay bill of more than £2million between March 31, 2013, and January 1 of this year, and that the number of senior management earners had also fallen by two per cent. Since taking over as director general, Lord Hall has been keen to argue that the BBC provides value for money and in a speech to the Oxford Media Convention last week he said a BBC survey had shown that some viewers would happily pay between £15 and £20 a month, compared to the £12 currently paid.

Cost: Lord Hall has suggested that viewers who watch BBC programmes through the iPlayer catch-up service should be forced to pay the £145.50 annual licence fee He also accepted the BBC needs to cut the amount it spends and refused to rule out making cuts to some channels such as BBC Three or BBC Four, as well as suggesting that viewers who watch BBC programmes through the iPlayer catch-up service should be forced to pay the £145.50 annual licence fee, which currently only applies to those who watch shows as they are broadcast. And in the wake of the severance pay scandal last year, he called for the Corporation to be run like an employee-owned organisation such as John Lewis rather than a bank seeking to maximise shareholder profits. He said: ‘The BBC is not a standard public service.

In ethos we’re less like the City and more like John Lewis...we are the BBC, not a PLC.’ TOP EARNERS AT THE BBC Director General Tony Hall £450,000-a-year (a decrease of £221,000 compared with Mark Thomas but the same as George Entwistle) Managing director, finance and operations Anne Bulford £395,000 (£43,000 more than former chief financial officer Zarin Patel) Director of news and current affairs James Harding £340,000 (the same as his predacessor Helen Boaden) Director, television Danny Cohen £320,000 (£50,000 more than George Entwistle's basic salary as director of vision in 2011/12.

Mr Cohen did not receive a pay increase on his promotion from controller of BBC One) Tony Hall, take a long knife to the parasites the BBC calls managers | Jonathan Meades | Opinion | The Guardian Tony Hall, take a long knife to the parasites the BBC calls managers Jonathan Meades Only a brutal demolition from the new director general can restore the glory of the British Betrayal Corporation John Birt, author of the BBC's 'bloated structure' and 'the improbable beneficiary of the Mendips camorra of William Rees-Mogg and Marmaduke Hussey'. Photograph: PA Tuesday 2 April 2013 01.59 EDT First published on Tuesday 2 April 2013 01.59 EDT Share on Messenger Close Nicholas Hytner recently complained that the BBC was "neglecting the arts" . Melvyn Bragg has said that "I'm disappointed at the way the arts seems to be shrinking on the BBC." But both Hytner and Bragg are one letter out.

The "arts" conjures up images of committees of bores, worthily reverent exegesis, the horrors of dance, the misfit between opera and even a 42-inch screen, and ancient avant-gardist cliches – "ahead of its time", "ground-breaking", "controversial". Bragg and Hytner, the National Theatre director, would have been on the mark had they omitted the "s". Yes, "art": television is capable of creating its own art, which is not dependent on other arts, or is at least a mongrel synthesis of them. It is capable of a sort of fabrication that is peculiar to the medium, of highly individualistic, highly crafted work that, like anything of merit, defies classification – although the very structure of the BBC's commissioning processes militate against the non-generic. The commissioning is also too centralised. Channel controllers at the BBC enjoy an increasing autonomy that has resulted in decreasing diversity. The deluge of gardening programmes on BBC2 a few years ago was caused by the then controller's solipsistic assumption that the channel's audience was as entranced by the sod and the trowel as she was. A brutal demolition is required.

Simon Jenkins once observed that the idea that a newspaper is like an oil tanker and can be turned round only very slowly is false. A newspaper is like a speedboat. It is remade afresh every day. Television is necessarily slower, but change can be swiftly effected if the will and the wiles are there. Of course programmes are formulaic, and of course ratings are relentlessly pursued, and of course they are regarded as the measure of value when the criteria are set by a senior management that has been recruited from such places as the marketing department of Coca-Cola, a product that has always to be the same. In the quarter century that I have been making shows for the BBC , its management has swelled in direct proportion to the diminution of programme budgets. This management is a parasite that believes itself to be the host. It is a pusillanimous, jargon-ridden, self-perpetuating proof of Parkinson's law . (There are some things that even digitalisation cannot change.) Tony Hall , who starts on Tuesday as the new director general of the BBC, ought to look back to Friday 13 July 1962: Harold Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives .

Don't worry Tone Boy, no one died. Supermac merely shafted a third of his cabinet. During his brief tenure in the job, George Entwistle had already begun to dismember the bloated structure installed by John Birt, the improbable beneficiary of the Mendips camorra of William Rees-Mogg and Marmaduke Hussey (those are the truly guilty men). The BBC does not have to continue on the path that it wrongly chose after the dismissal of Alasdair Milne as director general. The way in which the licence fee, nothing more or less than a poll tax, is divvied up between channels demands urgent overhaul. There is no reason why a channel that drools out light "entertainment" should receive a disproportionately hefty slice simply because it has always done so. It is within the power of the director general to overturn this inverted order. Why are former footballers like Alan Hansen and the one who looks like a porky hairdresser paid more than Jeremy Paxman , the most authoritative broadcast journalist in Britain? Is it because they invent new units of measurement – "half a yard" – or model provincial disco clothes, or talk drivel about "role models"?

Were these dorks themselves "role models" as broadcasters they might learn to parse syntactically and grammatically correct sentences in comprehensibly accented English. (The BBC's eschewal of received pronunciation – RP – is inverse snobbery: it was a useful instrument of pan-British comprehensibility. The regional accents that have replaced RP are vocal manifestations of identity politics, of parochial apartheid.) The fear of seriousness, and the assumption that seriousness is necessarily humourless, has to be overcome. There are manifold audiences. There is no evidence that the majority are as dull and backward as the BBC assumes them to be. The diet of gruesome "reality TV" (there is no such thing) and witless "lifestyle" shows is corrupting – it is a betrayal of the British. And I mean that. As well as emulating Macmillan, Hall should also follow the example of another Scot, Lord Reith. Oh, I know: autres temps autres moeurs. But the BBC's capacity and duty to educate and to inform has been all but jettisoned in its hideously successful attempt to become just another commercial broadcaster. Which has meant creating an ethos of gross sentimentality and predatory bullying.

Such job descriptions as "magician and children's entertainer" should have set alarm bells ringing. So obviously should have lowlife freaks such as Jimmy Savile , long ago described by Anthony Burgess as "the most evil man in Britain". The BBC's managers were less perceptive than the great novelist. Their quality can surely be gauged by being the only people in the country who had not heard that Savile dated mortuary corpses, kerb-crawled in a camper van and was an enthusiastic nick-sniffer. Deaf? Cut off? Wilfully immemorious ? Mendacious? There's a lot of cleansing to do. Untermenschen who merely make programmes ought all to get behind Tony Hall as he takes his Karcher to managers and prescribes Depo-Provera to "entertainers". Jonathan Meades's most recent book is Museum Without Walls • This article was amended on 3 April 2013. The original referred to curb-crawling rather than kerb-crawling. This has been corrected. Tony Hall to meet with officials from NUJ and Bectu in effort to clear the air following industrial action last Thursday.

By Josh Halliday Published: 2 Apr 2013 Tony Hall sends email to staff on his first day in the job outlining key challenges for the corporation. By Josh Halliday Published: 2 Apr 2013 The following decade is set to have a dramatic effect on all aspects of the corporation Published: 2 Apr 2013 New director general also highlights Radio 3's Bach Marathon and BBC1's drama The Village as showing corporation at its best. By John Plunkett Published: 2 Apr 2013 Ex-BBC Chief Mark Thompson on the Jimmy Savile Scandal: “The Ravens Have Not Left the Tower of London” | Vanity Fair Twitter At left, erroneously accused Lord McAlpine; at center, former BBC host Jimmy Savile; at right, ex–BBC chief and current New York Times C.E.O. Mark Thompson., From left to right: by Luis Enrique Ascui/Fairfax Media/Fairfax Media/Getty Images; from Evening Standard/Getty Images; by Oli Scarff/Getty Images. In 1215, King John allegedly spent the night before signing the Magna Carta at Duncroft, a manor about 20 miles west of London.

By the 1970s, Duncroft had become an “approved school,” a stately home with bars on the windows for intelligent wayward girls. It was visited often by the BBC’s radio and TV star Jimmy Savile, Britain’s greatest pedophile. Growing up, BBC producer Meirion Jones would visit Duncroft, where his aunt was the headmistress, and he would witness Savile, the flamboyant M.C. of the music show Top of the Pops, alight from his Rolls-Royce proffering cigarettes, rides, and invitations to the BBC studios in London, where, it is now believed, he violated dozens of under-age girls—as well as boys—in his dressing room.

“My parents would say to my aunt, ‘What are you doing letting a 50-year-old man take a bunch of under-age girls in his car?’ And my aunt would say, ‘Oh, he’s a friend of the school.’ ” (Jones’s aunt has recently said she had no idea Savile was a predatory pedophile.) When Savile died, on October 29, 2011, at the age of 84, having been knighted by the Queen as well as the Pope, he was one of Britain’s most famous personalities, a combination of Dick Clark, Johnny Carson, and Wolfman Jack. The self-proclaimed creator of the first disco, he claimed to be the first D.J. to play records for money, in rough dance halls in Leeds and Manchester as far back as the 40s and 50s. In the early 60s, he counted among his friends the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Savile became so renowned for his charity work that he was literally given the keys to several hospitals and institutions, where he had his own rooms and volunteered as a porter and administrator, all the while cunningly waiting for chances to pounce on ill and vulnerable girls.

He was proud of spending New Year’s Eve with Margaret and Denis Thatcher by the fire at Chequers, the British prime minister’s country house, and of acting as a go-between when Diana and Charles’s marriage was falling apart. A senior Health Service official known to one BBC staffer remembers once in the 80s being called to Highgrove House, where Prince Charles introduced everyone to “my health adviser, Jimmy Savile.” Dan Davies, Savile’s biographer, told me, “He was a very serious confidant to the heir of the throne up until Charles got together with Camilla. Then his influence waned.” In his narcissistic 1974 autobiography, Love Is an Uphill Thing, Savile recounts a scruffy, almost Dickensian childhood as the youngest of seven in a Catholic family in Leeds, where he worked in the mines, and where his mother, nicknamed the Duchess, was the only true love of his life.

On the first page he boasts that as a baby he once peed into his grandmother’s eye, adding, “I have continued to pee on the Establishment ever since with similar success.” The book is riddled with sexual braggadocio: “Were I to tell all, no one would believe it, plus I’d have to take up residence in some inaccessible Himalayan village.” The BBC made him a star, though his outrageous style was in striking contrast to the network’s high-minded tweed-think, and today most there claim that he was never their kind. “Brash figures like Savile were aggressively anti-intellectual, childishly anti-political, anti-everything the BBC was concerned about,” says Jeremy Paxman, the anchor of Newsnight, the current-affairs program. “The managerial class was scared of them, and they were left to get on with it. So nobody really knew, and didn’t want to know.” Meanwhile, generations of English children were mesmerized by Savile’s show Jim’ll Fix It. They would write in their wishes, and he would have them appear with him on-air, where he would grant those wishes. One of the boys, then nine, now says he was assaulted in Savile’s dressing room.

(According to the latest police report, 18 percent of Savile’s known victims were male.) It’s not as if he didn’t leave clues. Savile, who could be threatening and quite litigious, recounts in his book an incident when he was warned by the police that there was a runaway girl in his area. He informed them that he would turn her in only if he was allowed to spend the night with her, “as my reward.” She soon appeared, and he blithely marched her into the police station late the next morning, where, he writes, “she was willingly presented to an astounded lady of the law. The officeress was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues, for it was well known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me.” (Savile regularly hosted coffees for chief constables and other officials.) Talking to esteemed BBC veterans, one frequently hears the argument that the times were so different at the height of Savile’s fame, in the 60s and 70s—when rock stars and groupies were constantly thrown together, no age questions asked.

A veteran BBC filmmaker told me the BBC itself “was a hotbed of repressed sexuality.” He recounted the tale of an editor of the current-affairs program Panorama and a female staffer encountered in flagrante across the editor’s desk one night by a fireman. “Don’t you even knock when you come in?” the editor asked. “I did knock, sir,” the fireman replied, “but you was knockin’ rather harder.” Given England’s strict libel laws, Meirion Jones knew that he would have to wait until Savile’s death to act on years of rumors about the man’s sexual proclivities, indulged right under the noses of, or with the complicity of, the BBC, which so far denies having ever received any complaints about Savile during his 30-plus years of employment. Today, however, the exploding list of inquiries by the police and other institutions—more than 400 people so far have come forward to report sexual assaults by Savile—has thrown the BBC into turmoil, deeply embarrassed its hierarchy, contributed to the resignation of one director general, and cost British taxpayers millions of pounds for investigations.

(One hospital has even investigated rumors of necrophilia.) Yet the public still does not know exactly why the BBC halted the broadcast of an exposé of the late Savile, prepared by Jones and correspondent Liz MacKean for Newsnight at the same time the network’s entertainment division was planning tribute shows to the star, which did run, at Christmastime in 2011. Both the exposé and the tributes had been planned for the BBC’s coming schedule, and the exposé was flagged on the Managed Risk Programmes List to alert all divisions that something that might affect the organization’s reputation was coming. Then the exposé was abruptly removed. According to the Pollard Review, the inquiry subsequently set up by the BBC to get to the bottom of what happened, deputy news director Steve Mitchell, who did the removing, can provide no explanation. Neither he nor Peter Rippon, the editor of Newsnight, who had put the exposé up on the scheduling board in his office, remembers a purported phone conversation they had the day before Rippon suddenly did a U-turn on Jones and MacKean and raised the bar on what it would take to get the exposé on the air.

“You had two trains running simultaneously down the tracks,” explains Jones. “One was the Jimmy-Savile-is-a-pedophile train, and the other was the Christmas-tribute train.” The pedophile train had the brakes put on it November 30, a week before its proposed broadcast, but the Savile tributes ran on time. Ironically, the tribute shows were presented in lieu of a formal memorial program, which might have proved to be too dicey to run. Almost a year and a half before Savile died, an e-mail unearthed in the Pollard Review was sent from a BBC executive who had worked with Savile years before to George Entwistle, who then had the Orwellian title of “controller of knowledge commissioning” but who later became the director general of the BBC for 54 days before he was forced to resign, because of what Savile had wrought. The e-mail stated, “I’d feel v queasy about an obit.

I saw the real truth!!!” The day after Savile’s death, the executive sent another e-mail to another department, saying, “We decided that the dark side to Jim (I worked with him for 10 years) would make it impossible to make an honest film that could be shown close to [his] death. But maybe one could be made for later.” In fact, 10 months later the rival, independent network ITV scored a huge ratings success after Mark Williams-Thomas, a former police officer in child protection who had worked with both networks, took the BBC’s original material with permission and expanded on it. Williams-Thomas’s program ran on October 3, 2012. The Guardian called it “one of the most talked-about shows of recent times” and it generated page-one headlines that seriously called into question the BBC’s decision to drop the Newsnight exposé. It included interviews with five female victims and a former BBC employee who had seen Savile kissing an adolescent girl in his BBC dressing room, and it drew attention to a dropped police investigation—one of several, it turns out—during Savile’s lifetime.

“Clearly people either saw or turned a blind eye to young girls going in and out of his dressing room,” Williams-Thomas told me. “I find it astonishing that at no stage anyone would make a formal complaint.” In September, three weeks prior to airing the program, ITV sent a series of questions to the BBC, asking for an explanation as to why Newsnight had chosen not to run the story. That sent the BBC scrambling. Peter Rippon posted to the BBC editors’ blog to respond to all the criticism in the press—a post that contained significant errors. He indicated the story had begun as an investigation into why the police had stopped their investigation of Savile, after a “key witness” told the BBC that the police dropped the case because Savile was too old. When the Crown Prosecution Service countered that the Savile investigation had been dropped due to lack of evidence, Rippon said, he had concluded that there was no story. In fact, that is not at all what happened. The Newsnight program had begun as an investigation of Savile as a pedophile and abuser.

Rippon suddenly made the dropped police investigation the issue after his purported phone call with Steve Mitchell, even telling Jones and MacKean, “I can’t go to the wall on this one.” Nevertheless, several major interviews were given by BBC executives, including Lord Patten, the head of the BBC’s governing body, the BBC Trust, who maintained the dropped-police-investigation line. Moreover, BBC management allowed the flawed blog to stand uncorrected for three weeks. The BBC was finally forced to correct it because of questions from the station’s own investigative program Panorama, which often competed with Newsnight, and was poised to air interviews with both Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean, who totally contradicted their boss. By that time, October 22, anyone in the line of fire further up the ponderous management structure of the BBC, such as Mitchell’s boss, Helen Boaden, director of news, whose job included telling Entwistle about the possible Newsnight story on Savile in the first place, had already been able to sidestep direct scrutiny by the media because Entwistle had called on Nick Pollard, the former head of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News, to commence his inquiry.

“It’s hugely convenient, because they don’t have to field any questions,” says Miles Goslett, a freelance journalist who was the first to seriously pursue the story. Newsnight, meanwhile, itching to prove it still had all its moxie, contracted out what became a totally specious exposé, which truly tarnished its once sterling reputation. The Newsnight show that aired November 2, 2012, alleged child molestation in North Wales in the 70s by a former senior Tory figure whom it did not name but whose identity—Lord McAlpine, former treasurer of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher—was tweeted thousands of times through “jigsaw identification.” The BBC lawyers and the show’s temporary supervisors had evidently not considered the implications of social media. Alistair McAlpine, an author and a collector, revealed that he had never been contacted by the BBC, and his photo had never been shown to the accuser, who later declared that McAlpine was not the man who assaulted him, and apologized. Once again the BBC looked absurd, particularly since the whole issue of this mistaken identity had already been resolved in a 1997 investigation in Wales.

In addition, the BBC had to pay McAlpine $293,000 in damages, plus legal costs. Several days after the spurious broadcast, Phillip Schofield, host of an ITV morning “couch show,” thrust a list of purported pedophiles at his guest, Prime Minister David Cameron, demanding to know what the government was going to do about it. For a split second, McAlpine’s name could apparently be glimpsed on camera, so ITV was then also sued by the lord, who collected another $200,000 in damages, plus costs. Adding to the general chaos and mystery was the role played by former BBC director general Mark Thompson, who held that position until mid-September 2012. Despite press reports about the Savile scandal dating back to January 2012, including a detailed Oldie magazine article by Miles Goslett, Thompson has consistently claimed that he knew nothing of the swirling controversy of the Newsnight tributes fiasco until shortly before the ITV program aired, in October, after he had left. However, Goslett had made a Freedom of Information Act request to the BBC in April and called Thompson’s office in May.

On September 6, in response to a series of specific written questions posed by the London Sunday Times Magazine probing into what Thompson knew about Savile and when, a letter was drafted on Thompson’s behalf by outside lawyers—not BBC lawyers—threatening libel action if The Sunday Times printed a story suggesting an intentional cover-up. Thompson claims never to have read the letter, which one London legal observer finds “inconceivable. If he approved and hadn’t read it, he’s just as culpable.” Today, Thompson is the newly installed C.E.O. of The New York Times, which has been compelled to report on his “evolving” views of what he remembers. For all concerned, this story just keeps growing, like Topsy. ‘The manure had been spread,” Athena McAlpine, the vivacious, much younger wife of Lord McAlpine, said of the garden her husband had been going to plant with prized David Austin roses given him for his 70th birthday. But the libel suits intervened. As we breakfasted one Sunday at the Ritz, in London, the couple explained the bizarre way their lives had become entangled with the toxic tweets as a result of the BBC broadcast.

They had made Lord McAlpine a pariah and led to his declaration that he was planning to sue every single person who had falsely tweeted about him. That seemed most improbable in view of how removed the McAlpines are from the scene of battle. They live in a 500-year-old former monastery in a small village in southern Italy, without TV, newspapers, or—for him—the Internet. Athena keeps the monastery as a hotel but does not advertise for guests. She says of her husband, “All he does is garden. He wakes up at five A.M. and goes to the garden. I am a garden widow.” They had been planning a trip to Switzerland to see a collection of Indian bronzes, but the trip turned out to be to their lawyer in London. After two major heart bypass surgeries, one of which paralyzed a vocal cord, which makes it difficult for him to speak above a whisper, Baron McAlpine of West Green had deliberately absented himself from public life.

He told me, “The oddest thing about the whole scenario is that we’ve almost elected to live outside the loop.” Last November 2, however, he recalled, “I got a call from a journalist who said I was going to be named that night on Newsnight. I said, ‘Well, if they do that, I’ll sue them.’ I was quite flippant about it, and then I began to think, It’s a criminal affair, one of the worst criminal offenses. My wife’s business will be destroyed.” He said that Michael Crick, a political correspondent for Channel 4 News in Britain, “rang back later and asked if Newsnight had contacted me. I said no. Then he contacted me again and said it’s very unusual [not to be contacted]. Then he said, ‘Well, it’s too late now. It’s five P.M.’ Then the Telegraph rang. I told them I didn’t know anything about it—if it’s true, I’ll sue. Then it hit the Twitter.

It went absolutely mad.” Newsnight, short on staff, with its usual chain of command sidelined by the Pollard inquiry, had turned to a reporter from the small, independent Bureau of Investigative Journalism (B.I.J.) to mount the program that falsely incriminated Lord McAlpine. Acting editor Liz Gibbons had worked with the B.I.J. before and evidently felt she could trust it. The morning before the broadcast, however, Iain Overton, B.I.J.’s founding editor, unfortunately tweeted, “If all goes well we’ve got a Newsnight out tonight about a very senior political figure who is a paedophile.” Michael Crick cautioned in a later tweet, “‘Senior political figure’ due to be accused tonight by BBC of being paedophile denies allegations + tells me he’ll issue libel writ agst BBC.” Despite the warning, BBC lawyers evidently felt protected by not naming the accused. Soon thousands of people took up the tweets, and within 24 hours Lord McAlpine was being photographed by paparazzi gathered outside the monastery. One of those who tweeted was Sally Bercow, the tall, glamorous wife of House of Commons speaker John Bercow: “Why is Lord McAlpine trending?

innocent face”. That really rankled the McAlpines. Sally Bercow had previously posed for a magazine profile portrait in nothing but a bedsheet in a window in the vicinity of Big Ben. She became part of the cast of Celebrity Big Brother, a British reality series, “and she was the first one kicked out,” sniffed Athena McAlpine. The McAlpines filed a libel suit against Sally Bercow. Athena doesn’t have much truck with Phillip Schofield, the TV host who showed David Cameron the list of pedophiles with her husband’s name on it, either. “He began in children’s television with his thumb stuck up a glove puppet.” Lord McAlpine, who claims that generally the BBC is “fantastic,” was determined to bring Twitter to heel. He announced a Web site where those with fewer than 500 followers who tweeted falsely about him could register, including a box asking, “Have you apologised to Lord McAlpine?” Those who filled out the form were also asked to make a small contribution to a BBC children’s fund, for he was not out to bankrupt ordinary people. Nearly 300 have done so. “It’s like the Black Death.

You’re standing there, and one day later you say, My God, the world hates me,” Lord McAlpine said. “You used to be able to say, Today’s news, tomorrow’s fish-and-chips wrap, but with the Internet it never goes away.” Athena added, “These people are journalists, but they just don’t know it, and they are not subject to an editor. They are not subject to fact-checking.” Lord McAlpine’s lawyer, Andrew Reid, concurred: “If you go to a social-media board like this, there must be a mechanism to clear the board, to take [a libel] down immediately rather than let it pervade.” He added, “All social media does is allow people to operate in a cowardly fashion in the ether.” The McAlpines feel strongly that they are victims of something more sinister and subtle. “The subtext is actually more interesting than the actual act,” Athena told me.

Explaining why her husband ended up as the target, she said while ticking off on her fingers, “He was a Tory, a toff, and, worst of all, a Thatcherite!” Lord McAlpine added, “I cannot imagine the hostility that exists towards this woman [Thatcher] even today. In Billy Elliot there are lyrics that even say, ‘One day closer to her death’ .” Athena cited numerous pictures in the press showing Savile with Thatcher and with Prince Charles in kilts. “There’s an agenda,” she said. There is a long-standing enmity between Lord McAlpine and Lord Patten, the non-Thatcherite, conservative head of the BBC Trust and adviser or director of at least a half dozen other institutions, who was described to me as “an ornament of the British establishment.” According to the Daily Mail last November 11, “In McAlpine’s 1997 memoirs Once a Jolly Bagman, he recalls asking Patten to lunch at The Dorchester hotel shortly after becoming treasurer.

‘I can remember him tucking into a plate of oysters,’ he wrote, ‘his blond forelock falling forward, hiding both his face and the oyster that he was eating.’ McAlpine found this significant. ‘You can always tell the character of a man when he eats oysters, and I marked Patten down as greedy.’ ” As for the blame Patten shares this time, Athena said, “It all happened on his watch.” The MacQuarrie Report, the McAlpine version of the Pollard Review, headed by Ken MacQuarrie, BBC Scotland director, judged the hastily put-together piece a “serious failure of BBC journalism.” The B.I.J. producer who should have seen to the fact-checking on the story was moonlighting as a stand-up comic. Lord McAlpine told me, “They bought a package that would have finished me off in every respect and within a week exposed it without checking any facts. It’s not just sloppy journalism, it’s malice.” There is nothing in the U.S. comparable to the position that “Auntie Beeb,” as the BBC is affectionately known in Great Britain, occupies in British life.

The BBC is the last vestige of that proud declaration “The sun never sets on the British Empire.” Every household in Britain with a color TV set is mandated to pay the station an annual licensing fee of $230, which guarantees the institution, employer to more than 20,000 worldwide, a huge funding base that other, independent media entities in the United Kingdom do not enjoy. It is estimated that each week the average Briton devotes 19 hours to the BBC’s offerings on television, radio, and online. Its innovative Web-based iPlayer lets anyone catch up on the last week of BBC programming with a couple of clicks. I recently toured the grand new $1.6 billion BBC headquarters, in central London, which houses 6,000 employees, and where the BBC broadcasts via three 24-hour news TV channels and nine radio networks. I was stunned by its size. One enters through a piazza with audio in dozens of languages, embedded ground lights, and 750 squares with place names representing various parts of the earth where the BBC is heard; it has a thriving Web site and numerous other entities, from entertainment productions sold around the world to numerous items of merchandise.

Through a sweeping glass wall on the entry level, one looks down on the main newsroom, where 300 people sit in front of their computers in long, open rows. On the fifth floor, I watched a TV news show being taped in Urdu, one of 26 languages in which the BBC broadcasts, and met journalists being trained to report the news to Myanmar. The management structure of such a vast enterprise, where the head of television is called the director of Vision and bosses of the various radio and TV networks are called controllers, is not easily decoded. The director-general also holds the title of editor-in-chief. In this privileged world, the funds never dry up, and the “lifers” who rise through the ranks to become “barons” enjoy fat pensions and perks. The barons, however, have been increasingly criticized for their “silo mentality” and for using their strict church-state code of separation between news programs and everything else as an evasion of accountability.

Just as the liberal BBC was thought to take an inordinate glee in the travails of its biggest competitor, Rupert Murdoch with his BSkyB, during the recent phone-hacking scandal, the mostly right-wing press as well as the liberalGuardian has seemed to pounce on every BBC misstep. “The BBC regards itself as a counterweight to Murdoch’s power,” a London financial executive told me. “The right wing and ITV hate the BBC, [because its] Internet site is killing everyone else and eating into their business.” According to BBC anchor Paxman, “There are vast vested interests at stake. The BBC is seen as a market disrupter. There is great appeal in trying to discredit it.” One of the reasons given for why Mark Thompson’s successor, George Entwistle, a respected program producer, lasted only 54 days on the job is that he simply was not used to the unrelenting glare of Fleet Street. “He’d never been in the firing line before,” said Professor Stewart Purvis, a journalism blogger and former head of ITN.

“When the British press goes for you, it’s an experience you never forget.” At the height of the McAlpine scandal, Entwistle gave a disastrous interview to John Humphrys, of BBC Radio4, in which he appeared to be out of touch and uninformed. “You should go, shouldn’t you?,” Humphrys demanded. That very day Entwistle was gone, but with a full year’s salary, which only further angered many. A leading London legal observer told me, “The general feeling is the BBC secretariat exists largely to look after itself.” To the BBC’s powerful creative director, Alan Yentob, however, such a failing was seen as a vindication: “There aren’t many organizations where you’re the boss and your executioner is the employee.” After the recent scandals concerning expenses in Parliament and pedophilia in the Church of England, not to mention the failures of the press and the police in the phone-hacking miasma and the Savile travesty, it can appear at times that the center of British society is not holding.

Last November, when judge Lord Leveson published his 2,000-page inquiry on the phone-hacking scandal, he sent chills through Fleet Street by strongly suggesting that the press in Britain should be regulated by law and held accountable to a stricter set of standards, thereby putting David Cameron in an uncomfortable position. The betting today is that there will not be formal legislation but, rather, beefed-up controls set by the press itself. Leveson devoted only one of the 2,000 pages specifically to the Internet, but the real game changer for everyone could well be what the BBC set in motion by violating its own code of conduct in not contacting McAlpine and thereby allowing his mis-identification via jigsaw on Twitter. “We are all going to have to be very careful now about what we all publish and air,” says *Vanity Fair’*s London libel attorney, David Hooper. This comes at a time when a number of British newspapers are hanging by a thread, when any day could bring the announcement of a major paper shutting down or being forced to continue online only. George Entwistle., By CARL COURT/AFP/Getty Images. ‘The ravens have not left the Tower of London.

Big Ben is still ringing,” Mark Thompson said, cautioning me to take the “post-apocalyptic landscape” with a grain of salt. Of all those waiting to exhale in the wake of the Pollard Review, former BBC director-general Thompson, safely ensconced as the C.E.O. of The New York Times since November, has to be one of the most pleased. He has steadfastly maintained that he knew nothing of the row over Savile and hardly anything about the man himself. “I never worked with Jimmy Savile. I never worked in his department, or worked where he worked, or ever met him. I think he finished regular appearances in the early 90s, before I took over,” Thompson told me. “My clearest recollection of him is sitting at home watching him in my childhood and early teen years.” During Thompson’s tenure at the BBC, from 2004 until 2012, he said, “he appeared as a figure of the past. I think I’d heard he published a biography where he bragged about sexual conquests.” Thompson said he was never briefed or notified about Savile.

He denied to Pollard that he was aware of any of the seven print stories, at least several of which would have appeared in the daily BBC press clippings packet sent to top executives. He also told me that he had had no idea about the Freedom of Information request sent to his office by Miles Goslett, and that he had only verbally O.K.’d—without reading it—the very strongly worded letter threatening libel written by independent lawyers to The Sunday Times Magazine. When first questioned by New York Times reporters, Thompson repeated that he had “never heard any allegations” about Savile while he was at the BBC, and that he did not know what the killed exposé was about. According to the Mail Online, “He later admitted to a British newspaper that after a conversation at a party he ‘formed the impression it (the Newsnight investigation) was about sex abuse.’ ” The reason for the admission was that Goslett had discovered that Caroline Hawley, a BBC reporter whom he did not name, had approached Thompson at a pre-Christmas party in 2011 and said he must be worried about Savile. Thompson subsequently asked Helen Boaden, director of news, about it. Since then Thompson has sought to clarify his position.

In a January 2013 letter to a member of Parliament sent from New York, for example, Thompson said he did remember a “chance conversation” at a cocktail party in December 2011, but neither Hawley nor the leadership of BBC News (Helen Boaden), with whom he subsequently raised it, “told me what the investigation had been about,” though he did know the story was abandoned on editorial grounds. He said that when he indicated to the Times “that I might have formed the impression at the time of my conversations with Caroline and Helen that the investigation related to allegations of sexual abuse, this was speculation on my part in October 2012 about an impression I might or might not have formed after a pair of brief conversations nearly a year earlier.” Today it does not really seem to matter whether anyone can even parse that statement. Thompson has traded his role of heading his country’s most prestigious media empire for that of overseeing a much smaller, operation at this country’s most prestigious newspaper.

Asked what he made of a BBC insider’s claim that Thompson has “failed up” and is a “floater, not a sinker,” Thompson remarked that during his tenure, “the BBC went on to have a really outstanding decade,” and that after taking an earlier job at Channel 4, he grew it “back to profitability. No one got fired or stabbed.” What about bitten, per a 1988 incident in which he bit a Nine O’Clock News colleague on the arm? “That was a very, very long time ago—it was a joke that went only slightly wrong.” At present, he is far from the BBC turmoil that began in his tenure, and Pollard has declared his support: “I have no reason to doubt what Mr. Thompson told us.” The Pollard Review cost British taxpayers more than $3 million and examined more than 10,000 documents.

Rushed out in nine weeks just before Christmas, it concluded that the BBC was guilty of serious failings in oversight and management control, and that dropping the Savile piece “led to one of the worst management crises in the BBC’s history.” Moreover, “the BBC’s management system proved completely incapable of dealing with it.” However, flawed as the decision was, the Pollard Review concluded that it was made in good faith, that there was no attempt to suppress the story. For those who have covered Newsnight and Savile from the beginning, plus some of those directly involved, however, the report was deeply unsatisfying. “I think it’s completely useless,” Miles Goslett told me. “It doesn’t satisfy my curiosity. I still don’t know why it wasn’t shown on TV.” The reason, it seems from the report, had to do with the persistently vague memories of those making some of the crucial decisions and the fact they all had their own lawyers, paid by the BBC to defend against anything critical said about them.

The report makes clear that there was “personal animosity” between the Newsnight editor, Peter Rippon, and the producer Meirion Jones, who was widely considered a leaker (which Jones strongly denies) and was not trusted—to the extent that one press officer sent an e-mail saying he would “drip poison about Meirion’s suspected role.” However, Pollard apparently never attempted to ask why Rippon, or anyone else, didn’t just go to Jones’s partner on the piece, reporter Liz MacKean, who was not suspected of leaking to the press, to get her opinion of the sources. Amazingly, Rippon killed the piece without ever having seen any on-camera interviews of the principals involved. He did not know or remember that more than one woman had been interviewed. And when Entwistle was confronted with a forensic examination proving that an e-mail he said he could not remember reading had indeed been opened, twice, he still could not remember. Throughout the 185 pages, it’s hard to find management taking responsibility for anything, particularly when everyone has such strict respect for non-interference in someone else’s line of authority.

Very few at fault have gotten axed, and most people have moved sideways; even Stephen Mitchell, who will retire on time with his pension, and Peter Rippon who left Newsnight but remains at the BBC. Helen Boaden, who had been re-installed as head of news, was appointed on February 14th to the position of director of BBC Radio—another plum job. “What everyone’s done is get away with it,” a BBC reporter told me, echoing widespread skepticism in the building. BBC executives seem very pleased with the report. “There is no question of conspiracy or collusion,” said Alan Yentob. “It’s not a cover-up, it’s a cock-up.” He characterized the main features of the controversy as “slight mistrust” between Rippon and Jones and “bad communication.” He also pointed out that trust in Auntie Beeb, which dipped after the Savile charges were aired, is now climbing back up. Lord Patten, of the BBC Trust, was not quite so sanguine: “It portrays an organization where chaos and confusion could have been avoided through better leadership, organization, and communication.” He is demanding that the next director-general, Royal Opera House chief executive Tony Hall, produce an overhaul in three months.

Next up is the detailed inquiry into the “culture and practices” of the BBC, led by former High Court judge Dame Janet Smith, out sometime in the next year or so. And victims are now beginning to sue the BBC and Jimmy Savile’s estate for what they have endured—there are no “punitive damages” for sexual abuse in Britain, however; damages for libel are larger. The police inquiries continue, and at last count 39 past and current BBC presenters and employees have been accused of sexual misconduct. Also snared by the Savile investigation was English pop star Gary Glitter, who was previously convicted on child pornography charges and was reported to have had sex with an under-age girl in front of Savile and others in Savile’s dressing room. A number of aging 60s and 70s TV and radio entertainers and other, behind-the-scenes figures have also been arrested. The police report released in January details approximately 600 complaints of sexual misconduct—about 450 concerning Savile—from all over England. The report’s lead investigator said Savile “groomed a nation.” The BBC is now officially “appalled” by his crimes. Share

Question: Who replaced George Entwistle to become the present Director General of the BBC in April 2013?
Answer: Tony Hall