BBC sex abuse scandal has implications for NYT

No idea how much play this is getting in the States, but it's huge news over here.

Difficult to summarize, but basically, a guy called Jimmy Savile, a well-known TV and radio presenter who died last year, has turned out to be a serial pedophile who abused hundreds of girls. Among the accusations are that he used his children's charity work to get access to victims and that he was given rooms in various hospitals, including Broadmoor, the most famous psychiatric hospital, in which to take his victims.

As he was before my time here, I'm not sure whether it would be accurate to describe him as the country's Dick Clark, but he was definitely a Clark-esque figure. The scandal also looks likely to draw in well over a dozen still-living celebrities, the first of whom was dragged in for questioning Sunday. That he was Gary Glitter is probably the least shocking development in the whole thing.

This all came to light a couple weeks ago, when ITV ran a documentary about it. However, what has emerged is that the BBC had one of its own ready to go last December, but that it basically got shelved because the BBC wanted to base a lot of its Christmas programming around Savile, who had died just a couple months earlier. That's the NYT angle -- the director general of the BBC at the time, Mark Thompson, was recently appointed CEO of the NYT.

It's also become pretty clear that just about everyone knew that Savile was a lech, but that he was basically given a pass on the whole thing because of who he was.

 

Bump on this one -- NYT reports yesterday on a paper trail showing pretty clearly that its new boss is lying about not knowing any of this until after he left the BBC.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/world/europe/letter-raises-questions-about-when-bbc-ex-chief-learned-of-abuse-cases.html

Can't see him sticking around the new job much longer.

 

This might get better play on the journalism board.

 

In what was pretty much a blatant attempt for missing the story under its own nose, the BBC's Newsnight ran a different program a couple of weeks ago accusing an unnamed "senior Conservative figure" from the 70s and 80s of having been involved in a child sex abuse ring at children's homes in Wrexham, north Wales.

As tends to happen, the name got out on Twitter. Only problem -- the guy not only didn't do it but also had only been to Wrexham once. Turns out the police told the guy who was abused that that's who it was -- and the BBC never showed him a picture before putting the show on the air. As soon as he saw one, the guy recanted.

That forced out the replacement director general.

 

Betcha he gets a golden parachute.

 

A cringe-worthy aside: My buddy who works for the BBC had to bring cookies to work this week, because the Beeb was holding its annual bake-sale and telethon to raise money for abused kids.

 

Based on the right to privacy, it seems incredibly easy for public figures to squash embarrassing stories in the UK vis-a-vis injunctions. I bet even where they involve dead celebrities there are some things which we'll never know what we don't know. That the Saville story finally got out just shows the magnitude of his evil ways (as well as the rigidness of British libel law while he was alive.)