Savile debacle is the clear consequence of a BBC under siege

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/24/jimmy-savile-debacle-clear-consequence-bbc-under-siege

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When Charlotte Moore, controller of BBC1, suddenly became controller of BBC2, BBC4 and iPlayer as well a few days ago, her possible sort-of boss – Mark Linsey, acting director of television – delivered the quote of the week. “This role will allow Charlotte to take a view across channels to drive distinctiveness, quality and risk-taking even further, while offering a single point of contact for programme makers and ensuring audiences get the best programmes, however and wherever they choose to watch.”

Of course ordinary people – Linsey included – don’t actually talk like that. Of course such managementspeak flowed from some robotic pen. And of course there’s nothing here that connects directly to Jimmy Savile, Dame Janet Smith’s leaked draft report and what director general Hall calls “a dark chapter in the history of the BBC”. But in other ways, everything connects.

Dame Janet has ploughed through 375 witnesses over three years. She has documented four Savile rapes and some 61 sexual assaults in corporation corridors, kitchens, dressing rooms and studios scattered far and wide. And yet she concludes that “nobody in a senior position at the BBC was ever aware of information that could have led to, or assisted in, the prosecution of Savile. Prosecution and imprisonment was the only way to stop him.”

How can this possibly be? Surely, surely… But Smith, cycling back and forth up the BBC’s 10 floors of bureaucracy, blames “a deference” down the line that stifled allegations about Savile in a trice. He was “talent” (like other offenders from the same putrid pod). He seemingly couldn’t be stopped, sacked or prosecuted. He was special. Therefore he had to be defended, like the broadcasting giant he served, because – then, in the 1970s, as now – it was under attack.

Those attacks come now, as they came then, from politicians seeking to bully the state broadcaster. They impose unwanted governance by Downing Street démarche. They threaten the BBC’s future – and find ready supporters in Fleet Street. Deference up and down the chain; defensiveness as a dominant posture; a culture of loyalty and mute embarrassment; a determination to survive by rocking as few boats as possible. In today’s terms, the BBC of the 70s and 80s was already a powerful brand: a brand under siege that had to be protected.

There’s nothing, in one sense, unique about that. The world is full of huge organisations turned silos of silence. “Our NHS”, as the politicians say, has a dismal record there (one that Savile himself exploited). Did Rupert or James Murdoch know – incontrovertibly know – about phone-hacking on the News of the World? Did Sebastian Coe know what a stinking hole was under his feet at the centre of international athletics? Does the Metropolitan Police commissioner sit at his desk each morning pondering apologies?

Smith’s leaked findings aren’t surprising. They’re part of a pattern: of enterprises under fire, hunched against outside attack, anxious to secure their reputation, reluctant to give their enemies any succour. They show us, many times over, the way things are.

Why did acting director Linsey need to cloak Moore’s promotion in rent-an-adjective adulation? Because it was a signal decision after 50 years of BBC2 having its own, distinctive controller. Because while Moore remains, Kim Shillinglaw of BBC2 departs into the night: one talent kept, one gone. Because none of this was advertised or predicted, just announced – though the future of “acting” Linsey himself, four months after Danny Cohen abruptly departed, isn’t settled yet and the search of an editor figure at BBC2 is only just beginning.

None of this need be remotely sinister: reshuffles (Jeremy Corbyn might add) don’t always come easy. But the instinct it reveals is instinctively, ritually defensive. Don’t explain, assert. Reach for the bromide spray-can. Keep awkward questioners – if any – far away. Tell, don’t show.

In fact, much of the time, the BBC internally is far better than this. Tony Hall holds informal court. He doesn’t blah the blah. He’s convivial and open to many who pass through his office. He has scant obvious need for the 147 information officers a Press Gazette inquiry revealed a few months ago – or the 221 members of a communications “family” disclosed by FoI requests. But pause, then, to feel the heat in the kitchen, the constant hostility, the glum trips to select committees, the keeping of the flame. “BBC’s £10m whitewash” booms the Mail across two whole pages.

Institutions under attack build walls around themselves. They repel controversy. They create sheltered places where bad things can happen. And their external fear translates into an internal dread of nasty news. It’s the job of journalists to open up these worlds – a job failed in Savile’s case over decades, and tragically let slide by a defensive Newsnight.

But it is also the job of journalists to understand as well as denounce. There’s plenty of Exaro flak flying already. Maybe, it’s suggested, the BBC wanted to string the findings out beyond charter renewal date. Maybe the leaks were part of some byzantine game. Maybe… But Savile – on the wards, in mental hospitals, in rehearsal rooms – played the vilest games. There is no point or solace in playing more. These horrors “must never happen again” says Hall. Well, of course. But they happen when no one dares to tell truth to distant power. Watch this baleful space.

■ What do the Port Talbot Magnet, the Southport Reporter, Your Harlow and Your Thurrock have in common? They’re four of the 12 tiny publications – some online, some fortnightly, some free – who’ve signed up to be regulated by Impress (sole rival to Ipso) as it seeks official blessing from the Press Recognition Panel. Your assorted Magnets from Essex to Wales have never caused any regulation problems, of course: nor will they be able to pay much over £50 a throw in dues to keep Impress going – or to reassure the nation that the £3m of public money already spent on recognising the barely recognisable is well spent.

No: the aim is perversely different. Get recognised somehow or other, and then the Royal Charter provisions may start to operate, escalating libel damages and costs for those hundreds of publishers – from the Mail to the Guardian – who’ve either joined Ipso or sat outside what the Guardian’s last editor called “a medieval nonsense”. Quite what this has to do with press freedom isn’t clear (especially with an indignant Max Mosley’s family trust putting up another £3m-plus to help Impress pay its bills). Quite how it will play when some outrageous libel bill piles legal nonsense on top of medieval flummery remains obscure, too. And quite what a government that clearly wants to leave well alone will do then is mystery plus enigma. But hey! Who cares about credibility or money sensibly spent when this bizarre game of pious punishment’s afoot?