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BBC Chief Admits ‘Horror’ as Sexual Abuse Inquiry Opens
(about 11 hours later)
LONDON — The director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation on Tuesday defended the institution’s handling of a burgeoning sex abuse scandal involving one of its best-known personalities, saying the corporation was not trying to “avoid answering questions” and had begun inquiries that were “the opposite of an attempt to hide things.”
LONDON — As the first of a battery of inquiries into Britain’s burgeoning sex abuse scandal opened in a parliamentary committee room on Tuesday, lawmakers reacted with stunned incredulity and barely disguised anger as they sought answers to the painful questions being asked in every living room, commuter train and pub in the country.
The director, George Entwistle, was appearing before a parliamentary panel that has played a major part in investigating Britain’s phone hacking scandal and is known for its often abrasive interview techniques.
How could this have happened, over decades, without action to stop it? How could some of the country’s most respected institutions — among them the BBC, the National Health Service, police forces in London and a range of other areas, as well as the national prosecuting authority — have failed to bring the accused principal abuser to book? How could so many vulnerable young girls and boys — more than 200, according to the police — have been exposed to such vileness, for so long, and so blatantly, without anybody stepping in to help them?
But in more than two hours, Mr. Entwistle seemed to parry most questions, falling back frequently on the argument that formal inquiries that he has commissioned at the BBC would resolve some of the issues. Denying accusations of a cover-up, he expressed “horror” at the scandal and said it had raised questions of trust and reputation for the BBC. He insisted that his direct knowledge of the episode was minimal, prompting panel members to mock him for what they called an extraordinary lack of curiosity about events around him.
The occasion was the opening of hearings by the House of Commons committee on culture, media and sport, and the matter at hand cascading revelations in the past month that have portrayed one of Britain’s most beloved television hosts, Jimmy Savile, who died last year at 84 after half a century of hosting wildly popular programs on the BBC, as an insatiable pedophile, a predator who abused teenagers in children’s homes, in hospitals for the emotionally disturbed, in BBC dressing rooms yards from stage sets where he made himself a national idol.
The hearing came just a day after the BBC broadcast an examination by the “Panorama” program into a decision by the editor of another program, “Newsnight,” to cancel an investigation last December into accusations of abuse against Jimmy Savile, an iconic showman and prime-time television host once depicted by the BBC as a national treasure.
The leadoff witness before the parliamentary panel was George Entwistle, director general of the BBC. In his job barely a month, he is likely to be followed by a host of officials from the BBC and other institutions caught up in the scandal who seem sure to be called as witnesses before the parliamentary panel, a police investigation, two inquiries by the BBC, and possibly, though the government has yet to confirm it, a full judicial inquiry.
“There is no question in my mind that this is a very grave matter indeed,” Mr. Entwistle said.
Mr. Entwistle acknowledged the damage the revelations have done to the BBC, an institution that many in Britain regard as a repository of much that is best in the country.
“I would accept that there have been times when we have taken longer to do things than in a perfect world I would have liked,” he continued. “But I think if you looked at what we have achieved since the scale of the crisis became clear, I think you see we have done much of what we should have done and done it in the right order with proper respect paid to the right authorities.”
“One can’t look back with anything but horror that his activities went on as long as they did undetected,” he said at the hearing. “There’s no question that what Jimmy Savile did and the way the BBC behaved — the culture and practices of the BBC seemed to allow Jimmy Savile to do what he did — will raise questions of trust and reputation for us.”
It was not possible to look back on the decades of Mr. Savile’s behavior “with anything but horror that his activities went on as long as they did undetected,” Mr. Entwistle said.
The extent to which the scandal has shaken the country from its moorings was captured by the sight of one of the BBC’s own political correspondents reporting live from outside the hearing and comparing the elusive testimony of Mr. Entwistle, the reporter’s ultimate boss, to James Murdoch. Mr. Murdoch’s stewardship of his father’s media empire in Britain ended, effectively, when he was grilled by the same committee last year as it investigated the phone hacking scandal that has convulsed News Corporation.
Asked whether sexual abuse was endemic at the BBC, as some victims have suggested, Mr. Entwistle said he did “not have enough of a picture to know it was endemic.”
Other events during the day enhanced the sense that the scandal was gathering pace, with the potential to force far-reaching change in a cultural climate that many commentators here have described as slow to respond to accusations of sexual abuse, especially when they have involved people in authority or with the power of celebrity. Without waiting for the inquiries to be completed, two charities established by Mr. Savile and bearing his name, both dedicated to raising funds for the poor and the sick, announced they were shutting down, and that they would distribute their funds to other charities.
But he went on: “There’s no question that what Jimmy Savile did and the way the BBC behaved — the culture and practices of the BBC seemed to allow Jimmy Savile to do what he did — will raise questions of trust for us and reputation for us.”
After Mr. Entwistle struggled to give a precise answer to the lawmakers’ questions about other instances of sexual abuse uncovered by the BBC, the broadcaster issued a statement saying it was aware of allegations involving nine other current or former staff members or contributors, whom it did not name, and that it had referred the cases to the police. One may have been the 1970s pop star Gary Glitter, a convicted pedophile who was named in an investigative documentary broadcast by the BBC on Monday as having been accused of abusing young people in BBC studios while performing on one of Mr. Savile’s shows.
The BBC has instituted two formal investigations, one into its culture over decades and one into the specific details of the canceled “Newsnight” program. Mr. Entwistle said the “scope and scale” of those inquiries was “as wide as it should be” to fully investigate the scandal.
In another development that prompted comparisons with the phone hacking scandal that has embroiled the Murdoch empire, there were fresh signs that inquiries into the Savile scandal may rely heavily on the e-mail trails left by important witnesses.
The police are also inquiring into what they have called abuse on an “unprecedented” scale possibly involving more than 200 girls, some on BBC premises. And, on Tuesday, Prime Minister David Cameron’s office said the government order its own inquiry after the existing investigations.
Channel 4 television reported Tuesday that it had seen an e-mail from a BBC reporter, Liz Mackean, in which she said the editor of “BBC Newsnight,” Peter Rippon, had shelved an investigative report she was working on, diminishing the seriousness of the accusations by saying of the victims “the girls were teenagers, not too young,” and that “they weren’t the worst kind of sexual offenses.”
David Jordan, the BBC’s head of editorial policy, told the panel that since the period when some of the abuse has taken place, the BBC has tightened its rules governing the protection of children on its premises. “The sorts of things that happened, where people were allowed to be taken into the dressing rooms of stars, as has been alleged, should not and could not happen today.”
The decision to kill the Newsnight investigation drew much of the lawmakers’ ire at the hearing. Mr. Rippon was forced to step aside from his Newsnight post on Monday, the first BBC casualty of the scandal, after Mr. Entwistle decided that there were unspecified “inaccuracies” in a blog post by Mr. Rippon defending his decision. In the blog, Mr. Rippon said that journalistic concerns about the conclusiveness of Newsnight’s case against Mr. Savile alone caused him to halt the investigation.
The BBC announced on Monday that the editor of “Newsnight,” Peter Rippon, was “stepping aside” while the episode is investigated after it was found that his explanation of the cancellation was “incomplete” or “inaccurate.”
At its core, the scandal has centered on the extensive evidence, some of the most compelling laid out in the documentary broadcast on Monday, that many people at the BBC and other institutions Mr. Savile frequented, knew or strongly suspected from the 1960s on that he was a serial sexual predator. The program suggested that he felt sufficiently protected by his status against any would-be accusers that he joked and boasted about it.
Mr. Entwistle said there was no question of managerial pressure on Mr. Rippon to cancel the investigation. “The decision was made by Peter Rippon,” he said.
The parliamentary committee focused on more recent issues, including the role of top BBC executives in acquiescing in Mr. Rippon’s decision to kill the Newsnight investigation in the last weeks of 2011. Mr. Entwistle, then the BBC’s television chief, said he first heard of the Newsnight story when the head of BBC News warned him that it might require the cancellation of several tribute programs to Mr. Savile that were scheduled to run over Christmas.
Mr. Entwistle, who took over as director general on Sept. 17, was also questioned about a conversation he had last December at a time when the BBC was planning a series of glowing, year-end tributes to Mr. Savile, who died last year at 84.
Mr. Entwistle said he had not asked the subject of the Newsnight investigation so as not to infringe on a BBC management policy of giving program editors full autonomy.
At that time, Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news, told Mr. Entwistle at a lunch that the investigation by “Newsnight” could have an impact on year-end schedules and he might have to change them.
Alan
Cowell contributed reporting.
“I was grateful to her for giving me the heads-up,” Mr. Entwistle told the panel on Tuesday. But, he said the “key message” from the conversation was whether the “Newsnight” investigation “was going to stand up or not.” When he did not hear from Ms. Boaden about the Savile inquiry again, he said, he “inferred” that the program was not going ahead.
Asked whether he regretted broadcasting the tributes to Mr. Savile, Mr. Entwistle said: “In the light of what happened, of course I do.”
Mr. Entwistle said he did not inquire about the details of the “Newsnight” investigation, prompting members of the panel to accuse him showing an extraordinary lack of curiosity. He did not wish to seem to be influencing the investigation by showing “undue interest,” he said. “The possibility in my mind was that the investigation would not come to anything. I was waiting to hear,” he said.
John Whittingdale, the chairman of Parliament’s select committee on culture, media and sport, had said earlier that Mr. Entwistle “was in the process of commissioning the most fulsome tributes to Jimmy Savile, which went out on the BBC over that Christmas, and I just find it very surprising that, having been told by the director of news, given a warning, he didn’t think it appropriate at least to ask what the investigation was about.”
Mr. Entwistle might also be questioned about the BBC’s earlier assertion that the “Newsnight” investigation was about a police inquiry into Mr. Savile’s behavior, not about the BBC’s failure to respond to broad rumors of abuse by one of its most enduring television personalities, some of it reportedly on BBC premises.
But in a news release on Tuesday the BBC said that, after the “Panorama” documentary broadcast late on Monday “we should also make it clear we now accept that the ‘Newsnight’ investigation did not start out as an investigation into the Surrey police’s handling of the case against Mr. Savile.”
Since July 2011, the committee has been closely associated with inquiries into phone hacking mainly at Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid, the now defunct News of the World, interviewing both Mr. Murdoch and his son James in closely-watched sessions.
The director general of the BBC at the time the “Newsnight” segment was canceled was Mark Thompson, the incoming president and chief executive of The New York Times Company. In a letter sent to members of Parliament earlier this month, a BBC spokeswoman said that neither Mr. Thompson nor Mr. Entwistle, his successor, was involved in the “Newsnight” decision.
On Oct. 13, Mr. Thompson said: “I was not notified or briefed about the ‘Newsnight’ investigation, nor was I involved in any way in the decision not to complete and air the investigation. I have no reason to doubt the public statement by the program’s editor, Peter Rippon, that the decision not to pursue the investigation was entirely his, and that it was made solely for journalistic reasons.”
On Tuesday, the BBC quoted a spokesman for Mr. Thompson as saying he was asked by a journalist at a party last year about a “Newsnight” investigation into Mr. Savile. Up until that point, Mr. Thompson had been unaware of the investigation, the spokesman said.
Mr. Thompson later mentioned the conversation “to senior colleagues in BBC News and asked if there was a problem with the investigation,” but was told it had been dropped by “Newsnight” for journalistic reasons, the spokesman was quoted as saying.
