The Jimmy Savile scandal, Mark Thompson and the New York Times

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/jimmy-savile-mark-thompson-new-york-times

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Among the major institutions in the world most inclined to self-scrutiny and self-criticism are the BBC and the New York Times. This is not to say that they are transparent or self-aware, but, rather, achingly self-conscious, consumed by the scrutiny of others.

The fact that the former head of the BBC, Mark Thompson, is shortly to become the CEO of the New York Times (the Times uses the modifier "incoming", just in case he never gets there), creates a sort of double whammy.

Thompson was lucky enough to get out of town (that is, London) before the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal became an opportunity for the BBC to flagellate itself – in part, for not flagellating itself when it cancelled a documentary expose about Savile – and for its myriad enemies to join in. But Thompson was unlucky to have escaped to an organization that, while entirely remote from the Jimmy Savile story, now had to make it big news by emphasizing and exaggerating its own role in the scandal (that is, for hiring Thompson) – lest it incur even larger opprobrium for seeming to minimize its role.

This is a column about context, so let's set it. Nobody in the US knows who Jimmy Savile is. Even when a Brit explains, nobody in America gets it. Part Captain Kangaroo, part Pee Wee Herman, part Dick Clark? But not really. What's more, nobody in America really understands what the BBC is, at least not in the sense that it pervades British life and has as much to do with national identity as it does with news and entertainment.

And then, there is the nature of sex scandals themselves. They are, almost always, culturally specific: Jerry Sandusky and Penn State was a minor story in the UK (American football doesn't translate in Britain); likewise, Jimmy Savile would have been, save for Mark Thompson and the New York Times, a footnote here (the BBC doesn't translate in the US).

Still, both nations have progressed to seeing sexual abuse as an absolute evil; any rationalization, or effort to specify context, seems to add to the evil.

Before, gingerly, trying to address the social context, let me stay with the institutional context.

Both the BBC and the New York Times are each in one of the most difficult periods of their histories. The logic of the BBC's massive public subsidy in an age of ever-expanding media choice, is under fire. The Times' bleak financial straits are existential as all newspapers dwindle, and, as well, a cause for harsh recriminations as to the various decisions that might have deepened the company's predicament and hastened its fate.

One of the ways the BBC has responded to increased public scrutiny and political pressure (and, as well, ramped up criticism and attention from its media competitors), is to become ever more cautious, self-questioning, and self-protective. (Some people date this to Crowngate, when the BBC aired footage of the Queen storming out of a photo session seemingly in a great huff, when she was, in fact, entering in a good humor, resulting at the Beeb in groveling apologies and high-placed resignations.)

Almost any remotely controversial subject before the BBC is now second-guessed. Nobody wants to put a foot wrong. Or, at least, nobody wearing a bureaucratic hat wants to put a foot wrong. This creates, of course, a tension with the non-bureaucrats or program-makers, eager to pursue compelling material and subjects. Hence, there exists a greater-than-usual cold war between the administrative side and the content side – a simmering war that has connected itself to the canceling of the Savile documentary, and to the weird, operatic, tabloid tale of Savile himself, reaching deep into British pop, class, and sexual culture.

At the New York Times, as its future becomes more fraught, a greater and greater chasm has opened up between management and other parts of the institution (journalists, shareholders, family, greater media community). Its purpose and identity seem ever more under siege. A crisis mentality grows.

If the Times dies or is diminished, the feeling among a certain circle seems to be that journalism will sink with it. Therefore, the people who might damage the Times damage journalism and, hence, civic welfare. Indeed, the Thompson controversy has largely been sparked by the Times' own public editor (an outside critic to whom the Times gives editorial space and a salary to air his or her disgruntlement). Margaret Sullivan turned Thompson's hiring from a management issue (what exactly is his job?), to a journalism question (what did Thompson know and when about the Savile scandal?), and to a broad challenge to the company's moral leadership.

Thompson was hired by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr, whose family controls the company. Sulzberger's appointment of a man without newspaper experience or experience in the American media market as CEO, has been, to all, confounding. (Or transparent: Sulzberger long ago became the true operational CEO, and surely does not want his de facto role to be challenged by someone with the actual job.) Clearly, one obvious outcome of linking Thompson to Savile is to embarrass Sulzberger – the man who seems most responsible for the Times' general extremis status.

Unfortunately for Sulzberger, he has, throughout his tenure as publisher, been temperamentally incapable of getting the tone right when it comes to addressing or parsing the emotional issues that relate to the Times' future and identity and his own decision-making skills. He defends rather than explains. He's hysterical rather than judicious. He mixes up the personal with the institutional. Sulzberger has already defended his incoming CEO in the kneejerk way that he has approached problems before.

One result of his reflexive defensiveness, is that he often seems to lash himself to sinking ships (see his stout defense, and ultimate abandonment, of Howell Raines and Judy Miller). Now, somehow, beyond all sense and logic, he's gotten himself on Jimmy Savile's boat.

And it's worse than that. Because we don't know who Jimmy Savile is or why he ever came to exist, we've equated him with our own most notorious sex abuser, Jerry Sandusky.

Late last week, I was having a gossipy lunch in New York with a retired media grandee and the subject quickly and eagerly turned to Thompson, Sulzberger, and Savile.

"Of course," said the media grandee, "Thompson would have known. You always know." Alleging, I suppose, that Thompson was Penn State's Joe Paterno in this analogy, turning a blind eye as one of his employees used his position to sexually abuse minors. And that seemed a plausible assumption to me.

Then, not a half hour later, I ran into Michael Jackson, the former CEO of the UK's Channel Four broadcasting company, who may know more about British television than anybody else living in America. Continuing the discussion, Jackson first corrected my pronunciation of Savile, and then, when I repeated the Penn State comparison, pointed out that Savile had long been retired by the time Thompson became the director general of the BBC.

Sure, sure … details. But what about the cancelled Newsnight show?

Even if you can absolve Thompson of the overriding issue of who knew what, when, about the minors Savile is said to have abused, how could the BBC's director general not have known about the decision to kill the investigative report that would have exposed Savile?

Thompson admits to knowing something – after he denied knowing anything. He went to a cocktail party and someone asked whether he was worried about the Newsnight Savile investigation. And what did he do?

Here's the only decent and safe response (at least, at this point in hindsight): "That's a great story and we've got to have it. Pursue the truth wherever it goes." Any other response would seem to be saying: "Don't you dare mess with our Jimmy." The truth is probably something else: I'm not really listening to this. I hate all the complainers who work here. Sounds like someone else's problem. Who cares about Jimmy Savile? Jimmy Savile – gross!

Over the weekend, another reporter – characterized, in most accounts, as a "freelance" reporter – claimed he had logged a call to Thompson's office and left a message inquiring about Savile and charges that he abused girls while at the BBC. This made front-page news not only in London, but also in the New York Times. The fact that a random phone call from a random reporter to an executive office, which would invariably deflect phone calls from random reporters, now seems to be part of the evidential chain is more proof that life inside the scandal hot-house has diverged from everyday life.

Of course, the problem is compounded – the problem is always compounded – by the fact that just as the BBC was getting ready to expose Jimmy Savile, it was also getting ready to celebrate him with a special Christmas Day encomium. This certainly does seem, in its baldness, less conspiratorial and more like two hands unaware of each other: why would you go out of your way to praise such a potential liability?

But celebrating him and damning him also seems consistent with the two sides of Jimmy Savile. It is not just that managers of the BBC may have turned a blind eye to and effectively colluded in protecting Jimmy Savile, but that everybody in the country knew about him. Or should have known. Just look at Jimmy Savile on You Tube. Your jaw is sure to drop.

Indeed, Jimmy Savile and his reputation as a sexual masher of under-age girls turns out to have been, for at least a generation, a reliable pop culture riff – one guaranteeing a certain laugh. Everybody knew.

And yet, somehow, for whatever weird, self-loathing, Dickensian, kinky British reasons, Jimmy Savile had become an eccentric, but apparently proud, British institution. Not to mention a face of the BBC. He was a cultural norm, rather than an aberration.

It is a not insignificant context point that a parallel showbusiness world of outré behavior and coddled perviness has long existed. To the extent that this has been one of our fascinations with that world, someone has to live our fantasies. A quick email to a former BBC personality of my acquaintance gets me a robust list of celebrity pervs in Britain. I could compile one for US pervs.

Now, perhaps, the page is turning and our tolerance has come to an end. Or perhaps Jimmy Savile was just more extreme, though that seems like a difficult line to draw.

Perhaps I cannot fully interpret what the Brits really mean when they invoke Jimmy Savile, beyond guilt and darkness, and when they display a striking tolerance of weird uncles at holiday gatherings, and an ambivalence about the BBC. But I do know that when certain New Yorkers say "Jimmy Savile", they merely mean that the New York Times is a bumbling and directionless and vulnerable organization.