LONDON — A report published Wednesday examining the sexual abuse crisis that has shaken the British Broadcasting Corporation strongly criticized the editorial and management decisions that led to the cancellation of a broadcast last year that would have exposed decades of sexual abuse, some of it on BBC premises, by Jimmy Savile, a network fixture who had been one of Britain’s best-known television personalities.
The 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a former head of the Sky News channel who began his broadcast career as a BBC reporter, traced in detail what it described as “a chain of events that was to prove disastrous for the BBC.” Among other things, Mr. Pollard blamed a rigid management system that had “proved completely incapable” of dealing with the crisis that followed the cancellation.
While much of the report centered on the interplay between journalists and their superiors as the allegations against Mr. Savile were investigated, its central conclusion appeared to be that confusion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision to drop the Savile segment, which would have been broadcast on “Newsnight,” an investigative program. Mr. Savile died at 84 in October 2011, weeks before the segment was scheduled to run.
“The efforts to get to the truth behind the Savile story proved beyond the combined efforts of the senior management, legal department, corporate communications team and anyone else for well over a month” after ITV, Britain’s leading commercial station, broadcast a documentary detailing five women’s claims that they had been sexually abused as teenagers by Mr. Savile. “Leadership and organization seemed to be in short supply.”
Mr. Pollard dismissed a widely circulated theory that BBC News executives or their superiors, reluctant to have the BBC reveal a dark passage in its past, pressured the “Newsnight” team to cancel the Savile segment. Peter Rippon, the program’s editor, said he had considered the team’s conclusions about Mr. Savile not adequately substantiated.
“While there clearly were discussions about the Savile story between Mr. Rippon and his managers,” Mr. Pollard said, he does not believe that they exerted “undue pressure” on him.
After the publication of the report, Tim Davie, the BBC’s acting director general, said that Stephen Mitchell, the deputy head of news, had resigned and that Mr. Rippon would be moved to another job. “Newsnight” will also gain a new deputy editor.
In a statement, the BBC Trust, which oversees the broadcaster, cited Mr. Pollard’s conclusion that no “inappropriate managerial pressure or consideration” factored into the decision to cancel the Savile segment. Still, the trust said the report would require major changes in the operation of the BBC. It said top executives must take initiative and responsibility, share information and embrace criticism, and persuade all employees to rid the company of the insularity and distrust that was revealed in the report.
“The BBC portrayed by the Pollard review is not fundamentally flawed, but has been chaotic,” it said. “That now needs to change.”
The report was strongly critical of several news executives who were directly involved in the decision to cancel the Savile exposé, including Mr. Rippon and the two top executives in the BBC’s news division to whom he reported, Helen Boaden and Stephen Mitchell, all three of whom were suspended from their posts during the nine-week Pollard inquiry.
But it paid scant attention to the role of Mark Thompson, who was director general of the BBC when the Savile segment was dropped and is now the president and chief executive of The New York Times Company. It did not dispute Mr. Thompson’s public statements that he did not know about the Savile investigation until it had been killed and that he did not know of the allegations against Mr. Savile until he left the BBC in mid-September.
After Mr. Thompson was told about the scuttled segment by a reporter at a reception in late December 2011, he asked his news executives about it. According to his testimony to the Pollard inquiry, he “received reassurances” that it had been killed for “editorial or journalistic reasons” and “crossed it off my list and went off to worry about something else.”
BBC Inquiry Blames Rigid Management for Mishandling Sex Abuse Scandal
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BBC Inquiry Blames Rigid Management for Mishandling Sex Abuse Scandal
