BBC in crisis - radical overhaul promised

Dubai: The fall-out from the November 2 Newsnight programme, in which a child sex attack victim alleged he had been abused by Tory peer Lord McAlpine — a close ally of Margaret Thatcher, threatens to claim still more senior scalps at the BBC.

Newsnight is a flagship BBC programme, famed for its investigative journalism and hard-hitting news exposes but the highly respected news source has come under fire in recent months in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal in the UK.

Saville, who died last year, was a knighted BBC children’s TV host who had raised millions for charity and was seen as a well-respected public figure.

In September, a rival BBC TV channel ITV broadcast a documentary, Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, with claims he had sexually molested and raped women, and one child, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Since then, the Metropolitan Police said the Child Abuse Investigation Command have been pursuing around 400 lines of inquiry based on testimony from 200 witnesses via 14 police forces across the UK with alleged child abuse “on an unprecedented scale”.

The scandal saw inquiries into BBC practices, George Entwistle apologised for what had happened and launched an internal investigation.

Crucially, a probe was also launched into why a Newsnight investigation into Savile’s activities was dropped shortly before transmission in December 2011.

Newsnight editor Peter Rippon was forced to step down in the wake of mounting criticism over Newsnight’s handling of the story.

As the BBC still reeled in the aftermath of the Savile crisis, and as internal and external probes continued, Newsnight broadcast a hard-hitting documentary revolving around alleged child abuse at the hands of a paedophile ring at children’s homes in North Wales in the 1970s.

The Newsnight story was based on Steven Messham’s claims he was abused as a boy at the home and taken to a flat where still more men abused him.

He also made claims in the Newsnight broadcast that he was abused by a senior Conservative Party figure, who was close to Margaret Thatcher.

Even though the alleged abuser was not named by Newsnight, as a result of the programme, Lord McAlpine was wrongly named on the internet as the Tory politician referred to.

Within days of the programme being aired, and in the midst of an internet furore over the abuse allegations, Steven Messham made a public apology to Lord McAlpine, stating he had been wrong.

Steven admitted that he had only seen a photograph of Lord McAlpine in the days after Newsnight was aired — and that as soon as he had seen the picture, he knew this was not the man who had abused him as a child.

This raised serious questions as to why basic journalistic checks had not been carried out prior to the screening combined with the fact McAlpine or his family say they were not contacted for comment on the allegations ahead of the broadcast,

Lord McAlpine has since issued a furious statement denying all allegations against him and vows to sue the BBC for libel over the Newsnight film — which was made in conjunction with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Its trustees include Sir David Bell, former chairman of the Media Standards Trust, which formed the ‘Hacked Off’ campaign following the phone-hacking scandal.

Sir David is now serving as one of the assessors for the Leveson inquiry into press standards — due to announce recommendations into press ethics in the UK in coming weeks.

Current and future Newsnight investigations have been shelved as the BBC deals with the fall-out from this latest crisis into journalism and ethics within its own corridors.

On Sunday, BBC Trust chairman Lord Chris Patten promised a thorough structural overhaul at the BBC in an attempt to deal with the situation.

He added: “Throughout this, in the way the BBC has covered ourselves, our credibility depends on telling the truth about ourselves and others, however horrible it might be.”