Sorry about this but it’s more Savile….it does seem that the BBC are interfering with the due process of any inquiry into this affair……
The BBC have announced two inquiries into the Savile business looking at whether the BBC was in any way to blame and why the Newsnight investigation was pulled.
However judging by what I have seen and heard and what some of the comments here are saying it would seem that the BBC has already decided and is on a mission to ‘fix’ the public’s perceptions regardless of the inquiries’ outcome.
It is wheeling in the big guns in a damage limitation exercise that is set on muddying the waters and massaging the truth.
We’ve had John Humphrys suggesting it was all so long ago and in a culture that is long gone, we’ve had Joan Bakewell spinning the same line….
“We were all padded, pinched, stroked, the whole female sex was available in those days – not willingly so – in the 1960s. It was how you treated women.”
But perhaps not how you treated 11,12,13, 14 year old girls…and boys.
Tory MP Rob Wilson delving deeper stated on the same programme that: ‘There was a culture in the BBC of Senior BBC management targeting younger female employees’……and he rightly says that other organisations also have many questions to answer but that doesn’t mean the BBC should escape from also providing answers.
And we’ve had Victoria Derbyshire doing a double act (45 mins) with ex-Today editor Kevin Marsh.
Derbyshire herself pre-empts the inquiry possible findings by stating that Newsnight dumped the programme because of ‘editorial reasons’……she reads out a few texts or emails that are against the BBC but the only callers that get through are pro-BBC…however she does read out this classic…..
‘Apart from harbouring tax dodgers and paedophiles the BBC does a cracking job’.
She then brings in Kevin Marsh to spread his own form of oil upon troubled waters….he has difficulty with recognising, or admitting the truth…..Derbyshire fed Marsh the questions and got the required answers…nothing to see here, move along. It is quite apparent that programmes such as this are meant to make people’s minds up about the BBC’s role long before any inquiry comes up with its own answers.
The BBC is acting as judge and jury in its own defence….and strangely enough finding all the evidence points to an acquittal.
KM: There will always be people who will be suspicious of big organisations and believe in conspiracy….having been inside the BBC for 30 years I know that is not true about the BBC’….he then comes up with his own conspiracy theory….’It is a commercial (Murdoch?) or political (Conservatives?) conspiracy against the BBC…no matter what the BBC says, it will be at fault’……he said it was ‘very easy to get angry about something for the sake of a newspaper column.’
So it’s all just a big conspiracy….firstly by anyone who just doesn’t trust ‘Big Organisations’ and secondly by Dark Forces opposed to the BBC seeking to attack it….and its all really about false anger drummed up to fill a few column inches.
KM: I believe George Entwistle when he said he didn’t interfere with Newsnight because it is part of the BBC’s makeup to be rigorously independent and to avoid allegations of interference…it’s not the way the BBC works for bosses to interfere…..There’s no question that Newsnight wasn’t pressured to drop the investigation…there were sound editorial reasons for it not to go ahead…..The investigation wasn’t even complete really, not a film ready to go….if we’d gone ahead and been wrong it would have been catastrophic.
That’s OK then….he believes Entwistle, the BBC is rigorously independent, and it was an internal Newsnight editorial policy to abandon the investigation.
No need for any inquiry at all then…it’s just an exercise in ‘seeing justice being done’…all a waste of time and money….as ‘Auntie’ is so trusted and respected it of course could never really be found to have done anything wrong.
Marsh has his version…but other BBC sources say otherwise:…let’s have Derbyshire & Co interviewing them…..
‘Questions remain about just why Newsnight editor Peter Rippon took the decision to stop the report, and how close it was to completion when he did so. On Sunday Kevin Marsh, a former editor of Today who has now left the BBC, wrote a blog that was sympathetic to Rippon. “When the Newsnight editor paused the investigation, it was still at the evidence-gathering stage… evidence he was beginning to have doubts about,” wrote Marsh. “In other words, there was nothing to ‘pull’ – there was an investigation in progress and it had hit a brick wall. There was no script, even, in spite of what’s been reported in the press.”
Meirion Jones, the then Newsnight producer who was putting together the Savile report (and who is now working on a new Savile investigation for Panorama), declined to comment when contacted by The Daily Telegraph. But Pollard will want to ask Jones whether Marsh’s version of events is correct, or whether Jones’s Newsnight report was – as some BBC sources continue to insist – actually at a more advanced stage (and therefore less easy to shelve for genuine “editorial reasons”).’
