BBC's Incurious George vows to 'calibrate systems' after Savile affair
Strangely uninquisitive 'for a journalist'
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The BBC's new director general provoked derision from MPs today after spending most of two hours explaining why he had failed to follow up information, as well as having to answer questions about BBC decisions. Entwistle came across a polite man, but no leader, and the picture of the BBC that emerged was more surreally bureaucratic and inert than a TwentyTwelve-style parody.
George Entwistle was appearing before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee in a one-off evidence session on 'the Jimmy Savile case'. Select Committees often flunk it with grandstanding, or more often, failing to ask follow-up questions. The grilling today was persistent and on-topic.
An outsider may have been able to breeze through by expressing dismay and promising to investigate. However Entwistle has been at the BBC for 23 years and became the chief executive last month, ran BBC TV (or 'Vision', in BBC-speak) and spent most of his 14 years at Newsnight or Panorama, the corporation's two flagship TV news programmes.
The session started badly and didn't improve. Entwistle told the committee he hadn't been briefed on how many sexual abuse cases are reported at the Corporation, and explained why he failed to act on several pieces of information he received, saying that he did not wish to interfere with internal BBC processes. This was plausible up to a point, but as a blanket excuse, was ill-advised. Ninety minutes into the session, this was causing mockery from his interrogators. MP Philip Davies said this showed a "lack of curiosity... for a journalist".
Incurious George.
Entwistle confirmed that he had been told of the Newsnight investigation into Savile as head of TV, but had not enquired further. He also confirmed that he had been told this month that Newsnight editor Peter Rippon's subsequent explanation of the cancellation of the Savile investigation was inaccurate, and had not made further enquiries.
More damagingly perhaps, Entwistle told MPs he saw nothing wrong with last night's Panorama about Savile - which we now know, withheld important corroborative information from the viewer. As a consequence, attention was deflected from the current management onto past crimes, and from senior management onto Rippon, who began to look like a convenient fall guy. Another Panorama into why this Panorama failed to give us the true picture is a possibility.
On being warned informally on 2 December that Newsnight's investigation into abuse by Savile may have consequences for the BBC's Christmas schedule, Entwistle had failed to enquire, or ask others to enquire. He explained this inactivity was the desire to allow programme-makers to remain free from interference.
"So, 'Thanks Helen what are you looking at' would have been interpreted as interfering?" asked one MP.
"Perhaps I was being over-sensitive," Entwistle replied.
The level of bureaucratic dysfunction was also glimpsed.
"Our systems need to be more carefully calibrated," said the director general at one point. He also promised "an amendment to our guidelines".
In a classically dysfunctional bureaucracy, nobody takes personal responsibility, and the machinery of administration itself substitutes for individual moral judgments. New task forces are created, new procedural rules are drawn up, and the 'chain of command' is invoked. Entwistle deployed all three numerous times.
Few characters emerge from this with any credit. One is Louis Theroux, who did what no news and current affairs reporter or manager had been able to do, by confronting Savile with the allegations while he was still alive.
Newsnight producer Meirion Jones and reporter Liz Mackean, who both worked on the canceled Savile film, both deserve enormous credit. It took no little courage to leak internal evidence this month that embarrassed their superiors.
Some credit should also go to the Corporation for belatedly airing the accusations in a Panorama, but not as much as it would have liked. It made for disturbing and enthralling TV - and the belated self-criticism might have helped to restore the BBC's reputation. But the film became a symptom of the problem it was describing. The inference ensured blame was deflected from the management: the Best Bits were Censored. ®
COMMENTS
why has this taken so long ?
the information that newsnight's story was spiked , was a story in at least january 2012.. This was noted in last nights Panorama and can be confirmed with a bit of google.
So it's pretty sad for other media outlets to complain about "why didn't the bbc do anything" when they also did nothing this year until the itv documentary came out, which mainly was the same interviews initially taken in the newsnight investigation.
Obviously a bit of beeb bashing is much more fun than investigating Savile.
Sadly amusing
This whole affair is a perfect illustration of the average human being's strong desire to see everything as pure black and white. Savile, who always struck me as a bit of a self-advertising clown, was gradually built up to the same general level as Princess Diana. Once exalted, nothing bad could be said (or even thought) about him. The community - the nation - had chosen him as A Good Person, and that was that.
Similarly, nothing good can be said (or even thought) about Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden, or Mrs Thatcher.
Reality is not like that at all. It's always useful to recall the wise words of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in “The Gulag Archipelago”:
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being".
Incurious George is not alone
I'm sure that more was known than the BBC choose to report. But in slightly different fields, the "I knowed nuffink" defence has been done to death by the Murdochs and the their henchpeople, and by many bankers before select committees, and has proven very useful. Maybe their is a need for a law on "culpable ignorance".
In other fields, it is not uncommon for the heavy hitters in many organisations (successful salesmen, senior executives, high billing partners, high earning traders) to find that so long as their power/success lasts, the organisation will accept any behaviour, and do its utmost to sweep the evidence under the carpet. And here the politicians should remember how they tried to do just this to avoid the publication of expenses data.
I doubt I'm alone in thinking that the BBC management know there's a lot more to this than the case of the scruffy, tracksuit wearing perv.
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