BBC Still Determined To Cover-up the Legacy of Monster Jimmy Savile

21st Century Wire says…

No surprise here. Even with its billion pound budget and bottomless bevy of six-figure executive ‘managers’, BBC is unable to criticize itself over the horrific Jimmy Savile scandal.

The Guardian article below reveals exactly how the BCC pushed-out any Savile ‘whistleblowers’ – a clear indication of the systemic culture of deceit and corruption inside the publicly funded broadcast institution.

A shocking story, which shows just how desperate the management are to bury their own debacle…

(Image: Wiki Commons)

The sinister treatment of dissent at the BBC

Nick Cohen
The Guardian

Nobody from John Humphrys in the morning to Evan Davis at night dares mention a scandal at the BBC. It undermines their reporting of every abuse whistleblowers reveal. It reinforces the dirty common sense of British life that you must keep your head down if you want to keep your job.

The scandal is simply this: the BBC is forcing out or demoting the journalists who exposed Jimmy Savile as a voracious abuser of girls. As Meirion Jones put it to me: “There is a small group of powerful people at the BBC who think it would have been better if the truth about Savile had never come out. And they aim to punish the reporters who revealed it.”

Jones was one of the BBC’s best investigative producers. He had suspected that Savile was not the “national treasure” the BBC, NHS, monarchy and public adored, ever since he had seen Savile take girls away in his car from an approved school his aunt ran in the 1970s. He broke the story which showed that Savile was one of the most prolific sex abusers in British history, and handed the BBC what would have been one of its biggest scoops. If it had run it. Which, of course, it did not. The editor of Newsnight banned the report. Thus began a cover-up which tore the BBC apart.

A week ago, Jones’s managers told him that a temporary assignment on Panorama was over. He should have been able to go back to his old job. But there was no old job to go back to. He had been fired.

Jones’s reporter on the Savile film was Liz MacKean, who documents the sufferings of the powerless – whether it be raped children in Britain or persecuted gay men in Putin’s Russia.

But she spoke out, so the BBC forced her out too. “When the Savile scandal broke,” she told me, “the BBC tried to smear my reputation. They said they had banned the film because Meirion and I had produced shoddy journalism. I stayed to fight them, but I knew they would make me leave in the end. Managers would look through me as if I wasn’t there. I went because I knew I was never going to appear on screen again.”

The BBC press office bridled when I described Jones and MacKean as “whistleblowers”. As the Pollard review of the Savile scandal had concluded that BBC management had acted in “good faith”, I must not call them that.

If you are tempted to agree, consider the sequel. Panorama responded magnificently to the news that the BBC had killed the Savile scoop. It broadcast a special documentary, which earned the highest audience in the programme’s history. Jones and MacKean described how their journalism had been suppressed, and Panorama went on to document Savile’s crimes. How open the BBC is, I thought. What other institution would subject itself to the same level of self-criticism?

What a fool I was. Since then, BBC managers have shifted Tom Giles, the editor of Panorama, out of news. Peter Horrocks, an executive who insisted throughout the scandal that the BBC must behave ethically, announced last September that he was resigning to “find new challenges”. Clive Edwards, who as commissioning editor for current affairs oversaw the Panorama documentary, was demoted. The television trade press reported recently that his future is “not yet clear” (which doesn’t sound as if he has much of a future at all).

Compare their treatment with those who did nothing to advance the public interest…

Continue this story at The Guardian

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Source: http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/03/10/bbc-still-determined-to-cover-up-the-legacy-of-monster-jimmy-savile/