BBC Director General Resigns Over Newsnight

bb1 wrote:Knives are getting sharpened:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2231291/The-men-Bureau-Investigative-Journalism-helped-Newsnight-compile-child-abuse-dossier-falsely-accused-politician-paedophile-links-Hacked-campaign.html

BBC Crisis: News Executives To Stand Aside
Sky News – 10 minutes ago

BBC news director Helen Boaden and deputy Stephen Mitchell are to stand aside over the BBC crisis, Sky sources understand. It follows the resignation of director general George Entwistle at the weekend in the wake of the Newsnight row.
Media commentator Steve Hewlett told Sky News: "Helen Boaden and Stephen Mitchell have up till now been standing aside from all matters Savile - now they'll be standing aside from everything.
"They're going to be replaced by Fran Unsworth, head of Newsgathering. She will become director of news, and Kerry Thomas, the editor of the Today programme I understand is going to be deputy director."
Acting director general Tim Davie arrived for work but did not speak to waiting reporters. Later today he will set out his plans for rebuilding trust in the corporation in the wake of the botched Newsnight child abuse investigation.
Mr Davie held his first meeting last night with the BBC Trust since being drafted in to replace Mr Entwistle, who announced his resignation on Saturday.
It came as a row erupted over the disclosure that Mr Entwistle - who served just 54 days in the post - was to receive a full year's salary of £450,000 in lieu of notice.
Under the terms of the his contract he was entitled to only six months' pay but the trust said that the additional payment had been agreed as a reflection of his continuing involvement with the various BBC inquiries now under way.
BBC staff are now braced for further bloodletting.
On Sunday, Mr Davie received a report which Mr Entwistle had commissioned from BBC Scotland director Ken MacQuarrie into how Newsnight came to wrongly implicate former Tory Party treasurer Lord McAlpine in the north Wales children's home scandal of the 1970s and 1980s.
Before he quit, Mr Entwistle warned that it could result in disciplinary action against staff and over the weekend MPs demanded that those directly involved in the broadcast were held to account.
The future of Newsnight also appears to be in the balance, with the chairman of the BBC Trust Lord Patten warning that there would have to be some "tough managerial decisions".

Sabot wrote:
Lord Patten needs to go.

Lamplighter wrote:

Sabot wrote:
Lord Patten needs to go.

Why? LL

Sabot wrote:

Lamplighter wrote:

Sabot wrote:
Lord Patten needs to go.

Why? LL

Because he knew about the slur campaign against Lord McAlpine before it was broadcast.

bb1 wrote:Sabot's right, he did, I am pretty sure. That has rather slipped under the radar in the rest of the mess.

I'll try to find a link.

BBC Report: 'Unacceptable' Failings At Newsnight
Sky News – 8 minutes ago

A report into a BBC programme which mistakenly implicated a senior politician in a child abuse scandal has found a number of "unacceptable" failings.
Ken MacQuarrie, director of BBC Scotland, was asked to investigate the November 2 edition of Newsnight, which led to Lord McAlpine, the former Conservative treasurer, being wrongly accused of abuse at a care home in North Wales in the 1970s and 1980s.
His report found that "some of the basic journalistic checks were not completed", and that there was "ambiguity around who was taking the ultimate editorial responsibility".
The Corporation said it would take "clear and decisive action ... to restore public trust in the BBC's journalism", and said disciplinary proceedings "will begin immediately".
The BBC Trust described Mr MacQuarrie's findings as "very concerning", and said "serious failures in the normal checks and balances that the Trust expects from BBC journalism" had been identified.
A spokesman for the BBC said: "The next stage of this process is now underway.
"It will, amongst other things, seek to clarify decision-making roles and responsibilities in relation to the Newsnight report.
"We expect that these investigations will be concluded as quickly as possible."

UK November 12, 2012 Rupert Murdoch gleeful at BBC debacle in Britain

LONDON (AP) — Few seem to be enjoying the management meltdown at the venerable BBC more than Rupert Murdoch, the News Corp. chief whose rival British newspapers have been caught up in their own lengthy, embarrassing and expensive phone-hacking scandal.

But the troubles for both media organizations highlight that the news industry in Britain is at rock-bottom in public esteem, and could face increased restrictions from the government of Prime Minister David Cameron, which appears convinced it has been unable to police itself.

The British Broadcasting Corp. has moved into full-bore damage control since it retracted mistaken allegations by its marquee news program that a politician sexually abused children. That serious mistake followed the BBC's earlier failure to report on widespread child sex abuse allegations against one of its biggest stars, the late Jimmy Savile.

"BBC mess gives Cameron golden opportunity (to) properly reorganize great public broadcaster," Murdoch tweeted gleefully Sunday. The scandal follows several years of turmoil over the phone-hacking scandal, which exploded with the discovery that employees of Murdoch's News of the World tabloid hacked into a kidnapped girl's mobile phone. The scandal widened when scores of celebrities, sports stars and politicians said they, too, had been hacked. The tabloid folded, Murdoch's media paid out millions in compensation and still faces scores of lawsuits. Several news executives have been arrested.

A report due this month from Lord Justice Brian Leveson, based on months of jarring testimony about wrongdoing by Murdoch's reporters and others, may prompt the government to impose statutory regulation on the British print press, which is overseen by an industry watchdog.

Many say the reputation of the British media is at an all-time low. "The issues the BBC is dealing with at the moment ... are very different from the phone hacking and illegal intercept of communications which led to the Leveson inquiry," said Bob Calver, a journalism professor at Birmingham City University. "(But) clearly in the public mind there won't be that distinction, the public will see it as poor standards across the board."

Murdoch's grudge against the BBC was vented in detail in a 2009 speech by his son James, a TV executive who railed against the BBC's funding, which comes from a television license fee paid by every TV household in Britain.

Because of its funding, "the BBC feels empowered" and "the scope of its activities and ambitions is chilling," said James Murdoch. Phil Harding, the BBC's former controller of editorial policy, warned U.K. media to resist the temptation to criticize too much.

"If you really tear into another journalistic organization, what you are going to do is ... undermine public confidence in journalism," he said Monday at a Society of Editors conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

BBC chief George Entwistle resigned this weekend, and on Monday the head of news, Helen Boaden, and deputy Stephen Mitchell were temporarily removed from their positions, though the broadcaster said neither were implicated in the errors involving its child sex abuse reports.

The broadcaster also came under fire Monday for the terms of Entwistle's removal after only 54 days on the job. He is drawing a full year's salary of 450,000 pounds ($715,000). "Clearly, it is hard to justify a sizeable payoff of that sort," Cameron's spokesman Steve Field told reporters.

Iain Overton, who was involved in preparing the "Newsnight" story about the politician, resigned Monday as editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The organization, a nonprofit muckraking group based at City University in London that works with several news organizations, said the BBC story had been "strictly contrary to the fundamental principles and standards of the bureau."

Further resignations or suspensions at the BBC are likely as the investigation develops. "Consideration is now being given to the extent to which individuals should be asked to account further for their actions and if appropriate, disciplinary action will be taken," the BBC said.

In New York, Mark Thompson, Entwistle's predecessor who was in charge when a BBC investigation into Savile's alleged abuse was sidelined, said Monday he is "very saddened" by the scandal at the broadcaster. Arriving on the first day of his new job as chief executive of The New York Times, he told reporters he has "no doubt it (the BBC) will get back on its feet."

Telegraph:
This isn't the first time that Angus Stickler and Newsnight have made OTT claims about secret child abusers
By Brendan O'Neill Politics Last updated: November 12th, 2012

The hilariously misnamed Bureau of Investigative Journalism is getting a lot of much-deserved flak over the Lord McAlpine scandal: its editor, Iain Overton, has just resigned. It was one of the bureau’s chief reporters, Angus Stickler, who researched and presented the now notorious Newsnight report which falsely accused a “high-ranking Tory” of being a paedo. And it was Overton who cranked up the frenzied Twitter rumour mill. On 2 November, shortly before Stickler’s report was aired, Overton tweeted: “If all goes well, we’ve got a Newsnight out tonight about a very senior political figure who is a paedophile.” It was this tweet which led to a febrile climate of “naming and shaming” across the Twittersphere and blogosphere, with false claims being made about Lord McAlpine by everyone from bedroom-bound conspiracy theorists to serious journalists like George Monbiot.

Yet this isn’t the first time that journalists now linked with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in particular Angus Stickler, have made less than airtight claims about paedophiles or child abusers or witches. Indeed, on a number of occasions over the past 10 years, Mr Stickler, who was a BBC journalist before he joined the bureau, has fronted scandalous-sounding reports about blood-curdling child-snatchers which later turned out to be quite questionable.

In 2006, in reports for both Radio 4’s Today programme and Newsnight, Mr Stickler claimed that a Tottenham-based pastor of Congolese origin, Dr Dieudonne Tukala, was diagnosing children as “witches” and encouraging their parents to “beat the devil out of them”. This led to newspaper reports about severe cruelty against “child witches” within London’s religious African communities. On the back of Mr Stickler’s reports, Pastor Tukala was arrested by the Metropolitan Police on charges of child cruelty. But after a thorough 10-month investigation, the charges against him were completely dropped; evidence for the very serious things said by Mr Stickler about Pastor Tukala was found wanting.

In 2005, someone at the Met leaked a report to Stickler, who was then at the Today programme, which said that young African boys were being trafficked to the UK and murdered in “human sacrifices”. Stickler said he had heard things that were “absolutely chilling” and said “the most gruesome details come from the African communities”. He also reported, darkly, that 300 African children had gone missing in Britain over a four-month period. Newspapers leapt upon these claims, too, most notably the Evening Standard, which ran with the headline, “Children sacrificed in London churches”. However, the claims were false. The Met later said that there was “no evidence whatsoever” of human sacrifices taking place in Britain, or that boys had gone missing for this purpose. Its internal report was purely “anecdotal”, it said, and should never have been leaked, far less splashed with such seriousness on the Radio 4 airwaves. (See Private Eye, 1-14 September 2006.)

Mr Stickler seems to have a strange fascination with paedophiles and witches, one which often runs ahead of the evidence. Indeed, long before this week’s Newsnight debacle, Stickler’s reporting on the North Wales children’s home scandal was being called into question by experts. The late Richard Webster, author of the exhaustive, Orwell Prize-nominated Secret of Bryn Estyn, which examined in extraordinary detail the claims made about child abuse at that home, argued in 2004 that a Radio 4 report about the home by Stickler had got some things “spectacularly wrong”. Stickler interviewed Stephen Messham for that report, just as he did for Newsnight this week, even though, as Webster pointed out in 2004, given his background, it would have been wiser not to use him at all . “To any dispassionate observer, it should now be apparent that the ‘paedophile ring’ enthusiastically located by journalists and others in North Wales children’s homes belongs to the realm of higher fantasy”, said Webster.
When Stickler isn’t seeking out political paedophiles in North Wales or African witch-killers in London, he is putting the boot into alleged paedophile rings in the Catholic Church. Indeed, according to a 2003 Guardian report, Stickler was originally recruited to the Today programme in order to “cause trouble for the Roman Catholic Church” (something the BBC loves doing, of course), which he duly did with a series of reports about Catholic paedophilia.

What the case of Stickler suggests is that when journalists go hunting for modern-day witches, they can get carried away with themselves; they risk letting their standards slide and their imaginations run riot. One of the most striking things about the McAlpine scandal in particular is that it should have been stirred up by Stickler's Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which is linked to the much-respected City University journalism school and to serious broadsheet journalists. These are the very people who, over the past two years, have been campaigning against scurrilous tabloid journalism, in particular the use of phone-hacking at the News of the World, and calling instead for proper investigative, “public interest” journalism. So is this what they mean by “public interest” journalism? The fact-lite naming and shaming of wholly innocent men? In an irony so profound it is almost impossible to get one's head around it, this is one of the things these erudite journalists most hated about the late News of the World – its cavalier naming and shaming of paedos.