UNITED KINGDOM
The Guardian
Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian, Friday 26 October 2012
There is a tide in the affairs of men and this one has gone in and out and back in again. The first wave brought horror at the alleged crimes of Jimmy Savile, revulsion at a deception that had been perpetrated on the British public over four decades: hoodwinked by visible good deeds, so that we wouldn’t see the darkness beneath.
The next wave saw that fury turned on Savile’s longtime employer, the BBC, for failing to reveal the truth about him when it had a clear chance, by binning a Newsnight investigation a year ago – a decision the programme’s editor made, we now discover, a day after the corporation had published its Christmas schedule, a lineup that included not one but two fawning tributes to the presenter. That BBC-focused rage reached a peak at the start of the week, when Panorama tore into its sister programme as George Entwistle prepared to take a pasting from a House of Commons select committee.
Since then the tide has headed in the reverse direction, with both commentators and politicians insisting it is wrong to obsess over BBC management practices when the real issue is the sexual abuse of children. “The voices of the victims seem to have been completely ignored,” the Tory MP Claire Perry told Question Time, because “the BBC is doing too much navel-gazing”.
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