The BBC Is Bluffing Its Way Out Of The Savile Scandal. And No One Seems To Mind

Adam Lovejoy writes from London: Has everyone gone bonkers in good old Britain? Or maybe trashy television has turned a large proportion of the population into zombies who can’t distinguish right from wrong, black from white or, in this case, right from left.

Yes, I’m talking about the report into the axing by the editors of the Newsnight programme of a piece about the late Jimmy Savile, former BBC top star, and his sexual abuse of underage girls for decades while working at the Corporation. The mere idea that a whole inquiry costing two million smackers should be conducted to establish who said what to whom about a report that was not shown around last Christmas is a farce in itself. Because no one really cares about it and it’s rich for the BBC to pretend that it warranted a full-blown investigation. The whole point of the revelation about Savile and his chums sexually abusing underage girls and young women was about a cover up of a paedophile network operating within the BBC, a publicly funded broadcaster that has been flaunting its own charter for decades when it came to impartiality and quality of content.

The funniest thing of all is that some hacks, who obviously side with the BBC and hope to get a slot of their own on the airwaves for their treachery, are calling the inquiry headed by Nick Pollard, a former news boss at Sky, and the pathetic report it has produced ‘hard-hitting’ and even ‘damaging’ for the BBC. This is about a document that found no evidence of a conspiracy to hush up Savile’s abuse and prevent the showing of a programme revealing some of it. As a result of this inquiry one man, Deputy Director of BBC News, Stephen Mitchell, has been removed from his post while the editorial team of Newsnight is being replaced by hacks who will continue to produce the same left-wing drivel that this news programme – that practically no one watches anymore – is famous for. But remarkably, the head of BBC News, Helen Boaden, who ‘stepped aside’ after the scandal had erupted, has returned to her post. This is the woman who presided over extraordinary bias in BBC news reporting but is still deemed suitable enough to get back her highly paid job.

No wonder the Chairman of the BBC Trust, Lord Chris Patten, quickly accepted Pollard’s report ‘in its entirety’. Sure he would. Because it lets him and the BBC as a whole off the hook. The most hard-hitting bit of this ‘critical document’ was about the ‘chaos’ that had erupted in the Corporation when the Savile scandal broke out initially and the lack of efforts to deal with the matter effectively. If Mr Pollard thinks that this will keep the top dogs in the BBC awake at night, he must be kidding himself.

The report also made a big fuss out of the now former BBC Director General George Entwistle getting 450 grand as a pay-off after being forced to stand down. As if this was some huge scandal that revealed deeply unpleasant things going on at the BBC. To hell with left-wing bias and misuse of public money on leftie propaganda, Mr Pollard probably figured. And to hell with meddling in politics and plugging the Labour party. It was the pay-out to the former DG that mattered most, even though he was probably entitled to it by his contract. Not to mention that the name of Mark Thompson, the former BBC Director General, under whose watch Savile was having fun with his mates, was not even mentioned in this ‘hard-hitting document’.

Why on earth the BBC has such power over everyone is unclear. But for decades it has been able to get away with murder, journalistically speaking.  Even when it got into hot water it always came out of it dry and unruffled. RIP British journalism if not one mainstream hack dared to dig deep and get some juicy facts about the Savile cover-up and the way the BBC wages its propaganda war against the very people who pay its bills.

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