See also Michael Moynihan, Will Mark Thompson Survive as New York Times CEO amid Jimmy Savile Scandal? Daily Beast (Nov. 2, 2012):
"A rough précis of the increasingly complex scandal: BBC presenter Jimmy Savile,
who died last year at age 84, is alleged to have sexually assaulted
hundreds of woman and underage girls, which some have claimed was an
open secret at Broadcasting House. Soon after his death, the BBC’s
program Newsnight was set to air an investigation detailing
horrifying allegations of rape and pedophilia against Savile. But for
reasons that are still unclear, higher-ups intervened and the program
was dropped. Who intervened—and why—is a matter of furious debate.
"Thompson, then the top man at the BBC, claims to have known nothing of the Newsnight investigation and, therefore, was in not involved in spiking the Savile segment. But Thompson’s line on what he knew and when has been modified, shifted, and qualified since the story broke. (See The Daily Beast’s previous coverage of Thompson’s seemingly contradictory account of the Savile timeline here.) But new allegations in London’s Sunday Times suggest Thompson’s office was twice contacted about the Savile investigation by a freelance journalist last April. Thompson claims this information languished on his secretary’s desk, never reaching his ears, a defense that has provoked renewed scrutiny of his role at the Times. As New York magazine writer Joe Hagan put it, if conclusive evidence surfaces that 'Thompson had prior knowledge of the BBC report on Savile, the Times’ reputation would be damaged, not least because of its own tough reportage on molestation cover-ups inside the Catholic church and at Penn State.'”
"Thompson, then the top man at the BBC, claims to have known nothing of the Newsnight investigation and, therefore, was in not involved in spiking the Savile segment. But Thompson’s line on what he knew and when has been modified, shifted, and qualified since the story broke. (See The Daily Beast’s previous coverage of Thompson’s seemingly contradictory account of the Savile timeline here.) But new allegations in London’s Sunday Times suggest Thompson’s office was twice contacted about the Savile investigation by a freelance journalist last April. Thompson claims this information languished on his secretary’s desk, never reaching his ears, a defense that has provoked renewed scrutiny of his role at the Times. As New York magazine writer Joe Hagan put it, if conclusive evidence surfaces that 'Thompson had prior knowledge of the BBC report on Savile, the Times’ reputation would be damaged, not least because of its own tough reportage on molestation cover-ups inside the Catholic church and at Penn State.'”
....
....
The New York Times was not nearly so solicitous of what it took to be the defense of wilful ignorance in the case of Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals such as Bernard Law. (This is different because, after all, Thompson is not a Roman Catholic cleric?)
Is it time for someone to investigate whether the New York Times tolerated criminal sexual misbehavior by people within its own ranks? Or does the Times think that a journalist's privilege bars such an investigation?
Evidence marshaling software MarshalPlan
6 comments:
In the NYTimes: As Scandal Flared, BBC’s Leaders Missed Red Flags
By MATTHEW PURDY
Published: November 4, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/business/media/mark-thompson-and-bbc-missed-red-flags-in-savile-scandal.html?hp
Paul Stone, "BBC Faces Potential Liability in Sex Scandal," Wall Street Journal (Nov. 1, 2012), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203707604578090821356733996.html?KEYWORDS=Mark+Thompson
"The [Savile] case is causing additional problems for the BBC, which last December shelved an investigation by one of its news programs into Mr. Savile's behavior—a decision that now is placing pressure on current BBC Director General George Entwistle and his predecessor Mark Thompson, the incoming chief executive of New York Times Co." Id.
Maureen Orth, "The BBC Blame Game," Vanity Fair (Feb. 15, 2013), http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/02/bbc-chief-mark-thompson-jimmy-savile-scandal : "Adding to the general chaos and mystery was the role played by former BBC director general Mark Thompson, who held that position until mid-September 2012. Despite press reports about the Savile scandal dating back to January 2012, including a detailed Oldie magazine article by Miles Goslett, Thompson has consistently claimed that he knew nothing of the swirling controversy of the Newsnight tributes fiasco until shortly before the ITV program aired, in October, after he had left. However, Goslett had made a Freedom of Information Act request to the BBC in April and called Thompson’s office in May. On September 6, in response to a series of specific written questions posed by the London Sunday Times Magazine probing into what Thompson knew about Savile and when, a letter was drafted on Thompson’s behalf by outside lawyers—not BBC lawyers—threatening libel action if The Sunday Times printed a story suggesting an intentional cover-up. Thompson claims never to have read the letter, which one London legal observer finds 'inconceivable. If he approved and hadn’t read it, he’s just as culpable.' Today, Thompson is the newly installed C.E.O. of The New York Times, which has been compelled to report on his “evolving” views of what he remembers. For all concerned, this story just keeps growing, like Topsy."
Id: "Thompson said he was never briefed or notified about Savile. He denied to Pollard that he was aware of any of the seven print stories, at least several of which would have appeared in the daily BBC press clippings packet sent to top executives. He also told me that he had had no idea about the Freedom of Information request sent to his office by Miles Goslett, and that he had only verbally O.K.’d—without reading it—the very strongly worded letter threatening libel written by independent lawyers to The Sunday Times Magazine.
When first questioned by New York Times reporters, Thompson repeated that he had “never heard any allegations” about Savile while he was at the BBC, and that he did not know what the killed exposé was about. According to the Mail Online, “He later admitted to a British newspaper that after a conversation at a party he ‘formed the impression it (the Newsnight investigation) was about sex abuse.’ ” The reason for the admission was that Goslett had discovered that Caroline Hawley, a BBC reporter whom he did not name, had approached Thompson at a pre-Christmas party in 2011 and said he must be worried about Savile. Thompson subsequently asked Helen Boaden, director of news, about it. Since then Thompson has sought to clarify his position.
In a January 2013 letter to a member of Parliament sent from New York, for example, Thompson said he did remember a “chance conversation” at a cocktail party in December 2011, but neither Hawley nor the leadership of BBC News (Helen Boaden), with whom he subsequently raised it, “told me what the investigation had been about,” though he did know the story was abandoned on editorial grounds. He said that when he indicated to the Times “that I might have formed the impression at the time of my conversations with Caroline and Helen that the investigation related to allegations of sexual abuse, this was speculation on my part in October 2012 about an impression I might or might not have formed after a pair of brief conversations nearly a year earlier.”
Today it does not really seem to matter whether anyone can even parse that statement. Thompson has traded his role of heading his country’s most prestigious media empire for that of overseeing a much smaller, operation at this country’s most prestigious newspaper. Asked what he made of a BBC insider’s claim that Thompson has “failed up” and is a “floater, not a sinker,” Thompson remarked that during his tenure, “the BBC went on to have a really outstanding decade,” and that after taking an earlier job at Channel 4, he grew it “back to profitability. No one got fired or stabbed.” What about bitten, per a 1988 incident in which he bit a Nine O’Clock News colleague on the arm? “That was a very, very long time ago—it was a joke that went only slightly wrong.”
At present, he is far from the BBC turmoil that began in his tenure, and Pollard has declared his support: “I have no reason to doubt what Mr. Thompson told us.”
The Pollard Review cost British taxpayers more than $3 million and examined more than 10,000 documents. Rushed out in nine weeks just before Christmas, it concluded that the BBC was guilty of serious failings in oversight and management control, and that dropping the Savile piece “led to one of the worst management crises in the BBC’s history.” Moreover, “the BBC’s management system proved completely incapable of dealing with it.” However, flawed as the decision was, the Pollard Review concluded that it was made in good faith, that there was no attempt to suppress the story."
Tillers: "Good faith" has many permutations. But I cannot help wondering whether in the eyes of the NYTimes the type of "good faith" allegedly displayed by Mark Thompson would have or did excuse any of the U.S. Catholic bishops who allegedly ignored evidence of sexual misbehavior by priests under the control of such bishops. (There is the different but broader and more important question of whether Thompson should have instituted BBC policies to reduce sexual misbehavior by BBC employees. [The Vanity Fair article cited above mentions {toward the end} that quite a few BBC employees other than Savile have now been said to have engaged in sexual misbehavior, and presumably some of them did do while Thompson was in command. Was there a "corporate culture of indifference" toward such problems? It has been argued there was.])
Jennifer O'Mahony & Alice Philipson, "BBC releases Pollard report into the Savile inquiry: as it happened," The Telegraph (Feb. 22, 2013), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/jimmy-savile/9887449/BBC-releases-Pollard-report-into-the-Savile-inquiry-as-it-happened.html:
"13.27 A baffling quote from Mark Thompson, former director-general of the BBC. The knowledge of Savile's predilection for underage girls was widely known at the BBC, and almost every other interviewee has conceded this was the case.
[Thompson said he had "never heard" that Savile had a "dark side."]
Post a Comment