The self-betrayal of the BBC

NO recent British scandal has occasioned greater horror than that of the nine Muslim men who were gaoled in May of this year for child sex exploitation and sex trafficking in the town of Rochdale. It was a particular source of horror that the men in question were Muslims, eight of them Britons of Pakistani background, one an Afghan asylum-seeker, and that the girls on whom they preyed were white British. The insinuation of much newspaper coverage was that their crimes were an indictment of Muslims at large.
The myopic, self-serving racism of such journalism is currently being shown up in spectacular fashion.
Scarcely had the Rochdale “grooming” story dropped out of the news than an investigation by Britain’s ITV network, broadcast earlier this month, revealed that one of the top British celebrities of the past 40 years, the disk jockey and television presenter Jimmy Savile who died last year, was a compulsive abuser of underage girls. The spate of disclosures precipitated by the ITV program has left little doubt that Savile perpetrated gross improprieties in his dressing room at the BBC, the broadcasting organization with which he was conspicuously associated, as well as in hospitals and care homes that he frequented. Police are following 340 lines of inquiry relating to possible abuses by the presenter who was knighted by the Queen and bore the title Sir Jimmy Savile.
The Rochdale scandal raised deeply troubling questions about how such abuses could have gone on for years under the very noses of the police and social services. There are questions every bit as disturbing about how Jimmy Savile pursued his sordid activities with such impunity at the BBC and elsewhere.
Amazingly, his deviant behavior turns out to have been common knowledge among his broadcasting colleagues. Yet at no stage was he ever called to account — despite suspicions of abuse that might well have justified the gravest charges being pressed against him. It is especially shocking that some of Savile’s victims found themselves being admonished for making complaints about him. Largely thanks to the BBC, the presenter enjoyed a status as a “national treasure” that made him sacrosanct.
The Savile scandal is developing into the ugliest episode in the history of the BBC. It is extraordinary to reflect that for decades after it was established in the 1920s, the corporation was a byword for strict moral probity. Not only did the corporation’s founding director general, the stern Scottish Presbyterian, Sir John Reith, expect the BBC to conform to the loftiest standards in its broadcasting, he also demanded impeccable conduct on the part of its staff. In earlier days, divorce was regarded as an unforgivable moral lapse at the BBC. It appears that in the post-Reithian era, the BBC lurched from extreme Victorian rectitude to an ethos that, in some parts of its culture, embraced wholesale permissiveness.
Belatedly, the BBC has pledged to launch independent inquiries into the Savile affair. But it reflects ill on the corporation that it was slow to face up to the magnitude of Savile’s transgressions. Under the regime of the recently departed director general, Mark Thompson, there was apparently so little sense of Savile’s potential to bring disgrace to the BBC that 3 tributes to him were broadcast at the close of 2011. What makes the BBC’s handling of the whole affair peculiarly lamentable is that, at the time of these tributes, the BBC current affairs program, Newsnight, was preparing an expose of Savile that included compelling testimony by victims who later took part in the ITV program that has trashed Savile’s reputation. Yet on grounds that the BBC is finding more than a little embarrassing to explain, the expose was never broadcast.
Whether or not Newsnight was subjected to executive coercion to axe its report on Savile, there is an unfortunate impression that the BBC attempted to cover up Savile’s misdeeds. Certainly, he was long seen by the Corporation as such a prize asset that effectively he enjoyed a license to behave as he liked.
Identified in the 1970s and 80s with his hugely popular television show, Jim’ll Fix It, in which he arranged for young people to fulfill their favorite dreams, Savile also forged a reputation for charity work, raising millions on behalf of the disabled and other good causes. (It is said that he morally blackmailed people who threatened to expose him as a pedophile, warning that they would be robbing charities of vital donations.) The BBC programs celebrating Savile’s career were evidently put together on the premise that fond public memories of him would guarantee sizable audience figures.
A year after his death, Jimmy Savile is a source not of fond memories but of universal revulsion. It is a measure of the nausea the revelations about him have provoked that Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested that steps be taken to rescind Savile’s knighthood. Meanwhile, at the request of his relatives, the headstone of his grave in his birthplace Leeds has been dismantled for fear that adjacent graves could be desecrated, and charities bearing his name are under pressure to repudiate their connection with him.
For many years, champions of commercialized media, led by Rupert Murdoch, have operated a vendetta against the BBC, maintaining that the license fee the British public must pay in order to watch not just BBC but all television programs is an intolerable imposition. Needless to say, its enemies have been exploiting the BBC’s discomfiture over the Savile affair to the hilt. Yet the irony is that nothing its detractors ever said has done half so much damage to the BBC as, through its blind loyalty to a depraved celebrity, the corporation has now done to itself.