Two BBC news brass step aside

News director, assistant will bow out until probe concludes

— The BBC struggled Monday to contain a spreading crisis over its reporting of a decades-old sexual abuse scandal as two senior executives withdrew temporarily from their jobs after the resignation of the corporation’s director general.

The BBC’s website said its director of news, Helen Boaden, and her deputy, Stephen Mitchell, had “stepped aside,” the latest moves since the current affairs program, Newsnight, wrongly implicated a former Conservative Party politician in accusations of sexual abuse at a children’s home in North Wales in the 1970s and 1980s.

The BBC management said that while neither Boaden nor Mitchell “had anything at all to do with the failed Newsnight investigation” of the politician, Alistair McAlpine, it “believes there is a lack of clarity in the lines of command and control in BBC News” because of an inquiry into a separate Newsnight debacle - the cancellation of a program a year ago into allegations of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile, a longtime BBC television host who died last year at age 84.

The BBC said the twoexecutives would step aside until the end of that investigation, which is being conducted by Nick Pollard, a former head of the rival Sky News.

The BBC said its head of news gathering, Fran Unsworth, and Ceri Thomas, the editor of the Today current affairs radio program, are to fill in for the executives who stepped aside.

Tim Davie, 45, an executive with a background in marketing who is director of the BBC’s radio operations, is to serve as the acting director general. In a videotaped interview posted by the BBC, Davie also said he would take a short period to deliberate.

“I’ve just got into the job,” he said. “I’m going to take a bit of time to look through the recommendations, and then we’ll take the disciplinary process through and be fair to those individuals.” He added: “The BBC has lost a directorgeneral in this process. That in itself is very significant and he has taken responsibility.”

Accounts published in Britain’s newspapers, citing current and former BBC staff members, said the Newsnight team had worked with an independent group, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at the City University in London, in preparing the Nov. 2 report that wrongly implicated McAlpine.

The privately funded bureau was founded in 2009 to investigate contentious issues and, in its own words, to provide a “gold standard” for reporting. It has used experienced journalists and students at the university’s journalism school, often in conjunction with mainstream media organizations like the BBC, which have paid the bureau for its work.

In a statement, the bureau’s board of trustees has said that it was “appalled by what appears to be a breach” of standards and that “remedial action will be taken against those responsible.”

The bureau’s work for the report was led by a former BBC reporter, Angus Stickler, who was lent to Newsnight and worked jointly under a BBC producer and the bureau’s own managing editor, Iain Overton, a former BBC producer who resigned Monday.

Several of those involved in the preparation of the Newsnight report have been quoted in British papers as saying that errors included not calling McAlpine for a response and not showing a former child home resident interviewed for the report, Steve Messham, a photograph of McAlpine to identify him. Messham has apologized to McAlpine, tracing the confusion to the police identification of a photograph of a manhe identified as his abuser in the early 1990s.

The latest debacle has compounded the problems facing the network since accusations last month against Savile, who is suspected of sexually abusing as many as 300 young people. Critics have accused the BBC of covering up the abuse by canceling a Newsnight report on the accusations against him in December. Entwistle has said that he was not informed beforehand of the nature of the Newsnight investigation or the reasons for its cancellation.

At that time, Entwistle was in charge of all the BBC’s television productions and was seeking to succeed Mark Thompson as director-general.

Thompson stepped down in September after accepting an offer to become president and chief executive of The New York Times Co., a post he took up Monday. He has said he knew nothing beforehand about the Newsnight investigation of Savile or the decision to scrap it, but that he is willing to answer any questions from investigators.

In a message to the staff of The Times on Monday, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and board chairman, welcomed Thompson without alluding to the crisis at the BBC.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 11/13/2012

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