Nick Pollard said “leadership and organisation seemed to be in short supply” around the time of the breaking scandal and that the BBC showed a “complete inability to deal with the events that when Newsnight’s editor Peter Rippon cancelled the investigation into Jimmy Savile’s dark history of paedophilia.
Pollard, the former head of Sky News who was commissioned to put together the report as an independent journailist, said Rippon “did not look properly at the evidence”.
George Entwitsle lasted only 54 days in his job as BBC director general but was given a £450,000 payoff. The report revealed that he was warned in email messages from members of staff. Exec Jan Younghusband said the presenter had a “darker side” and Nick Vaughan-Barratt emailed that he was “v queasy about an obit. I saw the real truth!!!”
The BBC continued with tribute shows dedicated to the Jim’ll Fix It star last Christmas following his death on the 29th of October last year despite concerns from staff working on the Newsnight investigation.
The police have since asserted that Savile may have been one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders with around 450 people submitting allegations and evidence so far.
It has also been announced that the editor and deputy editor of the BBC’s Newsnight programme will be replaced, following the wrongfully implicated, but did not name, Lord McAlpine in a recent episode focusing on child abusers. The Tory peer successfully sued for £185,000 in libel damages.
Watch the statement from Nick Pollard in the video below.
