Slashdot Mirror
Director General of BBC Resigns Over "Poor Journalism"
dryriver writes "George Entwistle, the new Director General of the BBC who had been on the job for a mere 54 days, has voluntarily resigned over a BBC program that featured 'poor journalism'. The program in question was 'Newsnight', which typically features hard-hitting investigative journalism similar to American programs like '60 Minutes'. On Friday night, Newsnight accused a prominent Conservative MP and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Lord Alistair McAlpine, of having sexually abused a number of young boys at Bryn Estyn Children's Home in the 70s and 80s. Only after Newsnight aired with the allegations in the UK did the BBC realize that 'the wrong photographs were shown' to the alleged sexual abuse victims, who are now adults, and that Lord Alistair McAlpine had nothing whatsoever to do with the abuses committed. Newsnight's 'poor journalism' caused George Entwistle, the Director General of the British Broadcasting Corporation, to resign voluntarily over the scandal caused by the erroneous allegations. This example of an important media chief 'resigning voluntarily due to bad journalism' is interesting, because many TV, Web and Print journalists make 'serious mistakes' in their coverage at some point or the other, and quite often no heads roll whatsoever as a result."
The viewer attention span is too short.
Big deal. You accused an innocent man of being a pedophile. But at least you didn't cover up an investigation of another man being a pedophile. Oh wait!
Accusing somebody of rape when he did nothing is a very serious matter. It destroys that person's life forever!
If you don't put the correction up high enough, people will miss that it was a false accusation, and a "urban legend"/meme type thing will form, that sticks to that person forever anyway.
It is exactly why slander / character assassination is a crime, and the original reason such actions were criminalized. (Until they got abused to censor everybody and everything.)
At first I thought I clicked on the wrong bookmark, but the style and appearance sure looks like Slashdot, however to content is apparently completely random international news.
Better known as 318230.
What actually happened, is that the victim went to the police at the time the alleged incident took place, which was IIRC in the 80s. He was shown photographs by the police and told that they were of Lord McAlpine. The case collapsed and the evidence was destroyed for whatever reason. Police corruption wasn't exactly unheard of back then (see: Hillsborough).
Now after all this Jimmy Saville stuff came out, Newsnight picked up the story from a legit witness who believed he had been assaulted by McAlpine, BECAUSE THE POLICE TOLD HIM THAT'S WHO IT WAS. Remember that Newsnight was recently blasted for NOT showing a story about paedo Saville based on evidence that was actually less solid than this. This is a witchhunt against the BBC. They had no way of winning this, damned if they did, and damned if they didn't.
I really don't see how this story is of any interest of Slashdot.
Newsnight never named McAlpine explicitly but rather stated that it was a high-up Tory MP from the Thatcher years. He was named on the "internet". The journalistic issue at hand has more to do with failing to verify the individual the source was identifying and not querying Alistair before running the program.
How nice to see old school trolling alive and well on /.
Having people resign for bad journalism isn't necessarily a bad thing... But why on earth start that at the BBC !!?? Why not start that trend at the Huffington Post? Or Fox News?
What did the BBC do wrong? They just reported that someone's name was being quoted by other people. This was entirely true. This looks ;ike a huge smokescreen to avoid investigating the actual allegations.
Korma: Good
This _current_ BBC pedophilia scandal is far greater than what the slashdot article is letting on here.
Pedophilia is rampant in the uk and elsewhere in the social golden-spoon strata McAlpine hails from
all the way to the top. It looks like they've decided on trying the easy way out here yet again by slandering the
investigators and firing them from the job. This is a common form of retaliation with these people.
Google for BBC pedophilia scandal, there is far more than just this going on.
Newsnight didn't name the person (wrongly) accused with the crime. They merely hinted you could find it out online if you wanted to. The fact that the internet doesn't appear subject to the same legal restraints as broadcast television is aiding witch hunts. In this case the mob got the wrong person.
has voluntarily resigned over a BBC program that featured 'poor journalism'.
Or, instead of The Guardian, you can read all about it on the BBC website.
Yes, you read that right - the BBC are reporting on this and not pulling too many punches. In fact, one of the last straws for Entwistle was a difficult grilling by a BBC interview on their flagship radio news program. That goes to show why, although some heads need to be cracked together over this screw-up, the BBC is something worth keeping.
Couple of other points:
Newsnight accused a prominent Conservative MP and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, Lord Alistair McAlpine,
Actually, they didn't name him, just described the accsued as a "prominent Thatcher-era conservative politician" but in the process they leant a lot of credibility to internet tittle-tattle which did name him.
This example of an important media chief 'resigning voluntarily due to bad journalism' is interesting, because many TV, Web and Print journalists make 'serious mistakes' in their coverage at some point or the other, and quite often no heads roll whatsoever as a result."
Its worth putting this in the context of the BBC's current predicament - they've been accused of dropping an investigation into sexual abuse by the formerly-much-loved celeb, now deceased and discredited Jimmy Saville. Of course while, with hindsight, that investigation was right on the money, had their evidence not panned out then there would have been an uproar, so close to the star's death. This looks awfully like an attempt to over-compensate, and not spike a story that should have been spiked. However, that this should happen when the BBC management knew that they were already under scrutiny does not look good.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
This example of an important media chief 'resigning voluntarily due to bad journalism' is interesting, because many TV, Web and Print journalists make 'serious mistakes' in their coverage at some point or the other, and quite often no heads roll whatsoever as a result."
This is not in any way uncommon in the UK. Whenever something goes wrong and catches the media's attention, which is inevitable in any big organisation given that the employees are only human, a frenzy will be worked up until one of the higher-up heads roll. Given intensive media coverage that lays blame wherever it can, many will chose to step down to avoid becoming the main ring event of the coming circus. Sensationalism triumphs regardless of reason. This is not unique by any means to the UK, but it is very distinctive here and you will usually hear of someone stepping down or getting sacked every few weeks. It even affects football coaches who fail to bring their teams to the finals, as though the coach could control the ability of all other teams and all luck involved in the sport.
Somehow it has come to be expected that the head of any organisation can micromanage every single employee in the organisation ever single second of the day.*
All that said, in this case it is reasonable to expect that the director general of the would be aware of this given the potential impact and that there were concerns several days before the program aired. If nothing else he failed to make himself accessible for important information.
* It goes even deeper than that. Negative sensationalism sells and most things are framed just that way even when they do not deserve it. Just watch the "investigative" journalism of prominent presenters such as Kay Burley or Steven Sackur (in particular "Hard Talk"). They clearly ask questions that are intended to come across as incisive but which are often nothing but vapid, thinly veiled strawman arguments designed to make them appear insightful and clever. They completely ignore any answers given to them and continue to pursue this tainted image that they are trying to create in order to sensationalise the issue.
It's no wonder that politicians and others stick to carefully engineered sound bites. Even the rare honest few who would like to explain intricate issues and other matters know that their words will be twisted to sell some scandalous headlines. /rant
He really resigned because people found out that he raped children.
My bad, that's completely wrong.
Gawd I hate putting those two words next to each other... if FOX News had a director resign after every piece of bad journalism, you could watch the line of new directors walking continuously through the building without ever stopping. Of course this would require journalistic integrity... so FOX will never have to worry abut this problem.
The more interesting fact is that the programme did NOT name the suspect. Its editor trailed an unwise hint on Twitter, and the blogsphere guessed many names, most of them (probably...) wrong. You had to search quite hard to deduce that the unfortunate Peer was in the frame. Now the media politics is overwhelming some scandals that do need reviewing.
At first I thought I clicked on the wrong bookmark, but the style and appearance sure looks like Slashdot, however to content is apparently completely random international news.
The geek tends to believe in the technocratic notion that his specialist skills place him above the law and other social norms.
It's useful corrective to be reminded now and again that it just ain't so,
The BBC Newsnight programme ran this, and the Director General had no idea they were running it. Ordinarily, he might get away with it if it were an isolated thing. However Newsnight was recently found to have cut an investigation into Jimmy Savile, a well-known TV/radio personality who turned out to be a serial child abuser. The investigation was cut for "editorial" reasons last year (soon after he died) and the suspicion was that it would allow them to run sacharine eulogies for him at Christmas. Finally, the accusations only got aired this year by another channel, and it looks like he abused hundreds of kids over decades, including in BBC dressing rooms.
So Newsnight was under a lot of scrutiny, and the Director General ought to have been watching it like a hawk.
However he admitted (to a BBC journalist in a very tough radio interview - let's see any other news organization allow its own journalists to bury their editor-in-chief) that he hadn't known what the programme was going to say about Lord McAlpine, and he didn't have an answer to the accusation that he was "asleep at the wheel".
So yeah, he mucked up by not being sharp enough. The BBC itself doesn't look good as it seems to have (thus far) allowed the people who made the "editorial decision" to cut the Savile investigation to continue in their roles. I suspect they will go eventually, once the independent inquiries have run their course.
However the one thing it has got right, and *no other* news organization would ever get right, is to have one part of it criticize another. There is no way Sky News would ever allow one of its journalists to have a go at the head of Sky TV in the manner of this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9768000/9768406.stm
I thought it was "Entertainment"
The Telegraph on Friday have made accusations that Lord McAlpine's brother (who ran the huge building company) lived close by the care home and had a huge collection of expensive cars (noted by witnesses at the time). There are some theories that this was a simple mix-up by a key journalist/the police and fingered (bad expression) the wrong brother which has now caused the BBC to go into melt-down.
What's odd is that The Telepgraph published another article which seems to downplay the idea that Jimmie was in any way involved.
I wonder whether this is an orchestrated plot to reduce the power of the very-Labour-focussed BBC by the government (Conservative/liberal coalition) which will also play well for Scotland (led by the SNP) that has it's own BBC problems etc
I come to Slashdot to see the news about Australia.
Occasionally there is an article about something happening in the USA, but I don't mind, because Australia has so thoroughly tried to make itself the USA of the Southern Hemisphere that it's interesting to compare the two.
But it's very fucking confusing to come to Slashdot only to find news from somewhere else; Somewhere that is NOT Australia or the USA.
It's unacceptable, and the last remaining non-Australian Slashdot "editor" should be fired and replaced with an Australian.
Can't tell if Gene Ray or David Mabus.
I take it "on the job" doesn't have the same meaning on that side of the pond, because 54 days worth is in no sense of the word "mere".
at least this dude showed some decency by resigning ; 99% of all journalists would simply have kept on being overpaid illiterate assholes after a shruggy 'oh well'.
It wasn't the "mob" that got the wrong person, they got the name of the accused correct, the problem was that during the original police investigation the person who had been abused was told the person he identified was Lord McAlpine when it was actually someone else. Newsnight clearly didn't do sufficient fact checking before running the story, if they had even shown a photo of Lord McAlpine to the person making the accusation he would have realised that Lord McAlpine was not the person who abused him.
The BBC has fallen very low indeed.
And yet all it takes for me to be content with paying my licence fee is about five minutes watching any other major news channel, from the UK or otherwise. The BBC isn't perfect, but it's so far above the average there's no meaningful comparison, and IMHO it is still somewhat ahead of even the decent alternatives overall.
One of the most interesting things about the BBC is the remarkably neutral way their news programmes report on stories involving themselves or their own people. George Entwistle was being interviewed on their regular breakfast programme -- not a show you would normally associate with hard-nosed journalism and heavy questioning of interviewees -- just a few hours before he threw in the towel, and even there the hosts weren't giving him a bye just because he was (at that moment) their own editor-in-chief. On many of the news networks, I imagine the kind of blunt challenges those presenters made would have been career-threatening moves.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The lesson to take home from all this is that the problem is not in the Catholic Church (and the celibacy). It's everywhere: sports, Boy Scouts, the BBC, orphanages, homes, schools, workplaces, political offices... There seem to be two kinds of men: sexual abusers and those who admire them and give them cover.
It's time to stop pretending these are isolated incidents. As the father of two children I'm saying assume the worst of every man.
If this spreads, it would be impossible to follow Fox News any longer. On account of all their new anchors trying to talk while holding guns in their mouths.
Have gnu, will travel.
They clearly ask questions that are intended to come across as incisive but which are often nothing but vapid, thinly veiled strawman arguments designed to make them appear insightful and clever.
This is a very unwelcome recent trend at the Beeb. I place the blame squarely on Jeremy Paxman and/or the editorial team behind Newsnight. At some point, a little while ago now though it's hard to pin down exactly when, he seemed to jump from asking difficult questions of his guests but respectfully to doing pretty much exactly what the above quote says. And since Paxman is one of the BBC's longest-established Serious Interviewers, and Newsnight is the nightly serious news show, if you can get away with that sort of behaviour there you can do it anywhere.
Also, it would help if the BBC stopped trying to promote its senior correspondents into celebrities whose personal opinions are somehow more important than the news they report, particularly when those senior people aren't always particularly credible within their fields anyway. Robert Peston and Nick Robinson between them could probably bring down a national economy or something.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Exemplified by BBC's own programme years ago, if you look up 'The Dirty Fork Sketch'. (Original).
So the DG walks with a £450000 payoff as that is what his contract allowed.
Most ordinary workers who resign get naff all.
....that the person who is supposed to have originally pointed the finger at McAlpine is a notorious liar; see here. Didn't the BBC do any checks or were they simple after any scandal?
My web domain.
Oh come on. You can remember faces from thirty years ago? I can't remember the faces of three people that assaulted me thirty years ago; you could show me a dozen photos and I'd just end up shrugging.
Western news outlets are all propaganda mouthpieces of the western government neo-imperialistic agenda.
Why report on the news, when the easy money is in meddling in other countries under false flag by making up the news.
Yes. You are an absolute arse dryriver. Making a claim that all journalists make serious errors in their lifetime is an OPINION coming from one that isn't in the industry!
His severance package only amounts to 450,000 GBP. In the US, I am sure it would have been much more.
I'll assume you are being paranoid and not outright racist.
I live in a large North American city with it's share of black and brown people, and these people are the most law abiding citizens as blacks and browns are hardly ever mentioned in crime news, it's always nasty white or oriental people in crime news reporting.
It's just coincidental that witnesses and victims of crime in my city all have bad eyes/color blind, because the description in the news are always lacking ethnicity details. That's just bad luck.
And you can hardly blame the editors in the news room for only showing white people under arrest, since black and brown faces don't show up on camera well, so they must edit out the black and brown faces to have good quality video to show to their audience.
You know these immigrants from third world shitholes really clean up their act once they manage to scam their way to our developed countries.
Who needs the kind of shit he's had to take since he stumbled into the job less than two months ago? You'd have to be a pretty hard-assed kind of guy to brazen out the flak that the (print) media have been dishing out against the BBC in general and him in particular. Not that they'd have any kind of agenda in the aftermath of the Leveson inquiry...
The BBC is still the best and least biased source of news in UK, and probably in the English-speaking world. Every other source has manifold compromises because of its ownership, sponsorship, or government influence. OK, a couple of programme editors screwed up; at least they had the freedom to do so.
When one considers the absolute value, I mean.
Resignation of the director general after less than two months on the job, due to poor journalism on one particular show, is neither effective nor appropriate.
On the other hand, if resignation is the most effective way the fellow could think of to make the point that the problems at BBC are hard to solve and/or the director general has the responsibility but insufficient authority to solve the problem, then he didn't deserve the job in the first place.
I think I understand why you post as AC now.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Resigning is the RightThingToDo(TM), it's the ultimate apology
His payoff is equal to one year's pay of £450,000 (approaching $700,000).
Which he gets to claim for 54 days of work that he's also already been paid for. By quitting now, he's made just a hair under £10,000/day ($16,000/day), including weekends.
If he'd stayed for five years plus a final year's payoff, he'd have been paid a fifth of that rate.
I wish I could fail that hard.
And when someone googles a job applicant and sees the story with name and pictures and decides NOT to hire, then what? Being misinformed is not a crime and can not be enforced - especially when the result is inaction. Spreading the misinformation is a crime - or at least something you can sue for. Lets not blame the people who heard the news instead of those that report it.
He was shown the photos at the time, and the police told him it was Lord McAlpine. Just because you wouldn't remember the faces of the people who assaulted you thirty years ago, it doesn't mean he doesn't. It seems he still remembers enough detail to be sure it wasn't Lord McAlpine after being shown a photo, which raises the question why Newsnight didn't bother to check before running the story.
Perhaps things would improve if the BBC actually had to EARN their money rather than sucking the population dry through the abuse of stoneage "laws". For the Americans here, in many European countries, people are forcedd to pay for a "license" for simply owning a TV. Here In Germany people have to pay even for owning a smartphone or computer simply because they *might* visit their website and view their crappy content.
grep 'wisest human' didn't return any matches: not Gene Ray.
altho, also not gloaty enough to be Mabus..
The existence of the BBC forces the independent television channels to keep advertising to acceptable limits, unlike US TV where the adverts sometimes overwhelm what is supposed to be the content.
Our system isn't perfect, but anyone with a functioning brain who compares UK television output to US television output will realise that 5 times the population is not able to support anything like five times as much good television.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Presumably works for the Daily Mail. Apparently the people who work for it actually think it is a newspaper. As do its readers....but most of them can't lift their hands to operate a keyboard, or they fall over.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It reminds me of visiting South Africa in 1980. People were asking me what it was like being bombed. They found it hard to grasp that Northern Ireland was two hundred and fifty miles away from where I lived, and that through the entire period of the Troubles hardly any part of the rest of the UK outside London was affected.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Porn has forever changed the common vernacular of the acronym "BBC."
Now it means, the Big, Black Cock.
I think I understand why you post as AC now.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Want to see a picture of my big black cock. (This is work-safe.)
Time for the crazed witch hunt to get some perspective. Sadly it's tragedies like what the BBC have done to this innocent man that force us to ask questions about how far this has gone. It's gone too far.
So that didn't work there.
Really?
England rules the waves, and if you say different, the beeb will crush you. Not through the actions of one person or any campaign, just by ridiculing you over and over again until you are gone.
The Brits never had the revolution, instead, they were given cricket and an attitude of NEVER ever attacking the establishment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5gm9hoTw6Y
This is an "anarchy" group of comedians battling it out with church leaders... this is Britains idea of revolution, a cozy chat over tea. Of course I don't expect John Cleese to loose his temper but still, in the world of the beeb, the status quo rules supreme. You can be an atheist as long as you still celebrate Christmas. You can see this with the BNP, a nasty bunch but when Brown got an egg thrown at him and punch the man, the beeb made sure to show the entire clip. When a bnp was spit in his face and he threw a punch, only the punch was shown. It is how the beeb reacts to any who dare to think different, outside the world of Oxford graduates and us know us. Newsnight is rather famous for hardhitting questions, except to Muslims. Watch the above clip, even back then, it was known that you could make fun of Christians but not of Muslims. 30 years ago now?
And the beeb is happy to go along with it. Count the number of black quests on its talk shows. You don't need more then one hand. It is not anti-black but it only shows black that are not to integrated and not to angry. Same with Muslims, nicely sanitized only please, no asking the really difficult questions. The beeb would be truly happy in a world where the conservatie and labour party changed seats every election without ever actually dealing the collapsing country because that is the role they are used to.
Take this resignation. The guy leaves after 5 months, gets half a million bucks. BAM! That sheds a different light on it alright. It is not that the establishment in England is corrupt, it is more a "this is how we always did things and if they were okay 500 years ago, they are okay today". See the expenses scandal. The elite take care of themselves and their own and the rest?
I am not surprised that the beeb looked the other way while children were raped. What is a few kids to the happiness of one of their own? Remember that NOBODY at the beeb reported this. Not a single one. Not the co-workers and not the janitors cleaning up. Semen stains in the dressing room of a child star after a kid party? This kind of stuff doesn't go unnoticed but it did go unreported.
And if this went unreported, how much more did? Scandals never exist alone. Who protected who for what reason? And if an internal scandal went unreported, what external scandals went unreported for the sake of peoples careers?
Some of the faces of the beeb been around a long time and they influence public opinion to this day. But what are their motives? Their secrets?
In my own country, Holland, after the expense scandal, the claims by Dutch politicians were investigated and found to be embarrassing to the extreme. Nothing wrong whatsoever. BORING! So it shows this all encompassing corruption is NOT the norm, not just the cost of doing business.
But cases like this cast doubt on everyone touched by it. If this was hidden, what else was hidden. And if something else was exposed, why was that exposed and not this?
The beeb has some hard question to answer and so far, it isn't.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
To clean the mind eye after that Big Black Cock, here are some boobies: http://www.bay-of-fundie.com/img/2008/boobies.jpg
Enjoy!
I couldn't resist!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Here's a link to the events leading up to the current situation, as published on the BBC News UK web page: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20286848
No it doesn't.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Interesting story to coverup the truth "showed the wrong pictures". I wonder how much money it took to find out about the wrong pictures. I am shure George did not expect to air that and keep his job. This story goes all the way to the royal family. We may be hearing more about this later. only if there are more honest journalist willing to lose their job or life.