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."
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.
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.
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
One of the most powerful people in world media has resigned 'voluntarily' for running a hard news programme. If you don't think that's news that matters then it's your shortcoming not the sites fault. Furthermore, one of the reasons this has become such a big issue is because even though Newsnight didn't name the individual and left the description vague enough to give cover, and parliament were asked not to use privilege to name him via the house of commons, the name was outed on Twitter by various people (including other journalists) thus a clear tech connection that the summary missed.
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.
Didn't you read the articles? Gynoids and replicants were involved...
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,
And surprisingly all of these facts are being 'missed' by the other news outlets in the UK. Madness.
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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
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.
Actually my first source for most of that information, in the BBC's credit, was BBC radio 4s coverage of the story. It is quite likely that some of the people who named him specifically on Twitter will be receiving a court summons for defamation of character soon which again will be an interesting case in the field of both news and technology.
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.
As the father of two children I'm saying assume the worst of every man.
OK, I'll assume the worst of you. Have you stopped fucking your children yet?
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."