The Power of the Paedos - another high profile case hits the 'never happened' wall?

[Jan Klimkowski]

The link here is to this morning's interview by BBC Radio 4 of the BBC Director General George Entwhistle.

Entwhistle has so far declined to be interviewed by non-BBC media organisations.

This won't save him though.

His defence is that he's a bumbling, no nothing, fool who has no idea what's going on inside the BBC despite being Editor In Chief.

The original Newsnight report was broadcast on Friday 2 November and had been promoted hours before its broadcast by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Iain Overton, the editor of the bureau, tweeted that, "all going well", Newsnight would make explosive revelations. "We've got a Newsnight out tonight about a very senior political figure who is a paedophile," he wrote.

This immediately prompted a Twitter row with Newsnight's former political editor Michael Crick who told Overton that the politician had not been contacted about the allegations.

Entwistle also said he was unaware of the Twitter row, or of the newspaper website reports earlier that day flagging up the extraordinary claims about to be made by the BBC.

"This tweet was not brought to my attention, so I found out about this film after it gone out," Entwistle said, to which Humhprys asked: "Nobody even mentioned it?" Entwistle replied. "No. In the light of what's happened, I wish this was referred to me."

Asked when precisely he found out about the film in which Steve Messham, a victim of child abuse in a Welsh care home made the claims, Entwistle said: "I found out about the film the following day." Asked why he had not seen it on Friday night, he replied: "I was out."

Entwistle compounded this apparent lack of awareness of the controversy swirling around the BBC for the past week by saying he only became aware that McAlpine had been wrongly implicated when Messham made his statement withdrawing the claim on Friday afternoon.

An increasingly incredulous Humphrys, who discussed the McAlpine affair on Friday's Today programme following reveletions in the Guardian that McAlpine was the victim of mistaken identity, then asked Entwistle whether or not he read the papers or listened to the corporation's output.

"Did you read the Guardian yesterday morning?" he asked, to which Entwistle replied: "No, John, I was giving a speech yesterday morning."

The admission that he was unaware of the Newsnight investigation until the day after broadcast will further fuel criticism that the BBC director general had shown a lack of interest in the corporation's controversial output. Last month, a parliamentary select committee lamented his "extraordinary lack of curiosity" about a Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile last December.

Entwistle on Friday ordered an immediate suspension of all Newsnight investigations to assess editorial robustness and supervision, a suspension of all co-productions with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism across the BBC, and that Ken MacQuarrie, director of BBC Scotland, will write an urgent report, covering what happened on the investigation into the North Wales children's home scandal. But the director general said on Saturday he would not be closing Newsnight down.

It also emerged on Friday that the BBC decided it was not appropriate to contact McAlpine for a right of reply on the Newsnight report because it had no intention of naming him. It opted instead to accuse a "leading politician of the Thatcher years" of being involved in child sexual abuse linked to care homes in north Wales.

Entwistle told BBC Breakfast that Steve Messham made "an inaccurate identification" but stressed he was not blaming him "at all".

He said: "It was our responsibility, Newsnight's responsibility, to make sure that any misidentification did not end up on television and I am afraid we did not manage to do that, therefore we have to absolutely take the blame."

A BBC Trust spokesman said on Saturday: "This is a deeply troubling episode. The Trust notes the BBC executive's apology and would like to offer its own apology also. The Trust has impressed upon the director general the need to get to the bottom of this as a matter of the utmost urgency and will expect appropriate action to be taken as quickly as possible."

The BBC issued an unreserved apology on Friday night after one of the victims spoken to admitted he had wrongly identified Lord McAlpine as the man who had abused him in the 1970s and 1980s.

Entwistle admitted the corporation was facing a "bad crisis" of trust in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, including a decision to drop a Newsnight investigation exposing the late DJ as a serial child abuser.

Although Newsnight did not name Lord McAlpine, the peer has indicated he now intends to sue the BBC after it led to him being identified on the internet.

Source.

This is the James Murdoch defence, and the criticism is exactly the same.

Either Entwhistle knew and is complicit in journalism which failed to do due diligence and should never have got past the BBC lawyer. Or, as he maintains, he didn't know but he clearly should have done.

Entwhistle is revealed as incompetent and unfit to be DG in either scenario.

This clown is paid as follows according to the BBC:

George's annual substantive salary as Director-General is £450,000 excluding taxable benefits.