Ace
Ace of Spades HQ
10/26/2012
…Savile died in 2011. Recently, reporters at the BBC’s Newsnight (which I gather is a news-magazine type show, like 60 Minutes) was preparing a report on all this — and the report was killed by higher-ups. The next week the BBC ran a series of tribute documentaries to Savile.
The BBC claims (or at least they initially claimed) they hadn’t “killed” the story, they had merely told the reporter to keep digging and finding more evidence and that sort of thing.
The reporter disagrees with that claim:
Mr Rippon stepped aside from his job on Monday after the BBC said his explanation of why Newsnight dropped its Savile investigation was “inaccurate or incomplete”.In the email, Ms MacKean wrote: “Having commissioned the story, Peter Rippon keeps saying he’s lukewarm about it and is trying to kill it by making impossible editorial demands.”
She reportedly claimed: “When we rebut his points, he resorts to saying, well, it was 40 years ago … the girls were teenagers, not too young … they weren’t the worst kind of sexual offences etc.”
Here’s the NYT connection. Mark Thompson was the Director-General of the BBC, from 2004 until currently. So he was the top man at the BBC when the decision to kill the Savile story was made.
He was just hired as CEO of the New York Times Company (the parent corporation which owns the Times and a smattering of other properties.
His story about what he knew and when he knew it has already changed…
Read the whole thing at Ace of Spades HQ
