The legacy of this “ghastly mess,” in the words of the BBC chairman, is a warning. “The crisis is already well passed,” Claire Enders, a media analyst in the UK, said. “But it showed that the very mightiest institution can be laid low by its own internal weaknesses. This is a salutary lesson to all organizations involved in this game that falling asleep on the job is not an option.”
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The BBC incident demonstrates how coverage of the British media by the American press is politically driven. When Rupert Murdoch's company tapped a dead girl's phones, there was wall-to-wall coverage and widespread denunciations of NewsCorp's culture.
When it's the BBC covering up a few hundred sexual assaults, we get a few bloodless articles like Sheffield's pretending that the scandal is too "complicated" to cover. Instead of naming names, we hear about how "several staff members" have stepped aside. CJR's coverage also consistently fails to mention that the scandal is not just the spiked news program; it's that Savile was molesting kids *at the BBC* and people there knew about it at the time. (Sheffield's assertion that this is only about one program and one man is therefore a bald-faced -- well, let's be charitable and call it an error).
There's a relatively simple scandal here, about exploitation and the corruption of power, but there is still a lot of digging left to be done, to figure out who knew what and who covered it up. By mischaracterizing and minimizing the issues (out of personal and political affection), however, the American press is hindering the search for truth.
#1 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Mon 19 Nov 2012 at 06:52 AM