Trust chairman calls for ‘radical’ overhaul of BBC

Britain’s BBC must undergo a radical overhaul in the wake of “shoddy” journalism which led to the resignation of its chief or its future will be in doubt, the head of the state-funded broadcaster’s governing body said yesterday.

BBC director general George Entwistle resigned late on Saturday just two months into the job, after the corporation’s flagship news programme aired mistaken allegations of child sex abuse against a former leading politician.

Already under pressure after revelations that a long- time star presenter had been a paedophile, Entwistle quit saying the unacceptable standards of the Newsnight report had damaged the public’s confidence in the 90-year-old BBC: “As the director general of the BBC, I am ultimately responsible for all content as the editor-in-chief, and I have therefore decided that the honourable thing for me to do is to step down.”

Former senior Tory and current chairman of the BBC Trust Chris Patten said a complex hierarchical management structure at the BBC was partly to blame.

He said opponents of the BBC, especially Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, would take advantage of the turmoil to up the pressure on its long-term rival.

One of the BBC’s most prominent journalists Jeremy Paxman, a Newsnight presenter, said in recent years, management had become bloated while cash was cut from programme budgets: “He [Entwistle] has been brought low by cowards and incompetents,” Paxman said in a statement.

Patten, in charge of finding a successor to sort out the turmoil, said changes needed to be made after describing the Newsnight journalism as “shoddy”.

“One of the jokes I made, and actually it wasn’t all that funny, when I came to the BBC... was that there were more senior leaders in the BBC than there were in the Chinese communist party,” Patten said.

“If you’re saying, does the BBC need a thorough structural radical overhaul, then absolutely it does and that is what we will have to do,” Patten told BBC TV.

Entwistle only succeeded Mark Thompson, set to take over as chief executive of the New York Times Co, in September and almost immediately faced one of the biggest crises in the history of the BBC, funded by a licence fee paid by viewers.

This was the revelation by rival broadcaster ITV that the late Jimmy Savile, one of the most recognisable personalities on British television in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, had sexually abused young girls, some on BBC premises.

Suggestions then surfaced of a paedophile ring inside the BBC at the time, and a cover-up.

Entwistle was condemned for the BBC’s slow response to the Savile furore and lambasted after it emerged Newsnight had axed a planned exposé into Savile shortly after his death and the broadcaster had gone ahead with tributes instead.

His appearance before a parliamentary committee provoked mockery, with one lawmaker saying he had shown a “lamentable lack of knowledge” of what was going on at his own organisation.

The last straw came when Entwistle was forced to admit on BBC radio that he had not been told about the Newsnight report before it aired nor known — or asked — who the alleged abuser was until the name appeared in social media.