The 200-page report by Nick Pollard, a veteran British broadcast executive, strongly criticized the editorial and management decisions that prompted the BBC to cancel a broadcast last year that would have exposed decades of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile, a BBC fixture who had been one of Britain’s best-known television personalities.
While the scandal led to the resignation and reassignment of several top executives — including George Entwistle, just two months into his tenure in the BBC’s top job as director general — Mr. Pollard absolved top management of applying “undue pressure” in the decision to stop the broadcast.
The report also did not challenge the assertions of Mark Thompson, then head of the BBC, that he had no role in killing the Savile investigation and was unaware of the sexual abuse accusations until he left the BBC this September. Mr. Thompson is now president and chief executive of The New York Times Company.
The report traced in detail what it described as “a chain of events that was to prove disastrous for the BBC.” Its central conclusion was that confusion and mismanagement, not a cover-up, lay at the heart of the decision to drop the Savile segment on “Newsnight,” an investigative program. Mr. Savile died at 84 in October 2011, weeks before the segment was scheduled to run.
“The efforts to get to the truth behind the Savile story proved beyond the combined efforts of the senior management, legal department, corporate communications team and anyone else for well over a month” after a rival channel, ITV, broadcast its own exposé in October 2012.
That segment presented the accounts of five women who said they had been sexually abused as teenagers by Mr. Savile, the report said. “Leadership and organization seemed to be in short supply.”
Mr. Pollard, a former head of the Sky News channel who began his broadcast career as a BBC reporter, dismissed a widely circulated theory that BBC News executives or their superiors pressured the “Newsnight” team to cancel the Savile segment to avoid embarrassing the BBC. Peter Rippon, the program’s editor, said that he canceled the report because he thought the team’s conclusions about Mr. Savile were inadequately substantiated.
“While there clearly were discussions about the Savile story between Mr. Rippon and his managers,” Mr. Pollard said, he does not believe that they went beyond journalistic considerations.
After publication of the report, Tim Davie, the BBC’s acting director general, said that Stephen Mitchell, the deputy director of news, would be taking early retirement and that Mr. Rippon would be moved to another job. Helen Boaden, director of the news division, who along with Mr. Rippon and Mr. Mitchell was suspended while the nine-week Pollard inquiry was in progress, will return to her job, overseeing new editorial leadership at “Newsnight.”
In a statement, the BBC Trust, which oversees the broadcaster, said the report made clear the need for major changes in the BBC’s operation. It said top executives must take initiative and responsibility, share information and embrace criticism, and persuade employees to rid the company of the “insularity and distrust” revealed in the report.
“The BBC portrayed by the Pollard review is not fundamentally flawed, but has been chaotic,” it said. “That now needs to change.”
The report was strongly critical of several news executives who were directly involved in the decision to cancel the Savile program, including Mr. Rippon and the top executives in the BBC’s news division to whom he reported, Ms. Boaden and Mr. Mitchell, saying they had reached a “flawed” conclusion in canceling the “Newsnight” segment that overrode the “cogent evidence” against Mr. Savile that the “Newsnight” team had gathered.
But it paid scant attention to the role of the former director general, Mr. Thompson, and did not fault him for missing opportunities to learn the details of the allegations against Mr. Savile.
After Mr. Thompson was told about the scuttled segment by a BBC reporter at a reception in late December 2011, he said, he asked his news executives about it. According to his testimony to the Pollard inquiry, he “received reassurances” that it had been killed for “editorial or journalistic reasons” and “crossed it off my list and went off to worry about something else.”
