BBC whistleblowers

From Nick Cohen at the Guardian:
　
"The BBC press office bridled when I described Jones and MacKean as "whistleblowers". As the Pollard review of the Savile scandal had concluded that BBC management had acted in "good faith", I must not call them that."

"If you are tempted to agree, consider the sequel. Panorama responded magnificently to the news that the BBC had killed the Savile scoop. It broadcast a special documentary, which earned the highest audience in the programme’s history. Jones and MacKean described how their journalism had been suppressed, and Panorama went on to document Savile’s crimes. How open the BBC is, I thought. What other institution would subject itself to the same level of self-criticism?"

"What a fool I was. Since then, BBC managers have shifted Tom Giles, the editor of Panorama, out of news. Peter Horrocks, an executive who insisted throughout the scandal that the BBC must behave ethically, announced last September that he was resigning to "find new challenges". Clive Edwards, who as commissioning editor for current affairs oversaw the Panorama documentary, was demoted. The television trade press reported recently that his future is "not yet clear" (which doesn’t sound as if he has much of a future at all)...."

"If the BBC had exposed Savile, viewers would have admired its honesty. If it had bent over backwards to ensure that Jones and MacKean did not suffer for speaking out, everyone would say that it was behaving as a free institution should, rather than looking like the official broadcaster of a paranoid dictatorship or the board of directors of HSBC."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/08/bbc-whistleblowers-jimmy-savile