BBC bosses step aside as sex abuse crisis deepens

Entwistle, who dramatically quit as director-general on Saturday, would receive a pay-off of US$715 000 after just 54 days in the job.
Prime Minister David Cameron reportedly said the payment was “hard to justify”, increasing the pressure on Chris Patten, the chairman of the BBC’s governing board the BBC Trust, who is himself fending off calls to quit.
Entwistle’s departure has left BBC in chaos as it fights the fall-out from allegations that its late star Jimmy Savile was a serial sex offender, and from a television report that wrongly implicated a politician in child abuse.
At the heart of the scandal is the role of staff and managers overseeing the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight.
Newsnight broadcast a report on November 2 implicating a senior Conservative party figure in abuse at a children’s home in Wales in the 1970s, which it was then forced to retract.
The programme was already facing accusations that it axed a report into allegations of sex abuse against Savile last year because it would be embarrassing to the corporation as it prepared to run a tribute to the late presenter.
Police have since said that Savile, who died in October 2011 aged 84, may have abused up to 300 children over four decades.
Newsnight editor Peter Rippon stood aside last month over the axed Savile report and yesterday BBC announced that Director of News Helen Boaden and her deputy Stephen Mitchell would also be temporarily standing down over the row. BBC insisted that they had not been sacked and were expected to return to their jobs after the inquiry by former Sky News boss Nick Pollard was published.
It also stressed that Boaden and Mitchell had not been involved in this month’s botched Newsnight programme, which wrongly implicated former Conservative party treasurer Alistair McAlpine in sex abuse at the Welsh children’s home. However, the corporation warned heads were likely to roll over the crisis.
BBC said yesterday there was a “lack of clarity around the editorial chain of command” and it had decided to “re-establish a single management to deal with all output, Savile related or otherwise”. — AFP.