United Kingdom: Can the BBC still be trusted?

The BBC is imploding before our eyes, said Paul Cockerton in The Mirror. The Jimmy Savile horror is still unfolding, as more and more of the late BBC TV host’s sex-abuse victims come forward, some of them molested on BBC premises. And now that scandal has given rise to a new one: The editor of the flagship news program, Newsnight, stepped down last month amid controversy after he killed a story that was critical of Savile. Then the leaderless Newsnight came out with a libelous story. It falsely implicated Lord McAlpine, a former Conservative Party treasurer, in sexual abuse at a children’s home. A damning internal report said the reporters on the McAlpine story had failed to do “basic journalistic checks,” such as showing a photo of the man to his alleged victim. Now George Entwistle, the BBC’s director general, has resigned and two other top officials have been suspended.

That’s just a start, said Jackie Ashley in The Guardian. There’s no doubt the BBC has been badly managed. A proliferation of superfluous middle managers has created a “culture of obsessive compliance” involving “fiddly reviewing of films by too many people and a nervousness about risks.” That led, in turn, to this latest screw-up, when “frustrated reporters were so worried about being stopped that they went ahead too fast.” Change at the top won’t be enough to put a dysfunctional institution back on track. The next head of “the Beeb” will have to restructure the entire news division and purge several levels of management to streamline the editing process.

While we’re at it, let’s reform away the BBC’s institutional left-wing bias, said Simon Heffer in the Daily Mail. The “appalling false pedophile smear” against Lord McAlpine “is but the latest—and most grotesque—manifestation of an anti-Tory culture” throughout the BBC. Lord McAlpine was a close associate of Margaret Thatcher, and the BBC pounces with glee on “anything that besmirches the memory, reputation, or philosophy of Thatcherism.” As multiple former news directors have admitted, BBC journalists are almost uniformly far-left; one of them even admitted to weeping when she heard about the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. More recently, the BBC catechism has included belief in global warming, reverence for the EU, deference to Islam, and anti-Americanism.

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For the most part, though, the BBC does get its facts right, said The Daily Telegraph in an editorial. Its reporting on its own “appalling misjudgment” at Newsnight has been top-notch. Indeed, BBC Director General Entwistle’s resignation was a direct result of a “merciless interview” with him on the BBC’s Today program. BBC News clearly needs a tune-up, but it is not ready for the junkyard. It still “sets an international benchmark” for excellence.