LONDON — A senior press officer for the British Broadcasting Corporation darkly volunteers to “drip poison” to discredit a BBC reporter he suspects of having leaked embarrassing information. The woman in charge of the corporation’s news divisions accuses Newsnight, a public-affairs program she oversees, of being out of touch and “sneery” toward rival BBC shows.
And, as investigators seek to uncover why the corporation canceled a Newsnight broadcast alleging that a once-beloved BBC personality who had recently died had in fact been a serial pedophile who preyed on vulnerable girls, everyone involved is scrambling to deflect blame onto someone else.
These and other unflattering details about the inner workings of Britain’s public broadcaster emerged Friday when the BBC released some 3,000 pages of internal documents — e-mails, memos and transcripts of interviews — from an external investigation into why the program, about the BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, had been canceled.
In all, the documents painted a picture of a highly dysfunctional, top-heavy organization divided into discrete, rival factions, and weighed down by mistrust, poor communication, buck-passing and internecine squabbling.
There were no startling revelations; all those came out in the so-called Pollard report into the Savile affair, which was published in December and which concluded that there were deep structural problems in the BBC. But the supporting documents released Friday shed light on just what Nick Pollard, who prepared the report, meant by his scathing critique, said John Whittingdale, chairman of the House of Commons culture and media committee.
“It demonstrates the extent of unhappiness within the BBC structure, the frustration at the bureaucratic nature of the management, and the generally poor state of morale,” Mr. Whittingdale said in a television interview.
Referring to the fact that material in some of the newly released documents was blacked out, apparently because of concerns that it might give rise to lawsuits, Mr. Whittingdale added: “The fact that so much of the evidence can’t be published, because we are told the lawyers have advised it could be defamatory, in a sense tells its own story.”
Large portions of the testimony of Jeremy Paxman, a blunt-talking Newsnight host who is known for his testy and combative interview style, for instance, are blacked out in places where it appears he is about to make personal remarks about other people.
And in an annoyingly tantalizing instance, Peter Horrocks, director of global news, declares: “It is no secret that ...” What follows has been redacted, however, so that it is in fact a secret.
Lord McAlpine, a former Tory cabinet minister who, in another debacle at Newsnight, was unjustly accused of being a pedophile in a report that was broadcast, said that the BBC should not have left out any material. “The BBC is not the Secret Service, for Christ’s sake,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
But the BBC defended the redactions. Tim Davie, the acting director general, said that “97 percent plus of all the thousands of pages are out there.”
In an interview with an off-camera interlocutor that was broadcast on the BBC Web site, Mr. Davie continued: “We are not redacting or taking out material that is embarrassing or uncomfortable to the BBC. We have simply taken out stuff that external lawyers saw as a clear risk.”
He did not make himself available for interviews with other news organizations on Friday — indeed, no one from the BBC did. That strategy was roundly ridiculed by the broadcaster’s rivals.
On Twitter, Ben de Pear, editor of Channel 4 News, said that over his career he had successfully coaxed interviews out of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. “We are still trying for Tim Davie,” he said.
Much of the material focused on who said what to whom, and when, during Newsnight’s investigations into the allegations against Mr. Savile — and during the subsequent decision to cancel the broadcast. But there were also general interviews with many key figures in the corporation about what was wrong and how to fix it.
The testimony of Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, was particularly sharp, as he described the chaotic flow of information, the preponderance of high-ranking officials (the BBC had “more senior leaders than China,” he said) and the general mistrust within the corporation. “Is a lesson I should take from this that I can’t believe it when I’m told things by the next director general, that I have to query everything he says or the director of news says to me or whatever?” he asked rhetorically.
No, he said in response. “With the next director general I won’t — or his senior colleagues — I won’t begin every conversation on the assumption that he or she or they may not be telling me the whole truth,” he said. “I will want to be more convinced that there is a structure in place which ensures that the truth is being told.”
