media blog medium badge

Don't blame Newsnight: we had 40 years to look into Jimmy Savile

Rather than beating up the BBC now, we need to ask why so little investigation was ever done in preceding decades
Jimmy Savile
Why did no one look into rumours about Jimmy Savile when the allegations were current? Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/PA

Condemning Newsnight (and thus the BBC) for not screening the 12 minutes of Jimmy Savile ignominy when they had the chance is just a little too easy – and too easy to hint darkly of intervention from the upper reaches of management. Peter Rippon, Newsnight's editor, says his programme isn't normally interested in celebrity exposés: "Savile was unable to defend himself. What was the public interest served by reporting it, given he was dead? There was the nature of the allegations and the level of proof required, plus the fact that the incidents were 40 years ago."

Newsnight's key witness, Rippon asserts, "said she was perfectly certain the BBC had no idea whatsoever of the goings-on". And the Crown Prosecution Service told him that their reviewing lawyer "had advised the police that no further action should be taken due to lack of evidence".

Editors are employed to run or not run stories as a matter of judgment. That, right or wrong, is their job: and the temptation to turn over the stones of the lately dead and air stories the lawyers would have squashed while their subject was still alive isn't always a lofty moral imperative. (Witness some of the rubbish dumped on the memory of Eric Hobsbawm last week.)

No: the real question isn't whether Newsnight should have done something before ITV did. The question is why no TV investigator or newspaper bloodhound ran something 30 or 40 years ago, when the abuse was supposedly current and there were young lives to be rescued.

Was the gossip about Savile really as pervasive as ITV witnesses claimed? Why didn't it reach the crowds in Leeds at his funeral – or the palace that made him a knight? Did the police look at the rumours hard enough? How did our omnipresent libel laws come to bear? Did tabloids (as one old Star editor says) quail at disturbing the gods of celebrity?

This isn't a story to bury with Savile. But nor is it a horror to beat up the BBC over (again). It's a story that should have been followed, should have been told. And, somehow, a story that only emerged far too late.

Today's best video

Today in pictures