Broadcaster Huw Edwards arrives at Westminster Magistrates' Court on July 31 in London, England. Photo / Getty Images
Warning: mention of sexual assault and child pornography
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Rosa Silverman is a features writer for The Daily Telegraph.
OPINION
Huw Edwards is the latest in a long line of high-profile controversies at the Beeb, but will they ever learn from their mistakes?
Lessons must be learned. This familiar refrain greets scandal after scandal at the BBC. They had to be learned after the prolific sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile was, finally, exposed.
Again, they needed learning after the corporation was found to have covered up “deceitful behaviour” by journalist Martin Bashir to secure his Panorama interview with Princess Diana. They were the order of the day after Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross made their infamous prank call to actor Andrew Sachs.
Yet to the average licence-fee payer – dismayed, but perhaps no longer shocked, at the news of yet another scandal – these words risk ringing a little hollow.
This time, it’s Huw Edwards in the frame, and once again, the BBC itself. The corporation knew in November that their star news presenter had been arrested on suspicion of serious offences. It continued to employ him for the following five months, until his resignation in April. Last year, he was the BBC’s highest-paid journalist, receiving between £475,000 ($1,015,925) and £479,999, after a £40,000 salary increase.
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This week, he pleaded guilty at Westminster Magistrates’ Court to three counts of making indecent images of children, bringing to a shameful end an illustrious career as the face of some of Britain’s biggest news events.
If it feels like we’ve been here before, that’s probably because we have. The roll call of names is now depressingly familiar: to mention a few, former BBC entertainer Rolf Harris was convicted of a string of historic indecent assaults on girls in 2014; Chris Langham, star of BBC comedy The Thick of It, was found guilty of possessing child pornography in 2007; Stuart Hall, star of BBC show It’s a Knockout, was jailed in 2013 after admitting historical indecent assaults of 13 girls, one as young as 9. Savile’s offending, revealed in 2012, was of a different order of magnitude, as was the failure of the BBC (and other organisations) to put an end to his decades-long spree of sex crimes, despite opportunities to do so.
Edwards’ case is different; but the fact the BBC finds itself here again raises the inevitable question of why it seems to be so plagued by scandals.
One answer, say insiders, lies in the way stars are treated at the corporation.
“People like Edwards at the BBC become demigods,” says Robin Aitken, former BBC journalist and author of the book Can We Trust The BBC? “They think they’re above the rules.”
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“No manager, not even the director-general, is considered bigger than the on-screen talent,” he says.
“This leads to excessive reverence towards the big names,” he suggests.
“Very often, BBC managers are reluctant to take on criticism of their big stars. I think there is a problem there, managing these big stars and their behaviour. If their behaviour is bad in any way, is the BBC sufficiently tough and does it take sufficient action? I suspect not.”
Meirion Jones, a former BBC journalist whose Newsnight investigation into Savile was pulled, agrees the BBC treats its celebrities and star presenters “in a way that makes them think they’re almost gods”.
He says: “We saw that with Savile, we saw it with Russell Brand, we’ve seen it again with Edwards. There’s a feeling they are not constrained by the same rules that affect ordinary people working at the BBC.”
But this culture of invulnerability doesn’t only enable bad behaviour from on-screen talent, he indicates. It also seems to permeate those higher up in the corporation. In the recent past, Jones has been approached by BBC staffers telling him that when complaints are made to senior managers, it’s the complainants who are dealt with.
“They end up leaving,” he says. “That then means the managers tend to line up with the big names in thinking they’re all-powerful, and ordinary people who work at the BBC are not.”
A common complaint is quite how many of these senior managers are employed by the broadcaster, according to one former senior BBC news correspondent. “The BBC as an organisation is very top-heavy,” he says, “The thing you’ll always hear from people at the coalface is ‘why are there so many managers and what the hell do they do?’”
Another BBC insider puts it equally bluntly: “Management is incapable of managing.”
This view is arguably borne out by the apparently botched handling of crisis after crisis, and what some see as a culture of cover-ups. This, indeed, was the flavour of Lord Dyson’s damning report into the Bashir affair. The review said that several senior figures knew about the duplicity the journalist deployed to land his interview with Diana, and still did nothing about it.
The circumstances surrounding Edwards’ downfall aren’t entirely clear-cut. While the BBC now admits it had been “made aware in confidence” in November of Edwards’ arrest, it points out that no charges had been brought against him at this time, and stresses it had “been made aware of significant risk to his health”. In an interview on Friday Tim Davie, director-general of the BBC, defended the decision not to sack Edwards back then, despite knowing the presenter’s arrest involved the most serious category of indecent images of children. He said the corporation had taken “difficult decisions in a fair and judicious manner”.
But there have also been accusations by BBC employees that Edwards sent them inappropriate messages. Two complainants have said that they couldn’t report this behaviour to BBC managers. While the BBC says it always treats “the concerns of staff with care” and “would always urge any staff members to speak to us if they have any concerns”, these revelations will prove uncomfortable for them.
“There isn’t an open whistleblower culture,” says Jones. Instead of swiftly addressing concerns and getting to the bottom of them – or what Tim Davie might call “getting a grip” – there’s a sense a proactive approach is neglected in favour of a process that is at best slow and lumbering, and at worst wilfully blind to possible wrongdoing.
Naturally, other broadcasters are not immune from scandal. In recent years, ITV had its Phillip Schofield moment to contend with; Fox News had its Roger Ailes sexual harassment scandal (which also exposed a culture of cover-ups at the station and was turned into the film Bombshell, starring Nicole Kidman). So-called black swan events can happen anywhere. What’s notable is the frequency with which they seem to happen at the BBC.
“What we’ve seen is how these black swans are now white swans,” says PR guru Mark Borkowski. “It’s a constant flurry. We look at yet another scandal and shake our heads.”
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The risk of so many scandals is, of course, a loss of trust. For the publicly-funded BBC, this is particularly serious.
“When you’ve got such a massive organisation, there’s enormous bureaucracy and there are always going to be people doing things management don’t know anything about until it becomes too late,” says the former BBC news correspondent. “The question is what do they do when they do have a whiff of scandal.”
Many feel that what they do is not what needs to be done. “The BBC doesn’t tend to handle these things very well. It’s not nimble, it’s not like any sort of private organisation where there’s someone strong in charge who can react,” says the former correspondent.
So do they ever learn their lessons? Will they now?
“The sort of lessons they do learn is to be more receptive to staff mental health and bullying in the workplace,” says the former BBC correspondent. “But they haven’t learned how to deal with someone committing sex offences in their private life. It is very tricky. I’m sure there’ll be an inquiry and they’ll say lessons have been learned. Who knows whether they will be?”
The Telegraph has approached the BBC for comment.
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