tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/tony-hall-25297/articlesTony Hall – The Conversation2019-10-04T09:27:13Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1246462019-10-04T09:27:13Z2019-10-04T09:27:13ZBBC: Munchetty affair shows it is struggling with changing times and new challenges<p>Here’s an everyday story about BBC internal politics. BBC presenter Naga Munchetty is pressed by her Breakfast colleague Dan Walker for her views on an <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/49004860">offensively racist statement</a> by Donald Trump. She gives a relatively calm, guarded answer. A single viewer writes in and the complaint is, partially, upheld. The <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bbc-bans-staff-from-protest-against-racism-censure-cmb6mcmnx">outrage, letters and petitions</a> generated by this judgement force the BBC’s director-general Lord Tony Hall to intervene. He wisely <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/sep/30/naga-munchetty-bbc-reverses-decision-to-censure-presenter">reverses the decision</a>. </p>
<p>This sequence of events should be no surprise. Anyone trying to read the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines">BBC’s editorial guidelines</a> would be struck by how confused they have become. The corporation once dominated a tiny number of TV channels in an age when such organisations were controlled by a disciplined hierarchy and online communication didn’t exist. The style of its news was impersonal and much of its audience thought that increased its authority.</p>
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<p>The BBC now <a href="https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/annualreport/2018-19.pdf">employs 20,000 people</a>, costs £4bn a year and operates in a less formal world in which most people on earth can command a torrent of information to flow through a small device in their pocket.</p>
<p>The editorial guidelines make a brave attempt to sound clear and consistent with the founding traditions of a public service broadcaster. But the spread of digital communications has changed the impact of information, weakened the authority of expertise, encouraged sinking popular papers to abandon accuracy completely and provided dozens of points of view which any consumer of news and opinion can compare and contrast at will. It’s hardly surprising that public service broadcasters are finding it ever harder to set down stable and consistent rules which preserve impartiality.</p>
<p>The guidelines try to take account of the fact that a broadcaster must be able to express some personality without expressing opinions of the wrong sort. The part of the complaint originally upheld against Munchetty did not object to her giving an opinion about racism but criticised her for speculating about Trump’s motives – a delicate distinction to say the least. </p>
<p>BBC rules bend over backwards to give presenters and journalists wriggle room for judgements, but are complex and vague about exactly what is off limits. They say more than once that opinions ought to be “reasoned” and supported by facts. If someone is making a film for the documentary series Panorama over several weeks, that might reasonable. For a presenter needing to keep up the pace of an on-air conversation and compelled to reply in a few words, that is unrealistic.</p>
<h2>Lost in the noise</h2>
<p>A much larger and more dangerous issue lurks underneath rows such as the one over Munchetty’s brief words. It is painful to record this, but the world’s politicians are <a href="https://voxeu.org/article/effect-fake-news-populist-voting">learning a lot from Donald Trump</a>. Trump realised some time ago that in an age saturated by information, only certain assertions and images stand out well enough to be remembered.</p>
<p>He campaigned in the 2016 presidential election by saying several tendentious or untrue things on Twitter every day. Facebook shares and likes then gave him a real-time read-out about which of those eruptions was striking enough to stick. Then he doubled down on it the next day. If he was caught or corrected, he switched topics and the incident was swiftly forgotten in the ceaseless flood of words and images. Accuracy or inaccuracy was not the point – blurring certainty was the aim.</p>
<p>For many politicians, truth is less important than that old marketing idea of “cut-through” – the phrase or allegation which sticks when others fade. A few years ago, an ambitious interviewer asked Salman Rushdie: “What is the biggest problem of all?” <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/salman-rushdie-when-people-stop-believing-in-truth-demagogues-come-forward">He replied</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our collective inability to agree on the nature of reality. There are such conflicting descriptions of how things are that it becomes difficult to make agreements that allow people to move forward.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The problem with truth</h2>
<p>The shrinking space for agreement about how to establish the truth is a danger to every society which depends on the quality of public reason. But that assault on reason and facts is a special danger to organisations such as the BBC. And Brexit is currently the biggest risk of all to it.</p>
<p>Politicians have plenty to answer for but they did not create this problem. They are riding a tide of disillusion, resentment and national populism which has been building for years. Social media have helped to accelerate and amplify the idea that all opinions have equal value, that outrage gets you the most attention, that elites are self-preserving and corrupt and that global organisations are inherently bad.</p>
<p>Public service broadcasters depend on assumptions about how societies rest on shared values and on what those values are. They can survive certain changes – and the BBC, since its foundation just under a century ago has seen and weathered huge changes in attitudes to religion, social deference and diversity. But the planting of doubt about facts and how we go about relying on them generates unprecendented strain. Mark Damazer, a former controller of BBC Radio 4 made this comment in March.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every senior editorial manager I spoke to believes that it has become more difficult to persuade both the public and politicians that the BBC is doing its impartial duty on Brexit.</p>
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<p>In the face of these dangers, Lord Hall has taken the only line he can. The BBC, he says, is as close to a journalistic gold standard as we have – so value and preserve it. The BBC is <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49615771">backing a scheme</a>, shared with the hi-tech giants, to detect and stop misinformation, particularly at election times. There is talk of a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2019/tony-hall-lords">BBC-backed foundation</a> to promote journalism of quality.</p>
<p>Hi-tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter have a <a href="http://georgebrock.net/social-media-and-democracy/">role to play as well</a>. They are not, strictly speaking, media organisations – but they are part of the infrastructure of free speech. Neither they nor anyone else foresaw that an enormous increase in peoples’ power to communicate could be used to damage truth and reason. </p>
<p>These new players should control the amplification of material that can do harm (even if they do not suppress the original expression), they should base their own guidelines more closely on international human rights laws and they will have to devote yet more resources to “curation”, otherwise known as editing. They have moved in these directions, but they need to go further, faster. The hi-tech platforms are wrestling with problems which most editors have faced for centuries and which the director-general of the BBC faces every day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124646/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>George Brock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The UK’s public broadcaster is struggling to maintain its values in a news environment being remade by digital technology.George Brock, Visiting Professor of Practice (Journalism), City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/664212016-10-03T15:01:54Z2016-10-03T15:01:54ZLouis Theroux’s new Jimmy Savile documentary is a horrible misstep<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140101/original/image-20161003-20243-1fhef2k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Theroux the looking glass. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.bbcpictures.co.uk/image/11888212?collection=11888212+11888225+11888238+11888199&back=L3NlYXJjaC9zaW1wbGU%2Fc2VhcmNoJTVCZ2xvYmFsJTVEPXRoZXJvdXgmYW1wO3NlYXJjaCU1QnN1Ym1pdCU1RD1TZWFyY2g%3D">BBC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://vimeo.com/76002148">original</a> BBC documentary by Louis Theroux in 2000 about Jimmy Savile, the former British TV star thought to have <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/01/jimmy-savile-panorama-study-_n_5429071.html">sexually abused at least 500 women and children</a>, was uncomfortable viewing even before his crimes were common knowledge. Watching with the benefit of hindsight, one moment that really sticks out in When Louis Met Jimmy is when Theroux finds a notepad with his ex-directory phone number on it. “There’s nothing I cannot get,” Savile tells him.</p>
<p>Theroux revisits the moment in his new documentary, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07yc9zh/louis-theroux-savile">Louis Theroux: Savile</a>. It is a statement of Savile’s power that helps us understand why his victims – a number of whom Theroux interviews in the film – found it so difficult to speak out while Savile was alive. Some are clearly still haunted by their failure to do so.</p>
<p>Theroux mostly acts as witness to their testimonies, aware of his own complicity in the myth-making that ensured their silence for so long. Yet as much as these victims deserve to be heard, the way their testimonies are framed is troubling. Louis Theroux: Savile is meant to be about the relationship between these two men. By persistently asking Savile’s victims how he got away with it, Theroux ends up effectively implicating them. </p>
<p>To be fair, there is never any question that he accepts their accounts of feeling some responsibility. But all the same, allowing them their moments of self-blame without making any comment leaves the viewer with the sense that their silence and his ignorance are equivalent. It’s a lost opportunity to reflect on the structures which supported Savile and effectively silenced these women. </p>
<h2>Shattered histories</h2>
<p>Theroux also confronts three women who in different ways question the accounts of Savile that have emerged. First up is Janet Cope, Savile’s PA of nearly 30 years, who echoes much of what she has said in the press before. Savile emerges from her description as controlling, manipulative and cold. But ultimately, she defends him. “He didn’t do it,” she says categorically, noting that the allegations relate to a “different era” when she was “grateful if somebody gave me a pat on the bum”. </p>
<p>Another interviewee is Gill Stribling-Wright, a researcher and producer on Savile’s BBC shows who knew him for decades. Stribling-Wright tells Theroux she hasn’t read Dame Janet Smith’s <a href="http://www.damejanetsmithreview.com">report</a> into Savile at the BBC. What, she asks, would she do with it if she did? </p>
<p>The sense of the psychic trauma inflicted upon those close to Savile is even sharper in the account of Sylvia Nicol. Nicol worked with him at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, south England, where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/26/jimmy-savile-abuse-stoke-mandeville-hospital-inquiry">his abuses</a> have become notorious. She still has photos of Savile half-hidden in her home, and a large Lego bust of him intact in her garage. “I’m a victim” she tells Theroux, “a victim of losing those memories”.</p>
<p>These interviews raise difficult and uncomfortable questions about the private legacy of a disgraced public figure. With Savile now so thoroughly expunged from the archive that the BBC <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29308337">apologised</a> after a clip of him was mistakenly shown on a Top of the Pops rerun, how do those who cared for him, who worked with him, whose lives were intertwined with his, make sense of their own histories now? </p>
<h2>Questionable decisions</h2>
<p>At the same time, some serious gaps undermine Theroux’s efforts to understand how he (and others) were duped. Most seriously, Savile appears as a complete one off. There is no mention of the broader <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11393099/Operation-Yewtree-The-successes-and-failures.html">Operation Yewtree</a> enquiry into celebrity sexual abuse, nor the convictions of the likes of Rolf Harris, Max Clifford and Stuart Hall and the other arrests that followed the Savile revelations. </p>
<p>The new documentary acknowledges that the Savile investigations resulted in major enquiries in the NHS, BBC and the police, but Theroux interviews no representatives. He focuses almost entirely on individual and not institutional culpability.</p>
<p>That the individuals in focus are all women is meanwhile deeply troubling. The structure pits woman against woman, moving between the victim testimonies and the interviews with Cope, Stribling-Wright and Nicol. </p>
<p>What about all the men who benefited from their connection with Savile? Who abused alongside him. Who eulogised him on his death. Who defended him by their own inaction within the NHS, the BBC, and the police. </p>
<p>That Theroux does not find a single man willing to be interviewed gives a very distorted picture. If none of Savile’s male friends, family or colleagues were willing, that in itself would require comment. Theroux’s own footage from his 2000 documentary shows at least two of Savile’s male friends. Despite the liberal revisiting of that original, neither appear here.</p>
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<p>The one other man who does appear is Tony Hall, director general of the BBC, speaking at the release of Smith’s report in February. Hall is removed, watched by Theroux on television in a press conference at the time. Unlike some of Theroux’s female witnesses, Hall has no personal links with Savile and is apologetic and willing to acknowledge responsibility. </p>
<p>Theroux’s documentary barely scratches the surface of the questions about BBC failures raised by Smith, as Mark Lawson, The Guardian’s arts critic, has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/sep/29/when-louis-theroux-met-jimmy-savile-again-gullible-bbc">already pointed out</a>. But neither Lawson nor Theroux acknowledge Smith’s fundamental point about the “macho culture” at the BBC that enabled Savile’s abusive career. </p>
<p>There is nothing macho about Theroux’s self-examinations, but in choosing to only place women in the dock alongside him over a 75-minute documentary, he has inadvertently contributed to a culture in which women are held responsible for men’s violence against them. It is a horrible misstep. It suggests there is still a lot of work to be done to unravel the <a href="https://theconversation.com/sexist-coverage-of-jimmy-savile-story-is-hiding-in-plain-sight-just-like-he-did-55457">unthinking sexism</a> which helped him to abuse with impunity.</p>
<p>The only interviewee to directly challenge the blame implicit in Theroux’s questioning is Angela Levin, a former Daily Mail writer, introduced as the source of the rumours he originally heard about Savile. “Don’t blame this on me,” she asserts. </p>
<p>Certainly there are as many important questions to be asked about individual responsibility as that of the institutions in this whole saga. But by asking these questions only of women this documentary contributes to the problem it attempts to unravel. And it lets abusive men, and the institutions which enable them, off the hook.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66421/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karen Boyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Filmmaker’s mea culpa is admirable but badly flawed.Karen Boyle, Chair in Feminist Media Studies, University of StirlingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/594972016-05-17T12:59:44Z2016-05-17T12:59:44ZThe BBC’s biggest problem? The public has no control over it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/122848/original/image-20160517-9484-z532rs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Your turn.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/zapthedingbat/3231146485/in/photolist-5Vwtha-h3RAcd-hC9CaG-6bPVME-hC9q5C-aofgTA-du2hFR-BtcWbK-C2jCo3-5X789N-mJGX8i-fFT6iA-cpPNn-79y3Qt-79x7zc-79x5Vz-9AaUXB-duJmox-hC8jct-4FJw3Z-6Ko5V-e5imc5-cB6HZm-9XfoFJ-5X733Y-hCaX12-5X6NEm-dDYoUa-88LRqb-daZzjS-kg4t9L-e5iwgh-e9a6Fa-duqPJu-e5iddj-hC9BN6-e6iBeT-e5irSo-h3Rpom-e5dZXV-mo6pY2-e5iqwL-95Hukv-cpMT1-95rJdC-cpPmG-e5hMCW-aBDVhY-cpRmf-cpQ4T">Sam Greenhalgh</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>To the relief of many in the BBC, the proposals in the government’s <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/a-bbc-for-the-future-a-broadcaster-of-distinction">white paper</a> appear relatively modest compared to what <a href="https://theconversation.com/bbc-white-paper-the-worst-has-not-come-to-pass-but-the-leash-is-tightening-59282">many expected</a>. If voices on the right had their way, the government would have scrapped the licence fee and effectively ended the BBC’s special status as a public broadcasting service with state funding. Instead it might have <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07b9j1v/this-week-12052016">ended up as</a> a subscription-based competitor to Netflix. </p>
<p>From the left, too, the BBC has been under attack – this time for its <a href="https://www.rt.com/uk/315723-corbyn-petition-bbc-bias/">perceived establishment prejudice</a> against the Labour leadership under Jeremy Corbyn and <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/john-robertson/bbc-bias-and-scots-referendum-new-report">against the</a> Yes side in the Scottish independence referendum. Yet the BBC remains <a href="http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/howwework/reports/pdf/bbc_report_trust_and_impartiality_jun_2015.pdf">stubbornly popular</a> with the public – just like the UK’s other great national public institution, <a href="http://www.health.org.uk/blog/wisdom-crowd-what-do-people-think-about-nhs">the NHS</a>. That may well have protected it from the direst predictions about the white paper. It certainly cannot be taken for granted in future, however. </p>
<p>The BBC has always defended its cherished “independence” and looks uneasy about the new proposal for almost 50% of its board to be appointed by the government. A response is that at least the government has some kind of democratic mandate. One remarkable truth about the corporation is that the British public is rarely considered in the debate. Never mind that it pays for the BBC to be its servant. </p>
<h2>Whose Auntie?</h2>
<p>Because the BBC was constituted at arm’s length from government, it has always enjoyed a certain autonomy. But this also made it a creature of the “great and the good”, personified by its founder <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/research/culture/reith-1">Lord Reith</a> and his paternalist values. It betrayed a lack of trust in “the masses” by the social elites that ran the British Empire. </p>
<p>The BBC nonetheless developed an independent public-service ethos in the more tightly regulated national-media era of the 1950s and 1960s. This is arguably the root of its enduring popularity, and lives on through the likes of Radio 3, Radio 4 and the Asian Network. Yet imposing all this without consulting the public always smacks of metropolitian elitism. </p>
<p>The BBC’s public service is also a long way from what it was. Since at least the days of John Birt’s very market-oriented director generalship in the 1990s, the corporation has been <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/3563180/BBC-must-restore-its-values-if-it-is-to-survive.html">regularly accused</a> of losing this ethos. In the scramble for mass-market ratings in the fragmented TV world of the 21st century, it produces much less critical and innovative programming than it used to. It is hard to compare today’s fare with the heyday of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165592/">Play For Today</a> and prime-time slots for landmark documentaries and fearless current affairs coverage. </p>
<p>Complaints about the BBC apeing its competitors and invading the natural space of the private sector are another long-running theme. There has been <a href="https://inews.co.uk/essentials/culture/television/bbc-studios-lose-crown-jewels-like-strictly-come-dancing/">much talk about</a> removing prime-time giants like Strictly Come Dancing, and most recently the BBC <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/17/online-recipes-off-the-menu-of-slimmed-down-bbc">has announced</a> it will take down most recipes from its website to placate its critics. </p>
<p>So will the public continue to stay onside to protect all this? The lack of trust in the public that was built into the BBC’s foundations is now being reciprocated by a growing public hostility to the political and media classes on the back of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7029940.stm">television fakery</a>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15686679">Leveson</a>, Iraq, the financial crisis, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20026910">Jimmy Savile</a> and all the rest. The cultural gap between the elites that run the corporation and the public that funds it may lead to a loss of support in future. </p>
<p>This might be aided by the long campaign by anti-BBC cheerleaders such as Rupert Murdoch, and the corporation’s evident difficulties with diversity. The sight of Scottish independence supporters <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/yes-voters-are-blaming-the-bbc-for-losing-them-the-referendu?utm_term=.yvXNaNM6lW#.auv1J1W3qz">cancelling their licence fees</a> two years ago to protest the BBC’s coverage of the referendum shows the risks. And there is a new danger to public-service broadcasting in the white paper: the BBC will come under the control of broadcasting watchdog Ofcom – a <a href="http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/what-is-ofcom/">creature whose</a> “principal duty is to further the interests of citizens and of consumers, where appropriate by promoting competition”.</p>
<h2>Democratising the corporation</h2>
<p>A radical answer would be to use the process for renewing the BBC’s Royal Charter in December to do away with elite appointment and have a democratically elected BBC Trust instead. Drawing on the <a href="https://theconversation.com/corbyn-public-ownership-push-reflects-what-is-happening-all-round-the-world-47652">experience of</a> newer and more representative forms of public ownership outside the UK, changing the governance structure could ensure that both consumers and the BBC’s other great neglected constituency – its workers – are properly represented.</p>
<p>A possible model could be to have one third of the board elected by licence payers; one third by the workforce; and the remaining third by government appointment. To ensure adequate geographical diversity, the government section might also include appointees from local and regional government. You would have fewer City grandees and more members of the general public and representatives from the UK’s regions. They could redetermine the corporation’s mission statement and values and bring a much more diverse range of experiences and knowledge.</p>
<p>The BBC would still have its independence and operational autonomy and be funded by the licence fee, but those who pay for it would now have proper ownership. The director general could still be a professional appointee with the right kind of managerial experience of running television and media enterprises. </p>
<p>Who knows if it would transform the corporation’s current output. I suspect you would see the BBC moving away from the increasingly narrow profit-driven commercial interests that characterise the corporate media, but either way the public would have helped choose. Look at what happened when the BBC <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/jul/05/bbc-6-music-saved">listened</a> to the Save 6 Music campaign and imagine that public representation being right at the heart of the corporation. </p>
<p>A democratic mandate would finally make it harder for future governments to undermine the BBC or remove the licence fee, and harder for the likes of Murdoch to criticise it – thereby helping to guarantee its independence. We live in an era where viewers vote constantly in reality TV shows. It is time we extended it to the people who oversee the BBC itself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59497/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Cumbers receives funding from ESRC for a current research project 'Transforming Public Policy through Economic Democracy'.</span></em></p>If you want to safeguard the licence fee and shore up public-service content, time to introduce democracy to the BBC.Andrew Cumbers, Professor of Regional Political Economy, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/554572016-02-26T17:37:04Z2016-02-26T17:37:04ZSexist coverage of Jimmy Savile story is hiding in plain sight – just like he did<p>In the opening statement in <a href="http://www.damejanetsmithreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Opening-Statement-of-Dame-Janet-Smith-25.02.16.pdf">her report</a> on Jimmy Savile’s years abusing girls, boys, women and men at the BBC, Dame Janet Smith refers to a “macho culture” as an important element that enabled Savile to get away with decades of criminal behaviour. She may have absolved the BBC of institutional responsibility, but director general Tony Hall <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2016/feb/25/bbc-savile-inquiry-tony-hall-apologises-to-survivors-of-sexual-abuse-video">has accepted</a> that the question of whether BBC bosses knew of Savile’s abusive behaviour does nothing to address the question: “How could you not have known?”</p>
<p>In this sense, the “macho culture” Smith identifies takes on an institutional character – institutional sexism – which the BBC clearly can and must tackle. Yet it is not the only institution where macho culture and sexism prevent us from seeing the reality of men’s abusive behaviours. The same problem is alive and well in the way the press has covered the story. </p>
<p>Savile’s abuse of women and girls at least was an open secret, existing, as the title of Dan Davies’ <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jul/13/jimmy-savile-man-who-knew-him-best-dan-davies-in-plain-sight">biography</a> suggests, in plain sight. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t know. It was that – among other factors – the macho culture prevented them, prevented us, from recognising it as abuse. </p>
<p>Davies’ biography demonstrates how Savile was adept at implicating others. He notes, for instance, that Savile explicitly referred to sexual contact with teenage girls in his <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/As-Happens-Jimmy-Savile/dp/0214200566">1970s autobiography</a>, and that he’d openly “joke” that his motto was “don’t get caught”. In the now infamous 1974 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Hx7Q2oC5U">Clunk Click programme</a>, where Savile hosted Gary Glitter, he joked about “giving” Glitter two girls before both men drape themselves over the young women on set. The TV audience at home saw this too, but most of us didn’t see it as abuse either. Celebrity men helped themselves to women, and too many of us went along with it. </p>
<h2>Now then, now then</h2>
<p>It would be nice to think this was a relic of a bygone age, but my work on more recent press reporting of Savile suggests there is no room for complacency. The UK press’s coverage of Savile between his death in October 2011 and three days after the <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/update/2012-10-04/watch-the-itv-documentary-on-jimmy-savile/">ITV broadcast of Exposure</a> in October 2012, which named him as a serial abuser of girls (the evidence of his abuse of boys came later), shows a similar sexist complicity to that of Savile’s addresses to journalists and on-screen behaviour.</p>
<p>At the time of his death, for instance, newspapers frequently referred to Savile as a “ladies man” or “womaniser”, also noting rumours of “underage sex”. The way he sexualised every interaction with women and girls – from incessant flirting to groping, demands for kisses, and comments on their attractiveness – was seen as part of what had made him a lovable eccentric. A national treasure.</p>
<p>Even when the stories of abuse first emerged, this perception persisted. They were labelled, in a variety of contexts, as “sex claims”, allegations of “child sex” and “underage sex”. Not: “sexual abuse claims” or “allegations of child sexual abuse”. This was at a time when coverage of Savile was dominated by stories relating to consensual sex (the emergence of a <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2069358/Jimmy-Saviles-secret-lover-Sue-Hymns-talks-VERY-unconventional-life-together.html">long-time hidden lover</a>, and a potential <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2174601/Forget-DNA-test-I-NOT-Jimmy-Saviles-long-lost-love-child.html">love child</a>). The abuse stories were arguably presented in a way that fitted this broader narrative – a narrative about sexual scandal and secrets - and initially the actual abuse was invisible.</p>
<p>For instance one of the first mainstream news outlets to cover the story (after it had been <a href="http://www.theoldie.co.uk/article/jimmy-savile-a-multiple-cover-up">broken by</a> The Oldie), was the Sunday Mirror, which ran with an <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bbc-axe-investigation-sir-jimmy-157675">intro about</a> “sex claims”, referred to Savile’s “colourful lifestyle” and described him as “iconic” and a “cigar-chomping star”. Although this report was about the dropped BBC Newsnight investigation on Savile’s abuse of vulnerable young women and girls at Duncroft School, not once were the allegations described as allegations of abuse or assault. The most damning language was to suggest his behaviour was “inappropriate”. Euphemism and salaciousness trumped accuracy. </p>
<p>Even when the story became one of abuse, the persistence of the label “underage” is also disturbing. Think about the phrase “abuse of underage girls”. Isn’t there an implication here that there is an age at which one can consent to the kind of abuse Savile was accused of: groping, attempted rape, rape? That’s also why the persistent labelling of Savile as a paedophile is unhelpful. Yes, he abused children. But he also abused adults. Smith’s report isn’t a report exclusively about child sexual abuse: indeed, a majority of Savile’s BBC victims were legally adults. However, that they were over the age of consent is immaterial: they did not consent.</p>
<p>Fast forward four years to the day the report was released. The Mail Online, anticipating the report, ran with a headline: “Damning Jimmy Savile BBC Sex Report to be Released Today.” But Savile wasn’t damned for having sex at the BBC. He – and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-35658025">Stuart Hall</a> – were damned for sexually abusing women, girls, (and in Savile’s case) men and boys at the BBC.</p>
<p>Surely one of the most potent legacies of the Savile case has to be that this conflation of sex and abuse in the media’s treatment of allegations against powerful men has no place in a civilised society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/55457/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Karen Boyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The report into Savile BBC abuse points to disturbing echoes in how the media has covered what happened.Karen Boyle, Chair in Feminist Media Studies, University of StirlingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.