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Originally Posted by nomadking
I wonder how much of last night's Panorama would have been in the originally planned Newsnight report. Did they have the ex BBC people saying they heard rumours, or saw suspicious behaviour etc, Either way, broadcasting the original report would have brought out all these new witnesses almost a year earlier. It is the ITV programme that has led to the large number of new revelations, which the reporters and researchers could not have uncovered by themselves.
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The original planned Newsnight report had testimony from a number of women Savile abused down the years, some of them apparently on BBC premises, but it did not seemingly have interviews from anyone from the BBC.
One point made in the Panorama documentary last night was that the Newsnight editor was working with a typical BBC mindset that was focused on attacking institutional rather than personal failings. This meant, when the team was unable to dig up evidence of failings on the part of the CPS or the police, the editor went cold on the story. The fact that Savile was a long-term predatory paedophile just didn't strike him as a story. Of course, there was an 'institutional failing' angle there for him - the BBC's abject failure to recognise that one of its employees was using its premises to groom and molest underage girls over many years. Unfortunately, though that angle was there in the original material gathered by his reporters, the Newsnight editor seems to have been blind to the scandal.