BBC Tragedy?

According to The Observer, the resignation today of the BBC's Director General is a tragedy. Well, it is a tragedy for the best media corporation in the world but it is difficult to shed tears for someone who had demonstrated consistent and arrogant incompetence. George Entwistle will be well looked after by the BBC - his bosses needed him to fall on his sword. Entwistle is a small man with a small mind. Read this exchange from the fateful Today interview:
JH: When did you know that this film was being broadcast and when was it drawn to your attention that it was going to make extraordinarily serious allegations about a man whose identity would inevitably be uncovered – wrongly as we now know?

GE: The film was not drawn to my attention before transmission.

JH: At all? Nobody said anything to you at all?

GE: No. John but I need to explain that there are an awful lot of pieces of journalism going on around the BBC which do not get referred to the editor-in- chief. Not everything gets to the editor-in-chief.

Did he think that was a defence? or the only possible excuse? True to form, the then DG's excuses were laced with threats to other members of staff.

The key is, is it referred sufficiently far up the chain of command and in this case I think the right referrals were made – but of course, it's important to give Ken MacQuarry the chance to find out exactly what happened.

Listening to this interview was an excruciating, shaming experience. Reading it later made it all too clear that John Humphreys had torpedoed the 54 day Entwistle regime.

The right and the Murdoch orcs may think they have the advantage here. For the moment, perhaps they do. But the lessons of the Savile affair have very little to do with the usual complaints about the BBC: by which I mean that Aunty is a mouthpiece for red handed lefties. Those of us who have worked inside the Corporation know that this is nonsense.

Even the drama of the last few days conclusively proves that the BBC is not the fantasy organisation that the Right Minded like to imagine. The BBC Panorama on Savile launched a broadside at the mother ship. It was Today with its expert interrogator who shredded the DG's chances of survival. What other Corporation would show this kind of commitment to washing its own dirty linen in front of a global audience? The Murdoch and Dacre sponsored enemies of the BBC with their pathetic hand wringing about reds under Aunty's bed would simply not understand the core values that the BBC even in crisis unflinchingly stands by.

Nor does the ugly Savile business fit the rightist fantasies about the BBC. Savile was a rapacious working class Tory, who liked to cosy up to the ghastly Thatcher and the Royal Family. He was a kind of whacky establishment icon - who exploited the apparatus of charity for his own ends. It is perhaps unremarked that all his megalomaniacal self aggrandising schemes worked against the principles of our National Health Service - currently being eviscerated by the Coalition government.

There is a way that Savile shines a spotlight on BBC culture. He used the Corporation and other public bodies, it would now seem, to exploit vulnerable young women - the constituency so calamitously slandered by the former editor of Newsnight. Above all, Savile was a bully - who used his peculiar status to humiliate exploit his victims without fear of retribution in his lifetime. Like the old colonial service, which Aunty so closely resembles, the BBC is dominated by public school educated men and women who take bullying for granted. Execs are prefects; the rest of us fags. It can be authoritarian and cruel. That's why the eccentric former miner fitted right in. He was a bully among bullies. 

The BBC is 'in crisis'. We should hope that it emerges from this self made swamp a better, more reflective institution.