By Osagie Alonge
The BBC’s director general, George Entwistle has resigned from his job, following BBC’s coverage of a spreading paedophile scandal.
Entwistle’s shocking departure was prompted by the public outrage over a recent report on ‘Newsnight’, one of the network’s flagship current affairs programs that wrongly implicated a former Conservative Party politician in a pedophile scandal involving a children’s home in Wales, New York Times reports.
Entwistle said the report, broadcast on Nov. 2, reflected ‘unacceptable journalistic standards’ and never should have been broadcast.
That broadcast has only compounded the problems facing the network since the revelation last month that a longtime BBC television host, Jimmy Savile, was suspected of having sexually abused perhaps hundreds of young people over the course of decades, sometimes on the BBC premises.
The network has been accused of covering up the accusations by canceling a Newsnight report on Savile last year, when Entwistle was a senior executive at the network.
Entwistle was barely two months into the director’s job, heading one of the world’s largest media organizations.
