Incredibly upsetting piece about the BBC and Savile

The BBC, as an institution, disgusts me to the core these days. Somewhat ironic that this article appears in the Guardian; whose cognitive dissonance - running an article about a rival news organisation ignoring/minimising/dismissing news items because the identities of the perpetrator and victim aren't convenient for the agenda of said news organisation - is, as ever, breathtaking. A plague on both their houses.

Am I the only one who wishes they’d stop using photos of Saville? I’ve just clicked that link and the picture makes me feel sick.

I’ll go and read the article now.

I didn't know about Liz MacKean either and my brain like all of yours went straight to today's situation. 'Reckoning' - what an apt name. It won't be just us drawing parallels when it airs.

Wow, that was a compelling read. A real page turner.

It would appear that Liz MacKean is the woman responsible for exposing Jimmy Savile. And I've never even heard of her.

The BBC are now making a programme about Savile. I shall be interested to see exactly how prominent she is in that programme. Or will they sideline her and fail to report accurately, all over again.

It's called 'The Reckoning.'

Reckoning

1. The action or process of calculating or estimating something.

2. the avenging or punishing of past mistakes or misdeeds.

"the fear of being brought to reckoning"

Liz Mackean- a definite shero, @drhf.
I didn't know about this, thanks for posting OP
(RIP Liz)
JS protected even after death

I was just reading that. Those poor women and the cowards at the bbc. Good on McKean for fighting this amazing story through.
I am livid that the story was not run because of how it looked. I'm sure I'm not the only person interested in perhaps imperfect "stories" with a non-conventional arc, heroes etc - I think the success of so many podcasts suggests there is an audience for complex stories (not that I think this turned out to be especially complex - usual story of women getting horrifically screwed over by everyone who should know better).

Yes I noticed that comment about ' filling the screen ' too. Makes you think....how shallow TV journalism is compared to radio.

“She’d always struck me as a very ordinary journalist,” a former senior news executive told me. “She wasn’t ambitious or sharp-elbowed. She didn’t fill the screen.” I put it to him that MacKean’s talents for listening to sources were one of the qualities that made her extraordinary. He considered this for a moment and said: “Listening wasn’t a quality we gave much credit to back then.”

What a shero Liz MacKean was. And the dismissiveness in that quote! Journalists should let the stories "fill the screen", not fill it themselves. It reeks of misogyny and lesbophobia.

Yes I read that this morning too. They handled it lightly in the article, but it sounds as if Liz MacKean was driven to the edge of a breakdown. Hadn't realised she'd died so young of a stroke, and with all her siblings and her parents outliving her - clicked through to the obituary. BBC certainly didn't redeem itself for the Savile days by the way it treated her - human costs don't seem to register. She was a heroine.

Hmm. They have finally woken up to the Cotton Ceiling and as Glinner says , it's only taken them five years. Perhaps they know something we don't? Tony Blackburn was present when Simon Dee told a BBC manager ' Something has to be done about Jimmy - he's too fond of the kids.' We can only hope this stuff is now in their corporate memory at last.