BBC suspends Newsnight investigations over sex abuse row

LONDON, United Kingdom – The BBC on Friday suspended all investigations by its flagship current affairs programme Newsnight after a politician was wrongly named on the Internet as a paedophile.

The British public broadcaster apologised “unreservedly” for having aired a Newsnight investigation alleging that a senior Conservative Party figure repeatedly abused a teenage resident of a children’s home in the 1970s.

Although the BBC did not identify the politician in last week’s report, former Conservative treasurer Alistair McAlpine was widely named on social networking sites as the alleged perpetrator.

He publicly denied the claims on Friday — and hours later his accuser Steve Messham, a former resident of the Bryn Estyn children’s home in Wales, said McAlpine was not his abuser and had been a victim of mistaken identity.

“Mr Messham has tonight made a statement that makes clear he wrongly identified his abuser and has apologised,” the BBC said in a statement.

“We also apologise unreservedly for having broadcast this report.”

It added that BBC Director-General George Entwistle had ordered Newsnight to air a full apology on Friday and to enact “an immediate pause in all Newsnight investigations to assess editorial robustness and supervision”.

The broadcaster has also suspended all co-productions with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, with whom it worked on the Bryn Estyn investigation, and ordered an urgent report into what happened.

Closing Friday’s edition of Newsnight, anchor Eddie Mair summed up the grim mood with the sign-off: “Newsnight will be back on Monday. Probably.”

The BBC has faced a barrage of criticism in recent weeks over allegations that the late presenter Jimmy Savile, one of its biggest stars, sexually abused as many as 300 children over a 40-year period.

Newsnight itself has come under fire after it emerged that its editor shelved an investigation by the programme into the Savile allegations in December.

The BBC has launched three inquiries into the scandal — one into how Savile was able to get away with the abuse, a second into why Newsnight dropped its investigation, and a third into wider allegations of sexual harassment.

McAlpine’s lawyers say they are pursuing legal action against “all media who have defamed Lord McAlpine’s reputation and published defamatory statements”.

The politician, who blasted the claims as “wholly false and seriously defamatory”, said he was forced to publicly deny them after he was named directly on the Internet and “by innuendo” in the written and broadcast media.

Messham has offered his “sincere and humble” apologies to McAlpine, who served under former premier Margaret Thatcher, and suggested that it was the police who wrongly identified the politician as his alleged abuser.

In a statement published by the BBC, Messham said: “After seeing a picture in the past hour of the individual concerned, this (is) not the person I identified by photograph presented to me by the police in the early 1990s, who told me the man in the photograph was Lord McAlpine.

“I want to offer my sincere and humble apologies to him and his family.”

Prime Minister David Cameron warned Thursday against a “witch-hunt” after he was given a list of alleged child sex abuse suspects on live television.

On the ITV daytime television show “This Morning”, presenter Philip Schofield handed Cameron a card with a list of names of Conservative Party figures compiled from Internet gossip.

Schofield later apologised after it emerged that viewers may have been able to see some of the names for a split second due to a “misjudged camera angle.” – Agence France-Presse