Considering nobody is entirely sure what precisely has happened, the BBC presenter scandal has left nobody covered in glory.
Starting with The Sun, a Murdoch paper that has never hidden its disdain for the BBC, publishing a story about a young person without verifying the details with the young person in question – who has categorically denied its veracity through a lawyer.
The story accused a then-unnamed BBC presenter of paying £35,000 to a young person in return for sexually explicit images. This from the paper that only gave up its sleazy topless Page 3 girls eight years ago and drooled over Samantha Fox’s breasts on her 16th birthday.
Let's not forget, The Sun posted Sam Fox on their Page 3 at just 16, she was still at school. pic.twitter.com/uC8gz1leeI
— MoaningYorkshireman (@YorkshireMoan) July 13, 2023
The Sun no doubt correctly predicted that its front page would whip up a frenzy, and indeed it did.
The estranged parents of the young person had told the paper that the money from the famous man had funded their child’s crack habit, and that the BBC had not acted when they had approached it some months ago.
If true – and nobody is quite sure – this story also doesn’t do Auntie Beeb any favours. After the Jimmy Savile uber-scandal, you’d think its safeguarding procedures would be razor sharp by this point and that even a whiff of a complaint of this nature would be grasped and thoroughly examined within hours.
Instead, it sounds like nothing at all was done.
But the big story, which ran for days and days, was the question of who the BBC presenter was. The lack of clarity meant that every high-profile man connected to the corporation was under suspicion by the baying Twitter mob, with eagle eyes waiting to see who was absent from their usual slots on the channels, after the BBC finally said it had suspended the presenter in question.
The networks implicated any man on a high enough salary at the BBC to be able to spend £35 grand on his predilections
Big names like Rylan Clark, Gary Lineker and Jeremy Vine were, at various points, trending on the social media site due to the not-so-whispering networks. Each had to publicly deny that they were the man in question.
It seemed that by failing to name the accused, the combined media networks implicated any man on a high enough salary at the BBC to be able to spend £35 grand on his predilections. After all, whoever it was was being accused of what can be described, at best, as pretty sleazy behaviour.
As I said, nobody has come out of this well.
But it somehow got worse. By the time the man whose name had been trending on Twitter all day had been revealed by his wife, he was an inpatient in a psychiatric unit due to a serious exacerbation of his already well-documented mental health problems.
I mention that they were well-documented because it makes any reasonable person wonder what both The Sun and the BBC – the latter being his employer, after all – were thinking and where their duty of care had been throughout this whole crisis.
The police have said there was no illegality, but it’s undeniable that Edwards – known best in recent months for being trusted to break the Queen’s death to the country and the world – has questions to answer. If there is truth in the accusations of the young person’s parents, if there is truth in the suggestion that he swore at somebody on a dating app who threatened to out him, and if there is truth that he sent inappropriate messages to less powerful people in this place of work, then he has screwed up and should answer to that, at a more appropriate time.
But this feeding frenzy that has led to a man being hospitalised, led by a tabloid paper’s long-term vendetta against the country’s public service broadcaster, and fuelled by homophobia and rabid social media users, has to teach us something about the way scandals are handled in the press.
Memories are long, especially where The Sun is concerned. You still can’t buy a copy of the paper in the city of Liverpool as a result of The Sun publishing grossly offensive untruths about the city’s football fans after the devastating Hillsborough Disaster in 1989.
The legacy media needs to get its own house in order, especially when dealing in such an almost comically exaggerated degree of hypocrisy.
I see Sun columist Rod Liddle has been brought out on Newsnight to comment on ethics and Huw Edwards.
That'll be Rod Liddle who said in 2012 that he "could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids" if he was a teacher. pic.twitter.com/xFAZUVV5DA
— The Sun Apologies (@SunApology) July 12, 2023
Social media companies must start to address the vast amounts of defamation on their platforms at times like this, the BBC needs to sort out its safeguarding and accountability procedures, Huw Edwards needs to get the care he needs and, when the time is right, answer questions about exactly what happened. The Sun needs to start by looking in a mirror.
Image: Jwslubbock
