Chris Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, said confidence had to be restored if the publicly funded corporation was to withstand pressure from rivals, especially Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which would try to take advantage of the turmoil.
“If you’re saying, ‘Does the BBC need a thorough structural radical overhaul?’, then absolutely it does, and that is what we will have to do,” Patten, a one-time senior figure in Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party and the last British governor of Hong Kong, told BBC television.
“The basis for the BBC’s position in this country is the trust that people have in it,” Patten said. “If the BBC loses that, it’s over.”
The BBC’s director general, George Entwistle, resigned on Saturday in response to a Newsnight report that falsely implicated a politician in a child sexual abuse scandal.
BBC director-general resigns after child abuse broadcast
JUST IN: BBC’s director-general George Entwistle has resigned, following ‘Newsnight’ child abuse broadcast. The Nov. 2 broadcast wrongly implicated a politician in a child sex-abuse scandal.
More on BreakingNews.com: http://www.breakingnews.com/topic/uk-child-abuse-allegations
Photo: George Entwistle leaves Parliament on October 23, 2012. (Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images)
Entwistle spoke on the controversial Newsnight episode earlier today, and while conceding the show was “fundamentally wrong,” he claimed he had no knowledge of the program prior to broadcast. Now, just hours later, and he’s gone.
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