'BBC scandal isn't a game - it's a disgrace stars have to defend their names'
IT isn’t a game, yet the impunity with which people are still treating it is frightening. Throwing names of innocent people into a conversation about sexual impropriety on social media with no thought about the impact on them, their families, their friends and their careers.
Hopefully the celebs involved will sue indiscriminately to remind the trolls that these are peoples’ lives they are playing with. But wherever this goes now, the way the BBC has handled it will continue to be the subject of some debate. In a statement on Sunday it claimed to have first been made aware of the allegations against one of its presenters – that he’d paid a teenager for sexually explicit photographs – in May.
Why could it still not answer basic questions put to it about the issue by a newspaper just days ago, nearly two months on?
The BBC’s intransigence has meant a number of other high-profile presenters have had to come out fighting on social media to make it clear the person in question is not them. Fair play to them all. But it is disgraceful that they were ever put in that position.
Surely, if you are the individual caught up in this issue, whether guilty or not, you must be feeling some level of regret over the impact on your colleagues.
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At some level you must surely be keen to get a line drawn under it for their sakes and their families. Look, as far as the Beeb is concerned, I get it. After all of its initial, apparent dithering, everything it does now, with full transparency, is potentially the subject of legal recourse.
Anything it does now could compromise the privacy of said BBC presenter. Especially if he is eventually found to be innocent.
So while the world and his wife is calling for the Beeb to simply name him already, they can’t until it is established whether there is merit to the allegations or not. But they should never have got here in the first place.
Yet, instead of the focus remaining on just how, in 2023, a man could pour petrol through the letterbox of a woman and her two children in Nottingham. Or the fact that four men have escaped accountability for their botched handling of the Stephen Lawrence murder in 1993.
Or the horrendous news a second child has died following the Wimbledon school car crash, the news is still dominated by an issue the BBC should have acted on weeks ago.
After Jimmy Savile you’d have thought the broadcaster would have structures and procedures in place to deal with precisely this kind of eventuality. Instead it’s given the impression that it’s running around like a headless chicken with no clue.
You get the sense this is going to get worse for the BBC before it gets better.
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