-By Warner Todd Huston
In a shocking tally, up to 500 people have come forward claiming to be victims of former British Broadcasting Corp. TV and radio star Jimmy Savile, British police have reported. The scandal has reached from the 1960s to today but has also reached across the ocean to the newly hired CEO of The New York Times, himself a former BBC executive.
New Times executive Mark Thompson was the most recent top man at the BBC of any long standing having served for eight years ending his tenure only this past September. Thompson resigned from the Beeb to come to America to take the helm of The New York Times just as the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal was developing.
In his pre-employment interviews, Thompson swore he had no knowledge at all about the decades of sexual abuse cases perpetrated by BBC TV star Jimmy Savile, many of which the BBC aided in covering up and hiding from both the police and the license-paying public.
But the latest news from the investigation into the Savile scandal raises questions about what Thompson knew and when he knew it and that timeline brings suspicion that he knew about the mounting scandal long before he told The New York Times that he did.
So, what will The New York Times do? Will the “paper of record” demand that its own chief prove his claims of ignorance about the very sandal under his nose for his full tenure as the BBC’s top boss? Will The Times demand the truth?
What did Thompson know and when did he know it?
See our previous coverage
- New York Times Chief Testifies over BBC Sex Scandal
- Third New Chief in Two Months Takes Over BBC
- NYT Scandal Editor Sex Abuse Scandal ‘Hasn’t Made Things Easy’
- Troubles Grow for Newest New York Times Boss
- Multiple Sex Scandals Force New BBC Chief to Resign
- BBC’s Mark Thompson to Become NYT’s Next CEO
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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