The BBC’s promises to change after Savile are as sincere as a prostitute’s smile

It should be easy to admire the BBC’s handling of the Savile scandal. Two of its journalists, Liz MacKean and Meirion Jones, broke the story. Panorama then ran a devastating account of the corporation’s failings which is still worth watching online.

This morning the Today programme properly led with the leak of Dame Janet Smith’s report on the multiple rapes Savile committed on BBC premises, which again showed an admirable capacity for self-criticism. Unfortunately, that is all it did.

Organisations and individuals are defined not just by their mistakes but how they react to their mistakes. Do they deny and bluster? Or do they confront their flaws and try to make amends?

The best people in the BBC behaved superbly. Their editors were, of course, a disgrace.

I say ‘of course,’ but the story of how the BBC punished its journalists for telling the truth about Savile has hardly been covered. The presenter on the Today programme got away with saying that short-term contracts might make modern workers at the BBC even less likely to speak out now than 30 years ago.