BBC Scandals Mount Up; Director-General Resigns

Earlier this fall, the BBC faced a child-abuse scandal involving one of its star presenters - and charges that the BBC failed to address early allegations and junked its own investigation of renewed charges, allowing it to be scooped by its competition.

  Now comes a second child-abuse scandal - this time falsely accusing a politician of child-abuse on its premier news program, Newsnight.  After airing the allegation, the victim said he had misidentified his abuser, and Newsnight reporters admitted they had neither shown the victim a picture of the politician, nor sought a comment on the story from his office.
  This was enough to for George Entwistle, Director-General of the BBC, to resign after two months on the job.
  These two scandals come in the wake of a scathing public inquiry about BBC news reports of government impropriety in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

One of the BBC's most prominent figures, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, said since the Iraq report furore, management had become bloated while cash had been cut from program budgets.
"He (Entwistle) has been brought low by cowards and incompetents," Paxman said in a statement, echoing a widely-held view that Entwistle was a good man who had been let down by his senior staff.

The head of the BBC Trust, which oversees BBC operations agreed that management structures were a problem -

"Apparently decisions about the program went up through every damned layer of BBC management, bureaucracy, legal checks - and still emerged," he said.

Patten continued, saying that radical changes were needed to restore the public's confidence in the public service broadcaster.

"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...
"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."

It'll be a hard job, but someone really has to do it - quickly.

Source -  BBC Head says broadcaster must reform or die,  Hollywood Industry blog