SCANDAL

NYT Public Editor Questions New CEO

Over role in Jimmy Savile affair at BBC.

Sometimes what happens across the Atlantic doesn’t stay across the Atlantic. The New York Times’s public editor publicly wondered whether the incoming chief executive is fit to take the company’s top job over questions of his role in the BBC’s Jimmy Savile controversy. Mark Thompson, who is set to take over as CEO on Nov. 12, was director-general of the BBC when investigative journalists from Newsnight discovered there had been hundreds of claims of sexual abuse of minors by Savile, a beloved BBC broadcaster for decades before his death last year. The Newsnight piece was subsequently killed, and the broadcaster instead aired a tribute to Savile.