Airing a Newsnight report which led to Lord McAlpine being wrongly named as a paedophile resulted largely from a failure by members of the team to follow the BBC's own editorial guidelines, the BBC Trust has said. The broadcast on November 2 was a "grave breach which had been costly to all concerned" and resulted in the public being misled, the Trust's Editorial Standards Committee (ESC) found. Its report, published on Wednesday, coincided with the Pollard Review into why a Newsnight investigation into broadcaster and DJ Jimmy Savile was shelved. And in its findings, the committee ordered another report by the BBC next year into what steps will be taken to make sure the corporation "learns from these events". The programme, which featured an interview with Steve Messham who said a senior political figure of the time abused him, led to the widespread naming of Lord McAlpine. The Tory peer, who had not been contacted by the programme, strenuously denied the allegations, launching legal action. The following week, Newsnight broadcast an apology, as well as apologies from Mr Messham, and Lord McAlpine later received £185,000 damages from the corporation. A report by the BBC, led by the corporation's Scotland director, Ken MacQuarrie, found that Newsnight failed to complete "basic journalistic checks" and there was confusion about who had the ultimate responsibility for "final editorial sign-off". He found that the programme's editorial management structure had been "seriously weakened" as a result of the editor having to step aside over the Savile scandal, and the departure of the deputy editor. Today, the ESC said there was a failure of editorial control within the BBC, adding: "This was a high-risk report which required rigorous supervision and did not receive it."
