Hindsight and History. Entwistle and Savile

In the Sempringham office we saw about half of the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee questioning of George Entwistle on 23 October and the event brought several thoughts strongly to mind. The most powerful was the members of the committee inability to see the events they were investigating not with the advantages of hindsight but from the perspective of the time. This inability was especially marked in connection with the brief ‘conversation’, about 10 seconds in length, last December, between George Entwistle and Helen Boaden, BBC director of news, in which the Newsnight investigation, later aborted, was mentioned. It was surprising to this writer that the Committee members were unable to have a feel for the modus operandi of the BBC bureaucratic management culture.

If issues were as ‘clear cut’ as the committee members seem to assume then Jimmy Savile’s actions would have been ‘outed’ years ago. For historians these events are a reminder that one of historians' great challenges is to see the past as it was, a task elegantly defined by H.R. Trevor Roper’s [Lord Dacre] valedictory lecture as Regius Professor in the University of Oxford, History and Imagination, Clarendon Press, 1980

Is it significant that the members of the media frequently seek ‘a cover up’ and that the trend to seek compensation, promoted in the US east coast, continues to spread?

Contributor: Geoff Williams. Sempringham [ehistory.org.uk] eLearning Office.