The BBC agreed to pay 185,000 pounds on Thursday to a former
treasurer of Britain's Conservative Party wrongly accused of child sex
abuse as a result of one of its reports.
The settlement
came as media reports said one of the BBC's former stars had been
arrested as part of an ongoing police investigation into sex crimes
centred on the publicly funded broadcaster.
Lord Alistair
McAlpine, an ally of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was widely
named on the internet as being the unidentified senior politician
accused in a report by the BBC's flagship Newsnight programme of abusing
boys in social care.
The flawed film sparked one of the
worst crises in the broadcaster's 90-year history and claimed the scalp
of Director General George Entwistle, after the abuse victim central to
the BBC investigation said McAlpine was not one of his attackers.
"I am delighted to have reached a quick and early settlement with the BBC," McAlpine said in a statement.
"I
have been conscious that any settlement will be paid by the licence fee
payers, and have taken that into account in reaching agreement with the
BBC."
His lawyer warned others who had sullied his
client's reputation to get in touch before they too faced litigation, a
threat which could ensnare hundreds of Twitter users and bloggers who
wrongly named McAlpine.
"We will now be continuing to seek
settlements from other organisations that have published defamatory
remarks and individuals who have used Twitter to defame me," McAlpine
said.
TWITTER USERS IN THE FRAME
One of the first who
could face action is Sally Bercow, the flamboyant wife of Britain's
parliamentary speaker who keeps lawmakers in order during debates.
She
had tweeted: "Why is Lord McAlpine trending? *innocent face*" as
speculation mounted after the Newsnight report. On Thursday, she wrote:
"I'm getting legal advice. Shocked that I'm first person Lord McAlpine
coming after though."
The controversy convulsed the
national broadcaster just as it was trying to grapple with revelations
that a former star presenter, Jimmy Savile, who died last year aged 84,
was one of Britain's most prolific sex offenders.
Police
investigating claims against Savile, said on Thursday they had arrested a
fourth man, aged in his 60s, on suspicion of sexual offences and added
the number of victims who had come forward with allegations had now
risen to 450.
The BBC and other media named the arrested
man as radio presenter Dave Lee Travis, who once appeared on the same TV
show and radio station as Savile and whose radio show Myanmar's
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi said had provided her with comfort
during her many years in captivity.
A Reuters photographer
reported there were a number of police officers outside the home of
Travis, 67, a short distance north of London. Travis publicly denied any
allegations of impropriety when claims first surfaced last month.
"HORRENDOUS SHOCK"
The
BBC's much-criticised handling of the Savile allegations and the
mistaken child abuse report on Newsnight prompted BBC Trust Chairman
Chris Patten to warn that the world's biggest broadcaster was doomed
unless it reformed.
Patten, a former Conservative minister
who is best known for handing back Hong Kong to China in 1997, was due
to meet the 11 other BBC trustees on Thursday to try to plot a way out
of the crisis and find a successor to Entwistle, who quit on Saturday.
McAlpine,
who is 70 and in poor health, said in a BBC interview it had been a
"horrendous shock" to find out that he was being linked to a claims of a
high-level paedophile ring.
He said the BBC should have called him about the allegations before airing the report.
"They
could have saved themselves a lot of agonising and money, actually, if
they'd just made that telephone call," McAlpine said. "I would have told
them exactly what they learnt later on ... That it was complete
rubbish."
At the height of the frenzy following the
Newsnight show on November 2, a presenter on a chat show on the ITV
channel brandished a list of alleged abusers during an interview with
Prime Minister David Cameron.
Britain's media regulator
said it was investigating both the Newsnight report and ITV, which said
it too had received a letter from McAlpine's legal team.
Peter
Fincham, ITV's Director of Television, said what his channel's show had
done was "wrong" and "misguided", and that "appropriate" disciplinary
action had been taken.
The regulator, Ofcom, could
theoretically fine ITV a maximum of up to 5 percent of annual turnover
while the maximum fine for the BBC, not an Ofcom licensee, would be
250,000 pounds.
Other penalties open to Ofcom are directing the broadcasters not to repeat the allegation, or to issue a correction.
