The
Newsnight in question didn't name anyone.
It appears that the police had originally shown abuse victim Steve Messham a photograph for him to identify. He said that it was a picture of one of his abusers. It was the police who then told him that it was Lord McAlpine.
There is no suggestion that I have seen that Waterhouse was all rubbish and that there was no abuse, or that an (or some) important person was involved.
The agency should have checked the identification issue – but the fact that it didn't is being used to pretend, in effect, that the entire story was a tissue of lies.
It's political opportunism – and not least since there are newspapers out there screaming for BBC heads to roll when they would never demand that anyone quit if they'd been caught do something wrong.
For instance, how many executives at the
Sun, the
Daily Mirror, the
Sunday Mirror, the
Daily Mail, the
Daily Record, the
Daily Express, the
Daily Star and the
Scotsman after being found guilty, in a court of law, of libel in the case of Chris Jefferies?
The
Mail yesterday set out to smear Messham – that's right: it set out to smear a victim of child abuse. But then given it's own proclivity for making profit from the sexualisation of underage girls, it's perhaps not really surprising. Children are simply commodities for the likes of Paul Dacre to make money from. And anyone who tries to raise the issue of abuse back from the metaphorical graveyard in which it was hidden, when the findings were, in effect, buried, is the problem.
The prime problem with the BBC is that it hasn't had the balls to tells certain people where to get off.
It does raise a slightly different issue, though: that people using social media need to learn some sense of responsibility. People rushing around to name all and sundry has done the victims no good at all either.
