Scandal-hit BBC appoints Tony Hall new director general
The scandal-hit body appoints head of Royal Opera House as its new boss while ITV settles case with ex-Tory leader over sex abuse report
The BBC appointed a former journalist who runs the Royal Opera House to lead the broadcaster yesterday after sex abuse scandals that shook public trust in one of Britain's most treasured institutions.
Tony Hall, a former head of BBC news division, was named weeks after the hapless George Entwistle resigned from the job - in a secret, emergency process aimed at restoring stability to the crisis-hit broadcaster. He is due to take up his post in early March 2013.
This comes as commercial television network ITV said it had paid out £125,000 (HK$1.5 million) to former Tory party treasurer Lord Alistair McAlpine who was wrongly linked to child sex abuse by one of its programmes and the BBC.
ITV apologised "unreservedly" to Lord McAlpine, who is at the centre of a row that felled the BBC's director-general, and said they had agreed to pay his legal costs on top of the £125,000 settlement.
Lord Patten, writing to BBC staff yesterday, said that Hall was "the right person to lead the BBC out of its current crisis and help rebuild public trust in the organisation" after an extraordinary period in which the broadcaster has been severely criticised for its handling of the Jimmy Savile child abuse scandal.
Hall, 61, was director of BBC news, and was a candidate for the top job in 1999 when Greg Dyke secured the position.
He went off to run the Royal Opera House for 11 years, taking over an organisation that was itself in crisis.
