Lord McAlpine

The BBC will pay £185,000 in damages to Lord McAlpine following the Newsnight broadcast in November which wrongly linked Lord McAlpine to allegations of child sexual abuse. Although the programme did not name Lord McAlpine , however he has indicated that he now intends to sue the Institution BBC after it led to him being identified on the internet (twitter, etc). George Entwistle the ex director general, stated that "We should not have put out a film that was so fundamentally wrong. What happened here is completely unacceptable" he goes on further to say "I have taken clear and decisive action to start to find out what happened and put things right." He also admits that the institution was facing a bad crisis of trust in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal. In my opinion i don't think that the programme newnight should close as this incident is similar to ITV's this morning where a list of  pedophiles was revealed on national TV including Lord McAlpine as one of them, this lead to Institution ITV being fined a sum of £125,000 similar to BBC. I think closing a show like newsnight will only cause even more problems for institution BBC as the recent story on jimmy savile has put them under enough pressure already.

This was the tweet that Sally Bercow tweeted which landed her in a lot of trouble. She argues that her tweet was just mischievous and not libellous and  if she gets sued for it then so be it.Personally i think that the tweet was wrong as the accusations made on BBC Newsnight were false and that the tweet was just another way to get at Lord McAlpine himself. However i don't think the tweeter should be fined as this is a form of pluralism, having the opportunity to voice your own opinions, but in today's society i think that with sites like twitter, peoples voices are becoming suppressed as it has seemed to land alot of people in trouble, for example the Tom Daley and Riley incident .

Sources

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ariel/20340847
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/15/bbc-lord-mcalpine-compensation-newsnight
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/bbcs-newsnight-report-implicating-lord-mcalpine-in-child-sex-abuse-should-never-have-gone-out-8303444.html