Professor of Media History at Westminster and the Official Historian of the BBC Professor Jean Seaton recently spoke to The Observer on the BBC’s decision to erase Welsh former journalist and presenter Huw Edwards from their archive footage after learning that he admitted to accessing indecent photographs of children.
The article addresses that Huw Edwards left Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 31 July after pleading guilty to accessing indecent material of minors, and continues to talk about the quick actions that the BBC have taken to remove any content involving him, starting with family and entertainment content on BBC iPlayer. They have additionally removed a 2006 episode of Doctor Who featuring Edwards and an episode of Great British Menu in which he took part in. The BBC have faced similar emergencies before such as when the child abuse of radio DJ and television star Jimmy Savile was exposed after his death in 2011.
Professor Seaton compared the difficulties of deleting footage between Edwards and Savile. She said: “Savile’s entertainment shows centred on him, so deleting much of that archive made sense, but Edwards' role was adjacent to coverage with importance much larger than him – news and national events. He was the familiar face of such important programmes which is a problem.”
She concludes that deleting footage of Edwards is more difficult as he was the face on television of much larger, more serious events, so deleting footage of him means deleting footage of important world news too.
She added: “But these events are ours. I suspect the BBC cannot or will not delete the archive – it may make clearly badged alternatives.”
Read the full article at The Observer.
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