The BBC has been prone to crises throughout its history, and it has the ability to survive them and even emerge stronger. But it is now facing one of its greatest ever tests after the coruscating findings of the Dyson report into its
Panorama interview with Princess Diana in 1995. Never before has the corporation been condemned so eloquently by a future king, who has said his mother was “failed” by BBC bosses “who looked the other way rather than asking the tough questions”.
“It’s hard to see how this could have been worse,” says one longstanding editor.
This story is first and foremost about a vulnerable young woman and how she was misled in a way that is still devastating, more than a quarter of a century later, to her family and friends. Every journalist, and all of us who worked for the BBC, should be shattered by the evidence of the destructive power of the wrong kind of journalism.