LONDON — The British Broadcasting Corp. sought to overcome its worst crisis in years Thursday by appointing a former BBC news executive who heads the Royal Opera House as its new director general, urging him to rebuild public trust shredded by a scandal over botched reporting of sexual abuse.
The appointee, Tony Hall, 61, will start in March. He replaces George Entwistle, the most prominent casualty of the scandal, who resigned earlier this month.
The appointment won enthusiastic approval from a wide spectrum of politicians, media commentators and current and former BBC staff members.
Hall spent 28 years at the BBC, starting as a news trainee and rising to lead the BBC’s news and current affairs department from 1996 to 2001.
His record of innovation includes overseeing the launch of the BBC website, the broadcaster’s 24-hour news channel and Radio 5 Live, a widely popular, news and-sport radio channel.
He moved to the opera 11 years ago at a time of artistic and financial disarray and succeeded in stabilizing - as well as popularizing - what has long been seen as one of the world’s top opera houses.
The BBC said his principal task was to restore faith and confidence in the integrity of Britain’s public broadcaster, a sprawling bureaucracy financed by a compulsory license fee levied on most television-set owners.
Chris Patten, head of the BBC Trust, said Hall was “the right person to lead the BBC out of its current crisis.”
“And of course it matters not just to people in this country - but to tens of millions around the world, too,” he said. “It’s been a difficult few weeks - but together we’ll get through it. I’m committed to ensuring our news services are the best in the world.”
Steve Hewlett, a former editor of Panorama, one of the BBC’s leading investigative programs, said Hall had a reputation among BBC program makers as “straightforward, honest, a man with no side to him” and “no pushover” in handling contentious issues.
“I think he brings to the BBC what is desperately needed, weight,” he said.
Ben Bradshaw, a former culture minister who was previously a BBC reporter, described Hall as “a very good, calm operator,” “a good motivator” and decisive in stressful situations.
“He’s a very safe pair of hands, and very decent, fair minded individual,” he said.
Hall had sought to become director general in the late 1990s, when Greg Dyke won the job. Dyke quit in 2004 because of a scandal related to reporting of the Iraq war.
Entwistle resigned Nov. 10, after less than two months in the office, over disclosures that a flagship BBC current affairs program, Newsnight, had wrongly implicated a former Conservative politician in accusations of sexual abuse at a children’s home in North Wales in the 1970s and 1980s.
The error compounded earlier disclosures that the same program had canceled an investigation a year ago into accusations of sexual abuse of minors by television host Jimmy Savile at a time when other departments at the corporation were planning Christmas tributes to Savile, who died in October 2011 at age 84.
A year later, a rival channel, ITV, broadcast details of the accusations against Savile that has shaken the upper ranks of the BBC. He is now suspected of abusing hundreds of young people over decades on the BBC premises and elsewhere.
Entwistle’s predecessor was Mark Thompson, who became president and chief executive of The New York Times Co. on Nov. 12.
The scandals at Newsnight pushed the BBC to begin a series of internal inquiries about its culture and practices in the decades of suspected abuse by Savile and into its specific reasons for canceling the investigation into Savile.
In a statement to the BBC staff, Patten said: “While there are still very serious questions to be answered by the ongoing inquiries, it is in the interests of license fee-payers that the BBC now starts to refocus on its main purpose - making great programs that audiences love and trust.”
“In doing this, it will need to take a long, hard look at the way it operates and put in place the changes required to ensure it lives up to the standards that the public expects.”
After the Newsnight program erroneously implicated the former treasurer of the Conservative Party, Alistair McAlpine, the BBC reached an out-of-court settlement with him worth about $295,000. In a separate suit against the ITV channel, which was also accused of libeling McAlpine, the broadcaster agreed Thursday to pay a settlement of about $200,000 and his legal costs.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 11/23/2012