stewgreen, Sir David King has not been strong on checking facts:

"The government's former chief scientist has backed away from his sensational claim that a foreign intelligence agency or wealthy US lobbyists were behind the hacking and release of controversial emails between climate scientists.

Sir David King admitted he possessed no inside information about the leaks of embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, and had merely been speculating on material already in the public domain. His remarks to a journalist had been a "side-issue", he said.

Sir David said the leak was probably a deliberate and sophisticated attempt to derail the Copenhagen climate summit. The story came a day after the climate change secretary Ed Miliband declared a "battle" against the "siren voices" who denied global warming was real or caused by humans.

Sir David told the Guardian today : "The operation looked amazingly efficient and amazingly sophisticated. It looks very much like an intelligence operation."

But it emerged that he had been misinformed about key facts. "

Fran Unsworth was the right sort of person for High Office at the BBC, as confirmed by The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/dec/15/fran-unsworth-appointed-bbc-head-of-news

In an interview with BBC NewsWatch about his successor, Harding said: “I chose Fran when I joined as my deputy and she has been an extraordinary person to work with.

“For people who don’t know her, Fran’s worked at the BBC for pretty much her entire career and knows and understands it, most recently she was running the BBC World Service.

“What you see with Fran is an incredibly thoughtful manager of people, a really intelligent judge of news and a fantastic ambassador for the BBC."

“But most of all what she has is the capacity to enable great people to do exceptional work and when you are the director of news and current affairs - that’s the thing you really want to do. It’s not what you do, the leadership of the organisation is enabling other people to do great things and no one does that better in my experience than Fran.”

Did no one at the BBC tell their bosses before she was promoted?

The BBC like to make the news.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5633999/BBC-reporter-sent-bad-taste-joke-email-Billy-Graham-rally.html

Today the court heard a message sent to Mr Johnson from his boss Fran Unsworth, deputy director of BBC news and current affairs at the time of the search and since promoted to director.

Her message said: 'It was an excellent piece of work. It was a very good piece of journalism.' 

Her message was read out by barrister Justin Rushbrooke, who is leading Sir Cliff's legal team, who said it portrayed Mr Johnson as a 'hero'. 

Mr Rushbrooke said: 'You were the hero of the day, not just in the local office, but in the national office.

'You were the toast of the UK newsroom.'

Mr Johnson replied: 'Editors seemed to be pleased that I had brought in the story.'

When asked what his 'scoop' was, the reporter said: 'The news that Sir Cliff Richard was being investigated by the police and that they were searching his house.