When I was nine I wrote to Jim’ll Fix It and asked; “Dear Jim, could you please fix for me to train with my Olympic hero Daley Thompson?”. When I never heard back from the BBC I went crying to my dad who told me that I shouldn’t worry about it and Jimmy Savile was “a stupid man anyway”.
Five years later when I was older and a little bit more worldly, I remember bringing up that experience with my dad. He told me that “stupid” was “father-language” to a nine year old for “paedophile”. “Jimmy Savile is a bloody weirdo and paedophile” were his exact words. “Just as well you never ended up on his programme”.
Before you get too excited my father didn’t know anything no one else knew - he had just heard all the rumours. These were the same rumours that led Louis Theroux to question Jimmy Savile about paedophilia back in 2000. The rumours of paedophilia surrounding Jimmy Savile had circulated around the BBC for decades and throughout most of the media. They were an open secret.
Now there is a big difference between gossip and fact, and I have no idea who in the BBC or other organisations Jimmy Savile worked for really knew what and when about his illegal activity. And it would be irresponsible to expect people to act on unsubstantiated hearsay.
However the failure to act on what now seems was almost “common knowledge” is a phenomenon that psychologists often see in large organisations and have even coined a phrase for it - “Groupthink”.
Groupthink is a term that was first identified by social psychologist Irving Janis in 1972 and occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment”. In very basic terms, Groupthink causes people in the group not to question the actions of the group properly, and start to take on board values that an objective person outside of the group may think bizarre. Sounding familiar yet?
The inability of some of Britain’s largest organisations to address Jimmy Savile’s behaviour in a way that now seems obvious to any objective outsider seems like a classic example of Groupthink. For readers of this blog it is also one of the strongest arguments for more black people and people from diverse backgrounds to be in positions of authority in the BBC and throughout the media.
Irving Janis identified several factors that can lead to Groupthink. But two of the largest are when its members are similar in background and when the group is insulated from outside opinions. A group made up exclusively of white middle-aged middleclass men are more likely to be prone to all think the same, have the same values, and conform in assessing their actions. The same is obviously true for all Asian groups, all black groups, single gender groups, etc. The lack of diversity in senior management in many of Britain’s largest broadcasters increases the risk of Groupthink.
The best safeguard against Groupthink is diversity; diversity of opinion, diversity of values, diversity in thinking. We are more likely to achieve this diversity if we have people from as many different backgrounds as possible in a group. All too often when we discuss diversity in the media people view it as a form of political correctness or think that we are making a moral argument. In reality there is a hard-nosed business case for increased diversity.
The Jimmy Savile saga may in fact be the best argument for diversity yet. We will never know if employing more black people would have stopped him (as the title of this blog post provocatively asks) but if we want the best television and the best organisations we need to avoid Groupthink, and employing more people from diverse backgrounds would be a great start.
