Former BBC Director Apologizes for Failure of Digital Project

Mark Thompson, the former director general of the BBC, offered a general apology to a parliamentary committee for the failure of an expensive digital project, but he insisted that he had never knowingly misled Parliament or the BBC Trust, its oversight board.

Thompson, now the president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, testified with other former BBC officials before the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, which has been looking into allegations of overspending and bad management at the BBC, which is largely financed by the public. The central issue on Feb 3 was a $205 million project, called the Digital Media Initiative, intended to transfer all of the BBC’s production and archived materials to a digital format. The project ran into many difficulties, and the effort was suspended in October 2012, with a net loss of $160 million. The independent National Audit Office said on Jan. 28 that the BBC executive board “did not have sufficient grip” on the program and failed to “commission a thorough independent assessment of the whole system to see whether it was technically sound.”