Liz Mackean
Journalist who found herself persona non grata at the BBC after helping to expose Jimmy Savile
LIZ MACKEAN, who has died aged 52, enjoyed a successful career as a reporter and presenter, on BBC Breakfast News and Newsnight, until she was squeezed out of the Corporation after a report in which she revealed that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile was suppressed.
After Savile’s death in October 2011, she and her Newsnight producer Meirion Jones launched an investigation in which they interviewed former pupils at an approved school for girls who claimed to have been abused as teenagers by the DJ and television star.
The programme was set to be broadcast in early December 2011 but was pulled in circumstances which have never been fully explained. Instead, the BBC broadcast tributes to Savile. Liz Mackean was incandescent with rage.
When the story exploded nearly a year later, at first the BBC claimed there had been no investigation of Savile by Newsnight. Liz Mackean’s bosses offered her paid leave to keep her quiet. “I was told I didn’t need to come in to work,” she recalled. “I said ‘hang on I haven’t done anything wrong’.” She was put under massive pressure not to blow the whistle; “I was questioned, challenged, ignored, briefed against,” as she later recalled.
At the height of the row she decided to make a statement to the media. Her BBC minder read the draft and gulped. “You have to run it past the press office” he said. “I think you’ll find we don’t,” she said, fixing him with a steely stare.
She then marched out through the revolving doors at the front of the BBC and told the assembled press and television cameras what she thought of how the BBC had handled Savile.
The decision to cancel the investigation became the subject of an inquiry by the former head of Sky News Nick Pollard, whose report, in December 2012, vindicated the Newsnight team and declared that the decision to drop the programme had been flawed.
In 2014 Liz Mackean took voluntary redundancy, explaining later that “the BBC tried to smear my reputation. They said they had banned the film because Meirion and I had produced shoddy journalism. I stayed to fight them, but I knew they would make me leave in the end. Managers would look through me as if I wasn’t there.”
She was followed soon afterwards by Meirion Jones. But in 2015 the pair won a London Press Club Scoop of the Year award for their work on the Savile story.
The second of four daughters of a circuit judge, Elizabeth Mary Mackean was born at Romsey, Hampshire, on November 30 1964 and educated at Gordonstoun, where she appeared in a play with Prince Edward. She went on to study Drama at the University of Manchester and, while there, began working weekend shifts at Greater Manchester Radio.
She worked her way up through local radio stations before getting a television job based in Southampton. She was a natural and was soon picked up by BBC as a presenter, first on Breakfast News, then, from 2000, as a reporter on Newsnight. She explained that she had wanted to work on a programme that “wasn’t just the usual hit and run of news”.
She joined just as the programme was about to hit its peak. A million viewers switched on each night; Jeremy Paxman was in his peppery prime and she appeared with correspondents such as Michael Crick, Martha Kearney, Jackie Long and Paul Mason.
Northern Ireland was still in tumult following the Good Friday agreement, and as the programme’s specialist on the Province, Liz Mackean grasped the intricacies of politics and faction so well that even the most hardened Republican assassins and Loyalist killers were prepared to talk to her.
She mixed reporting and deeper investigations at home and around the world anywhere from Abidjan to Moscow. In 2010, with five others, she shared the Daniel Pearl Prize for International Investigations for a series of films for Newsnight on the oil company Trafigura, which showed how it had tried to cover up the poisoning of thousands of West Africans by toxic dumping. Typically she gave her share of the prize money to one of the victims.
Liz Mackean was a mischievous presence on location or in studio, her wicked sense of humour often reducing colleagues to helpless laughter. In front of camera she was assured and confident, but she was no prima donna. “A lot of on-screen people are bigheads and show offs”, her former colleague Michael Crick recalled, “not Liz. She was modest and genuine but also a wonderful journalist”.
After leaving the BBC, Liz Mackean went freelance and contributed reports to Channel 4’s Dispatches. Her first broadcast investigation, in September 2013, was the self-explanatory The Paedophile MP. How Cyril Smith Got Away With It.
She went on to win a Grierson award for best current affairs documentary for Hunted (2014), which revealed how Russian gangs were hunting down gay men, also earning the accolade of Stonewall Journalist of the Year. She was working on another Dispatches report when she died following a stroke.
Liz Mackean is survived by her wife, Donna, and by their son and daughter.
Liz Mackean, born November 30 1964, died August 18 2017