Ex-BBC head quits gallery job amid Diana interview fallout

LONDON, May 23, (AP): Tony Hall, who was director of BBC news and current affairs at the time of the public broadcaster’s explosive 1995 interview with Princess Diana, resigned Saturday as board chairman of Britain’s National Gallery.

Hall, who subsequently rose to the top job at the BBC, was heavily criticized in a report this week for a botched inquiry into how journalist Martin Bashir obtained the blockbuster interview.

In a statement, the 70-year-old said his continued presence at the gallery would be a “distraction to an institution I care deeply about.”

“As I said two days ago, I am very sorry for the events of 25 years ago and I believe leadership means taking responsibility,” said Hall, who served as the BBC’s director-general from 2013 until 2020.

John Kingman, the deputy chair of the National Gallery’s board of trustees, will assume Hall’s role for the time being. He said the gallery is “extremely sorry” to lose Hall but that “we entirely understand and respect his decision.”

The 126-page report by retired Judge John Dyson, published Thursday, found the internal BBC investigation had covered up “deceitful behavior” by Bashir, who was little-known as a journalist when he interviewed Diana.

The BBC also has faced questions about why Bashir was rehired in 2016 as the broadcaster’s religious affairs correspondent.

Diana’s sons, Princes William and Harry, have excoriated the BBC since the report’s publication, saying there was a direct link between the 1995 interview and their mother’s death in a traffic accident two years later as she and a companion were being pursued by paparazzi.

The BBC commissioned the report after Diana’s brother, Charles

Spencer, complained that Bashir used false documents and other dishonest tactics to persuade Diana to grant the interview.

In the interview, Diana said her marriage to Prince Charles had failed because he was still in love with former lover Camilla Parker Bowles, whom Charles would go on to marry a decade later.

Diana, then 34, said she was devastated when she found out in 1986 — five years after her marriage — that Charles had renewed his relationship with Camilla. Diana said she was so depressed that she deliberately hurt herself in a desperate bid for help.

“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” Diana famously remarked.

The fallout from the report has raised serious doubts about the BBC’s integrity, while the British government has said it would review the rules governing the oversight of the editorially independent national broadcaster.

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NEW YORK: CNN is cutting ties with former Republican senator and current TV analyst Rick Santorum over disparaging comments he made about Native American culture.

On CNN, Santorum was a senior political commentator who was often tasked with giving the Republican point of view during campaign coverage. His parting ways with the network was confirmed Saturday by Alison Rudnick, vice president of HLN Communications and CNN Diversity and Inclusion.

He sparked controversy in an April 23 speech before the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization. Santorum said immigrants created a nation based on the Judeo-Christian ethic from a blank slate.

“We birthed a nation from nothing,” he said. “Yes, there were Native Americans, but there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.”

The comment prompted Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, to call him “an unhinged and embarrassing racist who disgraces CNN and any other media company that provides him a platform.”

“To correct the record, what European colonizers found in the Americas were thousands of complex, sophisticated, and sovereign tribal nations, each with millennia of distinct cultural, spiritual and technological development,” she wrote in a statement.

Sharp called on CNN to fire Santorum or potentially face a boycott from more than 500 tribal nations and its allies worldwide.

Santorum later said on Chris Cuomo’s CNN show that he “misspoke” in the sense that it wasn’t clear that he was speaking in the context of the founding of the United States government.

“People say I’m trying to dismiss what happened to the Native Americans,” he said. “Far from it. The way we treated Native Americans was horrific. It goes against every bone and everything I’ve ever fought for as a leader in the Congress.”

Santorum’s comments have garnered blowback before, especially his views on gay marriage and homosexuality. In 2003, he infuriated gay rights advocates by appearing to compare homosexuality to pedophilia and bestiality