THE BBC’S director-general was rightly given a hard time by the Commons culture committee yesterday.

George Entwistle was subjected to two hours of hostile questioning over the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal and looked distinctly uncomfortable throughout.

The BBC is an enviable institution, with a proud history, but something has clearly gone badly wrong in the management of the concerns surrounding Savile.

Why has it taken so long for those concerns to surface? And why weren’t more questions asked by an organisation which has a publicly-funded duty to ask questions which are in the public interest?

Mr Entwistle himself stands accused of not showing greater curiosity about why a Newsnight investigation was dropped, particularly in view of the fact that, as the then “Director of Vision”, he was preparing a tributes piece to Savile at the time.

As the head of the BBC, it is right that Mr Entwistle is strongly challenged, but it seems odd that the culture committee did not similarly grill the man who dropped the Newsnight investigation, Peter Rippon.

An independent inquiry, led by former Sky head of news Nick Pollard, is now tasked with getting to the bottom of the Newsnight decision.

But while it is right to put the BBC on the rack, we should also not lose sight of the fact that, as this week’s Panorama programme underlined, it is an organisation prepared to stick the knife into itself.

What other news organisation would do that so openly in the face of such damaging criticism?

The BBC clearly has serious questions to answer over Jimmy Savile, but let us also give it credit for airing its failings so forcefully.