Mark Thompson and BBC Missed Red Flags in Savile Scandal LONDON - Last March, Mark Thompson addressed the Royal Television Society and took proud stock of his time leading the BBC, Britain's publicly financed media behemoth that is both treasure and target. He had successfully navigated eight years of political wrangling, the digital revolution, controversies over cost-cutting and his own pay, not to mention some cringe-making televised antics of BBC hosts. Anticipating coverage of the London Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee over the summer as the crowning jewel of his tenure, he recounted the BBC's considerable achievements on his watch and declared: "Trust in the BBC is also at an all-time high." He explained why. "When things go wrong at the BBC, the public can hear us admit it and can see us striving to put things right," he said, adding, "the modern BBC does everything possible to report on itself objectively." Eight months later, trust in the BBC has plummeted because of a scandal set off in part by the network's decision to halt a reporting project on decades-old accusations of child sexual abuse against Jimmy Savile, the network's longtime host of children's and pop music shows. Controversy over the canceled investigation was already brewing when Mr. Thompson addressed the television society. It fully erupted in early October, just after he left and began preparing for his new job as president and chief executive of The New York Times Company. The events have cast a shadow over his tenure at the BBC and have forced his new boss, the Times publisher and board chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., to defend him even before he starts work on Nov. 12. Mr. Thompson has said he knew nothing of the Savile investigation before it was canceled by the editor of the BBC's "Newsnight" program. As for what he knew afterward, his statements have evolved: He first said he was unaware of the investigation, but then acknowledged he was subsequently told of its cancellation by a reporter at a cocktail party. He said while he "may have formed an impression" about possible areas of a Savile investigation, including his charity work, he was unaware of child-sexual-abuse accusations. Interviews with former BBC executives and officials here in London show that in the months after the investigation was canceled, Mr. Thompson and his top executives repeatedly missed opportunities to pursue a fuller picture of the "Newsnight" reporting, the fate of the program and, perhaps, of Mr. Savile. In the two months after the inquiry's cancellation, seven reports appeared in the British press about the scuttled investigation and the accusations against the longhaired, cigar-chomping Mr. Savile, who died last year at age 84. The headline in The Daily Mail Online read: "BBC axes exposé into Jimmy Savile teen sex allegations." According to former executives, at least some of those articles were part of a packet of press clippings sent each morning to the network's top executives. Mr. Thompson's daily 9:15 a.m. conference call with his top executives often included discussions from the clippings file. Whether through a series of near misses or a more deliberate avoidance, the executives failed to confront questions about Mr. Savile and the possibility that, in decades past, the BBC was somehow complicit in his behavior. Beyond reverberating at the BBC, the broadcast last month of a documentary by a rival network led to a police investigation of hundreds of accusations that, primarily during the 1970s, Mr. Savile abused teenage girls and some boys at schools and hospitals where he performed charity work and, in some cases, on BBC premises. Mr. Thompson, 55, said in an interview last week that when he eventually heard the accusations this fall he felt "that mixture of shock and sadness." Mr. Thompson, who as the BBC's director general was both chief executive and editor in chief, partly attributes his lack of knowledge about the "Newsnight" inquiry to the BBC's enormous size. In fact, its 23,000 employees provide news and entertainment across eight television channels, 50 radio stations, a Web site and a host of other outlets - all with their own chains of command. But after he learned of the scuttled investigation late last December, he said he raised it with his news chiefs, who told him that the editor of "Newsnight" stopped it for journalistic reasons. "I wasn't told any specific lines of inquiry and certainly not anything related to the BBC," he said, adding that amid the flood of business, he was willing to be assured there was nothing to worry about. "It didn't occur to me that there was a contemporary corporate interest to defend," Mr. Thompson said. You can say it's a lack of imagination. But he pointed out that Mr. Savile's heyday was decades ago - he retired in the mid-1990s - and that his association with him was watching him on television as a child. Elevated Amid Scandal Mr. Thompson came to the top BBC job by way of scandal. The previous director general resigned in 2004, after a controversy over a BBC report concerning accusations that British authorities had "sexed up" intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Thompson was a natural choice as successor, having spent most of his career rising through the BBC ranks after arriving from Oxford as part of a highly selective trainee program. "He was one of the Brahmin class at the BBC that they usually got from Oxford and Cambridge," said Steve Hewlett, a former BBC journalist who worked with Mr. Thompson. Christine Haughney contributed reporting from New York and Lark Turner contributed research from London.