Future of BBC's Newsnight under threat At the heart of our news offering has to be uncompromising investigative journalism, but you have to get it right. John Whittingdale, chairman of the culture and media select committee, said: "Newsnight has been very badly damaged by this, and maybe it will need to re-branded. But the BBC will need to continue to have a flagship news and current-affairs programme. Newsnight was first broadcast in January 1980. Peter Snow, one of the founding presenters, said the programme had suffered from repeated cutbacks. Newsnight is an absolutely vital part of the schedule. It's not Newsnight that is the problem, it is some of the people who have made terrible mistakes about fairly isolated bits of journalism. It should have the resources and the people of quality to produce proper journalism. It seems to me extraordinary that a programme like Newsnight is under-resourced while these ludicrous, huge, grossly inflated managerial figures pay themselves six-figure salaries. The Newsnight investigation, which was broadcast on November 2, was produced with the Bureau for Investigative Journalism. The programme made several significant errors. According to Steve Messham, the sex-abuse victim who made the allegations, reporters failed to show him a photograph of McAlpine to confirm he was talking about the right man. The programme also failed to contact McAlpine and give him a right to reply, and had no other named witnesses to corroborate the claims. The programme also relied on Mr Messham as the source for the allegations, despite the fact that a public inquiry had found him to be an "unreliable witness." Mr Messham was 14 when he was taken into care at Bersham Hall home in Wrexham, and a few months later was taken to the notorious Bryn Estyn home, where he was repeatedly abused. The Waterhouse public inquiry into abuse in north Wales children's homes, which was published in 2000, found that sexual abuse had left Mr Messham "severely damaged psychologically" and that his evidence was contradictory. He apologised after trying to attack the barrister during the inquiry. Last week he apologised again, offering his "sincere and humble apologies" to Lord McAlpine, saying it was a case of mistaken identity.