If Maureen Dowd had guts, then she would demand the resignation of her boss, Mark Thompson, who is the president and CEO of the New York Times.
In one of her recent columns, Dowd rails against the canonization of Pope John Paul II, saying, “he presided over the Catholic Church during nearly three decades of a gruesome pedophilia scandal and grotesque cover-up.”
Dowd ought to get her facts straight: there was no pedophilia scandal—less than five percent of molesting priests were pedophiles—it was homosexuals who accounted for 81 percent of the sexual abuse cases. The facts are incontrovertible. So it’s time she stopped her cover-up.
More important, Thompson worked at the BBC for decades, and claimed to know nothing about the BBC’s biggest child molestation case in its history: Jimmy Savile was a true pedophile, raping hundreds of children. Both Savile and Thompson worked at the BBC for decades; Thompson was Director General from 2004-2012. And unlike John Paul II, we have proof that Thompson lied: after Savile died in October 2011, a “Newsnight” story exposing his conduct was spiked, and Thompson said he knew nothing about it. In fact, he was told about the cover-up at a Christmas party that year. On top of that, he told his BBC lawyers in September 2012 to write a letter to The Sunday Times threatening to sue if they ran a letter implicating him in the Savile matter. His only concern was to land a plum job at the New York Times (he was set to join the Times on November 12, but events forced him to wait).
According to Dowd, the pope is supposed to know exactly what is going on in an organization that consists of 1.2 billion, but somehow we are supposed to believe that Thompson knew nothing about Savile when he presided over an organization of 23,000. Everyone else seemed to know about Savile’s rapes, so why didn’t Thompson?
It’s time Maureen Dowd showed some guts and demanded that Mark Thompson resign.
