BBC and Newsnight MacKean was a reporter at
BBC Hereford and Worcester before going on to present BBC
Breakfast News and becoming a
BBC News correspondent. She joined the BBC
Newsnight programme in 2000, going on to become a specialist on
Northern Ireland and covering the unfolding peace and political process, which included interviewing paramilitary figures from both the loyalist and republican sides, sometimes at personal risk. In a long-running series for
Newsnight, MacKean highlighted the plight of teenagers leaving the care system, leading to a government promise of action in 2010.
Jimmy Savile and Newsnight Newsnight launched an investigation into Jimmy Savile's paedophile activities immediately after his death on 29 October 2011. MacKean was the reporter and
Meirion Jones was the producer; MacKean was very unhappy when the report was not transmitted before Christmas 2011 and tributes to Savile were broadcast on the BBC. She alleged that her editor
Peter Rippon tried to "kill" the Savile story "by making impossible editorial demands". She told a
Panorama programme in October 2012: "All I can say is that it was an abrupt change in tone from, you know, one day 'excellent, let's prepare to get this thing on air' to 'hold on'." MacKean also claimed in an email to a friend that Peter Rippon said he was under pressure from his bosses: "PR [Peter Rippon] says if the bosses aren't happy ... [he] can't go to the wall on this one." The decision to cancel the
Newsnight investigation became the subject of the Pollard Inquiry, named after its head, former
Sky News executive
Nick Pollard. On 18 December 2012, Pollard reported that the "
Newsnight investigators were right. They found clear and compelling evidence that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile. The decision by their editor to drop the original investigation was clearly flawed and the way it was taken was wrong". He said
Newsnight could have broken the story a year before ITV's
Exposure. In a public statement afterwards, MacKean described the failure to run the story as a "breach in our duty to the women who trusted us to reveal that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile". However, the BBC has asserted that
Panorama found no evidence to suggest that Rippon was pressured from above to drop the report ahead of the Christmas tribute to Savile. MacKean took voluntary redundancy, while her producer Meirion Jones was sacked. "When the Savile scandal broke", she told
Nick Cohen of
The Observer in 2015, "the BBC tried to
smear my reputation. They said they had banned the film because Meirion and I had produced shoddy journalism. I stayed to fight them, but I knew they would make me leave in the end. Managers would look through me as if I wasn't there. I went because I knew I was never going to appear on screen again". The story of how MacKean was treated by the BBC was reported by
The Guardian in 2021. Later at the Festival, the then-Director General of the BBC,
Tony Hall, picked up MacKean's remarks and said "I think someone used the phrase 'officer class' and I think that's right. I understand the resentment and anger that is caused". Hall said he would "heal the appalling divide" between staff and senior managers.
Subsequent reports It was announced in May 2013 that MacKean had been hired for a "high-level investigation" for the
Dispatches programme on
Channel 4. MacKean's first broadcast investigation was
The Paedophile MP. How Cyril Smith Got Away With It concerning the activities of the
Liberal Party politician
Cyril Smith. The programme was transmitted on 12 September. MacKean made a series of programmes for
Dispatches on changes to Britain's welfare system, as well as the award-winning
Hunted and its follow-up
Hunted: Gay and Afraid. ==Personal life and death==