Liz MacKean

She and colleague Meirion Jones later won a London Press Club Scoop of the Year award for their work on the story.

MacKean went freelance after leaving the BBC, and reported on the Cyril Smith case for Channel 4's Dispatches series in September 2013.

[4] She was educated at Gordonstoun, a boarding independent school near the village of Duffus in north-east Scotland;[citation needed] she then attended the University of Manchester.

[7][8] 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.

[6] In 2009, she went to Côte d'Ivoire for the programme to report on the toxic dumping scandal involving the independent oil company Trafigura.

In 2010, MacKean and five others shared the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting for their story "Trafigura's Toxic Waste Dump", which "exposed how a powerful offshore oil trader tried to cover up the poisoning of 30,000 West Africans".

[9] 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.

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.

[18] 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.