Can you hold the current corporation guilty for not acting on rumours of what a dead guy did while they were still at school?

I understand that the allegation is more to do with the Newsnight report they chose not to show but, well, haven't we just been through a phone hacking scandal? Whilst every other supposed 'news' organisation is allowed to lie, cheat, steal and decimate lives, the BBC isn't allowed to sit on a report that either might be not yet fully confirmed or might damage them? Maybe I'm cynical, having grown up in a world where organisations and those operating within them (along with politicians and, indeed, consumers) put their own well-being above anything else to the point they're happy to strip mine the world, culture and all conceivable human assets to increase profit by a couple of pence in the short term. Newsnight didn't even actually name McAlpine.

For anyone wondering why they should still pay their licence fee at this point, the true answer has nothing to do with tradition and people in glasses wanting to watch highbrow jolly-hockeysticks programming. It showed the tabloids for what they are, it even managed to blow The News of the World out of the water. Without the BBC, even if the inquiry had taken place, we wouldn't have known about it