New BBC chief: It's time to move on

LONDON - The newly appointed chairman of the British Broadcasting Corp. told employees Friday that it was time to move beyond a period of "private anguish" after a bruising row with the government over its intelligence on Iraq.

"My job is to tell everybody at the BBC, it's going to be fine," said Michael Grade, whose appointment was announced earlier in the day.

Grade, 61, former head of Britain's independent Channel 4 network and a onetime BBC executive, becomes chairman May 17.

The previous chairman, Gavyn Davies, resigned after a senior judge harshly criticized the BBC's performance in broadcasting and then defending a report claiming the government exaggerated evidence about Iraqi weapons.

The report by appeals judge Lord Hutton also led to the resignation of BBC Director-General Greg Dyke, whose successor Grade will help to choose.

Grade was a BBC executive during the 1980s and said his background in broadcasting - unusual for a chairman of the BBC's board of governors - should give heart to demoralized staff.

"The BBC has been through a battering," Grade said at a news conference, declining to say what he thought of the judge's conclusions. "It's been a period of private anguish. . . . It's over now, we've got to put it behind us."

The fight between the BBC and the government culminated in the suicide of weapons scientist David Kelly, who had been publicly identified as the source of reporter Andrew Gilligan's story. Gilligan resigned after Hutton's report.

Grade led Channel 4 from 1988 until 1997. Some of the graphic programming he introduced there drew criticism, and one newspaper columnist dubbed him the country's "pornographer-in-chief."

But ratings rose and Grade won praise for his outspokenness and charismatic leadership.

He spent several years at the BBC in the 1980s, serving as controller of its flagship BBC1 station.

More recently, he has headed Pinewood-Shepperton Limited, which owns two major film studios, and Camelot, which operates Britain's national lottery.

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