Journalist whose Jimmy Savile probe was shelved by the BBC

Born: November 30, 1964;

Died: August 18, 2017

LIZ MacKean, who has died aged 52 after suffering a stroke, was among the most talented and respected Scottish-educated reporters and presenters ever to make their mark on UK national TV at the highest level.

She was best-known as a reporter on BBC 2's Newsnight programme. To Newsnight's discerning audience, and not least to fellow journalists, she became something of a moral icon when she quit the show after her BBC bosses shelved her exclusive breakthrough report on Jimmy Savile's lifelong paedophilia.

Ms MacKean had quietly investigated Savile for a long time before he died on October 29, 2011, but no-one at the BBC – or anywhere in the media for that matter – wanted to touch it. Savile was, after all, a "national treasure." Or so we were led to believe.

After his death, Ms MacKean and her producer Meirion Jones upped their research and uncovered women who said they had been sexually abused by the DJ when they were minors. They had kept quiet until his death, they said, because they were sure their word would mean nothing against "a Sir and a national treasure."

Six weeks after Savile's death, Ms MacKean and Mr Jones were about to blow Savile's reputation away. Their programme on his paedophilia was billed to be shown on the BBC on December 7, 2011, six weeks after his death.

But no. The programme was pulled by Ms MacKean's Newsnight bosses, specifically the editor Peter Rippon, at the last minute. Sir Jimmy's reputation so soon after his death would upset too many people, they reckoned. Besides, the BBC still had several Savile tribute programmes to run, including a Christmas special. Through her human approach, Ms MacKean had got many of Savile's victims to talk for the first time. They had trusted her to tell their story. And she had. But she and they had been silenced by the BBC. She was devastated on the victims' behalf but would later say, with typical discretion and understatement: "The decision not to run it was seriously flawed."

And, of course, Savile's horrendous abuse emerged, in dribs and drabs, through the following year – 2012 – until it became clear that he was the polar opposite of a national treasure, indeed a national disgrace.

Ms MacKean had to sit by and watch while her competition, notably ITN, picked up her pieces, relying heavily on her research, and ran "exposure" programmes about the real Jimmy Savile. A report into why the BBC ditched her original programme – the Pollard Inquiry headed by former Sky News executive Nick Pollard – was published no less than a year after Ms MacKean had completed her shelved programme. The Pollard Inquiry found that Ms MacKean and her producer Mr Jones had been right about Mr Savile being a paedophile and that keeping their report off the air had been wrong.

Ms MacKean had been vindicated by the Pollard Inquiry but still felt that she was being treated as something of a pariah within the BBC. She said the BBC's censorship was "a breach in our duty to the women who trusted us to reveal that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile." She later took "voluntary redundancy" – a euphemism for quit in disgust.

"The BBC tried to smear my reputation," she said. "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."

Ms MacKean and Mr Jones were belatedly given the Scoop of the Year award by the London Press Club for first uncovering Savile's paedophilia and lifetime of lies. In 2014, having gone freelance for the Channel 4 investigative series Dispatches, she was named Journalist of the Decade by the Stonewall charity for her work exposing violations of the rights of the LGBT community from Russia to the United States.

Elizabeth Mary MacKean was born on November 30, 1064, in Hampshire  but grew up in  Moray. Aged eight, she became one of the firsts girls admitted to Gordonstoun, near Elgin, attended by royals including the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew.

As one of the first new girls on the block at Gordonstoun, Liz MacKean found herself as a co-pupil of Charles' wee brother Edward, who had for some reason found himself as head boy, just like his father and elder brothers before him. At the school, Ms MacKean played female lead opposite Edward in the play Black Comedy written by Peter Shaffer. There was talk of a school romance between Ms MacKean and the Prince but she never commented on the rumours.

She later studied at the University of Manchester before getting her first job as a radio reporter at BBC Hereford and Worcester. Her voice, charm and gentle inquisitiveness helped move her over to TV as a presenter of BBC1's Breakfast News and the fact that her face and demeanour were clearly telegenic saw her hired by Newsnight. She was Newsnight's "man" in Northern Ireland towards the end of The Troubles and she covered the unfolding peace process, interviewing politicians, IRA leaders and protestant para-military figures, often at considerable risk to her safety.

In 2009, for Newsnight, she went to Africa's Côte d'Ivoire (the Ivory Coast) to report on a toxic dumping scandal and her work won her, jointly, the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting, for "exposing how a powerful offshore oil trader tried to cover up the poisoning of 30,000 West Africans."

Speaking at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013, she criticised excessive severance payments to senior BBC officials. She said an "officer class" had been created which was treating the BBC as a "get-rich quick scheme" for themselves and their colleagues.

For journalists like me, Liz MacKean was an inspiration and a gem. She is survived by her wife Donna, their  children Alex and Will, her mum and dad, and her sisters Mags, Jane and Sal.

PHIL DAVISON