According to former executives, at least some of those articles were part of a packet of press clippings sent each morning to the network’s top executives. Mr. Thompson’s daily 9:15 a.m. conference call with his top executives often included discussions from the clippings file.

Whether through a series of near misses or a more deliberate avoidance, the executives failed to confront questions about Mr. Savile and the possibility that, in decades past, the BBC was somehow complicit in his behavior.

Beyond reverberating at the BBC, the broadcast last month of a documentary by a rival network led to a police investigation of hundreds of accusations that, primarily during the 1970s, Mr. Savile abused teenage girls and some boys at schools and hospitals where he performed charity work and, in some cases, on BBC premises.

Mr. Thompson, 55, said in an interview last week that when he eventually heard the accusations this fall he felt “that mixture of shock and sadness.”

Mr. Thompson, who as the BBC’s director general was both chief executive and editor in chief, partly attributes his lack of knowledge about the “Newsnight” inquiry to the BBC’s enormous size. In fact, its 23,000 employees provide news and entertainment across eight television channels, 50 radio stations, a Web site and a host of other outlets — all with their own chains of command.

But after he learned of the scuttled investigation late last December, he said he raised it with his news chiefs, who told him that the editor of “Newsnight” stopped it for journalistic reasons. “I wasn’t told any specific lines of inquiry and certainly not anything related to the BBC,” he said, adding that amid the flood of business, he was willing to be assured there was nothing to worry about.

“It didn’t occur to me that there was a contemporary corporate interest to defend,” Mr. Thompson said. “You can say it’s a lack of imagination.” But he pointed out that Mr. Savile’s heyday was decades ago — he retired in the mid-1990s — and that his association with him was watching him on television as a child.