No-one to blame, nothing to see, move on, says the BBC

The Graun trotted out the usual BBC line on their latest foul-up:

The BBC has received tens of thousands of complaints relating to Emily Maitlis’ Newsnight monologue on Dominic Cummings, both from opponents and supporters of the presenter’s comments....Many of the first wave of complaints were from people criticising Maitlis for stating at the start of Tuesday night’s programme that “Dominic Cummings broke the rules – the country can see that and it’s shocked the government cannot”.. [Inevitably] a second wave of complaints came from individuals who feel the corporation has given in to the government and are angry at BBC managers who ruled that Maitlis overstepped the mark and broke impartiality guidelines.

The actual statement from the Beeb is also a classic, written in terse little bullet-pointy things:

[Maitlis's intro] said that ‘the country’ was ‘shocked the government cannot see’ Dominic Cummings broke lockdown rules; that he ‘made those who struggled to keep the rules feel like fools’....

But there are some who do not share this opinion, nor think that the issue is a ‘scandal’ or the Prime Minister has displayed ‘blind loyalty’. ...

By presenting a matter of public and political debate as if the country was unanimous in its view, we consider Newsnight risked giving the perception that the BBC was taking sides - or that the introduction constituted the presenter’s opinions, rather than a summary of the journalism which would follow, which explored these issues rigorously and fairly and, crucially, with the supporting evidence. ...

This is not a question of apportioning blame to anyone.

I am not in a position to say whether this summary of the Maitlis intro is accurate, or whether the BBC has selected bits to answer as before. None of the actual complaints are summarised, nor quantified.

The best bit is the last statement, though. Of course the BBC can see no actual person to blame, because newsreaders, reporters, programme staff and regulators share a npb ideological mind-set. They genuinely can't see a problem either, because that mind set has no such problem on its agenda. BBCfolk just know what is true, and Maitlis is obviously quite right (she must be -- they recruited her). But she might have committed a technical offence of not 'balancing' with alternative views, ridiculous as they might be, and so she has not followed the guidelines perhaps as rigorously as she might.

Normally, a lofty disregard of such trivial and vulgar complaints would follow, but this time, some of the complainants seem to have been influential. Some seem to have got to Ofcom immediately. Hence Maitlis 'risked (did not actually produce) a (wholly wrong) perception that the BBC takes sides'. Of course it doesn't: it has guidelines for that sort of thing; it tells the obvious truth as it appears to them and all the people they talk to.

Minor offence, issue a general statement of policy, and move on.