Despite the BBC's execrable post-Savile performance, here's proof it can still get it right (hat-tip: SDG)

I was so angry about the BBC's pitiful, piffling, cowardly response to the Pollard an Ken MacQuarrie reports that I couldn't bring myself to write about it yesterday. The News Department makes a series of grotesque, unforgivable blunders, and, despite that, the head of the department manages to hold onto her job - and nobody at all gets fired. Not one single person carries the can.

How is this even possible?

Well, it's the EU/British Establishment way, I suppose: once you're in, you're in for life - unless you do a bad interview on the Today Programme, of course.

Not surprising, given that the Chairman of the BBC Trust is arch-Europhile and key member of the Great and the Good - puffy-faced, silly-haired Thatcher-killer, Chris  Patten. As far as I'm concerned, he should be instantly dismissed from his job, which he has performed with cosmic ineptness. Patten oversaw this shambles, and, when given the opportunity to chnage the culture of the BBC by defenestrating the people whose incompetence had made it a laughing-stock, he whimped out, and - inevitably - got nastywith real journalists who had  the temerity to penetrate the bubble of bland public sector smugness he inhabits:

Not much noblesse oblige about that petulant performance, my Lord.

This was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change the culture and attitudes prevailing inside the BBC: it was a racing certainty that with this plump old berk in charge, that was never in danger of happening.

It's always been assumed that the BBC's main purpose is to present the nation with accurate, unbiased television news. Given that it has proved itself incapable of doing this, perhaps it's time to ditch news altogether, and leave it to the professionals at Sky and ITV.