George Entwistle seemed rather mild-mannered at his first appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee this morning. But after listening to him for two hours, MPs were starting to suggest that the BBC director general was making a quietly savage attack on one of his juniors. It will be astonishing if, after Entwistle’s evidence, Newsnight editor Peter Rippon is not called before the committee.
Entwistle told the committee that he had asked Rippon to ‘step aside because of my disappointment at the inaccuracies in the blog… he hasn’t stepped aside to prepare or the Pollard review, he’s stepped aside because of it’. He also made clear that he was disappointed because he relied on ‘the editor of a programme having a full grip and understanding of the investigation they were in charge of, and in this case it doesn’t seem to have been happening’ and that he ‘absolutely would have expected the editor of a programme to have given a definitive and factually accurate account of what happened on that programme’.
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