More on the BBC meltdown:

To cut a very long story short -- the Hutton Report runs to 337 pages, even without the appended evidence -- Dr. Kelly gave an illicit interview to a BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan, last spring. Mr. Gilligan then claimed in a broadcast that Tony Blair had, through his then-press secretary, Alastair Campbell, knowingly inserted false evidence into a dossier on the existence of WMDs in Iraq. When asked by his BBC bosses for his source for such an astonishing claim, he named the scientist.

Not only did Lord Hutton find that the allegations were "unfounded," he concluded that there was no evidence that Dr. Kelly had even said such things in the first place to Mr. Gilligan. But in the end Mr. Gilligan's shoddy conduct is a side issue. The real problem is the institution of the BBC itself.

The report lacerates the BBC for broadcasting such a grave allegation and neither properly checking it before broadcast nor then, after the government had strenuously denied it, taking proper steps to inquire into its truth. When Alastair Campbell responded with a point by point denial, the BBC reacted with disdain, as though it were above criticism and could not soil itself by dealing with mere political functionaries. According to Lord Hutton, "the editorial system which the BBC permitted was defective in that Mr. Gilligan was allowed to broadcast his report at 6:07 a.m. without editors having seen a script of what he was going to say and having considered whether it should be approved."

Tony Blair came out of a potentially brutal week looking pretty good. The BBC on the other hand...