On the record

At the end of January, I highlighted a BBC response to an FOI inquiry, which asserted it would take more than four days to track down emails to and from Mark Thompson, from before January 2009, because of the process required to examine the archive.  This was interesting then (and now) because of various searches going on in news organisations to demonstrate (or not) clean hands in covering various stories. Famously, in News International's case, emails which once were lost were later found.  As the Leveson inquiry commenced, Mark Thompson ordered an internal review of the BBC record, and announced there was  "no rumour, whisper or suggestion" of phone-hacking by staff in January.

John Walker started this line of inquiry into the BBC's email archive in December last year; he followed up the January response on February 4, and it has taken the BBC two months, rather than the specified 20 working days, to come up with a longer version of the same response.

This still puzzles me. If it's so hard to find Mark Thompson's emails from before 2009, why was it so easy to clear 9,000 journalists of possible misbehaviour ?  Or didn't they look at emails ? Or only after 2009 ?