At the end of a week of sensational resignations and apologies at the BBC, there was a great deal of spleen vented in the direction of Lord Hutton who had failed, as the press saw it, to hang the noose around the government's neck.

"The longer I think about Hutton, the angrier I get," raged Max Hastings in the Guardian.

"It is hard to dissent from his conclusions about the BBC's failures. Yet the damage done by his grotesquely lopsided report vastly outweighs the gravity of the offence."

"I wish Lord Hutton had looked at the relationship through both ends of the telescope. He would then have produced a more balanced and credible report," said The Independent.

Hutton largely exonerated Blair and his government for their actions in the run up to Kelly's suicide in July last year after he was found to be the source of a BBC report that a dossier on Iraqi weaponry had been "sexed up".

BBC director general Greg Dyke and the chairman of its board of governors, Gavyn Davies, stood down after the corporation copped most of the flak over the Kelly affair for its "defective" editorial management.

Andrew Gilligan, the journalist whose report was found to be flawed, became the latest casualty when he resigned Friday, admitting errors but saying the BBC had been the victim of a "grave injustice."

BBC staff, who earlier in the week had protested outside the news giant's headquarters in central London, clubbed together to place an advert in The Daily Telegraph expressing their "dismay" at Dyke's departure.

Underneath the headline, "The Independence of the BBC", the petition said:

"Greg Dyke stood for brave, independent and rigorous BBC journalism that was fearless in its search for the truth."

"We are dismayed by Greg's departure, but we are determined to maintain his achievements and his vision for an independent organisation that serves the public above all else."

A rash of opinion polls published in the wake of Hutton's report show that the BBC is still more trusted than the government.

"Blair hopes desperately that Lord Hutton's judgement will enable him to win back the public's trust," said The Independent.

"My hunch is that he will be disappointed, and that -- on the question of trust -- the people already have reached their judgement on him," the newspaper added.

Blair's Labour party showed a one percent increase in the polls to 36, still three points behind the opposition Conservatives, after the publication of the report, according to a YouGov poll published Saturday in The Daily Telegraph.

"What's the point of Tony Blair?" asked the Financial Times, complaining that mere survival is not enough for a prime minister with ambitions to make a mark on history.

The aftermath of the Hutton report had been a public relations fiasco for the BBC, the FT said and wondered where the world's best-known and largest public broadcaster would go from here.

"The seismic shock from Lord Hutton and the double execution at the top could not have come at a worse moment," it said.

"The corporation is effectively rudderless; morale is shot," said one unnamed senior executive quoted in the newspaper.

But, in an interview with the newspaper, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell moved to reassure the BBC about its future funding.

Jowell told the FT that it was "somewhere between unlikely and improbable" that the licence fee -- obtained from the British public by way of a tax on TV sets -- would be replaced by other sources of funding.