Emily Maitlis has defended the BBC against accusations of bias, saying that people often think something is a conspiracy when it is a actually a “confluence of cock-ups”.

The debate about whose side the BBC is on, both politically and otherwise, gained traction during a particularly fractious general election campaign that saw ministers repeatedly grilled by presenters on Radio 4’s’ Today and other programmes.

“I’m not sure I buy the argument that the public is more mistrustful – the debate will always garner that kind of traction because anything the BBC does is always in the spotlight,” Maitlis, Newsnight’s chief presenter, told the Observer. “So often people read conspiracy into a thing when it’s really a confluence of cock-ups and the wrong button being pressed at the wrong time, or the guest you wanted gets into the wrong taxi and doesn’t show up.”

Maitlis’s intervention in the debate follows that of the BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, who last week defended the organisation against claims that its election coverage failed to remain impartial in a fast-changing media and political landscape.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘This was a man who had come to really get things off his chest’: Emily Maitlis on her interview with the Duke of York. Photograph: Mark Harrison/BBC

The BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, came under particular scrutiny, first when she uncritically posted a link to a racist, fear-mongering blog by the prime minister’s special adviser Dominic Cummings, and later when she was accused of peddling “fake news” by tweeting false claims that a Tory aide had been punched by a leftwing activist.

“I have enormous respect for Laura, She does an impossible job bloody brilliantly,” said Maitlis. “I just think there is a lesson for all of us in what we do with the stuff we’re told, how we double-check it and how we scrutinise what we’re told, even by people who seemingly should be trusted.”

She blames what she described as the “populist playbook” for exploiting the frenetic news cycle she has been up against in the last four years in particular. “It starts with denigrating experts so people don’t trust facts, then it destabilises institutions, then it works to get its message out in the media, so that’s what people cling to. And what can you do about any of that but know you are constantly pushing against that narrative?”

Maitlis began the year working on her book, Airhead, reflecting on the interviews that have made her career as one of the BBC’s highest-paid journalists: the meetings with presidents, prime ministers and the Dalai Lama. But it was her now infamous interview with Prince Andrew that thrust her into the spotlight this year.

Maitlis’s firm and unrelenting questioning of the Duke of York, under which he addressed allegations that he had sex with a teenager trafficked by his friend, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, forced him to withdraw from public life. The interview was widely hailed as one of the BBC’s triumphs of the year.

“My job wasn’t to elicit a certain type of response,” Maitlis said. “I didn’t go there thinking: ‘I will make you apologise, I’ll make you sorry and answer for this.’ That’s not what it was about. There were various ways he could have PR-ed it and didn’t. This was a man who had come to really get things off his chest after 10 years.”