Well, yes… but when the sentence does avoid mentioning the agent responsible, it’s generally done in the passive voice.
“The gun was discharged.”
“The suspect was shot.”
“The photograph was doctored.”
No where did I say that the passive voice was always bad.
In this case, the school is explicitly denying responsibility, but the construction makes it sound like it just “happened.” One of those blameless things. Who could fault the school when these things just happen?
We’re supposed to infer that the website operator or someone else did it, but they’re explicitly not assigning responsibility to any person. This in and of itself is odd – would you really not man the phones and get to the bottom of this ASAP if you were the school? Surely the chain between school and this appearing on the web could only consist of 2-3 people?
