A crisis, yes. But let’s not all shoot the BBC.

I have just returned from two hours of broadcasting on the BBC World Service. It is an odd time to be inside the BBC, not least because reporters from the organisation itself, as well as its rivals, are standing outside the studio doing pieces to camera about what is going on inside. Anyhow – having dealt with some web and print-press troubles in my last post, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on the BBC’s troubles.

1) The first is that the Newsnight McAlpine story is devastating. How any news organisation, let alone the publicly-funded (and compared to its commercial rivals extremely well-funded) BBC could have run such an amateurishly flawed piece of investigative journalism is appalling. Among other things the internal investigation must turn up how Newsnight managed to turn a crisis over not running one story which appears to have foundations, into running another story on a similar issue which fell apart within hours. Did anyone in the BBC think the McAlpine story was a fast-track exoneration for the mistakes over Savile? If so, who?

2) In all of this a real story is being missed. Just as the Today Programme / David Kelly affair ended up being about an internal media issue, so this Savile / Newsnight business looks set to continue being about media malfeasance rather than the more important issue of overlooked child abuse.

3) The media storm. As Rod mentioned a few weeks back, all media stories about the media reach a point where they disappear up their own fundament. The nadir in this case probably came the other week when BBC reporters door-stepped other BBC reporters on their way into work at, er, the BBC. I think BBC reporters reporting on the BBC from outside their own offices in the BBC runs that a close second.