The harshest lessons of Hutton are for the BBC

The BBC's response to the Gilligan story was as clumsily incompetent as the original story

One of the more alarming lessons emerging from the Hutton inquiry is that raging news stories, seemingly of profound significance, are almost instantly forgettable.

This can be the only explanation for the shocked reaction in most of the media to the extracts from Alastair Campbell's diaries. They reveal Mr Campbell's obsession last July with the BBC's story about the "sexed up" weapons. Conveniently most of the media has forgotten its obsession with the story.

The debate about the accuracy of the BBC story was screaming on the front pages with the BBC defending every word of its endless reports based on a "senior intelligence source". Most newspapers had taken the view that the BBC was wholly in the right and that Mr Campbell was affecting anger to divert attention from other stories.

No wonder Mr Campbell was worked up. Memories are short. Let us remember where we were at the beginning of July before David Kelly apparently committed suicide. The BBC was adamant that, according to its source, the dossier had been sexed up against the wishes of senior intelligence officials and that one piece of intelligence was inserted even though the Government knew it to be wrong. The corporation denied that its source was Dr Kelly and continued to insist that the story was based on information from a "senior intelligence source". One BBC executive briefed a colleague of mine that the source was so good it would take his breath away if he knew the identity. My colleague, like many others in the media, assumed that the source must be on the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).

Presumably, without Dr Kelly's apparent suicide this is where the story would have ended, with the BBC sticking to its guns and convincing most of the outside world that it had produced a sensational scoop. Only as a result of Dr Kelly's death do we know that the source was not a senior intelligence figure, the assertion by Andrew Gilligan that the Government inserted information knowing it to be false was a "slip of the tongue" and that the chairman of the JIC was content with the preparation of the dossier.

There have been broadly two reactions to the conduct of the BBC. The liberal newspapers have rushed to its defence, more or less accusing any critic of aiming to destroy the corporation. The right-wing newspapers have leapt in by accusing the BBC of being biased to the left, a perverse reaction given that the current row is with a Labour government (but proof that a row with Labour was never going to mollify these newspapers as some of the BBC's more insecure managers had hoped).

The Daily Telegraph's Beebwatch is the most absurd manifestation of the right-wing response, with its increasingly desperate examples of BBC bias. But the reaction of the Beeb's supporters is equally misguided: the BBC is under threat so we must stand by it in its hour of need - as if inefficiencies and incompetence in any public service should not be acknowledged or addressed in case it results in their abolition.

I take the opposite view, that public services have a better chance of thriving if their shortcomings are exposed and seen to be addressed. This applies to the running of hospitals, schools and universities as much as the BBC.

In the BBC's case it would be quite wrong to let Mr Gilligan hang, ban staff from writing for newspapers and assume that was more or less the end of the matter. The BBC's response to the Gilligan story was as clumsily incompetent as the original broadcastand the subsequent Mail on Sunday article. To take one of many examples, the crisis could have been over within days if the BBC had acknowledged the errors in Mr Gilligan's story while fiercely defending itself against Mr Campbell's more sweeping and totally unjustified allegation that it was "anti-war". Did any BBC manager suggest such an approach?

Lord Hutton confirms that the BBC managerial structure is designed inadvertently or otherwise to ensure that it is hard to pinpoint who is responsible for what. The editor of the Today programme is seemingly so marginal that he was not called to the Hutton inquiry, a figure portrayed as writing contradictory e-mails, one to Mr Gilligan praising him for his story, another to a senior manager expressing alarm at the "flawed reporting" while gloating in a New Statesman article that Greg Dyke had stood up to Mr Campbell.

Mr Dyke is the editor-in-chief, but cannot be responsible for every story in such a vast organisation and in this case did not read a transcript of the report until after he had defended it. Richard Sambrook, the director of news, took the main public role, but I suspect he did not know much about the story before it was broadcast, and probably knew little about the wayToday operated on a daily basis.

The BBC needs a more streamlined management, with a smaller number of managers encouraging the corporation's strengths for reporting and analysing news, live interviews and - yes - breaking accurate stories.

None of this matters as much as why Britain went to war, but it matters quite a lot. We pay these people's salaries. We need to know whether they are earning their money. The BBC is a life enhancing institution, but sometimes it needs saving from itself.

s.richards@independent.co.uk