Several lessons to learn from the BBC Newsnight fiasco, none of them new.
The biggest is that there is no industry on earth which has the capacity to gaze at its own navel better than the media. It sensationalises the sensational and usually draws a grotesquely self-important conclusion. Meanwhile, a child abuse scandal remains unresolved.
It is a story of elephantine management structures which, every now and then, will stumble in a big way. Happens in all big organisations, but in the BBC it's always going to be a very public fail. It doesn't mean the BBC is shot. It does mean it needs some robustly savvy people at senior levels who aren't afraid of speaking out or sounding alarm bells. That's unusual in any bureaucracy, where self-preservation usually reigns, and the higher the salary the rarer it gets. Poor old George Entwistle got cut off from reality.
It is a story, too, of over-excited investigative journalism which wasn't subject to enough wise and sceptical cross-examination. One of the most telling incidents in this sorry episode was an encounter between Iain Overton, of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Michael Crick, ex-political editor of Newsnight. The BOIJ did the legwork in the Newsnight probe into a child abuse scandal in North Wales and Overton told Crick all about it on the eve of transmission when they met at a social bash. Crick was already familiar with the story, which had been sifted over before. A journalist who has been around a bit, he also knew there was more to it than met the eye. After Overton breathlessly tweeted that a former Tory politician was about to be unmasked as a serial abuser, Crick tweeted a warning.
It's a story of holier than thou. In the media, the BBC is known as a self-regarding organisation which tends to look down on the little people in other TV organisations and newspapers. There was more than a hint of relish in its coverage of the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, which focused on the failings of national newspapers (some of whom had been ceaseless critics of the BBC). Unsurprisingly, newspapers are now devoting quite a few column inches to serial blundering at the BBC. La vengeance se mange tres-bien froide, you might say.
It's another illustration of social media's ability to run with a snippet of information and turn it into something poisonously inaccurate. Some of the speculation was clearly political, and people who should have known better (Tom Watson MP, Commons' Speaker's wife Sally Bercow, and Guardian columnist George Monbiot) should hang their heads in shame. Even now, some of the reaction is over-heated and partisan.
In July and August, the BBC demonstrated that it can be the best broadcasting organisation on earth, with peerless coverage of the Olympics. But it isn't peerless all of the time - beneath professional production, some of its routine programming on TV and radio is ploddingly unoriginal and box-tickingly tedious, and there's the sense sometimes that its multi-channel breadth is diluting standout quality.
It doesn't tune in well to some aspects of life, pigeonholing the middle class and the affluent. Despite everything Robert Peston and Stephanie Flanders have done, it still struggles to understand the business mindset beyond the political-corporate prism. Where there should be insights into owner-managers and family firms, we have the entrepreneur as entertainer (Dragons Den and The Apprentice) or reports about workers, bosses, unions and factories which sound like they're straight out of the seventies. This doesn't reflect economic or business reality.
It is prone to corporate hubris, too. Its decision to spend an absolute fortune creating a trophy presence in Salford while abandoning a production base in Birmingham (the UK's second city) was boom-era grandstanding. This money could have achieved so much more if it had been invested in people.
The BBC's Tower of Babel bureaucracy lets it down time and again. Yet it has been the birthplace and the nurturer of immense creative talent. It is a national and international centre of media excellence, a cultural beacon. Its journalism usually sets a consistently high standard.
If these blunders serve any purpose, it will be to make sure that - whatever the competitive pressures, whatever the management nonsenses - nothing is broadcast unless it meets those standards.
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