When Phillip Schofield ambushed David Cameron on This Morning last Thursday, it seemed unlikely that anything would surpass it as that week's nadir in broadcasting. It was rightly derided for what it was - a futile and ill-judged set-piece, which would do nothing to further a very serious story.
Yet it was wrongly characterised by some as a terrible example of broadcast journalism. What happened on This Morning was not broadcast journalism - it was an entertainment programme doing something inappropriate, dissonant and for which it was not remotely equipped. It also probably caused consternation in the entirely separate ITV News division, whose own brand risked being unfairly tainted by association in the very week that its output was the focus of a promotional campaign to highlight its strongest line-up of news and current affairs programmes in years.
Phillip Schofield - professional and genuine a broadcaster though he is - is not a journalist. That is not to say broadcast journalists exhibit perfect judgement in these matters (remember Andrew Marr's rumour-fuelled line of questioning about Gordon Brown's supposed addiction to painkillers?), but they generally adopt the right approach when it matters most. Leaving journalism to the journalists - what could possibly go wrong in that scenario?
Twenty-four hours later and the BBC is littered with the fallout from the actions of some of the most experienced journalists in the broadcast business. There is no doubting the magnitude of this latest crisis for the Corporation and the more that emerges, the less that seems to have been done to ensure that this most sensitive of stories was journalistically sound. Yet in the froth of immediate analysis, it is easy to weave a thread which suggests that the BBC's biggest crime is the bald fact that the story was untrue.
Clearly, no self-respecting journalist or serious news organisation wants to run a false story, even one which has been told in good faith. That is why all reasonable steps should be taken to stand a story up. In the majority of cases, such action is sufficient to ensure that any piece which makes it to air is wholly correct. However, journalistic integrity is not a guarantee of one hundred percent accuracy. Journalism is not a perfect science, investigative journalism even less so.
In this instance, it was not merely the fact that the story was wrong - but rather why it was wrong. Newsnight could have justified a similar, anonymised piece, had its journalistic processes been more rigorous. The emergence of Lord McAlpine's name was the result of social media playing its usual role of rumour-monger-in-chief and (once again) coming to the wrong conclusion. It was, of course, not helped by loose lips at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, whose collaborative work with the BBC and ITN this blog has previously welcomed. However, traditional media cannot be bound by how the on-line world responds to their journalism, provided that journalism is credible in the first place.
Ultimately, broadcasters must retain both the right and the nerve to air contentious investigative reports. Not so much "publish and be damned" as "publish and make sure you're not damned". The fine tradition of investigative broadcast journalism has just about managed to fend off the threat to its survival from commercial and financial pressures; it would be a bitter irony, if it were now defeated by its own timidity in the wake of the current debacle.
The media in general (and, sometimes it seems, the BBC itself) love nothing more than a crisis at the BBC. This has been a time of tumult, but is it really any worse than the near decade-old scandal over Radio 4's claims of a "sexed-up dossier" before the Iraq war? Then we lost a Director General, a Chairman and, more importantly, the source of the story took his own life.
Those who say Newsnight is finished either seem to think the programme should re-emerge in another form (through a superficial rebranding) or that the BBC should concentrate all its investigative efforts into Panorama. Either way, the loss of Newsnight would be a loss indeed. The programme's daily mix of topical debate and longer-form pieces is of such value that it should be allowed to weather this damaging storm.
A worrying footnote to this affair is the polling evidence produced by the media commentator Steve Hewlett on Newsnight's mea culpa edition last Friday. Even before the current crisis, a survey in the wake of the furore over the Jimmy Savile investigation, dropped by the BBC, had resulted in a majority of those questioned distrusting the Corporation for the first time in the history of such polls. Journalists in general always fare badly in trust surveys, but broadcast journalists are usually considered a more believable breed. If that changes as a result of all this, it will be a much more damaging legacy than any single episode of journalistic failure.
