Yet this insouciance reflects in part our confidence that newspapers are not our sole source of news. Surveys show that we nowadays regard broadcasting as our primary provider of information, and in Britain, broadcast journalism is a quite different proposition from its print equivalent. Its purpose is not to sell anything, even air-time. Britain’s biggest journalistic operation, the BBC, pursues not profit but a tax-funded mission to advance the public weal. Our other public-service broadcasters, such as ITV, Channel 4 and five, are tied by licence obligations to a very similar remit for their news.

The belief that broadcast news is therefore to be trusted more than newspapers ensures that the nation turns to it automatically in times of crisis. It also ensures that the content of that news is always a sensitive issue. Stories that would be laughed off if they appeared on a newspaper’s front page can generate frenzy in an off-peak broadcast bulletin. Yet exactly how our broadcast “public” news is supposed to differ from its commercial counterpart is nowhere defined. After the extraordinary trauma to which the Kelly Affair has subjected both journalism and government, perhaps it needs to be.

It is not only Alastair Campbell who considers the BBC to have strayed from its proper path in its dealings with the late doctor. Some of the BBC’s governors have apparently been wondering whether the corporation “should stick to reporting news, instead of trying to make it”. Few would have objected to an attack on the Government’s good faith from an anonymityshrouded source in a Sunday newspaper, and indeed, Andrew Gilligan joined Radio 4’s Today from The Sunday Telegraph. Rod Liddle, the editor who hired him, said he made the appointment “because we wanted Today to compete with Fleet Street on its own terms”.

The idea seemed to be to bring the fuddy-duddy BBC up to speed by importing the practices of its more dynamic, if less scrupulous, print counterpart. Elsewhere too, broadcast journalists eager to compete and excel have fallen excitedly on the febrile techniques of print’s cutting-edge. Some have argued that this is a matter not just of indulging their own macho instincts, but of positive necessity. They suggest that society has changed in ways which make fresh approaches essential. A newly sceptical, alienated and insubordinate populace must be provoked and stimulated, rather than merely informed. The object must simply be to make a splash by rocking the boat.

Not that this aspiration seemed to be shared by Gilligan’s Newsnight colleague Susan Watts when she came to give her evidence to Hutton. She explained that in a dialogue of her own with Kelly, she elicited interesting material which she nonetheless discarded since she considered it speculation which might be unfounded. Few would expect a newspaper to deny itself an arresting exclusive on such grounds. But what about a public broadcaster expected to pursue truth, not titillate? The industry’s leaders have yet to provide an answer.

Nowadays, broadcasting executives are reluctant to come clean on questions such as this. They are afraid that pronouncements might sound paternalistic if not patronising, elitist rather than inclusive, and therefore at odds with the spirit of the age. And they have reasons of their own for welcoming the convergence of broadcast journalism’s methods with those of its print equivalent that they do not necessarily wish to own up to. Recent years have seen competition among broadcast news providers increase dramatically, while competition from outside sources, such as the internet and mobile telephony, has been increasing exponentially as well. Everburgeoning supply has thus been matched by a disturbing decline in the consumption of broadcast journalism. This has not only threatened the position of news and news-related programming in the schedules, it has also alarmed the political class, on whose goodwill public broadcasters depend. Falling audiences for news have been linked with declining participation in elections, and hence the public disengagement from the entire political process which our rulers find so disturbing.

Broadcast news chiefs have thus become understandably determined to enhance the popular appeal of their output. Endless visual rejigs, an influx of nubile newsreaders and the prioritisation of celebrity gossip bear witness to this ambition. The kind of engagement and sensation which seem to work in print have seemed another obvious way to put bums on sofas. If this has had to mean sacrificing central features of the traditional order, that has been considered a price worth paying, not just by editors but by opinion-formers far beyond the newsroom.

Perhaps the most hallowed of British broadcast journalism’s special ordinances, and the one which most dramatically differentiates it from print, is the impartiality rule imposed by law on all news broadcasters. Yet in October last year a report from the Independent Television Commission proposed that the rule should be waived in some circumstances, in the hope that newscasts might then be devised which would attract more viewers. After all, fierce partisanship had enabled Britain’s press to build strong emotional ties with its readers. Could broadcasting afford not to follow suit? This particular proposal seems to have foundered, but the pursuit of popularity persists. Indeed, as doubts about the health of the body politic deepen, it is increasingly taken for granted that more people must be persuaded to attend to broadcast news and current affairs, whatever it takes to make them do so. But does this make as much sense as it seems to?

Increasing triviality

The effort to achieve this unlikely goal is, however, increasingly infecting our news and current affairs programmes with the triviality and sensationalism of their most popular print equivalents. More disturbingly, it is feeding the very cynicism it is expected to remedy. The overall outcome of the Kelly affair has been to entrench public contempt for politicians further and to exacerbate the consequent dislocation between rulers and ruled. Is this really an achievement to relish?

The point of publicly ordained broadcast news is to equip citizens to discharge their democratic duty effectively, a function we cannot rely on newspapers to fulfil, since commercial imperatives drive them elsewhere. And the truth is that for this purpose, trying to maximise audience size may be not only destructive but actually unnecessary. After all, even in the days when the media took the public agenda more seriously than they do now, and people had more time on their hands than our busy-busy lifestyles currently permit, few devoted themselves to the diligent study of public affairs. None of us has time to become expert on everything, so we instinctively build up a network of people whose advice we consider reliable in fields we do not choose to master, whether these be personal finance, spelling or gardening. Public affairs are no different.

Most people develop their views on issues of the day not through careful attention to news media but by tapping the knowledge of people they trust who are prepared to put in the necessary effort. These may be uncles, shop stewards, religious leaders, Tupperware hostesses or pub bores. Tribal elders such as these feed us insights they have assiduously gleaned while we have been more productively or amusingly occupied, and we meld these with our own instincts and prejudices.

The idea that a small and self-selecting body of men and women should gateway the input of civic information in this way may be unappealing. Certainly, the operation of such secondary dissemination flies in the face of the contemporary notion of inclusiveness and raises the dread spectre of elitism. Yet the delegation of authority involved is an entirely legitimate exercise of free will by the people making it, who can be forgiven for having better things to do than watch Newsnight. But if this is the way the world is, what matters is not the size of the audiences which news-based programmes attract, but the character of the material they supply to the few who act as conduits to the majority. What exactly do these people need?

Not, for sure, sensation. These are serious men and women seeking hardcore fare, not news lite. They do not need to be dragged kicking and screaming from more pleasurable pursuits by the promise of an emotional fix. They really want to know whether GM food is OK, what climate change will mean, and how public services should be run. This does not mean they can be served adequately by what broadcasters rightly denigrate as “passive journalism”. Long before Hutton, Alastair Campbell suggested that broadcasters should allow “democratically elected politicians to speak for themselves, free and unedited”. In an age in which politicians routinely exploit access to the airwaves to distort, obfuscate and lie, that will not do. Though broadcast journalists need not try so hard to excite, they must interpret and explain far more, not less, than they do at present. They must examine remorselessly not only the forces shaping events, but the policy options through which these forces can be engaged. They must commission original research where necessary, and analyse all available data to destruction.

Plunged into a war

Such postures may delight audiences by rocking the composure of the powerful, but they are not compatible with providing impartial analysis. Political interviews dedicated to mockery rather than enlightenment do not help much either, whatever gratification they, too, may provide. Nor does undercover reporting when used for its own sake, rather than as a journalistic tool. More damaging still is identification with politically loaded causes, even though this may also appeal to viewers and listeners. Mindless attachment to liberal values hamstrings much broadcast discussion of public affairs. The Mail and Telegraph can be left to hammer Blair, and The Guardian ought to be able to promote its agenda without on-air back-up. John Pilger’s journalism may be acceptable in the Mirror, but we should expect a more objective approach from ITV.

Of course, many broadcast journalists prefer challenging authority or championing popular causes to analysing the public agenda. They would rather be thought frivolous than boring and like to see themselves as outsiders and trouble-makers, the more so perhaps because their quasiofficial status is so uncomfortably at odds with journalism’s bohemian traditions. Many of them have little desire to discover how the world might be improved. Indeed, they sometimes condemn the whole idea of investigating public issues as manufacturing the consent of the people for the purposes of their rulers. Nonetheless, public journalism is there to serve public objectives, not to pander to the tastes of either its practitioners or its audiences. Society faces challenges that require collective action and depend on consent. The world is not a peep-show, and authority does not exist simply to be jeered at. We cannot afford the luxury of descending into a kind of decadent, infantile anarchy.

Back in 1975, John Birt (as he then was) and Peter Jay (as he still is) argued in an article in The Times headed “The bias against understanding” that broadcast journalism should become a self-contained engine of exposition on a scale sufficient to match the power of government. Yet when Birt, as deputy Director-General, went on to reorganise the BBC’s journalism, he encountered intense resistance from the journalists themselves, even to straightforward efforts to raise standards. That resistance was largely successful, and in spite of the BBC’s undoubted ability to annoy Downing Street, it is a much weaker counterweight to official thinking than we have a right to expect from an organisation receiving £2.7billion a year in hypothecated taxation.

The Hutton experience has already provoked some rethinking in the world of broadcast journalism, most visibly at the BBC. The immediate response of the corporation’s news managers has been to opt for a bureaucratic fix (with, for example, tighter restrictions on anonymoussource journalism), rather than fundamental reform. There have, however, been signs that something more may be on the way. Director General Greg Dyke is usually depicted as a crazed populist and hammer of Birtism. Yet in the past he has proved a worthy pillar of public journalism. While chief executive of London Weekend Television in the early 1990s, he went out of his way to sustain both the (unwaveringly serious) London Programme, and Walden (the uncompromising political interview show), in the face of growing commercial pressures. Now, he has personally manipulated the BBC’s finances to procure funding for a series of public issue analysis programmes (to be called If), and secured it a prime slot on BBC2.

Perhaps the impending review of the BBC’s Charter, which expires in 2006, may encourage Dyke to follow through the logic of this decision. Perhaps the governors will lend power to his elbow, by converting their inchoate misgivings into clearly articulated proposals for meaningful change. We might then yet see broadcasting fulfil some of its early promise to make our society better. That might mean fewer journalistic fireworks on the airwaves. Never mind. We’ll still have the papers.