It is
exactly a year since we listened with growing incredulity as Lord
Hutton delivered his verdict and found journalism guilty of… well…
being journalism.

Many who had been following the inquiry had
expected the Hutton Report to be based on the evidence, not in apparent
defiance of it. Never was the term ‘whitewash’ splashed about so
liberally as in the hours and days that followed publication.

But
since then, it seems, there has been a process of revisionism that
emphasises only the BBC’s mistakes, that accepts the government’s
belated focus on one particular broadcast (the notorious 6.07am
two-way), and that paints reporter Andrew Gilligan as the villain of
the piece. This reached its apotheosis when Richard Sambrook, then
director of BBC News, declared: “I am not one of those who would argue
that Andrew Gilligan was ‘mainly right’. In journalism ‘mainly right’
is like being half pregnant – it’s an unsustainable condition.”
(British Journalism Review Vol 15, No 3.)n That things are not
necessarily so simple was suggested when a non-journalist –none other
than Rear Admiral Nick Wilkinson of D-Notice fame – rebuked Sambrook
for failing to understand what was at stake.