Hutton may be regarded as a whitewash, but the BBC still has to learn hardlessons, writes Roy Greenslade
"BBC in crisis". That's the message that hit screens across the world last week after the corporation's two most senior executives resigned in the wake of the Hutton report.
Such is the BBC's reputation, within an hour of Greg Dyke standing down as director general I received calls from journalists in several countries, all wondering whether the BBC was about to collapse. When BBC staff began to walk out in a spontaneous eruption of anger, many British journalists were amazed at the turn of events, too.
Suddenly, the great victory for Tony Blair that the Hutton report represented looked decidedly tarnished. One paper suggested that Hutton was as great a whitewash as the Widgery inquiry into Bloody Sunday.
With the BBC staff paying to advertise their woe in a full-page advert in a national paper followed by Andrew Gilligan's inevitable resignation, the anti-government agenda continued.
By the weekend, with Dyke spitting blood and threatening legal action, the whole sorry mess had blown up in Blair's face.
No matter how much his loyal supporters, including his erstwhile communications director, Alastair Campbell, protested about the independent nature of the Hutton inquiry and complained about sore losers, the British public were having none of it.
Several polls showed that they overwhelmingly supported the BBC, with three times as many people saying they trusted the public service broadcaster more than the government which has enjoyed two landslide election victories within the last seven years.
That's a measure of the turnaround in Blair's popularity since he decided to prosecute a war on Iraq: millions of Britons were against the invasion and never did accept Blair's argument that Saddam Hussein either had weapons of mass destruction or that he could deploy them within 45 minutes.
Although Gilligan's infamous broadcast was wrong on several points, there was ample evidence presented to Hutton which showed that the broad thrust of his reporting had been correct. For once, the devil was not in the detail but in the generality or, to use Blair's favoured term , "the totality".
Gilligan's mistake was in not acknowledging his mistakes. The BBC's was in not treating the government's complaint with enough rigour.
Gilligan compounded the hurt by writing an article in the Mail on Sunday which fingered Campbell as the author of a lie.
The truth, as we discovered during the Hutton inquiry, was that the contentious 45-minute claim did emanate from the intelligence services; it was inserted into the dossier late because it arrived late; and Campbell's involvement concerned its presentation, not its invention.
But Hutton was not asked to consider only the errors made by the BBC. His remit, already narrow, was to look into all the circumstances surrounding the death of Gilligan's source, Dr David Kelly.
It was obvious from the evidence presented to the inquiry, which was held in public so that everyone could read it and weigh it in the balance, that the Ministry of Defence played some role in the affair.
I accept that once Kelly came forward to identify himself to his MoD bosses as the likely source of Gilligan's story he sacrificed his own chances of remaining anonymous. Sources cannot expect protection if they break cover themselves.
That said, the MoD still had a duty of care towards him because of his long, hard and skilful work on its behalf: once it decided that his name should emerge, it should, at the very least, have offered him a safe place away from the press along with wise counsel.
Yet Hutton hardly admonished the MoD, or questioned Downing Street's decision, based on political expediency, to ensure that Kelly's identity was revealed to newspaper journalists.
Even if we accept that the BBC should have shouldered much of the blame for the affair, the weakness in Hutton's report is its one-sided nature. He has come up with a black-and-white answer to a grey situation.
Dyke's threat to force a judicial review of a judicial inquiry is a sideshow with little chance of success. But there are two important inquests which should be held: the BBC must reconsider its internal news-gathering processes and complaints procedures; the government must find a way of rebuilding a mature relationship with Britain's public service broadcaster, which also means lifting the threat to its funding mechanism - the mandatory licence fee - so that the corporation and its audience can be confident in its future.
It is not inconceivable, and not unreasonable, that the BBC should lose the right to police itself. The archaic system under which the board of governors acts as overseer is flawed, as the circling of the wagons after the government complaint proved. It is time to consider bringing the BBC under the aegis of the new communications super-regulator, Ofcom, which is perceptibly more independent than an internal governing board.
But the main problems are the government's. One minor but sensitive matter is the pressing need to appoint a new chairman of governors who, in turn, must appoint a new director general. These choices will be watched carefully and could well stir up more trouble.
By far the greatest headache for Blair is the continuing scepticism, which Gilligan's story highlighted, about whether Britain went to war on a false premise.
For the BBC, as with the rest of the media, this is the major story of the moment.
It is therefore an immediate test for the BBC's news and current affairs departments: can they fulfil their duties to the British public without arousing government speculation that their reporters are trying in some way to get their own back for the setbacks they have suffered because of Hutton?
It is going to be a fascinating period in British history. So important has the drama been that, in future years, both the BBC and the government are going to talk of their worlds in pre- and post-Hutton terms. And all because of a short, stumbling broadcast at 6.07 one May morning in 2003.