Broadcasting House: Despite the scale of the operation, BBC News does not break stories

A few weeks ago, Sean O'Neill, the crime correspondent of The Times, claimed that Lord Hope, the former Archbishop of York, had covered up allegations that a senior Anglican clergyman had abused choirboys and school pupils.

You have to have worked in a newsroom to know how hard it is to break a story like that. How do you get victims to talk to you? How do you know whether you can trust them? Accusations of sexual abuse are hard to prove. In the absence of forensic evidence, impossible to find years after the alleged event, they often come down to "he says, she says" or in the case of many paedophiles, "he says, he says." Then there are Britain's ferocious libel laws to navigate.

Nevertheless, O'Neill stood-up the story, and went home convinced that he and The Times would receive some credit for publishing. The next morning the Today programme reported: "It has emerged that the former Archbishop of York had covered up allegations that a senior Anglican clergyman had abused choirboys and school pupils."

Emerged? Does the BBC think that stories appear like rocks at low tide? Does it imagine that passers-by can point their fingers and say, "Oh look, evidence of corrupt political donations has emerged"? H.L. Mencken may have gone too far when he said that "for every nugget of truth some wretch lies dead on the scrapheap". But it remains the case that someone has to put in the work and take the risks if investigative journalism is to survive.

Euphemists favour the passive voice because it denies agency and whispers lies. When the BBC says "it has emerged" rather than "The Times reported" it was hiding the fact that someone else had dug up the information. If this were a rare lapse, I would not bother writing about it. But the BBC deploys the passive voice as a matter of course to cover the embarrassing truth that it is relying on the research of others.