No one should think that Harding or any other BBC manager has an easy life. The coalition cut its funding by 25 per cent and dumped on the BBC the cost of paying for  the World Service. There have to be savings, but the target of the cuts tells you much about Harding's priorities.

He announced that 415 front-line journalists would go. He wanted to fire all of Panorama's presenters and replace them with soft journalists who were easy on the eye, such as Fiona Bruce, best known for presenting that hardest of hard news shows, Antiques Roadshow.

He hit BBC radio journalism with ferocity, even though BBC radio is not only remarkably successful but the only reputable source of news anywhere on the British airwaves. He diverted funds to the high-profile but vainglorious and failing Newsnight to no avail. Internal auditors found waste and inefficiency and ordered an end to the extravagance. The chaos Harding created forced the Director-General, Tony Hall, to intervene. My sources in BBC News tell me that now no one knows who is in charge, what they are doing or where they are going.

The disarray at the BBC matters more than it seems. Writing in the age of totalitarianism, George Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Mutatis mutandis, the same applies today. New communications technologies create spaces for conspiracy theorists, the propaganda channels of authoritarian states — most notably Russia and Iran — and of political extremists — most notably the Tea Party enthusiasts of Rupert Murdoch's Fox News — while destroying the business plans of serious newspapers trying to tell the truth.

Beyond broadcasting there are 4.6 PRs for every working American journalist, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They work to protect corporate and political interests, and manufacture fake news that suits their paymasters. In Britain, the ratio does not seem so bad, but the official definition of a journalist includes online commentators whom no reporter would regard as colleagues. Beyond dedicated propagandists, the internet allows surfers to live in bubbles and avoid all information that might challenge them.

In a report on the incessant lying of Putin's Russia Today channel, Michael Weiss and Peter Pomerantsev of the Institute of Modern Russia quote a prescient Indian-American academic (and former Times journalist) Tunku Varadarajan: "There's an abandonment of the need for persuasion as everyone is in their own archipelago. The decline of the need for public debate can transmogrify into the need not to tell the truth."

I am no BBC groupie. But I can see that it is filled with journalists who try, however imperfectly, to put facts on the record that can counter the screams of dictators and religious fanatics, the smoothly packaged lies of the PR men, and the fantasies of the paranoid. If James Harding cannot protect and encourage them, if he does not understand the importance of the institution he so recklessly manages, then he has to go.