The BBC has gone through one of its intermittent public breakdowns. Many people on the political Right are rejoicing in the ever-vain hope that this might be the end for the corporation.

There are many criticisms to be made of the BBC. It should be leaner and more politically balanced. Yet, as with the Church of England, people tend to focus on the negatives without recognising the advantages. The print media in Britain are probably now the most dumbed-down in the world. The cost of foreign correspondents is so off-puttingly high that few British papers see the point in them and prefer to keep their journalists chained to laptops in London where they can monitor celebrities' Twitter-feeds in the hope of locating "gaffes". Original investigations are almost extinct due to lack of resources, experience and skills.

It is my experience that the BBC contains many, if not most, of the remaining people in the business who are any good, not because the BBC particularly hoovers up the best, but because it still trains people to be the best. When shells of papers like the Independent discover that a star columnist has been making it up for years nobody should be shocked. These are not newspapers now, merely barely supervised printing arrangements. This is why Newsnight's reliance on the piously left-wing Bureau of Investigative Journalism to provide them with the false McAlpine story is so devastating. The BBC is now virtually the only media organisation left which can do newsbreaking investigations. To justify the licence fee it must do just one thing: provide journalism of a better quality than anywhere else.

***