On the face of it, the BBC remains stuck with the self-regard of the last century. Newspapers and broadcasters could assume then that they were the sole source of news for their audience. When a rival secured a scoop, they could get away with passing off the story as their own, and engage in what journalists call "byline banditry".

In the age of the internet, their audiences can see through such shabby deceits within seconds. The best editors know it. They exploit the potential of the web and insist that their writers link to published sources. The readers can then check for themselves and read more if they wish.

But there is more to the suppression of sources than mere vanity. If the BBC were to report honestly, its viewers and listeners would realise how few stories the corporation breaks, even though it has thousands of journalists working for BBC News. You get a sense of the scale of the operation at the refurbished Broadcasting House in central London. On the ground floor is the largest newsroom in Europe. Above it are floors of studios stretching up to the sky. It is a magnificent sight, and houses many fine journalists. Right-wingers who loathe the BBC would do well to listen to Radio 4 from the Today programme through to the Shipping Forecast. If prejudice did not blight their minds, they might then grasp how much of British life would pass unnoticed if the BBC did not exist. Yet however indispensable the BBC is to the national culture, it does not break hard news.

Panorama has had only one genuine exclusive in years: its superb investigation into the abuse of mentally-handicapped patients by staff at the Winterbourne View care home. BBC Newsnight, once the pride of British television journalism, is now a sorry sight. BBC managers have starved it of resources. Channel 4 News has taken its place as the unmissable current affairs show.

It is not just "the cuts" that explain the corporation's failure of nerve. Investigative journalism is dangerous. It destroys BBC managers' careers. This month is the tenth anniversary of the scandal about the Today programme's claim that Labour had sexed up the dossier that justified Britain helping to overthrow Saddam Hussein. In hindsight we can see that the BBC was right to say that the government had spun the evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass-destruction, but wrong to imply that it lied. 

At least some of us know that both the BBC and New Labour treated David Kelly, the government scientist who had briefed the Today programme, abysmally. His Whitehall superiors forced him to deny the BBC's story. The BBC committed the most unforgivable sin a journalist can commit and compromised its source. Dr Kelly committed suicide shortly afterwards.