The press coverage of the BBC DG's visit to Downing Street asks several important questions about the BBC's impartiality and independence. And about how it maintains the public's trust that those really are the values behind its journalism.
The Daily Mail finds itself in an most awkward place: you wouldn't normally expect to read there the words 'BBC' and 'valued and trusted institution' in the same sentence ... even if they are attributed to Labour leadership hopeful David Miliband. Though of course it's just a momentary lapse in an otherwise standard Mail narrative about the "'biased' BBC" whose DG was both "hauled in" to Downing Street and caught "attempting to cosy up to the Government".
At the Open Democracy website, Tony Curzon is equally certain about events. Mark Thompson was caught "in flagrante" - and the BBC's main concern, he argues, is that the DG was caught in the act.
But it's the Daily Telegraph that, in more considered logic and language, puts its finger on the issue at stake:
"The director-general of the BBC has been accused of risking the corporation's editorial independence after it emerged that he attended a private Downing Street meeting to discuss coverage of Government spending cuts."
In other words - and you can tell this by the use of that journalistic weasel word "risking" ... meaning "this is what I really want to say but I don't want to be seen actually saying it" - this is one of those stories where the facts of the case are (apparently) less important than appearance, than impression. And, as is so often the case, the facts are what you make of them.
Is it really a surprise, for example, to learn that David Cameron's press chief, Andy Coulson, had lunch with the BBC Head of News, Helen Boaden, and that the subject of spending review coverage came up? Or that Mr Coulson would press for more 'context'?
Was the BBC DG "hauled in" to Number 10? Was he, as the Sun told us, "quizzed" on planned coverage of the review? Was it an "unusual" meeting? Have DGs routinely done this sort of thing; this sort of thing being, according to the BBC, a meeting which:
"discussed the possible participation of ministers in programmes about the spending review".
Now, I have no special knowledge or insight here - but certainly when I was running Today or World at One it wasn't that unusual to recruit senior executives to put in a good word when you were trying to fix big interviews.
And it's easy to see that with a huge, high-profile season on the horizon - and the spending review season will run across all of the BBC's national and regional programming as well as the News website - a bit of shoulder work from the chaps at the top is no bad thing.
Nor would you expect an Editor in Chief to go into such a meeting unbriefed - and you would expect that briefing to include issues you know the government to be sensitive about.
But of course no meeting between the BBC DG and the PM's head of strategy can ever be that simple - especially against the background of public sector austerity and the future of the BBC itself. For that reason if no other, the public will make of this meeting what they will, almost certainly based more on impressions and prejudice than on any facts.
As we all know, we judge ourselves - all of us - by our intentions; others by our perceptions of their actions.
And so it is that, as a former BBC programme editor, I'm certain that the teams putting together the spending review season will do it impartially and independently. And that, while those teams and their editors will listen both to No10 and to all other political parties and voices, any decisions they make will be their own.
The questions is, does press coverage of this kind make it even harder for them to persuade both those who love the BBC and those who hate it that that's the case?
