In the wake of the Newsnight catastrophe, people are now talking as if investigative journalism is just too difficult for the BBC to do. The wretched staff at the TV programme, having wrongly targeted Lord McAlpine as a sex abuser, are now suspended from the practice of the art, like a bunch of errant fourth-formers banned from the school chemistry lab.
Iain Overton, who ran the non-profit Bureau of Investigative Journalism when it brought in the story to the BBC, was forced to resign today, paying the inevitable price for being at the head of such a lofty-sounding outfit as it screwed up. Simultaneously, many of the tabloids, which want to be allowed to carry on hacking phones and peeping through the windows of celebrities, are setting up a lobbying chorus in advance of the forthcoming Leveson report into press malpractice, claiming that investigative journalism in print will also henceforth be inevitably doomed.
Yet it is nonsense, of course, to predict a collapse of journalistic investigations in Britain. While Newsnight stumbles, its sister programme, Panorama, edited by Tom Giles, carries on with tough, apparently well-resourced investigations, often venturing into tricky undercover territory. Former staff at the Winterbourne View private care home are now in jail because of Panorama's recent devastating exposé of their cruelty.
Just as the BBC is capable of perfectly successful investigations despite being heavily regulated, the press are capable of doing the same without resorting to bugging and bribery. It was reputable investigative journalism by newspapers that gathered the evidence that finally exonerated McAlpine from false charges. Just as it was investigative journalism carried out by ethical methods that held the News of the World to account for hacking the phone of the missing Milly Dowler.
It will always be true that such journalism can be dangerous, certainly compared with writing opinion columns or recycling press releases. The pursuit of exposures can hurt people, sometimes in unpredictable ways. Bruce Page, former editor of the Sunday Times Insight team in its great days, used to say it was often like playing blind man's buff with open razors.
But it is not rocket science, and it is probably not as difficult as domestic plumbing. One of Newsnight's more competent journalists, who didn't want their name used in the current climate of blaming and sniping, told me the other day: "There is a common thread running through the failure of Newsnight to run the investigation into real sex abuse by Jimmy Savile, and its insistence on running the false investigation into non-existent sex abuse by McAlpine. In each case, executives did not look at the actual evidence." To be faithful to the evidence, rather than to office politics, or party politics, is generally the key to successful investigative journalism. Some people at the BBC clearly need to go back to school to learn that lesson.
There is one genuine underlying problem, however, and, ironically, it is one that the ill-fated Bureau of Investigative Journalism was set up to address. A few years ago, several investigative journalists, myself included, used to get together and debate whether a non-profit foundation could be set up along the lines of ProPublica in the US, to subsidise the production of investigative journalism, as conventional business models that had kept the media in funds were swept away by the internet.
Eventually, two public-spirited people, the former Sunday Times writer Elaine Potter and her husband David, the developer of the Psion computer, tipped £2m of seed money from their charitable foundation into launching their own project, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Based at City University, it has done decent work and provided an income for young journalists to cut their teeth on serious material, rather than tabloid trash. It will be a shame if their efforts are swept away in the political hysteria.