People in glasshouses…

… shouldn’t throw stones. (Also, they should undress in the dark.) One of the more nauseating aspects of British press coverage of the Hutton Inquiry is the vicious attacks on the BBC delivered daily by the right-wing print media. To describe this sermonising as sanctimonious cant would be to dignify it. But yesterday’s Guardian carried a terrific piece by its editor, Alan Rusbridger, which beautifully pricks the bubble. He’s particularly good on Murdoch’s Times and Conrad’s loony Telegraph.

I expect that nobody will come out of Hutton looking good. But the BBC (though it made some mistakes) looks better than most. The Corporation should, however, now revise its policy of allowing BBC journalists to convert the celebrity they acquire as a result of doing their BBC job into freelance celeb employment. Andrew Gilligan, for example, the BBC reporter at the heart of the inquiry, should not have been allowed to write columns in rabid right-wing newspapers like the Mail on Sunday. Ditto for John Simpson, the former Foreign Editor of the BBC who was forever writing books and columns in reactionary periodicals about his adventures at the licence-fee payer’s expense. Ditto for the sanctimonious Fergal Keane — the nearest thing the media world has to Wackford Squeers. Journalists should never be celebs because that makes them the story.