Editorial by Jon Snow (anchor for Channel 4 News over here)
I have rarely felt worse emerging from the studio after a programme than I did on Wednesday night. I felt utterly conflicted. Relieved to have put out a good and coherent account of Hutton's deed, I felt no sense of elation in the competitor BBC's dark hour.
Like anyone else with any journalistic profile, in recent months people I knew, but never knew to have been in the secret intelligence service, or defence intelligence service, have made discreet contact and talked. They have spoken with alarming candour about their concerns over the interface between the politicians, the intelligence services, and the grounds for going to war. What they told me tended to substantiate and develop what we heard in testimony at the Hutton inquiry.
A few months ago, London's Tricycle Theatre staged several hours of testimony from Hutton. It was a beautifully balanced piece, the starring roles were those of Dingemans, the inquiry counsel, and Hutton himself. The judge's brief but incisive questions lent a wonderful sense of reassurance to the proceedings. The debate after the show revealed the audience had found the evidence reflected badly on almost everyone under scrutiny. The one hero of the two-and-a-half-hour play was the "Hutton process" itself.
Never before in British public life had so much been laid bare. The email traffic, the verbal testimony of men normally shielded from public view, and the vulnerability of ministers and journalists alike; it was indeed a liberating period. Somehow we felt the conduct of both journalism and government would never be quite the same again. Not any more we don't. Hutton's inquiry and his report do not seem to share the same genesis. How was it we missed the scale of the evidence that vindicated Blair, Hoon, Campbell and the rest of the government and intelligence process? How did we miss the sheer scale of the BBC's criminality that necessitated a stake being driven through its managerial heart? We must be thankful to Brian Hutton for enabling the blind to see, and the lame walk.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1134953,00.html