The latest figures make it clear that the number of young men carrying and using knives is increasing sharply. Clearly there's something to be concerned about; it's not just the media's hyperbole nor does it seem like a self-correcting, short term aberration in the statistics.

But for journalists, that's only the start of it. There are other questions.

How should news organisations report the real surge in knife crime? How much does tone and prominence distort the real picture? Is some coverage self-fulfilling prophecy? Does it spread fear and anxiety way beyond the rational?

Because the truth still remains that most of us are very, very, very unlikely to be a victim of knife crime. Most young men don't carry knives; most young people are not components of what some politicians are calling the 'broken society'.

Actually, I think most of us citizens know this; we're more likely to base our understanding of the world on our own experiences of it rather than on what we read in free papers on the bus to and from work. What we do need, though, as citizens is a press that helps our civic discourse - the debates and arguments we have about problems and what needs to be done to solve them.

When I explored this in a recent edition of BBC R4's Analysis, I found a clear gap between the press we need as citizens and the press we get, driven by editors' intuition, impact and high octane attention grabbing.

It's clear that the current spate of knife crime - the reasons why young men carry knives and occasionally use them - has complex causes and will need complex solutions.

Think about it for a moment: the only explanation for the sudden rise in carrying knives is that young men who didn't use to carry them do so now. The least likely reason for that is that they have become 'evil'. The most likely is that some set of 'nudges' have persuaded otherwise balanced, law-abiding young men that it's OK to arm themselves.

Nudges?

The brainchild of two behavioural economists in Chicago - Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein - and an idea that's pretty trendy right now with some politicians.

Crudely, 'nudges' are the tiny influences on our behaviour that we might not notice at the time but which make us act differently, usually to fit in with others around us: eat better, drink less or, in the case of the lavatories at Schipol airport... well, read about that for yourself.

Nudges, however, are morally neutral. And may explain why a young man who feels 1% more afraid or 5% more in need of being one-of-the-crowd changes his behaviour 100% from being unarmed to armed.

A proper public discourse to find ways of reversing this trend would be subtle and nuanced - it would think broadly about causes and possible solutions. And we know, from experiments like Today's Citizens Juries back in 2005, that if ordinary citizens are given the time and space, they have exactly the kind of subtle and nuanced discussions that we need.

But it's a debate that's inhibited, prevented even, by the tendency to polarise or simplify. According to your taste in newspapers, you learn that politicians' plans are "half-baked" or "not tough enough" or the work of a "softie softie"...and anyway, everyone knows "there's one choice - prison".

The real challenge to our media - and our press in particular - is not whether they can avoid misrepresenting or distorting knife crime: it's part of the purpose of our media to draw things to our attention, however crudely.

It's whether it is capable of reporting it in a way that helps us citizens really think hard about possible solutions; or whether it makes us feel the problem is insoluble.

Reading the papers this week, you'd be forgiven for thinking there is carnage on our streets - partly because one newspaper said exactly that.

The truth is, there isn't carnage on our streets and very few of us are victims of or witnesses to crime more than once or twice in our lives - even fewer are victims of serious crime.

In any rational description of the world, our risk of dying in, say, a knife attack or a serious assault ranks way behind our risk of dying in a road accident or from the effects of cigarettes or alcohol. And if you happen not to be a city dweller and are over 25, your chances of being shot or stabbed are vanishingly small: your chances of being attacked or killed by a stranger, approaching nil.

Except, we don't learn about the world from a rational description. We learn about it, for the most part, from "news" - and crime is news precisely because it is both shocking and uncommon. Except, of course, when it seems to confirm our society is sick and broken. Then, the more common and apparently true-to-type the gruesome violence can be made to seem, the better.

One of journalism's great father figures, American commentator, media critic and diplomatist Walter Lippmann, struggled nearly 90 years ago with this paradox. On the one hand, news is the way we learn about the world; on the other hand, you would be mad to rely on it to learn about the world.

"All the reporters in the world working all the hours of the day could not witness all the happenings in the world," he wrote. So, a thing becomes becomes "news" only when it is a "manifestation" at one of the places journalism has "watchers stationed" - the police station, the courts, the crime scene.

So how to put the deaths of Amar Aslam or of Jimmy Mizen or of any of the other 20 teenage victims of violence so far this year into context? They are terrible, sad events and we all have great sympathy for the boys' families. But beyond the personal tragedies that they represent, they tell us nothing about teenagers, gangs, knives or crime. Most of all, they tell us nothing about how concerned or fearful we should be for ourselves and our own families.

Three years ago, a Home Office survey found that 4% of 10-to-17-year-olds had carried a knife at some time in the previous 12 months: or to put it another way, 96% had not. This month, in Operation Blunt2, the Metropolitan Police seized 193 weapons in more than 4,000 searches: or to put it another way, 95% of those stopped were not carrying knives.

Or try this question. In England and Wales, were you more or less likely to be murdered last year than five years ago? Were you more or less likely to be stabbed last year than five years ago? Bludgeoned to death? Strangled? You'll have guessed the answer to each - according to official statistics (pdf file) - is less likely. There were 734 murder victims in England and Wales last year - almost 10% down on the 805 murdered in 2001-2002 and about 5% below the average for 2001-2006.

Is there another, better way of reporting crime that doesn't risk distorting what we think we know about our world? Take the trial at the Old Bailey of the two young men and two youths charged with the murder of 14-year-old Martin Dinnegan.

What are the alternatives to covering the trial as the news story that it is? Not covering it at all? Holding back details of the evidence? Pointing out repeatedly that most 14-year-old boys don't get stabbed? Using a chart within the story to show how deaths by stabbing and beating are falling not rising?

Maybe part of the answer is for us all - journalists and audiences - to understand that "news" is what it is: a semi-ritualised set of snapshots of a small sector of our common lives. No more, no less.

Maybe journalists should resist the temptation to make links where none exist: are we really in a "battle to fix broken Britain" as the Sun's banner for each report of teen violence claims? And maybe audiences have a job to do, too: to understand the limitations of "news" that Walter Lippmann wrote about all those years ago. And to realise it's the unusual that's weird, not the everyday.

This one - Can We Trust The Media? by Professor Adrian Monck of London's City University.

Anyone interested in British journalism should read it - not because it gives the right answers to its title: it doesn't. But because it asks the right questions. And at least it's been written by someone who's actually worked in a newsroom.

Prof Monck's purpose is unambiguous: "What I aim to do in this book is burst the trust balloon. I want to question just why it is we want to trust the media and lay out why that will never be possible."

Two things: one, he portrays the BBC's promotion of trust to value number one as an act of choice, not the (welcome) inevitability it is for a publicly funded broadcaster. Two (for different reasons and by a different route) he's joined me in diagnosing 'the story' as the malignancy in journalism's sick body.

Journalists want to be trusted, broadly in inverse proportion to the trust in which surveys say they're actually held. But there's a missing proposition in the question normally asked. Trusted to do what? Portray the world as it really is? Not possible - any account of the world can only ever be a subset of all the facts. Trust resides in the journalist's motivation in selecting the facts he/she does and in the realisation of that motivation.

Prof Monck tells us that "trust is not important. Not being trusted never lost anyone a reader or a viewer". And, he adds, it's journalism's job to aggregate facts and "get the entertainment values right". This may well be a description of the current state of journalism: but it's not much of an aspiration for the institution of journalism that - still - plays the defining role in the public sphere.

And it's simply not tenable for a publicly (and more or less universally) funded broadcaster like the BBC to accept Prof Monck's lowest common denominator description without some aspirational pushback. Nor is it possible for the BBC to be in the same game as the commercial press which can, say, choose its facts to suit its readers.

Even if it wanted it - and it doesn't - the BBC can't choose to make its way in the world by mimicking the exhausting diurnal anger of the Mail ('woe that the 1950s are gone') or the hand-wringing of the Guardian/Independent ('woe that global warming/capitalism is taking us to hell in an organic hand-basket').

But the really big thing in Can We Trust The Media? is this: journalism itself isn't the problem. The problem is journalism's fetish - 'the story'. And so it's no bad thing that 'the story' is dead... or dying.

That's an awkward paradox. 'The story' - in the sense that journalists mean it rather than the broader idea of narrative - is the source of all that's great in journalism and all that's vile in it.

On the credit side, you can go from Russell of the Crimea through Hersh of My Lai, Woodstein of Watergate to Peston of Northern Rock. In all of these, 'the story' has been the only way journalism could happen. The only way of handling the information asymmetry, the inevitability that power has information and journalists (on behalf of citizens) have to spanner it out, chunk by chunk.

On the debit side, all those things that make journalists seem untrustworthy. Why this story and not that? Why these facts and not those? The lure of the unusual, the rogue (and unreliable) data? Sensationalism, half-truths, self-fulfilling prophecies.

'The story' can easily become the journalist's way of evading responsibility. 'It's only a story' equals 'I don't need all the facts or even the best selection of them'. 'The story' can be no more than waypoints in a convincing narrative... convincing, so long as the reader looks no further than 'the story'.

Which is why 'the story' is dead. The people we journalists used to tell our 'stories' to, with a 'trust me' wink, now routinely look beyond 'the story'. And we help them. Websites like the BBC News website are built on the basis that users will look out their own subset of facts, context and background.

More than that, news websites blur the distinction (a distinction that was only ever really relevant to journalists) between 'news' and 'information' while news aggregators make no assumptions about any individual's news agenda in the way that 'the story' has to.

In other words, the process of selection that used to be the province of the journalist - the process we used to call 'storytelling' - is now the province of each member of our audiences. Good.

This is where Prof Monck and I are in total agreement. He doesn't quite put it this way - but the death of 'the story' is part of the answer to the trust conundrum. Now journalists can get on with increasing the access of the people formerly known as the audience to the information they need and in the way they need it.

And that hand journalists once used to polish 'the story' can instead be held out to guide readers, listeners and viewers through their selection of facts, context and background and not ours.

If you haven't caught up with the book yet, the headline to his Guardian article captures one half of his tale crisply: "Our media have become mass producers of distortion", it reads.

The reason, he argues: while the number of journalists on most papers has increased, the space they have to fill has increased even more quickly. Davies reckons the average national newspaper journalist now has to fill three times the space he/she used to... as well as the greedy pockets of owners and shareholders.

Result, he goes on: journalists are now forced to shovel unchecked drivel from PR firms straight onto the page or onto the airwaves - "passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists."

And because journalists don't have the time to do their jobs properly, he argues, - and this is where the threads go ping - some cut corners and resort to snooping, bugging and bin-trawling.

I'm not sure about this route from ‘gradgrind exploitee’, through dereliction of journalistic duty to moral bankrupt - too many newspaper journalists have been too content for too long to run massive moral overdrafts without any pressure from corporate bosses.

It's true that journalists have more time/space to fill - even more, incidentally in 2008 than in 2006, the last year that the Cardiff researchers looked at - and that's a concern for anyone who cares about journalism and what it does.

Nick Davies is right when he warns against 'churnalism' - news as process... but I just don't believe that the former royal reporter of the News of the World, Clive Goodman, illegally bugged royal phones (and he was not alone in that kind of activity) and went to jail because he and his paper were drowning under the weight of press releases to process.

Nor do I believe pressure to produce is the real reason why too many journalists couldn't stir themselves to check the facts of the Etireno "slave-ship" a few years back or of the Romanian "child traffickers" in Slough a few weeks back. (Though BBC and Guardian journalists did. Both.)

Nor was it why some political journalists connived at becoming little more than the publishing arm of No 10 in the Campbell era.

These are all questions of personal, moral and ethical choices. If a journalist chooses to abandon the principles that all journalists claim to hold (commitment to the truth, independence, acting in the interest of the public) then he or she can blame no-one but him/herself.

At the BBC College of Journalism, we place the ethics and values of the trade, along with safeguarding the trust of our audiences, far above any technical or editorial skill... one reason why trust in broadcasting remains much higher than that in the press.

The truth is, too many British newspaper journalists have for too long confused verification with impact, independence with arrogance and the interests of the public with the basest interests of some sectors of the public.

As the respected Guardian veteran and blogger Roy Greenslade describes, most senior, thinking journalists welcome Nick Davies' book as something to be taken seriously. Let's see if journalists - and not just editors - do take it seriously.

The trouble is, though, the British newspaper journalist has no history of taking criticism well... or working out what it is that needs to be done to turn a dysfunctional, distrusted press into something that performs a useful public purpose.

"The Future of Impartiality - is the Public Ethos Doomed?" is pretty weighty stuff on at least two fronts... existential, even, as far as the BBC is concerned.

But like Tristram Shandy, last night's joint BBC College of Journalism and POLIS event at the LSE never quite got to say what it was that it was talking about. Though it was no worse a debate for that.

In spite of Feedback's Roger Bolton pressing the panellists, none cared to define 'impartiality' - though that didn't prevent them discarding 'it' (Richard D North, author of 'Scrap the BBC'), redefining 'it' in terms of 'the right of reply' in an unlimited, webbed world (Emily Bell) or drawing a distinction between the intellectual case for 'it' - a difficult but not impossible one to make - and the instinct that it was right that 'it' is every BBC journalist's aspiration (Evan Davis).

Richard D North's case - that the BBC and other terrestrial broadcasters are constrained by an unnecessary obligation to be impartial - rested on his view that the market alone can deliver news and information (not just comment) from a limitless 'variety' of viewpoints. One, monolithic, impartial view was unnecessary. The British press, he asserted, was 'a beautiful thing', taken in the round - and had never needed an obligation to be impartial to make it so. Plus, the requirement to be impartial, he argued, had two important effects on BBC journalism; it encouraged the belief that its reporting was somehow 'more true' and an attitude amongst BBC journalists of 'perennial dissidence'. That it was enough to be 'equally unpleasant to everyone'.

Emily Bell's case rested on the web's ability to deliver limitless accountability, right of reply and fact checking. That overcame the need to try to define a particular standpoint or a particular way of embracing diverse standpoints. Emily even posed the idea of an editorless news organisation and deskless newsrooms - the audience deciding the order in which it uses information, the standpoint of that information, the depth and breadth of its use and, crucially, the extent to which it wants to play a role in creating and improving it.

Evan Davis's case was that impartiality was 'probably a public good' - though he acknowledged the intellectual difficulties that surround both its definition and its practice. His instincts, though, challenged his intellect; for all the difficulties in arriving at a definition and accepting that it's possible there's no market demand for it, the aspiration to be impartial, he thought, did mean that what the BBC did was 'a little bit different from what the Daily Mail does' - or any other newspaper for that matter. And, he said, he always tended to go with his instincts.

In the audience, two BBC (former) luminaries tried to help. Phil Harding spiced things up a bit by defining impartiality as 'truth, fairness and being unbiased'. Therefore, to be against impartiality meant being for untruth, unfairness and bias. While Will Wyatt observed that the level of trust in broadcasters - regulated and with a requirement to be impartial - was relatively high whereas the level of trust in newspapers - unregulated and with no requirement to be impartial - was low, 'at the bottom'.

So if impartiality was closely identified with the idea of the public ethos in broadcasting, did that ethos have a future? All agreed it probably did - but in different ways.

Richard D North foresaw its future embodiment as a kind of 'National Trust' of the air - relatively wealthy, educated middle class people clubbing together to preserve the kind of broadcasting they preferred, without state or taxpayers' interference.

Evan Davis likened this to the PBS model in the US - a worthy organisation with limited appeal and influence: he believed there probably was a future for the public service ethos within any future media market ... though in an entirely free market, without subsidy of some kind, he believed the product of that ethos would be smaller and lesser than it is at present.

Emily Bell had a very different, intriguing idea. A future BBC, she said, could be a kind of 'non-commercial search engine' interpreting its public mission in terms of ensuring equality of access to the world's information.

McLagan, a former BBC journalist, had written a book about police corruption. A former policeman who McLagan names in the book had successfully sued the author and his publisher for libel. Yesterday, the Court of Appeal overturned that decision and ruled instead in McLagan and his publisher's favour.

The case hinged on something called the ‘Reynolds Defence’ - a phrase on the lips of most journalists and some lawyers but not necessarily a subject of nightly conversation in the Dog and Duck.

Briefly, the Reynolds Defence is named after a defence raised in the late 1990s by Times Newspapers after the Sunday Times published an article about the former Irish prime minister, Albert Reynolds. Mr Reynolds sued, arguing the allegations in the article were not true and were defamatory. The newspaper argued that the allegations it published were serious and that it had a duty to publish them. They were, it argued, made in the public interest and after they'd exercised all reasonable care in checking. Even if the allegations were not true, they argued they should have been able to report them and be legally protected by 'qualified privilege'.

In 2001, the Law Lords decided that the Reynolds Defence was a valid one, subject to certain conditions. Crucially, for the defence to be successful the journalism had to be careful, its tone sober, its subject important and of urgent public interest. In other words, it had to be good journalism. It was not a charter for publishing tittle-tattle.

It was a defence that the Wall Street Journal raised when it was sued by a Saudi Arabian businessman Abdullah Latif Jameel and his companies. Initially the defence failed - but was finally successful on appeal to the House of Lords. In their judgement, the Law Lords seemed to move the law even further in defence of careful, sober, investigative journalism, also recognising the principle that journalists work in a pressured atmosphere in which the life of a news story is limited.

It is a stance that recognises the essential disadvantage an investigative journalist faces in breaking a story that someone, somewhere would rather was not broken. The libel laws in the UK notoriously favour those with the money or motive to make life tough for a journalist bent on disclosure and a public bent on transparency. The late Robert Maxwell was ruthless in his use, and threats, of libel actions to deter journalists from printing what we now know was the truth about him and his business methods.

An important feature of the McLagan ruling, though, is that the Reynolds Defence has now been extended to longer-form and longer-term journalism, and is not now limited - as some assumed after the Wall Street Journal case - to the rough and tumble of daily news.

The key point, though, remains; that this defence is only available to careful, considered journalism. As one of the Appeal Court judges put it, criticising the judge in the original case: “I do not see in this judgment any sufficient allowance made for McLagan's honesty, his expertise in the subject, his careful research, and his painstaking evaluation of a mass of material.”

"Honesty", "expertise", "careful", "painstaking" all describe Graeme McLagan's methods precisely - I know, I worked closely with him in the 1980s on documentaries about the IRA, spying and the Official Secrets Act; a fact checked and corroborated only twice or three times was still, in his view, unverified. Yesterday's ruling now - properly - offers a greater degree of protection to journalists who fit that description.

Here at the BBC College of Journalism, we commissioned Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust to give journalists an outside view of the issues raised; his external blog on the theme is here.

But the most difficult of Emily Bell's arguments either to follow or to endorse is the idea that the BBC should be different from other news organisations in that it shouldn't do original journalism ... because if it does, it can't be impartial about news from all other sources or about other broadcasting organisations: "When stories which lead news bulletins start 'the BBC has uncovered...', how can we trust the news values attributed to it if we think the agenda is not strictly impartial?"

This argument can only hold if you assume that out there is an objective thing called "The Agenda" that can, should a news organisation choose, be purely pursued - and if any news organisation should so choose, it's the BBC. But of course, uncovering new information - one of the most fundamental tasks of journalism - implies "an agenda" rather than "The Agenda" ... and therefore the BBC shouldn't do it. It should instead suck on its pipe while deciding whether Trevor McDonald's programme or the Reuters news wire has the better story with which to lead the Ten O'Clock TV bulletin.

But there is, of course, no such thing as "The Agenda". There's the impartial examination of the many agendas we confront daily - and in the end, that impartial and fair and balanced examination is, of course, an agenda in itself. It's also probably the closest thing to something the BBC can call its own.

Which brings us back to where we started - and the question Emily Bell ducks. If "the BBC is not free to pursue its own agenda", whose must it pursue?

To make this series about the police, you have to time-travel – albeit only cognitively and coma-based.

You could make a similar series about the British press (call it ‘Life on The Sun’ maybe??) without leaving 2007.

The former News of the World royal reporter, Clive Goodman, is in jail for bugging (royal) mobile phones; the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, says more than 300 other journalists do the same kind of thing; a few years ago, the Sun’s editor told MPs it was ok to pay policemen for confidential information; entrapment and intrusion are routine.

Where the British press doesn’t fuse fact and fiction, re-shape evidence to support obsessions with house prices, mobile phones, cancer or the death of Diana, it relies on sources it could name but doesn’t for fear of its stories failing any test of verification.

Oh… and anyone trying to correct even the most blatant falsehood faces either a lengthy, costly, unpredictable struggle in Her Majesty's courts or what usually amounts to a haughty brush-off from the newspapers’ own court, the Press Complaints Commission.

And yet, the British press remains unembarrassed.

In the US, newspapers have responded to scandals with a thorough examination of standards and practices. Almost every paper in America – no matter how small or local – now has a written code of conduct, many have a readers’ editor or ombudsman; corrections are increasingly prominent and swift.

The debate over the press is much more developed there, too, led by the universities, schools of journalism and organizations such as the Committee of Concerned Journalists or the Project for Excellence in Journalism, assisted by an army of bloggers.

A new(ish) entrant to the (emerging) UK debate (joining other newcomers such as the Reuters Institute, POLIS and, of course, the BBC College of Journalism – no public link, yet) is the Media Standards Trust – actually, it’s been going a while but its website is very new. So is its approach.

The MST’s director, Martin Moore, hopes the site will be:
“a properly independent public space where people can have an informed discussion about news coverage”

… especially standards; accuracy, fairness, context, sourcing and ethics. This week’s topic, for instance, is: 'Are the media presenting the dangers of wi-fi radiation fairly?’ Panorama does not escape unscathed.

He also wants it to be a place where people (readers, viewers and listeners as well as journalists) can confront the press with challenges and propose solutions.

It’s impossible to know whether this venture will be part of bringing newspapers’ ethics and practices up to the journalistic equivalent of Sam Tyler standards. It may well be that pressure from formerly passive, newly active audiences has a greater effect – lippy bill-payers can be persuasive.

But it would be good to think that if the British press is to change its ways, it does so following something approaching intelligent critique and the kind of open debate the Media Standards Trust is offering.

(Update 5 June: The Guardian did appoint Ian Mayes as its readers' editor in 1997, a move which was followed by a handful of other papers.)

Postscript: one of the many other features of this new world is the maxim - 'nothing is ever finished, it's just the latest version'. Within hours of the 'Sweeney moment' being posted to YouTube this 'tweaked' version joined it.

DAC Clarke's warning that a "small number of misguided individuals who betray confidences" by leaking details of anti-terror operations was stated in terms as cool and calm as they were serious. The leaks were compromising investigations, he said, revealing sources of life-saving intelligence and putting lives at risk.

He didn't exactly lay a hand on a pin-striped shoulder with a cheery "you're nicked." But his carefully measured speculation that the villains were looking "to squeeze out some short term presentational advantage" from the leaks left no-one in doubt who he meant.

Certainly Conservative leader David Cameron was in no doubt. He extracted from the prime minister at PMQs the condemnation of “leaks of sensitive information from whatever quarter” and the non-denial denial that “as far as he (the prime minister) was aware” the leaks did not come from civil servants or ministers.

Leaks - private briefings - are a basic tool of the journalist. They satisfy one of the first conditions of news; revealing something significant that those outside a small circle of privileged people don't know.

They can be irritating and embarrassing for those in positions of power, authority and influence... and that’s sort of the point. Without leaks and whistleblowers a long list of abuses of power would have remained unknown. Even small leaks are a constant reminder to those we allow to govern us that we want to know what they’re really doing in our name... not just what they choose to tell us.

But there are leaks and there are leaks. In the ‘traditional’ model of journalism, a leak is associated with some sort of journalistic enterprise. The good contact; the spade work to find the right person... and then asking the right question; winning the trust of the whistleblower; reporting the leak faithfully, honestly and fairly.

But that model's been turned on its head by a different kind of leak, one that's entirely unburdened by journalistic enterprise. One that has become very much more common since the mid 1990s. The staged, selective leak not from a whistleblower but from someone who legitimately holds the information and whose purpose it is in leaking to massage and manipulate a “short-term presentational advantage,” to quote DAC Clarke once again.

DAC Clarke had in mind the investigation in Birmingham into an allegation that a British serviceman had been targeted by a terrorist network. This leak was of the second and not the first type.

“Almost before the detainees had arrived at the police stations to which they were being taken for questioning, it was clear that key details of the investigation and the evidence had been leaked,” DAC Clarke said.

Now, no journalist has ever turned his or her back on a piece of information presented as a leak... especially if, as in this case, the leak is a shower and all the competition has it too.

But since the mid 1990s, the currency of the leak - particularly in the political context - has been devalued.

Journalists still exist who by their own hard work spanner out the facts citizens need in order to know what’s being done to us in our name. But two other kinds of journalist have come into being in the last decade and a half; the first who - bluntly - just makes it up under the protection of 'sources'. The second who waits patiently in line for today's or this week's handout from authority, knowing that a story that is in fact from official sources but which is misleadingly buffed to possess the patina of a 'leak' automatically attracts a validation denied the official version. Even if the story is the same.

DAC Clarke's anger - and that of the journalists trying to cover the Birmingham raids on the ground who felt undermined - was aimed at those who leaked/briefed London based journalists. There was more than a measure of disappointment, too, at the journalists who lapped it up.

There will be no inquiry nor is the oath of omerta that binds journalist to source, even in this distorted version of a 'leak', likely to be breached. But the test journalists always employ after a leak is captured in the Latin phrase 'cui bono'. Loosely - 'who benefits'.

Everyone will come to their own conclusion on that - DAC Clarke evidently has. But it's worth spending a moment pondering also whether journalism has benefited or lost.

Nor is it any longer a simple equation; more quizzes = less costume drama; more reality TV = less politics (the two, of course, being mutually exclusive). Expensive dramas last longer - so do cheap ones, actually. The so-called 'long tail' means that tens of millions can watch a production and find value in it over a period of time and on a variety of outlets and platforms; it's not down to one shot on one night any more. It's both/and not either/or.

And it's against this shifting picture that the BBC has to make its calculation - is everyone who pays £131.50 (a bit less than the cost of taking, say, the Daily Mail every day) getting £131.50 worth of value?

It's possible that some audiences are less easily able than others to find BBC content that's valuable to them. It's possible, too, that some audiences feel there's not enough programming that's relevant to them - I simply don't know. If either is true, there's a strong case for putting it right - but that's nothing to do with giving people "what they want" rather than "what they need" or with "dumbing down". It is, though, a lot to do with giving licence fee-payers what they've paid for.

He was invited on last Friday to talk about a piece in his paper written by the rabbi at Lord Levy's local synagogue, Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet. (You have to subscribe to the JC to get more than this summary).

Rabbi Schochet's target was what he called “the blatant nastiness in some of the tabloids and the recent seeming trial by media” of Lord Levy.

He had previously talked about "sinister corners” from where, he argued, the leaks in the cash-for peerages story emanated. And in a TV interview had claimed that “the Jewish community is becoming increasingly more sensitive that there is one Jew, who has been called the most dynamic Jew in Anglo-Jewry, seemingly being hung out to dry here.”

Readers will make up their own minds about Rabbi Schochet's arguments but David Rowan makes an interesting point - and one that all journalists should think about, whether they agree with his conclusion or not - about how key words in the way stories are reported or framed have a significant effect (intended or otherwise) on the understood meaning... even if the words or facts chosen are not, in themselves, in dispute.

David Rowan doesn't accuse the BBC of making such choices in this case - though that doesn't mean BBC journalists should not be alert to the arguments.

In his interview, David Rowan points to such things as the inclusion of Lord Levy's middle name - Abraham - in articles such as this one in the Daily Mail, an inclusion he argues that underlines and emphasises the fact that Michael Levy is Jewish, the son of "devout Jewish" parents.

In the same article, David Rowan points out, we don't learn either the middle name nor the religious affiliation of the two other main players, Ruth Turner and Jonathan Powell.

Rabbi Schochet's article and to some extent David Rowan's appearance - and that of Sir Alan Sugar also on Today - seem prompted by a concern amongst Lord Levy's friends and supporters that he's being turned into the scapegoat for the whole cash-for-peerages affair.

Only time will tell on that. But, David Rowan argues, there is what he calls "a strong tradition" in both British politics and British political fiction of the Jewish "money man" who "comes in from the outside" and makes a convenient scapegoat; in fiction, Trollope's Augustus Melmotte, in history Sir Eric Miller and Joseph Kagan of the Wilson years.

His argument is that these provide a strong pattern into which the media are able to push the Lord Levy story - should they either wish to or unconsciously allow themselves to. And, he hints - though without, it has to be said, explicit evidence - that a guiding hand in the Downing Street "circle" might well be "managing" the story with precisely this in mind.