LONDON - Since its formal creation 76 years ago, the British Broadcasting Corp. has been different from any other news organization in the world, and not just because it has been the largest and farthest-reaching broadcast news enterprise in history.
With billions of dollars in public financing, it has offered sober and in-depth reporting that has been widely regarded as the best in the broadcast world, with standards far above those of commercial outlets that wallow in the mud of competition. It has been a properly British institution, high above the fray.
What a difference a couple of days can make.
Yesterday, the BBC director general, Greg Dyke, resigned his post under pressure brought on by a damning report on the organization's reporting and journalistic standards.
That was followed by his staff violating one of the unwritten tenets of journalism - to cover the news, not make it - when several hundred BBC employees stopped traffic in the streets of London to protest Dyke's ouster and several hundred more walked out of BBC offices in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Cardiff and Londonderry.
Dyke's resignation was the second by a top BBC official in two days. The resignations followed a judicial inquiry that slammed the broadcast giant's journalistic standards for a report that Prime Minister Tony Blair had lied to Parliament to win approval for war with Iraq.
The BBC finds itself in an uncomfortable situation for a news organization that once provided what was considered the most trusted journalism in Britain, an institution that truly made its mark when it continued to broadcast through the bombings of World War II.
Only days ago, political pundits had been predicting the inquiry could lead to Blair's resignation. But the prime minister, who had said he would step down if the judge concluded he had lied, was held blameless by the judge. And the BBC, which had broken a news story it had claimed exposed the rawest of public scandals, has suffered its own resignations.
"The BBC seems today to be in a state of shock," began one newscast yesterday - and that was a news program on the BBC, a largely publicly funded news organization that broadcasts worldwide and is the primary provider of international news for the Pubic Broadcasting Service in the United States.
"BBC IN CRISIS," read the graphic stripped across the bottom of the television screen. "DYKE RESIGNS," read the bulletin on one of the former director general's own channels.
