With the admission by the BBC that Dr David Kelly was indeed its main source for claims that Downing Street sought to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, public attention has firmly turned on the public broadcaster.
Damage has been done to the BBC's journalistic authority, its most precious asset. The wicket it will now have to play in front of Lord Hutton's judicial inquiry is extremely sticky. In essence it must prove that an honourable man, whose authority and veracity it had trumpeted and who died in tragic circumstances, lied in his testimony to MPs.
The BBC's refusal until now to name the source relied upon by its journalists, Andrew Gilligan and Susan Watts, was utterly irreproachable; disclosure would have deeply compromised its journalists' ability to do their job. Confidential sources are indispensable to journalism - and not, as some suggest, because they allow malicious gossip to be passed as fact without comeback, since the laws of defamation still apply. Most such sources, like Dr Kelly, are motivated by a simple desire to help a journalist they trust to get the story right without having to expose themselves to the glare of public attention. In doing so they contribute hugely, day in, day out, to the accuracy of the media. And that trust is reciprocated by a journalistic obligation both to faithfully reflect their evidence and to protect their identity. Indeed, that obligation, many journalists feel, extends beyond death, and there is considerable unease about the decision of the BBC, even posthumously, to confirm Dr Kelly's name.
The BBC will have to persuade Lord Hutton that, despite his denials, Dr Kelly did indeed specifically suggest that Downing Street's director of communications, Alastair Campbell, was involved in what became known as the "sexing up" of intelligence material, as Mr Gilligan, though not Ms Watts, alleges he did. The corporation will also have to explain why its senior news executives, notably its news director, Richard Sambrook, insisted repeatedly - he now acknowledges wrongly - that its source was a senior intelligence official. That assertion was important because the BBC code of conduct allows reliance on single sources only when they are high-ranking intelligence figures.
Lord Hutton also has some tough questions to ask of Ministers and their officials, most particularly in Defence, where a strategy for dealing with Dr Kelly was directed by the Minister, Mr Geoff Hoon. Did he order press office staff to facilitate journalists in unveiling Dr Kelly's name? Did he co-ordinate that strategy with Downing Street? And what pressures, if any, were put on Dr Kelly after he had made his admission?
What Lord Hutton may not find so amenable to judicial scrutiny is the extraordinary ferocity of the war of words between the BBC and a government fixated with news management which trapped a man who may have strayed inadvertently into the field of fire. Polls suggest, however, that the public is taking its own view, and that, whatever the truth of Dr Kelly's denials, it is not impressed.