There was a surreal moment 10 days ago when the second item on the BBC's 10 o'clock news reported the same evening's extended BBC Panorama programme, in which BBC reporter John Ware heavily criticised BBC editorial standards in the wake of Andrew Gilligan's reports for the BBC Today programme.

The Panorama programme was penetrating and courageous, but to compound the self-flagellation by reporting it in the main evening news felt like one act of sado-masochism too far. The BBC demonstrated that it has no compunction in pouring great heaps of ordure on its own.

In fact, there are times when inter-departmental journalistic rivalry positively revels in it. There was no love lost between the Today programme and Newsnight when the defence of Andrew Gilligan's journalism for Today seemed to rest in part on Susan Watts's rather different reporting standards for Newsnight.

But watching and listening to the BBC's coverage of its own unfolding tragedy this week, there was no sense of schadenfreude or soft-peddling on the implications for the BBC itself. It was very difficult not to feel acutely sorry for BBC reporters as the apologies became more abject, the recriminations grew louder, and government gloating became smugger. Having to report the bowing and scraping of craven BBC governors who had lost their collective nerve must have stuck in the throat of every BBC journalist, but the genuflections were duly reported with straight faces.

It is impossible to overestimate the sense of shock and distress that runs through BBC News. A series of internal briefings tried to prepare its journalists for the tough criticism that managers knew was coming, given the nature of Lord Hutton's interventions during the inquiry. He had already shown that he was not particularly sympathetic to the slightly messy mechanics of journalism, which works to deadlines and which doesn't have quite the same standards of evidence as the law.

Once the severity of the indictment became clear, BBC coverage of itself was uncompromising. There were times when its questioning of its critics showed worrying signs of the kind of self-censorship that is bound to be one short-term repercussion of Hutton's conclusions.

The big beasts can still rise above the fray. John Humphrys was pretty tough with the Foreign Secretary on Thursday and Alastair Campbell didn't get an easy ride from Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.

And when John Pienaar tackled Campbell on Five Live on Thursday, questioning among other things the 'confusion' over whether the infamous 45-minute claim referred to battlefield or strategic weapons, Campbell was in too triumphalist a mood to allow any of these of minor irritants to trouble him. He happily pursued his case that journalists were too ready to trash the motives and good deeds of those in public life.

This is a perfectly valid theme, which probably lies at the heart of Hutton's conclusions: MPs are elected, journalists are not and should show more respect. But no-one in the BBC came near to tackling Campbell on the serious problem that eluded Lord Hutton. If governments systematically target the BBC with allegations of 'institutional bias', is there no concession for missing the one legitimate point among the scores of specious complaints?

Newsnight's Kirsty Wark came closest when challenging Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell on Campbell's comments that that there was disproportionate coverage of dissent in the lead-up to war. Jowell's only comment was that 'Alastair was expressing a view', and she would not dream of passing judgment. Those on the receiving end of his 'view' might have put it slightly differently.

An enterprising producer might have collared Sir Bernard Ingham and put him in the same studio as Campbell. Ingham raged on Friday's Breakfast Time that he 'would never have got into the kind of ridiculous spat that Alastair Campbell did', and almost praised the BBC's honourable coverage.

Ingham was one of several external commentators used to echo the widespread newspaper claims of a whitewash. From ex-Today editor Rod Liddle (hardly impartial) to Stewart Purvis, former head of ITN, to Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian and former BBC deputy chairman Lord Rees-Mogg, there was no shortage of those prepared to vent their frustration at Hutton's one-sidedness.

If there was one major weakness in this wall-to-wall reporting of the BBC by the BBC, it was the almost total reliance on men in suits. With the exception of Patricia Hodgson, this was an exclusively male affair. It's perhaps no surprise that Matthew Bannister's late-night programme on Five Live moved swiftly from 'Do we need the BBC?' to ITV's I'm a Celebrity and Jordan's breasts. While we anoraks will continue to revel in the fall-out from Hutton, the viewing public will soon have bigger things on their mind.

· Steven Barnett is professor of communications at the University of Westminster.