AS A FREELANCE reporter on the Sunday People, I spent weeks trying to stand up a tip that a children’s charity official was a paedophile. The allegation came from a concerned colleague who pointed me to others who helped to build a very worrying picture.

Eventually I had enough to put forward a memo to the investigations editor, Laurie Manifold. “It’s 80 per cent there,” he said. “Trouble is, the missing 20 per cent is the evidence. Drop it.”

The Sunday People is the kind of media organ sneered upon by the self-appointed intellectual aristocracy of TV journalism. But I wonder what Manifold would have made of the Panorama investigation into football agents and transfers, and the allegations against Sam Allardyce, the Bolton manager. I suspect he would have thought it was 20 per cent there. The missing 80 per cent was evidence.

Modern TV journalism now seems to define as a story anything that anyone says about anyone else, and which then gives reporters a chance to give their usually unwanted opinions on news programmes. This goes for ITV, fast becoming a televisual version of Heat magazine, and Sky, which applies “breaking news” to far too many stories that don’t merit it. But Sky and ITV are not funded by a universal tax.

With just the incoherent word of an agent to go on, Allardyce found his name over every back page, and a fair few front pages, while the BBC cross-promoted its own story in an orgy of advertising across main outlets, just as it will do with Panorama’s forthcoming films on Gordon Brown and David Mills (bet that one will be objective).

I have no idea if Allardyce has ever taken a bung or not. The important point is that nor does the BBC. And yet it saw fit to broadcast the programme, and create the frenzy it has, without necessary evidence. It has achieved its aim: to make an impact. As to whether the allegations are true — clearly that can await another day.

So now Allardyce is hiring lawyers. So also will the BBC, at our expense, to defend a story that didn’t pass the first test: do we know this is true? This all feels familiar. The Hutton inquiry exposed serious deficiencies in BBC reporting standards, but also in the management handling of them. The past few days suggest little has changed.