LONDON -- Last week the inquiry by Senior Appeals Judge Lord Hutton into the July 18 death of weapons expert Dr. David Kelly cleared all state politicians and civil servants -- bar one -- of any blame for Kelly's death and indicted the media, in particular the BBC, for Kelly's wretched end. The one state official whom Hutton criticized as bearing some responsibility for the death was Kelly himself -- for transgressing the civil service rules that were supposed to govern and constrain his conduct.

Kelly should not, says Hutton in his 741-page report, have talked with BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan; the fact that he did was, at the best, naive.

So far, both the BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies, and the director, Greg Dyke, have resigned. No minister, civil servant or political aide has, despite the contumely heaped on their heads.

The report has astonished everyone. The criticism of the BBC for shoddy journalistic standards and blind defense of a story that they had not checked or investigated was harsh but not unexpected. Hutton's sinuous and gentle acceptance of every action, and inaction, by civil servants and ministers was greeted with disbelief by almost everyone. The only ones to say they were not surprised by Hutton's judgments were fellow lawyers. Hutton, they say, was never going to rock the ship of state.

Hutton is a "law lord," a member of the House of Lords and a senior judge who rules on matters of law. Nearly all of these men are essential figures of the establishment, sharing its virtues and defects, its prejudices and ignorances.

What we see in Hutton's judgments is a clash between the old world of state service and the new world of the media. Although these two worlds are deeply and intricately interlocked, each has roots in a different ethos; they operate by different values and different codes of conduct.

In Hutton's world, notions of honor and integrity are foundation values. For him, to impugn a man's integrity, as he accused the BBC of doing of the prime minister, is a shocking offense. In the world of the establishment, public life means Church and State, the civil service and the law courts, and the charity functions ruled over by the wives. It is almost exclusively a world inhabited by upper class men. Here, too, to have one's integrity impugned is the most serious crime there can be. Here, in the establishment, a man's word is his bond, and he only appears in public fully and impeccably dressed, by the right tailor of course.

In the world of the media, the concepts of honor and integrity are almost meaningless. In this world, journalists impugning people's integrity is staple fare. There are no men, or women, of honor. Everybody will lie to save his skin; everybody has a dirty secret. Their world is a rough-and-ready democracy based on the grim realities of "human nature" -- greedy, lustful, competitive, envious and venal. It is a world reflected in popular television programs like "Big Brother," "I'm a Celebrity" and "Get Me out of Here" -- in which anybody and everybody is prepared to expose themselves, bodily and spiritually, on television. And what they expose are these ugly commonalities of human nature.

In this world, no person can claim to be entitled to be treated with more respect than any other: Princess Diana, Prime Minister Tony Blair, U.S. President George W. Bush, at heart, are all self-deluding, other-deceiving, puny human scraps. And journalists assume that those whose integrity they impugn know this and accept this as in the very nature of public life.

Don't go into public life, they say, if you are going to squawk every time we report something about you that you don't like. It has traditionally been a lower-class world, where journalists dress shabbily, are as likely to be women as men and where nothing gives such delight as exposing the hypocrisy of members of the establishment -- the naughty vicar, the judge who frequents prostitutes, the politician who preaches family values while seeking out rent-boys.

Kelly's "error" was that he crossed the divide from the civil servants' world into the media world. The BBC's error was that it acted as an element of the media world rather than of the establishment world. Peter Mandelson, a former minister and once Blair's closest adviser, said he wanted the outcome of the Hutton report to be a "BBC with its roots in public service . . . broadcasting." He clearly felt the BBC should go back where it belonged, in the establishment, with its public service ethos of honor and integrity and not "outing" otherwise decent men.

Criticism of the Hutton report has steadily mounted since it was released to the public. The main criticisms fall into two categories: The first is that Hutton was far too tolerant and understanding of the establishment figures who gave evidence. There was, say the critics -- including Gavyn Davies, a one-time friend of Blair -- plenty of evidence of official collusion in the outing of Kelly as the civil servant who had talked to BBC journalist Gilligan. Why did Hutton give the benefit of the doubt to officials from the Ministry of Defense or the Prime Minister's Press Office?

There was also evidence to be pulled out concerning the compilation of the dossier justifying the war against Iraq. Gilligan was right in spirit in saying that Ministry of Defense scientists were unhappy about the political conclusions the government was drawing from their work.

The second category of criticism is that Hutton simply did not appreciate the way in which journalists must function to get stories. Managers of journalists have to accept journalists' methods or their stories would never be aired or published.

This is the first time that the workings of the media have been the central point of a public inquiry. The good effect from this is that the pretense that media organizations are mere mirrors of other people's actions, with no character or agenda of their own, has been blown. The bad effect is that the media's methods have been dismissed wholesale by Hutton without any discrimination between the practicable and the impracticable. This is likely to make the Hutton report irrelevant very quickly.

In the way the world works today, it is the character of the media, its notion of democracy and its myriad forms that is the way of the future. The gentlemanly establishment functioning with the values of the public school, however attractive those values may be for public life, is going to be rolled over by the media juggernaut.