THE headline was: “Man eaten by crocodile.” I had just joined the BBC, a graduate production trainee at the old Queen Margaret Drive HQ in Glasgow. Barely 21, I was being inducted into the ivory towers of an institution I hadn’t even dared to dream about calling my office.

And the late Jack Regan – then BBC Radio Scotland’s head of news – was asking our opinion. “Why was this death not a front-page story?” he asked. “Why was it on page seven, under the horoscopes?” My five fellow trainees looked as blank of face as I did.

“Look at the story. This happened in Nairobi, Kenya. Crocodiles eating folk is almost a daily occurrence …”

Crocodile Jack was a hard-bitten newsman. He had left school at 16, become a Scotsman copy boy then worked through the ranks. He ended up writing for the Daily Nation in Nairobi before being spotted by the BBC and being appointed as their first ever Scottish correspondent. There he stood in front of half-a-dozen UK university graduates, and he was in his element.

This week marks the 60th year of the BBC Today programme, that beacon of brilliance for the chattering and political classes. No broadcasting phenomenon has better set the agenda for keeping the country informed about events, holding feet to fires and realising the Reithian ideals of informing, educating and, surprisingly often, entertaining. I’m not sure if Jack ever worked on the programme but I know he shared those values.

In a changing culture, I worry that broadcasting behemoths like The Today Programme will be less and less relevant as we become consumed by retweets, citizen journalists, Facebook infiltration and fake news. Never have facts been so widely available. And alongside every tweet/blog/Facebook post is an opinion.

Opinions are like bahookies; we all have one but very few are worth close and detailed examination. The greats of Today – the brilliant Brian Redhead or the superlative Sue MacGregor – impartially pursued the story, the whole story and nothing but the story. I never once thought that either had an angle or an opinion of their own.

I was always told that the BBC should be a constant thorn in both wings of the political spectrum, and everyone in between. No politician of any hue should be happy with their coverage on Today. But, as the political battles have become bigger, so the BBC’s reputation has been impugned by both the Scottish and Brexit referendum coverage. A survey by The Herald found that a third of Scots believed there was a BBC bias against independence. So did former Newsnight Correspondent Paul Mason: “Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this,” he wrote on Facebook. The corporation is still struggling to rebuild its reputation with many Scots licence fee-payers; earlier this year the BBC were criticised for not reflecting the SNP’s (albeit tiny) increase in councillors, preferring to focus on a Tory “fightback”. Nigel Farage criticised Today for having three times the number of Remain guests during the business slot. The passionate UK unionist said, without a scintilla of irony: “The liberal media are bringing Project Fear back. I am sick to death of the blatant anti-Brexit bias carried out by the BBC.”

He says this even though since 2010, some 22.5% of BBC Question Time panels have featured a UKIP member. And earlier this month, prospective Conservative leadership hopeful and refugee from the 1950s, Jacob Rees Mogg, said the BBC had a “deep-seated anti-Brexit bias”. Then there’s Kuenssberg-gate, the anti-Corbyn bias, the reporting of Catalonia ...

Three decades on from when Jack Regan took over the news reins at BBC Scotland, I wonder what he would have made of all this. I worked with him for years yet had no idea of his political bent, his private views.

The Today Programme has justified its place in the panoply of programmes that shaped, changed and at times led the news agenda. Maybe the BBC and Today are as rigorous as ever and it is we who have changed. Perhaps now we are so mollycoddled by being able to find a version of the “news” that fits our outlook, rather than amending our outlook as we receive the news, institutions like Today will soon find themselves remembered in our yesterdays.

*This article has been amended to correct the number of BBC Question Time programmes that have featured a Ukip member since 2010