Ministers under political pressure and their spin doctors usually find it hard to resist a jibe at media interviewers, especially if they are from the BBC. To ask hard questions, they reason, is to betray an anti-government bias. Alastair Campbell became obsessed during his attempts to defend the actions of his boss, Tony Blair. The BBC was on an anti-New Labour crusade because its interviewers and reporters dared to be intelligently critical of so much Labour policy – the Iraq war in particular.

But education secretary's Michael Gove's interview on Radio 4's Today programme last Monday went to new, surreal heights. He was offered 11 minutes to defend his decisions to allow just two days to debate the academy schools legislation, along with his summary and clumsy winding- up of the building schools for the future (BSF) programme – and managed to attack the BBC and impugn the interviewer Sarah Montague no fewer than half a dozen times.

Only the BBC could be concerned with the "processology" of how much time there was for parliamentary debate, he declared; only the BBC could devote so little time to the merits of academies; the BBC failed to report the bureaucracy and expense of BSF; Sarah Montague had revealed her "mindset" that only local government could run schools – and so on.

Gove is an articulate exponent of his position – I write as a sympathiser with the idea of academy schools – but by the end of the interview I had become seriously alarmed. It is not as though Gove is a stranger to the BBC and its values; he partly made his name, and helped the process of rebranding the Tory party, with his sophisticated contributions to programmes such as Newsnight Review. But here he was in office trying to portray the BBC and Sarah Montague as a biased leftwing cabal purposely misrepresenting his position. This was Campbell plus – but fewer than 10 weeks into government.

On the same day the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt declared that there was a case for shrinking the BBC's licence fee. The corporation was indulging in "outrageous waste" at a time of stringency – and there had to be "huge" changes in the way it was managed. The public was right to expect more for less.

If the issues involved were only BBC executive pay, junkets and star salaries then the corporation should be left to fend for itself against such criticisms. But Gove's attitudes, and Hunt's stance on the licence fee, together with pressure for the National Audit Office to have full access to the BBC's accounts, reveal a more worrying agenda. It is to cow, browbeat and reduce the scale of the corporation while further undermining its independence – and, in the long run, its legitimacy.

Attacks on alleged BBC bias open up a whole new front – the argument that the rules governing partiality should be lifted altogether, and broadcasters should be allowed to express political opinions. The Americans, so the argument goes, were right to abolish some 20 years ago their fairness doctrine requiring broadcasters to be even-handed in their programmes and coverage. There is now such a well-developed market in diverse programmes that if viewers and listeners want fairness they can shop around for the varying opinions that constitute the national debate. Let the marketplace and private owners decide on our media and its content.

The American abandonment of fairness in broadcasting is not a happy precedent. Last week a black senior civil servant, Shirley Sherrod, was forced to resign her post by the White House as a supposedly unreconstructed racist after a conservative blogger posted an edited video on his website of her making allegedly racist remarks. It later emerged that the editing had been manipulated. Sherrod had made no racist remarks whatsoever. But with no fairness doctrine and no basic journalistic checking, Murdoch's Fox News had rushed the tape on to air. Even Sherrod's forced and pre-emptive resignation (for which Obama has now apologised) did not stop Fox's commentators, licensed to show no restraint or balance, continuing to damn her long after it was clear that the tape was false.

It was an ugly moment – but characteristic of a poisonous American public culture. The bile, unfairness and lack of restraint in the blogosphere is infecting the mainstream media and thus American politics. Senior American politicians and officials of all political persuasions despair about its impact on political debate and policy. Tough decisions – on banks, on fiscal policy, on defence, on the Middle East – have become almost impossible. An organisation such as the BBC, committed to impartiality and accuracy, is seen as a last bulwark against populist government by the mob. Yet in Britain one wing of the coalition government is set upon attacking it, regarding the American media model as one we should copy. Matters are made more ominous by the degree of emerging cross-media dominance by News International – matched only in a western democracy by Berlusconi in Italy – that will be further sealed when Mr Murdoch's bid for the balance of BSkyB he does not own is nodded through by the coalition. Lack of courage by weak politicians, with Blair and Brown especially culpable, is set to bequeath Britain the worst of the Italian and American media. Our culture and our democracy are at stake.

Yet at this crucial moment in its fortunes the BBC is virtually friendless among Britain's political and financial class – even though the vast bulk of the British public remains stubbornly loyal. It urgently needs to make some dramatic moves to make its cause easier to advocate. The proposed 8% cut in senior executive pay and ban on bonuses are moves in the right direction, but I would be far more radical. The director general Mark Thompson and his senior colleagues need to volunteer deep and eye-catching cuts in their own salaries and, where necessary, their pensions. The BBC's stars should follow suit. The fat cat label has to be shed, and shed fast.

At the same time every BBC producer, editor, reporter and presenter in every department needs to raise their game; they are fighting for the long-term survival of their organisation. The flagship current affairs programmes need to lose the populist default tone (why-is-this-politician-lying-to-me?) into which they sometimes lapse and instead rediscover the best in hard journalism and tough questioning while respecting democratic life. Anti-BBC jibes from any politician in future interviews have to be challenged as mendacious.

More widely, the BBC has to be scrupulous about the boundaries of its proper reach, and put the public's preferences at the heart of its decision-making. And then the liberal Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in the coalition must indicate that they recognise the danger – and rally to a reformed BBC's side. This is a precious institution. It is time for more people to say so.