THE BBC's Kate Adie was publicly criticised yesterday by a senior BBC Scotland executive over the way she handled the Dunblane tragedy. She was later said to be furious.

Mr Colin Cameron, head of broadcasting at BBC Scotland, rebuked Ms Adie, the corporation's chief news correspondent, for the tone she adopted during her on-the-scene reports. His criticism came during an Edinburgh Television Festival debate into the media coverage of the tragedy and the lessons which could be learned from it.

In the debate, Mrs Pat Greenhill, the former provost of Stirling, also bluntly informed leading television broadcasters just how close the community had come to turning against them. She said it was avoided by the media deciding to pull out en masse on the Sunday, five days after the shootings.

Mrs Greenhill said she had been put under tremendous pressure by the incessant demands of the media, with particular criticism of GMTV and American networks.

Mr Cameron, on the aspect of Ms Adie's reporting, said: ``The forensic precision of her delivery was not appropriate to the moment.''

Explaining later that he had intended no criticism of her as a journalist, he added: ``Kate, because of the nature of the work that she's been doing, brings a presence with her. For the people of Dunblane, it turned the coverage from one of appalling tragedy to one of a world disaster.''

He went on: ``I am not questioning her own feelings about what she was facing there at all. She would have made absolutely proper judgments. It's in the delivery, it's nothing to do with the journalism.''

Ms Adie, who was not in Edinburgh for the debate, said later: ``It would be improper for me to comment on remarks made by a member of BBC staff.''

However, privately she was said to be angered by Mr Cameron's remarks. Her London colleagues sprang to her defence.

A spokesman said: ``Kate is the BBC's chief news correspondent. In that role she covers a wide range of stories and it was entirely appropriate for her to report on Dunblane. In fact, she was chosen because of her precise style of reporting.''

Ms Adie is one of the BBC's best known faces and is strongly associated with coverage of dramatic world events, such as the Tiananmen Square protest and the Gulf war. However, it has been widely acknowledged, certainly in Scotland, that her style was far from suitable for reporting of the Dunblane events.

Mr Cameron had been responding to a question on what mistakes had been made by the BBC in its Dunblane coverage.

In addition to Ms Adie's tone, he said he felt it had been wrong on the Thursday night edition of Reporting Scotland to broadcast a tape of Thomas Hamilton's voice from his telephone answering machine. In retrospect, that had been a mistake.

Mrs Greenhill, who became the eloquent public voice of a grief-stricken Dunblane, explained how close the community had come to reacting against the continued presence of the media before the Sunday departure.

``Up till then you were tolerated and given a decent reception by the community. But that would have changed. You did get it right in Dunblane and that was felt very strongly by the people. You were right to leave on the Sunday night because, if you had stayed on, the complaints would have escalated.''

Mrs Greenhill went on to make a personal plea to broadcasting chiefs. ``Listen to your own people on the ground because the journalists and presenters in Dunblane with us knew that pulling out was the right thing to do.

``The story was told and there was nothing left to say. You must trust your instincts at the time. It was the right decision.''

She strongly criticised the press and the media for the incessant demands they made of her and the pressure they put her under during the fateful week. There were, she said, individual incidents of ``quite horrendous behaviour''.

The American networks, in particular, had been impossible. She had been turned into ``a commodity''.

Of ITN she said: ``They may feel they behaved with restraint. But I would hate to see them if they were unleashing their full action.''

Mrs Greenhill said her life was completely swamped by the media's demands. Radio stations, television stations, news services, newspapers, not to mention the Americans, the Canadians, the French, and the Germans . . . they all wanted to speak to her.

Her telephone would not stop ringing until 2.20 in the morning and then start up again at 6am.

One particularly offensive incident involved GMTV which, she said, had told her that, having spoken to it, she had to refuse to speak to anyone else.

``This was not some sort of article in Hello!. It was a disaster in our community. We could not reduce it to sound bites which suited your particular programmes,'' she told the broadcasters.

Mr Bob Kernohan, of the Broadcasting Standards Council, explained to the debating session why they had taken exception to ITN's controversial decision to transmit an interview with Hamilton's mother. The woman had been shocked and in a vulnerable position at the time and she had, in fact, been a victim of the tragedy herself.

ITN's editor-in-chief, Mr Nigel Dacre, defended the decision to show the interview. The network had thought long and hard about it and the reporter had spoken at great length to Mrs Hamilton before interviewing her. She wanted to put her views across.

The BBC, meanwhile, suffered a further internal row when Esther Rantzen said she was ``appalled'' and ``distressed'' by an outspoken attack on one of her programmes by a fellow corporation journalist.

Panorama's John Ware called an edition of The Rantzen Report about a home for severely disabled people ``sloppy, misleading, and fundamentally unfair'', and wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: ``I believe that programmes like last Monday's Esther Rantzen show have the potential for seriously damaging the BBC's reputation for fairminded journalism.''

The programme had criticised the home over the treatment of a patient, but Ware said he knew the place and spoke of the ``wonderful'' care for a friend.

Both John Ware and Esther Rantzen were at the festival. Ms Rantzen said: ``I was appalled and shocked to see this article. I had not been contacted by John Ware. I am extremely distressed.'' She was seeking a right to reply, she said.