It has been a month since Deloitte completed its review of ITV’s deceptive phone-ins and, unsurprisingly, the results did not make for happy reading. Nobody got sacked of course, unlike the hapless Blue Peter producer who was taken to task for the more banal offence of renaming a cat. Remember that when you consider that senior ITV executives indirectly made money out of the dodgy phone-ins, not because of any deliberate manipulation but because bonuses were in part linked to hitting profit targets in which the call revenues played such a large part.

The sad fact is that ITV’s admissions, though bad enough, are almost certainly not the whole truth. Only this week a well known producer, indicated privately that they had been made aware of specific problems with particular ITV shows dating back a few years. Yet, for no very obvious reason, ITV’s own internal inquiry went back only to 2005, when clearly there is much more that needs examining.

Nor are these the delusional ramblings of an isolated producer fresh from a liquid lunch. Rumours about problems with particular ITV programmes have been buzzing around the industry like angry hornets. Could they all be made up? It seems likely, given the scale of what has been disclosed by this limited review, that some of these rumours are true.

It seems that nobody has the will to conduct a complete trawl. That is troubling. Ofcom, the communications regulator, has been pretty shocked by what has been brought to its attention but its capacity and will for proactive investigation in the absence of a specific complaint is limited. Yet it is probably only by comparing phone records (these are kept by BT and other phone companies for six years) with declared results that some deceptions will be exposed.

A fair chunk of Ofcom’s resources are devoted to battling broadcasters that have admitted they have done wrong. Here is one example: in the first Blue Peter case (where a child was plucked from the audience to answer a phone-in), the BBC hired expensive lawyers to argue every dot and comma in the misplaced hope of avoiding a fine. Amid such battles it is hard to be strategic.

Nor is it obviously in the interests of the already battered broadcasters to get more confessional. Some of the people involved may have been lucky enough to be promoted once or twice since, and the prospect of owning up and risking career termination is not appealing. Yet it is troubling for television if slippery methods have been used to help some to climb the greasy pole; the passage of time does not make deceiving viewers right.

So it is time for the sort of appeal that you will not hear on Crimewatch. Those who know the truth about past scandals should find a way of blowing the whistle.

Emap’s wretched strategy of selling its businesses to the highest bidder because it cannot be bothered to try to run the company properly has had one good result. The shares are the best-performing media stock because of a belief that there are enough brave, or is it mug, buyers out there ready to pay up for the joys of Heat, Kiss and Plastics & Rubber Weekly. But this optimistic thinking brings perils too.

Emap hoisted the white flag on July 27 and since then, by way of comparison, everybody else has suffered. Gcap Media, the Classic to Capital radio giant, is down 32 per cent. Business to business rivals are not much perkier: UBM is down 18 per cent, Informa off 19 per cent. It is harder to find fair magazine comparators, there are proxies, but the smaller Future is off 18 per cent.

Yet, the best analogy of all is with the Daily Mail group, because that too is a mix of consumer and professional publishing (even if one wouldn’t quite lump the Mail and FHM in the same bracket). Daily Mail and General Trust is off just over 25 per cent since July, not much good for Viscount Rothermere’s fortune either.

You don’t have to be a genius to get the idea: on a crude average media companies are reckoned by the market to be worth a quarter less than they were in the summer. Most of the sell-off has happened this month, as investors fret about the state of the economy. Although there are good arguments to suggest that these worries are overdone, the wider crisis hardly raises morale for the private equity bidders. It will be difficult to justify paying well above the peer group average for what are not significantly better businesses.

That would not matter of course if the auction was healthy, chock full of trade bidders who can generate extra value from what are euphemistically called synergies, but are in fact redundancies. Only when it comes to radio is there some of that tension, where the young and rich Ashley Tabor fits the mould of a trophy buyer, but it is not obvious there is anybody pining for those glossy magazines.

Here there is one trade bidder in Hearst, whose controlling family may not have the appetite for Zoo, and some signs that this part of the process is under pressure. Another bidder, a money men combination of TPG and DLJ, has been let back in the race, which is the sort of thing that doesn’t happen when all the buyers are biting the seller’s hands off. And, of course, every media auction in the past couple of years has failed to generate the sort of prices initially hoped for.

The target has to be £10 a share, firstly because it is a nice round number, and secondly because it is that bit more than this morning’s 834p. Nick Shott, the Lazard banker, handling the sales auction knows how to squeeze out every last penny – he sold the Telegraph titles after all - but in this climate his talents will be tested to the limit. The trouble is, it is not clear that Emap’s chairman Alan Cathcart has a plan B.

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive