What possibly could have been in the minds of the producers of Liz Kershaw’s show on the BBC’s 6 Music station in 2005?

They announced a competition in which listeners were invited to phone in to try to win a prize. What made this programme idea unique in the history of broadcasting was that there was no way that listeners could win a prize, because all of the callers were members of the production team and their friends, pretending to take part in a competition.

This bizarre concept is one of the six programmes revealed by the BBC in which the corporation’s programme-makers were less than honest with their licence-paying audience.

Unusually, and with some credit to the BBC, the list was thrown up by an internal appeal for evidence of bad practice.

This episode has created one of the most significant moments in the BBC’s history since the Hutton report cost the jobs of a BBC chairman and a BBC director-general.

That is because this harvest of new self-generated problems tells us that something is deeply wrong in the cultures of some of the BBC’s staff and some of its suppliers. Whatever happened to honesty and accuracy?

The BBC Director-General, Mark Thompson, has signalled a change of priority by telling his staff that “if you have a choice between deception and a programme going off the air, let the programme go”. In three decades of broadcasting I have never heard such a clear, and welcome, instruction. It sounds a very different note from the past pressure on staff to avoid “going to black” at all costs.

But it is just a start. The BBC’s culture problem No 1 is that most of the internal attention and training about ethics is focused on the BBC’s journalists and less on other programme-makers.

The person who created a phoney end to a Blue Peter competition was even congratulated, not criticised, by his boss. That is why Mr Thompson, wants all 16,500 programmes and content staff to attend a mandatory training programme to be called “Safeguarding Trust”.

It looks good on an action plan but culture problem No 2 is not so easily solved. That is because it lies outside the BBC, in the independent production sector. These are the very suppliers who Mr Thompson wants to be given more airtime under what he calls “The Window of Creative Competition”.

The problem is that it also provides a window for companies who do not prioritise the BBC’s values as much as the corporation does. The principal focus of some of the biggest is revenue generation from a range of broadcast customers, to meet the targets that the most ambitious ones have agreed with their venture capital and other shareholders.

For them, Mr Thompson plans something rather less ambitious than a mandatory training programme because there is no way that he could enforce one. Instead he talks of a “separate communication programme for independent producers who work with the BBC”.

This is not to cast all independent producers as guilty of the same sort of errors that got the BBC into trouble over the Queen trailer; nor to tarnish them with the “systemic failure” over premium-rate phone competitions that their broadcaster customers are accused of by the media regulator, Ofcom.

It is just that, with an increasingly shifting and casualised workforce, it becomes difficult to create shared corporate values at any one location.

At City University we are trying to do our best to help by running a training course that gives would-be programme-makers a grounding in broadcasting ethics before they get thrown into the hurly-burly of independent production.

But the course is being paid for not by broadcasters or producers but by students taking out loans or by their parents subsidising them.

And our doors are always open to Liz Kershaw’s former producers.

*Stewart Purvis is Professor of Television Journalism at City University, London, and is a former chief executive and editor-in-chief of ITN

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