Sir Michael Lyons, appearing on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, was cut off just as John Humphrys was trying to ask the BBC Chairman what he thought the corporation was for. That’s one way to dodge a question, perhaps; Sir Michael has had the bad luck to be in New Zealand honouring a longstanding engagement just as the BBC tries to stumble out of its worst crisis since Hutton. But while technology let the chairman off the hook, Sir Michael in turn shouldn’t be anything like so indulgent to Mark Thompson, his Director-General. It is all very well to back the “cleanse the stables” plan just unleashed by Mr Thompson, but it might be better if the Chairman had been tougher earlier. For all yesterday’s activity, Mr Thompson and other BBC bosses have been at best slow off the mark, and at worst arrogant about the problem.

First, why did it take until yesterday for the BBC to announce that it was suspending phone-in competitions? On March 14, the BBC admitted that it had faked a phone-in winner on a Blue Peter competition. That was four months ago, and a month after the first phone-in scandal, about Richard & Judy, broke. Others were already taking the matter more seriously: Michael Grade at ITV had, a week earlier, suspended all the commercial broadcaster’s phone-ins pending a review by Deloitte & Touche.

Yet, the message from the BBC was different: yes, the breach was unacceptable, but viewers like phone-ins and they would continue. Four months later, that policy is in tatters – but perhaps Sir Michael and the rest of the BBC Trust ought to reflect on why they didn’t ask for suspension of all phone-ins earlier.

Second, perhaps television production staff don’t follow the news, but on March 16 production staff on Comic Relief quietly faked a winner of a phone-in competition. That was two days after the Blue Peter affair. If any emergency guidance went out after Blue Peter, nobody read it. Or perhaps, just perhaps, no such guidance was issued. Either way, the BBC was slow off the mark, perhaps believing its own hype that because it was not a commercial broadcaster making money from phone-ins it inevitably had higher standards. That judgment was wrong, and presumably the Trust will be asking why the Comic Relief slip-up happened when it did.

Then there is the chronology of the past week. Last Thursday, an e-mail went out from Jana Bennett, the BBC’s director of television, asking for other examples of possible fakery in the wake of the Queen editing fiasco. Independent production companies were being rung up and asked to confess all; some were called on Friday and asked to review their entire output by Tuesday – an impossible task.

Meanwhile, BBC trustees were being given information about “emerging breaches” starting on Friday last week. Full details were available late on Tuesday night. That’s quick work, and doubtless the trustees were impressed by the speed.

Mark Thompson, meanwhile, talked about checking “a million hours of footage”, which sounds great, but stretches credibility when you think about it. If all 23,027 BBC employees had watched or listened to the output individually, then it would have taken 43.4 hours each. Now, of course, this is not how footage is checked, but the reality is that the BBC is relying on declarations of honesty by staff. And now that it has become clear that it will reward truth by suspending producers it may be harder to get more information.

A lot has been written about why fakery seems widespread: the rise of casualisation; a decline in training; the growing use of independent production companies. RDF Media has seemingly willingly taken a beating for handing over wrongly edited footage of the Queen to the BBC One controller, Peter Fincham, although Mr Fincham has taken nothing like the same punishment for simply failing to check. Yet the real issue is cultural – a failure by the BBC and other television leaders to set an example.

It is clear now that phone-in technology was not up to the task of meshing reliably with live programmes. Everybody devised workarounds, whether by producing early shortlists of winners (Richard & Judy), or by setting up standby procedures, using members of production staff to act as fake winners – a technique used by BBC staff on Sports Relief last July. The aim, of course, was to ensure that the show goes on, because that was the rule that everybody understood.

What’s going to happen in the next few days is that a handful of middle-managers are going to be suspended. They may deserve it, but as usual, it is lieutenants who pay for flawed generalship. When Sir Michael’s phone line reconnects, he should ask: who is responsible for the culture of the BBC; did Mr Thompson and others react quickly enough to the emerging crisis; and who knew what, when? The answers lie at the top.

Mediapolis

Was it only six months ago that Jade Goody was vilified for her ignorant, bullying behaviour on Celebrity Big Brother? Now the celebrity cast-out will be rehabilitated by that defender of liberal values The Guardian, which has awarded her a panellist slot to debate “sex on TV” at the Edinburgh International TV Festival. Ms Goody will no doubt attract tabloid attention, but is Edinburgh still a serious forum for debating the medium? It seems an odd place for her rehabilitation in the current climate.

— EMI is days away from falling into the hands of Guy Hands at Terra Firma, but the man being tipped to go in as chairman is the venture capitalist’s very own “Mr Fifty”, Stephen Alexander. Like Eric Nicoli, Mr Alexander has a background in food, having spent 17 years at Allied Domecq followed by Hillsdown. Running Odeon and other cinema chains is the closest he has been to the media. But I am assured he is a music junkie; much like the chaps who spend £50 a week in music stores to keep the industry afloat. It will need more than that.

— NBC Universal is keen to boost its international media business. Now the talk is of a move on the Hallmark channel, controlled by 3i and Providence Equity. Hallmark is quietly up for sale, at a premium to the $242 million purchase price.

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