Ray Snoddy on Broadcasting

The entire UK broadcasting industry stands condemned of deceiving the audience in the most cynical way. There is no easier way to put it – and an absolute need to say it again and again.

Last week, it was the BBC in the firing line and commercial broadcasters heaved a sigh of relief that the heat was off them – at least for the moment.

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There has also been the unedifying sight of attempts to shift the blame down the chains of command in the hope that scapegoats can be found – usually in the form of undertrained and undersupervised young people working in the independent production sector.

The recent events at the BBC mean that every single terrestrial broadcaster has been caught treating viewers with utter contempt.

The dramatic and shocking events at the BBC – the Queen walking in the wrong direction, the dodgy competitions and phone-ins – overshadowed an important report from the regulator Ofcom.

Richard Eyre, a former deputy chief executive of BBC News, found that there was a "systemic" compliance failure by broadcasters using premium-rate phone calls and that, at least as far as the commercial broadcasters were concerned, revenue generation was a major driver of premium calls.

There was also a lack of transparency in the supply chain, and broadcasters appeared to be in a state of denial about their responsibility to viewers. In other words – they were ripping off their customers because of greed, and they didn't care.

The Eyre recommendations to crack down on this are sound. Broadcasting licences, including radio licences, should indeed be amended to include consumer protection on premium lines, and there should be independent third-party auditing of all such activities. Through the BBC Trust, the probity of all competitions has to be supervised in a similar way, even though in the case of this corporation the motive isn't profit.

Michael Grade – the former chairman of the BBC governors and therefore the man who would have been in the eye of the storm if he had not decamped to ITV – was prescient in a speech he delivered on 3 July regarding the relationship between broadcaster and viewer, stressing "the case for zero tolerance" of the abuse of the audience's trust.

Grade stated baldly that trust was not sufficiently valued by all today's programme-makers, across all genres. Even he must be astonished at how soon his warnings proved justified.

But so far as the BBC is concerned, after all the condemnations have duly been issued, it is necessary to put this crisis in a certain perspective.

The faking of a Blue Peter prize-winner, however reprehensible, was a single incident and a panicky response to a failure to find a genuine winner.

The raft of deceptions revealed last week, however disgraceful, are all quite narrowly defined, and are all linked to faking competitions and phone-ins.

The common theme here appears to be a desire to run ambitious live competitions, often without the resources, experience or even the technology to do so successfully.

As for the case of the Queen, the American photographer and the royal huff that never was, it is difficult to know where to start. What we still do not know is how the clip of the Queen walking in the wrong direction came to be edited in that way. Was it deliberately fabricated by RDF Media, the independent behind the royal documentary, to spice up the sales pitches at television markets? Or was it an innocent error? If it was deliberate, as seems more than possible, RDF has some explaining to do.

The press quickly moved into rant mode about being misled, but how many journalists called the palace to check whether the Queen had indeed stomped out in a huff? And how many of the papers that ran headlines such as "The Shaming of the BBC" could actually stand such detailed scrutiny themselves?

The key thing to remember is the almost rag-bag collection of BBC misdemeanours that have been brought to public attention at the same time. There clearly is a need for perspective, even though deceiving the public can never be justified.

Even Newsnight now finds itself in the dock

There must be at least one sigh of relief to be heard at the BBC; that its journalism – neither news nor current affairs – has not been dragged centre-stage into the unfolding scandals, at least so far.

Dodgy phone-lines and competitions are shocking and unacceptable, but deceptive news would be quite another, much more serious, matter.

The one exception has come from a most surprising source – Newsnight. The programme, whose presenters include the legendary Rottweiler Jeremy Paxman, has admitted that in a quirky item about Gordon Brown just before his coronation, the sequence of shots did not follow normal chronology.

The item was unusual even by Newsnight standards. Earlier this year, the independent producer Jamie Campbell followed the Conservative leader David Cameron around in public for five weeks, peppering him with questions in a form of ambush journalism. Cameron did get irritable from time to time, but for the most part he was courteous and responded well to the informal questioning.

A similar exercise with Brown produced nothing other than to show how well the prospective prime minister, now the top man, was completely insulated from a maverick in the street with a camera. Campbell got nothing in the way of a comment or interview whatsoever, and the resulting piece undoubtedly gave a wholly negative impression of Tony Blair's successor.

The Brown camp complains that two events involving confrontations with a Brown press officer were filmed weeks apart and shown in the wrong sequence to suggest that one had caused the other. The BBC has insisted that the running order made no difference to the meaning of the piece.

Unfortunately, this is a rather difficult time to argue that the sequence in which events are shown is a trivial matter, as no doubt Peter Fincham, the BBC1 controller, would wish to testify. The Newsnight issue will now be decided by the BBC Trust, which has received a formal complaint about Jamie Campbell's activities.

Why heads won't roll

BBC folklore on crises is quite clear; when the worst happens, deputy heads must roll. Things didn't run true to type last time round; Lord Hutton brought down both the chairman Gavyn Davies and the director general Greg Dyke.

This time, the BBC is reverting to type. The high-ups are beating their breasts and promising to do better, while middling sorts are being suspended for breaches of trust. It will not be difficult to round up a few sacrificial victims. BBC guidelines have clearly been broken. It will be less easy to find out who knew what and when, and to identify exactly where responsibility lies in what looks like, at the very least, a subculture of wrongdoing.

As many have noted, breaches of trust have been identified in many parts of the UK broadcasting industry. At the BBC last week, there was more than a hint of an amnesty if confessions were made before last Wednesday's BBC Trust meeting.

The wise course now would be to draw a line under such unacceptable behaviour by broadcasters and concentrate on making sure that nothing like it ever happens again.

Raymond Snoddy presents NewsWatch, the BBC viewer access programme