Bored of talking about the fake TV crisis? Tough - it looks like there will be little else discussed at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, which kicks off today.
Andrew Marr thinks the fake TV crisis could be more dangerous to the BBC than Hutton.
Jeremy Paxman is expected to call for TV execs to show "greater purpose, or moral drive" for television, rather than chasing ratings, in his MacTaggart speech at the TV festival tonight.
BBC director general Mark Thompson says that yes, there is a serious problem, and yes, "We do have a lesson to learn".
Thompson adds:
The impact of these problems has been large but, when compared with previous broadcasting controversies or other recent breaches of trust involving life and limb or criminal intent, the stakes may seem small. Elsewhere in the industry some suspect competitions have involved many millions of pounds. In the cases we've found at the BBC, no one made, or tried to make, a penny from what they were doing. Instead they were either trying to keep a programme on the air or in some other, misguided way to make it "better".
As a result, I've heard a few people wonder aloud, when they hear that we're planning to insist that every programme-maker take part in seminars and training to explore the issue of trust: isn't this a complete overreaction?
I don't believe it is. Yes, of course we should keep a sense of perspective. The serious problems we've found affected a minuscule percentage of our output: not 10% or 1%, but perhaps a few thousandths of 1% of the programmes we have broadcast over the past couple of years.
But we know, because we've talked to them, that the public do not regard these failures as trivial. A significant proportion of our audience believes they are very serious indeed. Of course they expect our journalism to be trustworthy, but they also expect honesty and fair dealing across all our output.
