It would be unfair to call 60 Minutes' Sunday night mea culpa for its Beirut fiasco too little, too late, but we can certainly say this: it was little, and it was late.

By the time the program staggered on to our screens it was almost 9pm, post-Voice for Nine viewers and around the time people who'd watched the federal leaders' debate over on Aunty were easing off swearing at the TV set. The Masterchef cohort was still busy learning how to hero a turnip.

And then Nine's battling current affairs flagship made us wait even longer: it was two stories down before we got to the major event of the evening. Possibly by design, this most embarrassing moment in the show's 37-year history was likely played out before one of its smallest audiences.

In all, it was not a very dignified manner for a TV institution to plea for forgiveness, but this is the lot of 60 Minutes these days. It comes on air whenever the circus preceding it allows and, partly as a result of that indignity, fewer and fewer people are paying attention.

But for all its brevity and the lateness of the hour, the five-minute apology was revealing if you paid close attention - perhaps more revealing than intended.

Presented by reporter Michael Usher and including a brief interview with Gerald Stone, the show's founding boss and co-author of the internal inquiry report into the Beirut mess, the segment was played with sorrow and frankness.

"We sincerely apologise," declared Usher, for multiple and serious mistakes. "There is a lot to learn from this experience for us at 60 Minutes and for the entire network."

Note that line: not just us, but the entire network.

Usher threw over to Stone to tell viewers that the child abduction adventure should never have been commissioned and that priorities and judgement were askew.

"It's amazing to me that a program that bases itself on asking the right questions didn't ask itself the right questions," said Stone, echoing the findings of the internal inquiry report he had released on Friday.

But what stood out was the subtext of Stone's remarks when Usher asked him why producer Stephen Rice had been the only person involved in the fiasco to be relieved of his employment. Stone said he had "no doubt" the judgement of both Rice and reporter Tara Brown was blurred - "I don't understand how they would agree to undertake - both of them with families of their own - to undertake an assignment on that basis."

And then this from Stone: "I felt very strongly that as long as management was not completely in supervision of the program that it seemed to me unfair - and I am a journalist - that a journalist should be picked out. But if anyone was going to be picked out it would have to be the producer of the program because things do rest heavily on the role of the producer and that's why he is the producer, because he should take the blame when things go wrong."

Stone might be talking in code here, and it's code that would probably be all too clear to Rice and his former colleagues at Nine. Rice was not producer of the program, he was the producer of this particular story. And Rice is a journalist, a distinguished one. He was an off-camera journalist working in tandem with the on-camera journalist, Tara Brown. Stone makes it clear he believes no journalist should have been made to take the fall - and into that comment we can perhaps read that he believes higher-ups dropped the ball and should have worn some, if not all, of the disgrace.

Why didn't those higher-ups take the fall? What of Tom Malone, executive producer of 60 Minutes at the time the story was commissioned and since promoted to Nine's head of sport? Safe. Kirsty Thomson, chief of staff when the story kicked off and now Malone's successor as EP? Also safe. And Brown, who in the way of things as an on-camera 60 Minutes star would have been brought in to the story relatively late in the process, is also still in receipt of a large Nine pay cheque.

For 60 Minutes, the question now is whether Rice's sacrifice and the public thrashing the program has absorbed will be enough to begin restoring confidence. It's an uphill battle and it might be unwise for any of the inquiry survivors to relax just yet.

In the media, as in politics, sometimes the clean-out in the wake of scandal has to be ruthless if credibility is to be restored. In fact, there's a recent movie that depicts this very dilemma - it's about 60 Minutes, a star reporter and an ethics scandal that won't go away.

In Truth, Robert Redford plays legendary CBS anchor Dan Rather, opposite Cate Blanchett as producer Mary Mapes. When their story for the US 60 Minutes - about then-president George W Bush's military service - goes awry, heads have to roll.  The final toll: four producers sacked, and then superstar Rather himself resigns.

Redford, as Rather: "[They] want to appoint an independent panel to take a look at how the story was put together. And I'm going to announce it. Tomorrow. I'm going to apologise for the story. On air."

He tells Blanchett, as Mapes: "You've got to protect yourself now. We all do."

It's a good bet this kind of everyone-for-themselves drama has been alive and well at Channel Nine recently. An inquiry, a sacking and an apology later, it likely still is.