Richard Marson, the former Blue Peter editor, is understood to have been suspended after another instance of alleged viewer deception on the programme during his stewardship emerged relating to the naming of the show's cat.
Mr Marson, who was moved to a new BBC job in May after the show's fake phone competition scandal, is said to have been sent home on Monday after it emerged that the wrong name had been chosen for the new Blue Peter cat in an online poll, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.
It is understood that the name chosen for the ragdoll breed of cat that joined the show on January 9 2006 was not the one that came out top in the online poll.
The name that came top is thought to have been deemed inappropriate for a children's show and the cat was eventually called Socks following the vote.
This is the same name as another celebrity pet, the cat owned by former US President Bill Clinton when he was in the White House.
According to a senior production source, the BBC head of children's programmes, Richard Deverell, is said to have told Mr Marson of the decision after being told to take this course of action by more senior executives.
Mr Marson is now understood to be consulting his lawyers and is currently not at work.
The senior production source said staff at the BBC were in shock following the decision to suspend one of the most popular members of the children's programming department.
"I think the feeling was that if we can't honestly name a Blue Peter cat, then really, that is perhaps the last straw in this whole fiasco," the insider added.
"The feeling has always been that when alleged deception involves children it is a bit more serious."
A BBC spokesman declined to comment on Mr Marson's situation.
It has also emerged today that the producer of Liz Kershaw's BBC 6Music radio show has been dismissed for alleged misconduct.
In July it was revealed that The Liz Kershaw show on 6Music was using production staff on competitions on recorded shows. The programme was suspended.
It is understood that details of further departures are due to emerge by the end of the week.
Mr Marson was moved from his role as editor of Blue Peter in May two months after the programme shocked viewers by admitting it had rigged the result of a phone-in competition.
He moved to a different role with the BBC as an executive producer following an internal review of the incident, in which a girl on a studio tour was convinced to pose as the winner of a phone-in competition after technical difficulties meant callers could not get through.
A BBC insider said in May that the timing of Mr Marson's move to an executive producer position within the BBC after the phone-in deception was "not entirely coincidental" and was linked to the fact he had failed to report the incident when it happened.
A later Panorama investigation into the premium phone lines scandal claimed that Mr Marson "commended the researcher responsible for their initiative".
An internal investigation into the fake Blue Peter phone-in was commissioned by the director of BBC Vision, Jana Bennett, and conducted by former BBC chief adviser on editorial policy, Andrea Willis. It was passed to the BBC Trust in May.
In July of this year Ofcom imposed a £50,000 fine on the BBC - the corporation's first regulatory financial sanction by the regulator - for the Blue Peter deception.
This was followed in the same month by the storm over promotional footage for a BBC1 documentary that incorrectly purported to show the Queen storming out of a photoshoot being shown to journalists at a BBC publicity event.
Later the same month, the results of an internal BBC investigation into other incidents of deception uncovered six more cases of viewers and listeners being misled.
These included incidents during the BBC's flagship telethons Children In Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief that regularly attract audiences of more than 10 million and raise tens of millions of pounds for charity.
The BBC immediately suspended all its phone-in competitions across its television, radio and web operations.
In July, the BBC Trust said it was "deeply concerned that significant failures of control and compliance within the BBC ... have compromised the BBC's values of accuracy and honesty".
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