"He's got to be very very tough on Newsnight and very tough on that editorial line of command," he said.
Responding to the internal report compiled by Ken MacQuarrie, the director of BBC Scotland, into the Newsnight programme the BBC said it needed to take "immediate" action to address "the lack of clarity around the senior editorial chain of command".
Both had been "recused" from the editorial chain of command for Newsnight's disastrous Lord McAlpine story because they were already linked to a BBC inquiry into the failures of the same programme's Jimmy Savile investigation.
Richardson, aided by editorial second in command Randy Stradley, expanded the Dark Horse line in the late 1980s with licensed titles that continued the sagas of Twentieth Century-Fox's Alien and Predator franchises in best-selling comic books.
I have, occasionally, heard people at the Guardian (usually those higher up the editorial chain of command) address staff as "comrades", in what may be an attempt to play up to the Guardianista stereotype.
It has emerged that Mr Davie, a former executive with the food company PepsiCo who joined the BBC as marketing chief, was head of the editorial chain of command for the controversial Newsnight story, although it is understood that the matter was not referred to him.
In a statement, the BBC said Boaden and Mitchell were stepping aside: "To address the lack of clarity around the editorial chain of command, a decision has been taken to re-establish a single management to deal with all output, Savile related or otherwise".
She, in turn, was increasingly resentful of his intrusions into her command of editorial operations, and of his increasingly close relationship with Mark Thompson, the company's C.E.O., who came from England and the BBC to run the business side.
"There is no way she is second in command," Veryan Khan, editorial director of the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, told VICE.
