I seriously wonder which South Asian government has the courage to
take fraudulent broadcasters / print media to task for lying or
deceiving the public - I would be happy to post a list of instances
from India specifically if snyone thinks that fraud does not happen in a country that touts itself as the world's "largest" democracy.
Mehul Kamdar
BBC fined £400,000 by Ofcom for deceiving viewers and listeners
The BBC has been fined a record £400,000 by the broadcasting watchdog
for faking competition winners and deceiving viewers on a string of
radio and television programmes including Children in Need and Comic
Relief.
Ofcom handed down the largest ever fine on the corporation after
viewers and listeners were invited to enter phone-in competitions on
eight different radio and television shows which they had no chance
of winning.
In all the cases production staff breached the watchdog's
broadcasting code by making up the names of winners or even posing as
contestants themselves.
The most serious incidents saw producers taking "pre-meditated
decisions" to broadcast competitions and encourage viewers to enter
them "in the full knowledge that the audience stood no chance of
winning", Ofcom found.
"Ofcom considered that these breaches of the (broadcasting) code were
very serious," it said in statement. "In each of these cases the BBC
deceived its audience by faking winners of competitions and
deliberately conducting competitions unfairly."
Ofcom handed down the biggest fine - £115,000 - to the Liz Kershaw
Show on BBC 6 Music, which invited callers over a period of almost 17
months to participate in "live" competitions when in fact they were
pre-recorded with production staff posing as winners.
BBC One's Comic Relief and Sport Relief were both fined £45,000 for
allowing a member of the production team to pose as a winner, while
Children in Need received a £35,000 fine after the name of a
fictitious winner was read out on air.
Other BBC shows involved in the ruling include Radio 1's Jo Whiley
Show, the Russell Brand show on BBC 6 Music, the Clare McDonnell Show
on the same digital station, and the children's series TMi on BBC2
and CBBC.
The penalty comes a year after Ofcom fined the BBC £50,000 for faking
competition winner on Blue Peter.
It faces another fine for fixing an online poll which had asked
children to name the show's cat. They named the cat Socks when
children had chosen the name Cookie.
Mark Thompson, the BBC director-general, suspended all phone-in
competitions last July after the full scale of the deception became
clear.
Although Ric Blaxill, the head of programmes for BBC 6 Music, and
Richard Marson, a former Blue Peter editor, lost their jobs, MPs
called for resignations at director level and a full-scale police
investigation.
Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for culture, media and
sport, described the BBC's behaviour as "completely disgraceful".
"It is right that Ofcom has taken the action it has," he said. "New
measures have been put in place by the BBC to stop this happening in
future. But the corporation must ensure they are watertight, as
public confidence in the BBC was badly damaged by this scandal."
He added: "Several high profile broadcasters have been caught up in
the phone-in scandal, yet we still haven't had a police investigation
to determine if fraud took place. This must happen now."
The BBC Trust, which holds the corporation to account, said it
regretted that the fine would eat into licence fee payers' money
"We recognise that the penalty in these cases reflects that the
breaches were serious, deliberate and in some cases repeated," it
said. "These editorial failures were serious and, through our work,
we are confident they have been taken seriously by those involved."
A spokesman for BBC management said: "We have taken these issues
extremely seriously from the outset, apologising to our audiences and
putting in place an unprecedented action plan to tackle the issues
raised."
ITV was fined £5.67 million for cheating viewers out of millions of
pounds on some of its most popular programmes. The BBC is protected
against huge fines because it is a publicly funded organisation.
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