BBC handed unprecedented £400,000 fine for faked competitions
Thursday, July 31st, 2008Beeb in phone-in shocker. Again.
The BBC was fined £400,000 by media watchdog Ofcom yesterday, the largest fine in the corporation’s history, for a succession of phone-in competition scandals.
The BBC accepted the fine immediately, levied for breaching the broadcasting code on four television programmes and four radio programmes by “faking winners of competitions and deliberately conducting competitions unfairly”.
The £400,000 fine made up a fairly small proportion of the £11.5 million in charges levied at the broadcasting industry in the UK last year, after a spate of incidents involving the abuse of premium-rate phone-in competitions.
By contrast ITV was ordered to pay £5,675,000 in May for deceiving viewers of prime time TV shows such as Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night takeaway into entering competitions on premium rate phone-lines which they had no hope of winning. The maximum penalty for faking phone-in competitions is £2 million. However, Ofcom said the BBC’s lesser penalty reflected the fact that the broadcaster had not been seeking to gain financially from the deceptions. Nonetheless, the BBC had made serious breaches of the broadcasting code including making “premeditated decisions to broadcast competitions and encourage listeners to enter in the full knowledge that the audience stood no chance of winning”.
There were several issues of faked winners on television programmes: On a Comic Relief broadcast in March 2007 a member of the production team pretended to be a competition winner after a technical issue with the phone lines. In September 2007 a member of staff posed as a child after the programme had difficulty in getting in contact with competition winners. On a BBC Scotland production for Children in Need the name of a fictitious viewer was read out as the competition winner after a technical fault, and a member of the Sports Relief production team posed as a winner on air in July 2006.
However, radio programmes received the brunt of Ofcom’s criticism for their repeated breaches of the broadcasting code. The Liz Kershaw Show on BBC 6 Music received a £115,000 fine for 17 pre-recorded episodes which invited listeners to call or text entries to competitions they had no chance of winning. The names of fictitious winners were later read out on air. Other programmes that received fines were the Russell Brand Show, Jo Whiley’s show on Radio 1 and the Clare McDonnel Show.
The BBC said in a statement: “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.”
