BRITAIN:The BBC has been fined £400,000 (€509,000) by British media regulator Ofcom for faking winners and misleading audiences in viewer and listener competitions.
The penalty, for flagship shows such as Comic Relief, Sport Relief and Children in Need as well as the Jo Whiley and Russell Brand radio shows, is a record for the corporation.
The regulator said: "Ofcom considered that these breaches of the [broadcasting] code were very serious. In each of these cases the BBC deceived its audience by faking winners of competitions and deliberately conducting competitions unfairly."
The watchdog said that, in some cases ruled on yesterday, programme makers knew in advance that the audience had no chance of winning the competitions they were going to broadcast but went ahead with them anyway.
A member of the production team posed as a winner on a phone-in competition on Comic Relief on BBC1 in March last year, and a similar scenario featured on a Sport Relief phone-in in July 2006. On Children in Need, in 2005, the name of a fictitious winner was read out on air.
Earlier this year ITV was hit with a record £5.67 million fine for the abuse of premium-rate lines on shows including Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway.
GMTV, which is 75 per cent owned by ITV, was fined a previous record of £2 million.
In July last year, the BBC was ordered to pay a then unprecedented £50,000 fine over a Blue Peter phone-in scandal in which a young studio guest posed as a competition winner. Channel 4 was also fined £1.5 million for misconduct involving phone-in competitions on Richard Judy and Deal or No Deal.
On the Russell Brand show on BBC 6 Music, a staff member posed as a winner in an edition of the show that was billed as live but was prerecorded. Listeners who participated had no chance of winning. The Jo Whiley show on BBC Radio 1 faked a competition winner on two occasions.
Other BBC shows involved in the ruling include the Liz Kershaw show on 6 Music, the Clare McDonnell show on the same digital station, and TMi on BBC2 and CBBC.
The BBC Trust said it regretted that the fine would lead to a loss of licence fee payers' money. It said the BBC made a public apology last year and "a firm commitment to put its house in order".
BBC management issued a separate statement, saying: "We accept Ofcom's findings. 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.
"This includes a comprehensive programme of training for over 19,000 staff . . . and a strict new code of conduct."
Comic Relief and Sport Relief were each fined £45,000, Children in Need £35,000, and TMi £50,000. Liz Kershaw's show was hit with the biggest individual fine, £115,000. The Jo Whiley show was fined £75,000, the Russell Brand show £17,500, and the Clare McDonnell show £17,500.
Kershaw's show faked winners of listener competitions on up to 17 occasions between July 2005 and January 2007, and Ofcom said it was "extremely concerned by the repeated instances of pre-meditated, deliberate deception, in this case spanning nearly 17 months".
- (PA)