THE BBC was yesterday fined £400,000 by the 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.
It comes a year after Ofcom fined the BBC £50,000 for faking competiti
on winner on Blue Peter – and will met by TV licence-payers.
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 upon yesterday, programme-makers knew in advance that the audience had no chance of winning the competitions that they were going to broadcast but went ahead with them anyway.
It said: "The investigations found that, in some cases, the production team had taken premeditated decisions to broadcast competitions and encourage listeners to enter, in the full knowledge that the audience stood no chance of winning. In other cases, programmes faced with technical problems made up the names of winners."
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 during July in 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 that included Ant And Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. GMTV, which is 75 per cent owned by ITV, had been 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.
In the Russell Brand show on 6 Music, a member of staff posed as a competition winner in an edition of the show that was billed as live but pre-recorded. Jo Whiley's show on Radio 1 faked a competition winner on two occasions.
Other BBC shows involved in yesterday's 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, which holds the corporation to account, said it regretted the fine would lead to a loss of licence-fee payers' money. It said the BBC made a public apology last summer and "a firm commitment to put its house in order".
The full article contains 469 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
