BBC shows embroiled in controversy

THE controversy surrounding Frozen Planet is not the first time the BBC has been accused of misleading audiences.

In 2007, the corporation was forced to apologise to the Queen for wrongly implying she had stormed out of a sitting with celebrity photographer Annie Leibowitz. A trailer for a BBC1 documentary series, A Year With The Queen, gave the impression that the monarch had abruptly halted the photoshoot when Ms Leibowitz asked her to remove her crown.

The BBC was fined £50,000 in the same year after the results of a Blue Peter competition were faked. The show allowed a child visiting the studio to pose as a caller when technical problems stopped real calls getting through to the studio. Media watchdog Ofcom criticised the BBC for “negligence” and for “making a child complicit” in the deception.

This year, the BBC apologised to Primark after an award-winning Panorama programme about the firm was found “more likely than not” to have included faked footage of child labour. The BBC Trust found that a clip said to show three boys in a workshop in India testing stitching in Primark clothes should not have been included in the programme.