In the news: Fake phone calls = Big fines for BBC

[CrankyYankee]

The BBC is being fined £400,000 regarding phony quizzes and phone-ins.

Read all about it here:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article4428749.ece

[junglecitizen]

To be fair to the BBC, the fine was more for cheating the viewer about phone-ins to save time (and embarrassment when something went wrong), which is why the fine was £400,000 compared to the multi-million pound fine that ITV got, where the problem was that multiple phone-ins were actively made unfair or rigged in order to make more cash.

Should say that the Times is a Murdoch paper (of Sky & Fox fame) and does have something of a vested interest in hyping this as much as possible - Murdoch has been a long time advocate of selling the BBC off to the commercial sector, presumably because his TV companies would be the favourites to snap up the potentially profitable bits.