Friday, May 09, 2008 

How to defraud millions and get away with it part 2.

Credit where credit's due - all of the tabloids featured yesterday's news about ITV's fine on their front pages in some way or another, most likely because of the additional revelation that Ant and Dec took the people's choice award that was in fact rightfully Catherine Tate's. The Sun even managed to not mention the BBC once in their leader comment on the fine, something that must have taken real determination.

Most laughable and hypocritical reaction must go to the Daily Mail however, which screams "CAN YOU BELIEVE A THING YOU SEE ON TV?" Firstly, they must hope so, because the Mail's parent company owns 20% of ITN. Secondly, yet another incident involving the Mail and a blogger suggests that you can't in reality believe a thing that you read in the Mail:

On April 30th just after 3.30pm, I snatched up my phone and bit the bullet. I called up the journalist that had 'interviewed' me (I say this loosely) and expressed my upset at her not actually stating that she was interviewing me and my concern that I would be included in a feature about revenge, which is not what I, or this blog are about. I told her quite shrilly (I was stressed for fecks sake) that I did NOT want to open the paper and see something like "Blogger gets revenge on ex with her blog!" or some other pathetic headline.

I went onto the Daily Mails supposed section for women yesterday and actually nearly threw up in shock!

"Don't get mad, get E-VENGE!"

It's even worse in the paper where just in case the Daily Mail hadn't quite put the full boot into misrepresenting me and featuring me in article full of TWENTY SIX inaccuracies about me, they added a sub header of "It's the new mantra for women using the internet to take revenge on cheating men".

While obviously the best way to not get misrepresented by the Mail is to have nothing whatsoever to do with the stinking rag and her blog is the kind which I wouldn't even make my worst enemies read, getting twenty six separate things wrong about someone surely deserves some kind of award.

Doubtless tomorrow though the boot will be back on the other foot, due to the BBC Trust announcing that the corporation wrongly kept over £100,000 worth of money which should have gone to charity, even though the investigation by the Trust found that:

Lyons made it clear that senior staff within BBC Worldwide and the corporation did not know about the problem and nor did staff who worked on the affected programmes.

and the director general Mark Thompson said:

there was "no evidence" of any "impropriety or intention to defraud", adding that the £106,000 represented only 1.3% of the approximately £8m raised for charity through BBC telephone votes during the relevant period.
"All the money has been paid to the charities involved, with interest," Thompson added. "The oversight has been remedied. Clearly, this must never be allowed to happen again."

All very different to ITV's deliberate interference with competitions so that the most lively contestants would get on, or that only those in an already pre-decided area had a chance of winning. Don't expect that to come over in the reporting, however.

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Thursday, May 08, 2008 

How to defraud millions and get away with it.

Ofcom have fined ITV £5.675m for their scandalous abuse of premium-rate phonelines to some of their most popular programmes. Last year, when it was reported that ITV had in all conned those who had rang in out of £7.8 million, the same newspapers which had gone crazy at the BBC over their own fakery scandals, almost all of which were with the intention of keeping the programme going rather than deliberately misleading the public for fraudulent purposes almost entirely ignored the story. The Mirror was the only one to lead with it; the Mail instead ran with "BBC TO SCREEN MORE REPEATS", the schedule apparently being more of an outrage than ITV wilfully lying and stealing from its viewers.

It'll be instructive to note if the pattern is repeated tomorrow, especially seeing that the publishing of Ofcom's ruling has exposed another even more serious deception: the public vote at the 2005 comedy awards for the people's choice award being completely ignored, with the gong going to err, ITV's own Ant and Dec rather than the real winner Catherine Tate because Robbie Williams would apparently only present it if it went to them. The real issue here though is obvious: if the BBC so much as puts a foot wrong, it gets savaged by those diametrically opposed to almost everything it does, even if no one really lost out, the corporation apologies profusely, as it did over the ridiculous "Crowngate" affair which wasn't even its own fault and if those ultimately responsible lose their jobs, as Peter Fincham did. How different to ITV, where no one has been sacked and no one has resigned, and everyone simply just wants to move on, including apparently the newspapers so disturbed by the BBC's offences against the general public. As Ian Hislop once said, if this is justice, I'm a banana.

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Monday, October 22, 2007 

They took 7.8 million of YOUR MONEY and who do we blame? Err, no one.

Back a little later than I expected, so I'll get back into the swing of things properly tomorrow. First, if like me you missed FCC's dissections of tabloid garbage, his posts last week following the government's publishing of its own report into immigration (PDF) are essential reading.

Next, here's a scandal that it seems wasn't. The report by Deloitte into ITV's various phone-in scams discovers that at least £7.8 million was defrauded from viewers who had no chance of winning competitions or influencing public votes. Peter Hain described it as "daylight robbery". One of the most egregious examples of how money was taken under false pretenses was on Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, where those who weren't within an hour of where the show was filmed or suitably excited/telegenic/charismatic never had any chance of winning, which also has Ant and Dec (or is it Dec and Ant?) as executive producers. Like Manuel, they "knew nothing". Despite Michael Grade's previous bowel movement which declared that there would be "zero tolerance" towards any examples of fakery or deception of viewers, no one has resigned, and it seems likely that no one will be sacked, as Grade has now decided there shouldn't be a "witch-hunt". ITV have said that the money will be paid back, while Ant and Dec have promised that the money from the phone-ins on the next series will be given to charity. Never mind that Richard and Judy's attempts at giving the money fraudulently made back were far from successful: the problem has been solved.


Or at least that's the message that the middle-market tabloids have given off. While the Daily Mirror was the only one of the tabloids to give it a full-splash on Friday (the Sun cleared the front page to go with the suicide bombing targeting Benzair Bhutto in its final edition, previously having the ITV scandal in a sidebar, then featured it again the following day, again in a sidebar), the Mail had more important things on its mind, like the ring that Dodi never gave to Diana prior to them both coming to a sticky end. (Oh, and a suitably fruity photograph of the tennis coach who sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl. She "seduced" her; you can imagine what the Mail would say if it was a man in the same circumstances.) The Express isn't worth even looking at: Madeleine, where there hasn't been any new developments for weeks, still occupied the front page every single day.




How very different to the Mail's coverage of the BBC's own recent travails. When the BBC published its own findings into examples of fakery, none of which involved any defrauding of the viewer, but did involve some slight deceptions, the Mail declared it the "SHAMING OF THE BBC". After Blue Peter admitted that Socks the cat should have been named Cookie, only for it to be changed after they wondered about the suitability of the name, the Mail splashed with it, screaming "NEW LIES FIASCO SHAMES THE BBC". On the very day that the ITV report was the published, the Mail was shattering windows with its shrieking of "BBC TO SCREEN MORE REPEATS", despite for years calling for the BBC to be radically slashed and cut down to size. The Mail had previously splashed on one example of ITV alleged "fakery", that involving the death of a man in a documentary which it turned out wasn't, but that was during the silly season.

Just how do we explain this apparent attitude to ignore ITV's far more serious offences, which may well amount to fraud and definitely show a contempt for their very viewers? It can't be put down to the fact that the BBC is funded by every single one of us; ITV was taking the money off the public too. Is it just snobbery on the behalf of the Mail, thinking that its readers' won't have "wasted" their cash on such frivolities? If it is, this is incredibly blind: those who buy the paper might not have done, but their children are a different matter. Far more likely is that the Mail fears the effects of what a purge might well mean to newspapers themselves if they were held up to the same degree of scrutiny.

You don't have to read this blog or FCC to know that the tabloids lie on a daily basis; polls have consistently shown that the public holds around the same amount of trust in tabloid journalists as they do with estate agents, lower even than that in politicians. How often do journalists get the sack for getting it wrong? Apart from Andrew Gilligan, who ironically was completely in the right, you'll be hard pressed to find any such examples in recent memory or even history. If ITV were to go by the letter of zero tolerance, as Grade said, it would set a precedent also in the City itself. So far, just one member of the board of Northern Rock has resigned. No one at ITV has, or seems to be likely to. At the BBC, the Blue Peter editor's gone, as have others involved in the various bits of fakery. It's a weird scale when you add it all up: you can play naive, economically unsound games with the money of thousands of people and not have to face the consequences when it all goes wrong; you can defraud the public and cynically take their cash when they have no chance of appearing with Ant and Dec; but if you change the name of a cat that kiddies have voted for the name of, then you may as well hand in your notice straight away. So is the logic not just of media and their decision on what constitutes an outrage, but that of the market itself.

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