London
BBC engulfed in fake footage scandal
By Heidi Dawley
Jul 19, 2007 - 10:59:34 AM

The BBC, among the world's most respected media outlets, finds itself suddenly embroiled in a huge controversy that challenges that very reputation for integrity and quality programming. As the scandal grows, it could lead to the ouster of top executives and a revamping of operations.

What's set the furor off is revelations that a trailer for a documentary about another venerable British institution – the Queen – had been edited to show the Queen huffing out of a photo shoot, which in fact never happened.

It's now also come out that supposedly legitimate promotions in which viewers phoned in to the BBC to win prizes were in fact faked, the named winners in fact members of the shows' production crews.

The heat is now on, and the BBC scandal has become a top news story in London. All BBC phone-in competitions have been suspended, both on TV and radio, senior editorial staffers have been suspended, with more suspensions possible, and red-faced BBC executives have been doing the rounds apologizing and announcing plans to prevent further abuses of the public trust, including better training.

Already, investigators have gone through thousands of hours of tape looking for other instances of fakery, and so far have found six in which results of phone-in competitions were faked.

“We found, in relation to a million hours, a very small number, but a small number of absolutely, utterly unacceptable examples of deception to the public,” Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, said on a TV news program last night.

“And it is a very serious and grave matter for us to have even a tiny handful of programs which in the way they have turned out have ended up with a conscious deception of the public.”

The original incident, now dubbed Crowngate, came to light when a trailer for a documentary called “A Year with the Queen” was shown to the press last week to promote coverage.

The documentary, which was made by an independent production company, seemed to show the Queen walking out of a photo shoot with famed photographer Annie Leibovitz after being asked to remove her crown. In fact, footage had been edited out of sequence. The footage in which she was supposedly walking out was actually from when she was entering the shoot.

The queen incident came just as the BBC was hit with a $100,000 fine by regulators for announcing a fake winner in an on-air phone-in competition on a respected children’s show.

It was that incident that prompted the BBC to pore over two-and-a-half years of footage for other instances of fakery, leading to the six other incidents, some involving charity events.

Each instance was different, but in general the public was led to believe that a viewer had won the competition when in fact it was a member of the production team. It doesn't appear it was done to line anyone's pockets but rather because of this or that snafu, such as a problem with the phones, that made it impossible to name a legitimate winner. Rather than suffer the humiliation of admitting the competition had gone awry, producers would choose one of their crew as the winner.

“Whatever happened to honesty and accuracy?” asks Stewart Purvis in an analysis piece in the Times of London. Purvis is a professor of TV journalism at City University, London, and a former editor-in-chief of ITN, a major TV news producer.
 
For his part, Thompson is putting the best light on the scandal, or the best he can, while moving quickly to stem any further damage to the BBC's reputation, lest his head should be among those that roll if the public indignation gathers more momentum.

In a statement, he points out, "The vast majority of the 400,000 hours of BBC output each year, on television, radio and online, is accurate, fair and complies with our stringent editorial standards.”

It's the few hours that didn't that could sink him, but at least for now, Thompson has the support of government officials.

Chairman Sir Michael Lyons of the BBC Trust, which oversees the BBC, says Thompson is the right man to lead the cleanup effort.