It is all very well for the BBC to apologise for having misled the public by doctoring phone-in competition results as a "breach of [our] editorial standards", but what appears to have occurred in the BBC Scotland case used as the 'peg' for this report is much more than that; not only did the BBC conjure up fictitious 'winners', genuine telephone callers' entries were not taken into account. Such telephone calls are generally made to 'premium rate' telephone numbers and the BBC receives a proportion of the revenue received. So it has received a pecuniary advantage without having provided a service, whilst not disclosing this to the callers. It sounds like fraud to me; I hope the police will start to investigate.
It so happens I have never called one of these competitions, but I am a licence fee payer. I have believed for some time that the case for continuation of this compuslory 'viewing tax' (whether one ever watches the BBC or not) is weak; it now seems non-existent. End the licence fee now!
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