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The Office of Communications (Ofcom), the UK communications regulator, has imposed a fine of GBP 100,000 on Press TV, an Iranian news channel broadcasting in English on the Sky platform under a Television Licensable Content Service licence issued by Ofcom. The fine was for breach of provisions of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code requiring broadcasters to avoid unjust or unfair treatment of individuals or organisations in programmes and that any infringement of privacy in programmes must be warranted (Rules 7.1 and 8.1). The case concerned a broadcast in July 2009 by Press TV of a news item concerning...

The BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee has found that fifteen programmes broadcast on BBC World News breached its editorial and/or sponsorship guidelines. BBC World News is the commercial channel available across Europe and much of the world; unlike the BBC’s domestic services, it carries advertising. All the programmes involved had been acquired by the BBC at no or minimal cost from independent producers. They included Taking the Credit, on carbon trading, which had been funded by Envirotrade; this amounted to sponsorship, which is prohibited for news and current affairs. Other programmes...

The Prime Minister has announced that the Government will continue to provide film tax relief, the targeted tax break for the British film industry, until the end of December 2015. The scheme provides relief for film production companies in relation to the expenses they incur on the production of a film intended for theatrical release in commercial cinemas. For a film to be eligible for relief, it must be certified as British, either by passing a cultural test or under an agreed co-production treaty. The certification process is administered by the British Film Institute on behalf of the UK Government’s...

Section One of the Ofcom Broadcasting Code deals with “Protecting the Under-Eighteens” and should be read in conjunction with Section Two (“Harm and Offence”). Guidance already exists to assist broadcasters to interpret the Code and, in this context, in particular, Rule 1.3. This reads, “Children must…be protected by appropriate scheduling from material that is unsuitable for them”. However, “a fundamental requirement underpinning these rules is the application of the watershed, which applies to television only”. The watershed runs between 21:00 - 05:30. Between those hours, one should expect a...

The UK communications regulator, Ofcom, has decided that a continuous visual reference to Skype during an interview may constitute product placement. Sky News broadcast an interview via a video call in its coverage of the Utoya Island massacre in Norway. Whenever the interviewee was shown full-screen, the words ‘VIA SKYPE’ were shown almost continuously in a caption in the top right-hand corner. There was no product placement agreement with Skype, and Ofcom was concerned that this amounted to giving undue prominence in a programme to a product, service or trade mark, which is prohibited by the...