Category: Media

As many now know, digital television switchover begins in the UK this autumn with Whitehaven being the first town to go fully digital. Then, starting next year, a rollout across the rest of the country begins, starting in the Borders TV regions and ending in London, the southeast, the northeast and Ulster in 2012. Regular…

A great piece by Janine Gibson from today’s Media Guardian about how producers have forgotten how to tell the truth any more.

Five has been fined £300,000 by Ofcom – the largest ever fine for a public service broadcaster – for faking winners and misleading its audience with Brainteaser on five separate occasions. Good.

Today Ofcom has announced that it will conduct a public consultation into Sky’s proposal to replace it’s Freeview channels with three pay channels on DTT. As regular readers will recall, this proposal came as a counter measure to Setanta who will have Freeview, and also acted as a nice distraction for the launch of Virgin…

No no no no no. Being interviewed in Second Life is utterly pointless. What next? Political interviews in the middle of Deal or No Deal?

There’s an interesting report in today’s Observer which says that The Vicar of Dibley is likely to be accused of breaking BBC guidelines. The episode in question is the one I questioned at the time back on New Year’s Day 2005. Towards the end of the episode, viewers were shown a video supporting the Make…

… or “Viewer Participation” is an essential part of all entertainment TV programmes now. Or at least it was until it was revealed to viewers that the TV companies were ripping them off in many instances. But votes on programmes such as B** B****** have always been an intrinsic part and invariably there’s always someone…

You really do need to listen to this week’s episode of MediaGuardian’s Media Talk podcast. Presenter Matt Wells interviews C4 Chief Exec Andy Duncan, and really takes him over the coals in response to Ofcom’s damning endictment about how Channel 4 and producers Endemol failed in their duty. As Emily Bell and Janine Gibson, also…

All culled from Broadcast: – Kudos is developing a new BBC series called Outcasts, an SF series about “social misfits and criminals” sent into space to find and develop a new home for mankind. Science fiction is suddenly cool again with the likes of Dr Who, Battlestar Galactica, and even Life on Mars (yup –…

Oh dear – a very poorly argued episode on the supposed dangers of Wi-Fi. I just don’t know where to begin with this sensationalist scaremongering. The relative powers of different kinds of transmitters was ignored, the inverse square law was ignored, and it was mixture of facts and unproven information. We heard about Sylvia who…

Here’s a dull sounding subject which doesn’t seem to have had an enormous amount of coverage this week. The House of Commons Committee for Media, Culture and Sport has published a report of recommendations across a wide range of media issues. There are 28 in total, covering a wide range of issues – I’ll concentrate…

Even if John “Foghorn” Sweeney did come out as a bit of a clown towards the end of the Panorama on Scientology, they remain a somewhat sinister “religion.” And “sinister” is not a word that any religion should really want itself to be described as. You’ve got until next Monday to watch it again online.…

I’ve added a button to the right hand side of this blog to show support for Alan who has been missing for over a month now in Gaza. More over on the BBC Editors’ blog.