It’s funny how I was writing about media hypocrisy in relation to the premium rate phone-in scandals, only for the entire issue to resurface in a major way the following day. I have the power!

Anyway, I think the way the latest revelations have been covered by the media prove my point. Predictably enough, many people have sprung up to bash the BBC for fixing competition results. And while this is indeed despicable, what these people have ignored is the fact that every single other major broadcaster has done this. This is not a problem with the BBC. It is a symptom of the state of the MSM as a whole.

Earlier this year, record fines were handed out after viewers of Channel 4 and Channel Five were defrauded. Votes cast via premium rate phone lines were not counted on ITV programmes. Today the boss of GMTV resigned.

It is worth also remembering that the BBC is the only major broadcaster in the country that hasn’t had its fingers in the utterly deceitful quiz scam channel craze that has dogged airwaves of the past two years. In this sense, the BBC looks pretty clean compared to its commercial rivals.

Because most of the faked BBC competition results (with the exception of the truly shocking Liz Kershaw ones) were of the “panicking producer” variety. Meanwhile, the commercial broadcasters built up an entire industry that was desliberately designed to misleadingly part viewers with their cash.

It is nigh on impossible to think of a commercial broadcaster that has not played a part in this massive scam. Programmes such as Quiz Call (set up and formerly owned by Channel 4; still broadcast to this day by Channel Five), ITV Play and Quiz Night Live (produced by Endemol and broadcast on a channel owned by Telewest / NTL / Virgin). Viacom’s TMF broadcast Pop the Q, Emap’s channels featured the truly dire Cash Call. BSkyB have Sky Vegas. Few commercial broadcasters are clean.

None of this is to excuse the BBC though. Encouraging viewers to use premium rate phone lines to enter non-existent competitions is unacceptable. But the BBC cases do not have nearly as strong a whiff as the ones involving its commercial rivals.

And there is not a smidgen of the hypocrisy that has come from the newspapers surrounding the premium rate scandals of this year. Newspapers were quick to jump up and down when Richard & Judy and The X Factor got caught up in it all. But they remained conspicuously quiet when it came to similar premium rate phone lines used by themselves.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s own coverage of the scandal was notable for how harsh it was on itself. I have always felt that, despite (or perhaps because of?) the constant allegations of bias, the BBC provides incredibly dispassionate coverage on any stories that involves itself.

I remember that on the day of the Hutton Report I was glued to BBC News 24. While you could argue that the BBC would be biased in favour of itself, for the same reasons Sky would be biased against the BBC.

It’s just that the magnifying glass is forever focussed on the BBC, so they cannot afford to be biased, particularly when talking about themselves. So they way they covered it was professional and detached, although there was a slightly surreal moment when you could see everyone in the newsroom rushing towards the corridor where Greg Dyke appeared. For a journalist to maintain a stiff upper lip when the story literally surrounds them in this way is seriously impressive.

I first learned about the BBC phone-in problems on BBC News 24 itself, and you would have thought that the scandal was almost as seismic as Hutton. But the problems seem to be roughly on a par with ITV’s problems with The X Factor, and certainly nothing reaching the outright deception of, say, Richard & Judy or GMTV.

And, as Matt Wardman points out:

have Sky manipulated their phone-ins? If they had, how would we find out?

That is the key. Only the BBC has the ability to be as self-critical as it is, even though it can sometimes do a lot of damage. And they never seem to get any thanks for it.

• More on the fake television scandal from Scaryduck

I’ve heard this on Radio Five Live’s bulletins at 1 o’clock and 2 o’clock, but strangely I haven’t found any mention of this on the internet at all.

The offices of Big Game TV have been raided. Apparently it is alleged that at certain times callers had no chance of getting through. I am shocked.

I am surprised, though, that Big Game TV is the first one to be investigated. On-screen it doesn’t seem like one of the scammiest channels — just one of the most boring.

Most might not bat an eyelid if a small Sky channel is investigated, but what could be interesting about this is that ITV have their fingers in the Big Game TV pie. When ITV first started experimenting with participation TV on ITV3 and ITV2 it was simulcasting Big Game TV. Now Big Game TV makes The Daily Quiz, which is broadcast on Men & Motors and ITV Play.

Quiz channels, or ‘participation TV’ as the broadcasters prefer to call it, are a little bit of a hobby horse of this blog. The channels like to set impossible puzzles and they never explain the solutions. Essentially this turns the whole process into a lottery, as callers end up guessing a random number. Callers pay 60p or £1 per entry, and every so often somebody wins £50 or something.

ITV Play’s participation TV programming is said to make £2m per month. Goodness knows how much the others must be making then, because ITV’s programmes usually seem the most respectable of all of them (although I have noticed while flicking through that The Mint is beginning to set those ridiculous ‘add the numbers’ games).

Here is an interesting discussion about Grab a Grand, a programme on Sky digital which recently set up a channel, SmileTV, on Freeview. According to the DS forummers, Grab a Grand staff members are blatantly phoning up their own channel with wrong answers. And there is Who needs shopping channels? on this blog, which had some interesting comments before it got swamped by idiots who wanted to sling mud around…

If anything happens as a result of the raid, you can bet that quiz channels will find a way round it. When AuctionWorld was closed a couple of years ago for displaying grossly inflated ‘guide prices’, the other shopping channels merely replaced their ‘guide prices’ with ’start prices’.

Update: Finally, I can bring you a link. But it’s of a radio programme! Come on internet, you’re meant to be the future! (Via TV Forum.)

Update (20/05/2006): The Daily Quiz has been replaced by This Morning Puzzle Book on ITV Play today (This Morning at 6pm!).

Also, according to Sascha on this thread, The Mint makes £100,000 per night!

Update (21/05/2006): Sascha at TV Forum again:

The overnight quiz game on The Hits, Smash Hits etc. music channels, is actually broadcast from a scruffy building in Budapest, Hungary. It’s beamed into the UK via a very dubious company which also makes pornographic videos for the eastern European market.

If that’s true it is very strange. I always thought that those programmes looked particularly weird…

Music channels really are a load of pish. Apparently it is cheaper to run a music channel than it is to publish a magazine. And it shows. This is probably why Emap like to milk every last droplet out of their magazine brands while the magazines themselves have gone the way of the dodo (hello, Smash Hits!).

Freeviewers like myself have two and two-halves options. There is The Hits and TMF — the two halves being E4 Music and E4+1 Music+1 or whatever it may be called. I have to say that E4 really must be applauded for actually making music television watchable. You can tell they’ve put in a bit of effort to make it a bit more diverse, aiming for a more discerning audience. It’s just a shame that if I ever have a day free to dispose of by vegging in front of a glowing square, I am hardly ever up early enough to watch E4 Music.

The Hits and TMF are just diabolical though. When I first got Freeview I found it difficult to believe quite how many adverts they were broadcasting. Every three videos or so it would be time for another commercial break — one long enough for you to flick through all the other channels at least twice. And there are the adverts themselves of course. All for ‘ringtone clubs’ aimed at people with the intelligence of a fish.

Even worse are these new quiz subscriptions, which are like some evil combination of quiz channels and ringtone clubs. I wonder if anybody has yet won that £2000 they were giving away to one lucky person who was stupid enough to subscribe but clever enough to know that another name for ‘money machine’ is ‘blackbox’. …What?

Despite the fact that it appears to be so cheap to run a music channel, I saw recently that The Hits has jumped onto the quiz channel bandwaggon. At least it’s very late at night. What gets me is that they’ve decided to squeeze in a couple of hours of Teleshopping as well! I mean really! Do we really need yet more Teleshopping?!

Meanwhile, TMF is the home for amusing technical glitches. If you’ve ever watched TMF late at night you will no doubt be aware of ‘Matchmaker X-rated’, the on-screen money-making scheme that encourages twelve-year-old nincompoops to text their name and date of birth which in turn makes the ‘Matchmaker’ generate some random naughty text. A typical caption might say, “Ooh, you just made the computer cum in your eye. Try felching her ear tonight.” Well that once went out during the day.

Andrew at Cage of Monkeys has his own idea for a music channel:

NO ZANE LOWE!

Give that man an EPG number!

In the process, Andrew linked to this blog of interesting music videos. Definitely one to subscribe to. I like this video for Jamie Lidell’s ‘New Me’. It reminds me a bit of those smart BBC Four idents. Must have been a chore to time it all.