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 wonder if one of the great promises of digital television will not be kept in the long run. Theoretically, Freeview offers viewers more choice than the old five analogue channels. At first it was true. As well as the five channels we already knew, ONdigital launched with plenty of sport and film channels, childrens’ channels and a variety of other niche channels.

That’s still kind of the same with Freeview today. But Freeview is becoming a victim of its own success. There are dozens of channels on Freeview. But once you take away the shopping and quiz channels, many of the remaining channels spend much of their time broadcasting shopping and quiz programmes, or advertising their own subscription services.

Having a Freeview channel is like gold dust for a broadcaster now. But this means that if a company only has one channel on Freeview it has to make the most of what it’s got. Now, instead of each channel catering for its own niche, channels are scurrying around chasing the average viewer. So instead of having loads more choice than we did in the old days, we now have slightly more choice.

It’s a bit like local radio stations. There are millions of them, but as far as I can tell they are almost all exactly the same. Listeners don’t get choice here. They get the same bland middle-of-the-road pop music with over-excited presenters yelping over the top. I mean, how many radio stations have a slogan along the lines of “Classic hits and today’s best music, only on 97.3 Scrotum FM”? All of them?

Freeview still has a lot of quality channels. But most of the choice comes from the BBC, Channel 4 or (at a stretch) ITV. Even then, you sense that this is only because each of these broadcasters have multiple Freeview slots to fill.

Disney has one channel on Freeview: ABC1. Its diet of cheaply imported, inoffensive daytime-friendly American comedy has barely changed in years. Yawn.

BSkyB has three channels: Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel. That was, until they decided to replace Sky Travel with a general entertainment channel especially created for Freeview, Sky Three. So what about the fans of travel programmes? They’ll have to make do with gameshows that were originally shown on Sky One five years ago and cheaply imported American comedies. Boring. (Apart from Futurama, of course!)

Even Channel Five couldn’t manage to come up with interesting Freeview channels. Overnight it brings us The Great Big British Quiz, one of the worst quiz channels there is! Past the watershed, Five US is filled with wall to wall repeats of CSI. During the day we are treated to cheaply imported (imported from the past, that is) episodes of Happy Days and comedy backwater Joey. Pass me the pillow.

Five Life is so inconsequential, I won’t even go into it. All it ever seems to show is The Ellen DeGeneres Show (a cheaply imported American chat show). I shat my duvet out of boredom.

The latest culprit to contribute to the increasingly tumbleweed-infested airwaves is Viacom, whose sole Freeview channel is TMF. It used to be called The Music Factory. Just one problem. You’ll never find any music on it. This was understandable when it showed MTV programmes such as Newlyweds or Dirty Sanchez. For one thing, it brought MTV programmes into terrestrial homes which I guess you should be grateful for. And there was still a (tenuous) link to music.

But now TMF has brought into its schedule “classic comedies” such as Cheers, Ally McBeal and The Wonder Years. WTF!!! TMF is now even unrecognisable to what it was last week, never mind a few years ago! What do these programmes have to do with music?

Even the higher quality Freeview channels, such as ITV2, More4 or E4 show more than their fair share of American comedy and drama. Sky took off their travel channel to show more American programmes. MTV have changed their music channel beyond recognition to show more American programmes. Now Channel Five have an entire channel dedicated to it. So where has the variety gone? We may have more choice, but we no longer have variety.

But there is a silver lining! Ftn has been on Freeview almost since the very start, but it was easily the most uneventful channel on the lineup. This was despite all the potential. It could draw from the pool of Flextech channels, which surely have a few quality programmes to rub together. But whoever was responsible obviously didn’t care. Ftn was like a piece of shit on your shoe that you hate so much that you won’t even bother to wash it off, so instead you scrape your shoe all over the pavement as you walk along and hope that it just goes away. Yes, Ftn was exactly like that.

Until now, that is. On New Year’s Day, Ftn’s schedule was shaken up to include more quality programmes. The phone-in quiz shows and Thomas Cook TV segments have gone, and they’ve been replaced with repeats of The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and Bullseye!

Wow! Those were three of my favourite programmes when I was young! The fact that these programmes are now almost twenty years old messes with my mind. What’s even more amazing is just how much of The Crystal Maze I can actually remember, despite it being made way back in 1990.

I know what you’re thinking. These are just cheap repeats like all the other stuff. Well yeah, but at least it’s not Dawson’s Creek. Now, start the fans please!

The media is changing very quickly, and there are a lot of difficult issues that have to be sorted out. With the massive (and still growing, maybe even still accellerating) success of blogging, podcasting and vlogging, the boundaries between the mainstream media and the pamphleteers are becoming ever-more blurred. This week Michael Grade wondered about the digital challenge.

…I do not believe we are more than two or three elections away from the moment when some commercial channels will be ready to proclaim: “We win it for Tony, Dave, Ming (or whoever).”

Grade notes the difference in culture between the print media and broadcasters:

In the UK, we have developed quite different expectations of different media. With broadcasting, balance and impartiality have been statutory requirements: democracy is judged to be served by the absence of bias and partisan editorial agendas. For print, with its long history of struggle against state censorship, democracy is seen to be served by freedom of expression, and is characterised by partisan editorialising.

Television channels are still fairly heavily regulated by Ofcom. This is designed to keep television news impartial, which is said to ensure a healthy democracy. But were newspapers to be regulated in this way it would be rightly called an undemocratic suppression of free speech.

It might seem like a discrepancy. But up until recently, broadcasters were part of a privileged elite. A television channel could have a lot of power. You don’t have to go back far to find an era where the UK had only three and a half channels. People would be stuck with what they were fed. Television audiences of over 20 million, although almost unheard of today, were not that unusual back then.

A license to broadcast was a powerful thing to have. It was a privilege, and with that privilege came responsibilities. As such it was reasonable to regulate these channels’ news output. Otherwise just two or three companies would have had a ridiculous amount of influence over the electorate.

It was very different with newspapers. In theory, anybody could publish a newspaper. It certainly had fewer barriers to entry than broadcasting did. As such, press freedoms were cherished. A diversity of opinions unimaginable to broadcasting was available in print.

Today it’s a very different story. In just a few years it will be the norm for every television owner to have access to a few dozen different channels. There are hundreds available on Sky. It is now cheaper to run some television stations than it is to publish a magazine. And there are certainly more television channels than there are national newspapers.

The traditional analogue terrestrial channels are seeing audiences dwindle. The BBC, ITN, even Sky are all becoming less powerful. Competition has increased greatly. Viewers have so many choices, and broadcasting is no longer so much of a privilege. Yes, many of the new channels have been set up by the traditional broadcasters — but this is more of a damage limitation exercise than anything else.

But it’s not just the advent of digital television that is giving the traditional media companies food for thought. A far bigger problem is being posed by the internet. Young people spend far more time on websites like YouTube and MySpace than watching television. We live in an age where the world seems to be increasingly run by large, soulless corporations. But the internet is making those large, soulless corporations run scared.

Viacom (MTV) is particularly miffed that Generation MTV is fizzling out and almost bought Bebo to try and stay hip (it laucnhed MTV Flux instead). Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace after being slow off the mark to adapt to a new world in love with the internet. Most strangely of all, ITV bought Friends Reunited.

But in terms of news coverage, the emergence of citizen journalism should usher in a new era of free speech in broadcasting. With the advent of vlogging and websites like YouTube, who is to say what is and isn’t broadcasting? It is conceivable that one day soon there will be a blogger or a vlogger who is just as influential as somebody on the television.

For some governments, this means that you should regulate citizen journalists in the same way as you would regulate broadcasters. This year in Singapore the government attempted to gag bloggers during the election campaign. The Indian government also ordered ISPs to block popular blogging sites Blogspot, Typepad and Geocities. Two years ago, French authorities famously arrested a blogger for criticising the city mayor. Does that not all sound like a suppression of free speech?

Citizen journalism has created a new category of person somewhere in between the traditional journalist and the pub ranter. It’s a grey area. We would expect the traditional journalist to adhere to certain standards; we certainly would not expect the pub ranter to. So what should we expect the citizen journalist to do?

People in this arena are becoming increasingly ambitious. There will soon be the launch of a new internet television channel, 18 Doughty Street. Those involved are already among the most successful bloggers around. If 18 Doughty Street succeeds (still a big ‘if’, of course), traditional media companies will have to take notice.

As I said, the reason broadcasters are regulated is because they were in a privileged position. But they are now no longer in such a privileged position. We can get our news from a growing number of different outlets. Today, anybody can write an article or make a film and reach a large audience. There is now genuine competition in the media. There will always be a place for the mainstream media, but they are surely becoming less powerful.

Soon enough Ofcom’s impartiality regulations will look like an anachronism. Soon it should be time to wave goodbye to the impartiality regulations in favour of freedom of speech. Of course, this doesn’t mean that every news outlet would have to become a Fox- or Independent-style ‘views’ outlet. Broadcasters — particularly the BBC — will always want to appear unbiased. There probably isn’t much of an appetite in the UK for a Fox News-style channel — although I can see an opinionated channel based on The Sun being successful.

The point is that we are now lucky enough to be in a position where we have pretty much unlimited access to as many different opinions as we want. So it’s time to celebrate this diversity instead of suppressing it. Murdoch wants to launch a Fox-style channel in the UK? Why not let him? There’ll be thousands of citizen journalists ready to challenge.