Audio Recording Comparison

Russell Brand Jonathan Ross

Ofcom fined BBC £150,000 for Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross prank phone calls.

Media regulator Ofcom has fined the BBC a record £150,000 for broadcasting "gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning" prank phone calls made by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross to the actor Andrew Sachs.

In their calls, Ross and Brand left a series of lewd messages on the actor's answering machine, claiming that Brand had slept with his granddaughter Georgina Baillie.

It is believed to be the largest fine for a single case issued by the regulator. 

Ofcom said the scale of the fine "reflects the extraordinary nature and seriousness of the BBC's failures and the resulting breaches of the Code".

It condemned the way it had aired "explicit, intimate and confidential" information about Miss Baillie and Mr Sachs in both programmes without their consent.

"This not only unwarrantably and seriously infringed their privacy but was also gratuitously offensive, humiliating and demeaning," it said.

The BBC received 45,000 complaints following the incident – which forced the resignation of Russell Brand, Lesley Douglas Controller of Radio 2 and David Barber, the head of specialist music and compliance at Radio 2 and led to presenter Jonathan Ross being suspended without pay for 12 weeks.

Ofcom

The Office of Communications, commonly known as Ofcom, is the government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom. 

They set the relegations for the Radio, TV, Ect.... This is because media when shown on public grounds must be fair. 

Australia Radio Scandal

Jacintha Saldanha (1966 – 7 December 2012) was a British-Indian nurse who worked at King Edward 3rd Ward Hospital in London, England. On 7 December 2012, she was found dead by apparent suicide, three days after falling for a prank phone call as part of a radio stunt. In the prank call, the hosts of the Australian radio programme Hot30 Countdown, broadcast on the Southern Cross-owned station 2Day FM in Sydney, called Saldanha's hospital and impersonated the Queen and the Prince of Wales enquiring about the health of the Duchess of Cambridge, who was a patient there at the time. Saldanha fell for the hoax and transferred the call to the nurse looking after the Duchess.

Saldanha's suicide led to public outrage, including in Saldanha's home country of India, against those responsible for perpetrating and broadcasting the prank. Despite numerous calls for legal action, no charges were laid.