The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Breach by Salmond show
Television: Regulator finds RT programme broke broadcasting rules
The Alex Salmond Show on a Kremlin-backed TV channel has been found to have breached broadcasting rules for presenting messages as having come from viewers when they were in fact from production staff.
Regulator Ofcom investigated “audience tweets” in the former Scottish first minister’s debut show on RT, formerly Russia Today.
It found that the tweets were presented as having come from viewers but most of them were from production staff linked to the programme.
Four of the six tweets or emails featured in the November episode were sent by people connected either directly or indirectly to the production of the Alex Salmond Show or to Mr Salmond in some way, Ofcom said.
They included the question ‘Why RT?’, tweeted by ‘a freelance make-up girl who had been involved in rehearsals for the show’ and ‘What does Slainte mean?’ (the name of Salmond’s production company), which came from a “freelance cameraman and an acquaintance of one of the producers’ technicians”.
This is the first decision to be made into 11 investigations that were launched by Ofcom into RT.
The regulator is also investigating “the due impartiality of news and current affairs programmes on the RT news channel”.
It said since the Salisbury poisoning it has “observed a significant increase in the number of programmes” on the channel that should be investigated.
MPs have also voiced concern in the House of Commons about the Russian news channel while Prime Minister Theresa May has faced repeated calls for the government to take action against RT in the Commons.
A spokesman for Slainte Media, which makes the Alex Salmond Show, said: “For the very first programme of a recorded series there were obviously no existing viewers or live tweets to draw on in order to illustrate the audience participation section. Thus we used comment from a variety of sources for the six questions.”
He added: “This ruling is despite the fact that the content of the questions were basically light-hearted (eg the English meaning of the Scots Gaelic word Slainte) and clearly pursued no particular agenda nor could possibly have caused any offence. In other words this ruling, even one with no proposed sanction, is out of all proportion to this very minor matter.”
RT commented: “This was a notable and worrying example of Ofcom’s orchestration of the media in this matter by publicising, without notice to RT, its provisional findings for its decision in this case in a statement made on April 18.
“This was before it had heard, let alone had time to consider, RT’s representations on its preliminary view.”