ARY News rapped by Ofcom for recordings failure

Ofcom has rapped the UK’s most watched South Asian news channel, ARY News after it failed to send recordings of its transmission output as requested by the media regulator in January.

Ofcom received a complaint that unfair comments were made about an individual in four programmes broadcast on the channel, ARY News. To assess the complaint, we requested ARY to provide us with recordings of the programmes. One recording was received by the deadline given. A second recording was received by the deadline given, second time around. One further recording was received, although it was not adequately labelled, so Ofcom was unable to identify the programme to which the recording related. However, two recordings were still outstanding and not provided to Ofcom.

ARY News said that it had cooperated with Ofcom in this case but accepted that a technical fault caused by a ���system crash�۝ at a third party recording facility had prevented it from providing the requested recordings for 5 and 8 January 2016. ARY News said that this was a ���one-off error and was in no way deliberate�۝. ARY News added that it had provided some recordings to Ofcom related to this complaint which demonstrated that it had a system in place for retaining recordings. Further, ARY News said that it had implemented ���spot checks�۝ on the third party responsible for retaining recordings to avoid this problem happening in the future. ARY News said that it had failed to provide Ofcom with the recording when first expected due to staff resourcing issues.

Ofcom said it was putting ARY on notice that should similar compliance issues arise in the future, we will consider taking further regulatory action.