IRN issues statement regarding upheld Coast and County Radio Ofcom complaint

News provider IRN has responded to claims that its technology led to an incorrect showbiz bulletin to be broadcast on Coast and County Radio.

When investigated by Ofcom for broadcasting old news about Barry Humphries, the radio station said IRN had not updated its website correctly.

However, IRN has contacted RadioToday to say the breach had been caused by the station’s processes and human error.

The statement reads: “The IRN outage your journalist referred to by taking Scarborough Radio’s representations as fact happened several days after their error in broadcasting an old showbiz story which became the subject of the breach and therefore is a red herring in this case.

“Scripts or audio can’t remain on IRN for longer than 48 hours so it would appear that their breach had been caused by their processes and human error and had nothing to do with IRN, not least since the script in question was not on IRN Net Newsroom at the time they broadcast it.

“The first time I knew of any of this was after being contacted by Ofcom for comment last October.”

Speaking to RadioToday, a representative from Coast and County Radio confirmed the wrong information was broadcast (as per the report) and they provided Ofcom with all of the information requested at the time of the investigation.

They also questioned why the complaint took Ofcom 40 weeks to investigate over 23 seconds of wrongly broadcast audio.


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