Ofcom has now made its decision on a case where ITV were accused of using Arma2 footage in a documentary called ‘Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA’.

The footage showed soldiers taking down a helicopter. The documentary claimed that the soldiers were IRA forces attacking the vehicle.

“It is not sufficient for a broadcaster or programme maker to rely on footage provided by a third-party source, on the basis that that source had previously supplied other broadcasters with archive footage, and fail to confirm the details of archive film provided,” said Ofcom.

“We take into account that ITV: apologised; removed the programme from its catch-up video-on-demand service; and, has now put in place various changes to its compliance procedures to ensure such incidents do not happen in future.

“However, the viewers of this serious current affairs programme were misled as to the nature of the material they were watching. In the circumstances, this represented a significant breach of audience trust, particularly in the context of a public service broadcaster.

“As such, Ofcom considered the programme to be materially misleading, in breach of Rule 2.2. Ofcom was particularly concerned by this compliance failure by ITV. We do not expect any issues of a similar nature to arise in future.”

So ITV get away with just a telling off and promise to never do it again, although we’re sure someone must have been fired over this embarrassing cock-up.