Channel Seven's Today Tonight show dragged through the courts over dodgy investment gurus programs kickbacks

The oldest scam in the book is to "let people in on a secret to get rich".
If you knew a secret that did this you would be too busy using the knowledge and counting the money to tell anyone. Unless your secret to wealth is to in fact make money from people that you dupe into believing that you are in fact a nice person and want to help. To do this you need a prop. Something that gives you the trust factor. Makes you appear legit. Enter Australian Media Giant Channel Seven.
Well in appears that a program on a broadcasting station that most would trust was found to be taking kickbacks from the people sucked in by lies, and they were targeting women no less."The High Court of Australia has found a television current affairs program, broadcast by Channel Seven, breached trade practices laws by entering into a deal for exclusive get-rich-quick stories.
In October 2003 and January 2004 the Seven Network's Today Tonight program broadcast exclusive stories on an investment mentoring program called Wildly Wealthy Women (WWW). The exclusives were organised with Today Tonight by a "marketeer" who had made arrangements with WWW to receive a commission for every woman who signed up to the investment program.
The Today Tonight programs stated that participants in the WWW program would become millionaires through investing in property, even if they had no money to start with.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) took action, saying the TV program had no reasonable grounds to make such assertions.
The Seven Network did not dispute that the programs contained untrue claims about the wealth and assets of the two women who were offering the training.
Nor did it dispute that certain representations made in the episodes were misleading and deceptive."
But the Full Court of the Federal Court in June 2008 found the media exemption in the Trade Practices Act - sometimes known as the ''media safe-harbour'' protection - did apply to the Seven Network's broadcast.
So, whilst Section 52 of the Act bans a corporation from engaging in misleading or deceptive conduct, there is an exemption for ''prescribed information providers'', such as broadcasters.
The ACCC argued in the High Court that because of the arrangement made between the network and WWW to broadcast the program, the broadcast was not covered by the exemption. That is, the financial arrangement precluded from from protection.
A majority of members of the High Court on Thursday found the exemption did not apply to situations in which a media outlet publishes matter in relation to ''goods or services where the publication is subject to an arrangement with a supplier of goods or services''.
The High Court allowed the ACCC's appeal, set aside the Full Court's orders and restored the orders made by the original Federal Court judge in 2007 who came down in favour of the ACCC.
Mr Mortgage says shame on you Channel Seven. You thought you could use the law to find a loophole to slide your way out of your responsibilities as a broadcaster.So why are you allowed to still broadcast?
Scammers are everywhere in Australia these days. They are even on your TV, the last place you expect to find them pulling a fast one. But it is the best place to do just that, because the scammer gets the "halo effect" of trust they comes with television. Not any more. No wonder I mostly watch non commercial TV these days.
I have had my "BS" detectors on for years.