Ottawa, June 14, 2000 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning the broadcast of the Peter Warren Show on CKNW-AM in Vancouver. A complainant alleged that Peter Warren used “language in reference to a caller that is totally uncalled for and an abuse of this station’s privilege to have access to our country’s airwaves.”
In accordance with its ordinary practice, the CBSC had asked that the tapes of the show be held by the broadcaster pending resolution of the complaint; however, the CBSC was informed that the logger tapes were no longer available. The broadcaster’s Program Director explained that the employee responsible for the preservation of logger tapes at the time was no longer employed with the station, and after much effort, the secured tapes could not be located. Consequently, the B.C. Regional Council was unable to assess the validity of the complaint. While the broadcaster’s explanation for the missing tapes was not in doubt, the Council stated that “its expectation is one of result, not of best efforts.”
In finding that the broadcaster breached its requirements of membership in the CBSC, the Council stated:
Barring a natural catastrophe of the nature of a fire, broadcasters must retain and provide the tapes which are the essence of the self-regulatory, and regulatory, investigations. The failure to comply constitutes a breach of one of the broadcaster’s fundamental obligations as a member of the CBSC.
The Council noted in its decision that the complainant had requested an audiotape of the broadcast so that he could make his own evaluation of the words spoken by the host. The Council explained its policy regarding such requests in this way:
Broadcasters are not required, either by law, by any broadcast code or by virtue of their membership in the CBSC, to provide tapes of their programming to complainants or any other members of the public upon request. Each broadcaster’s fundamental legal obligation (under the Broadcasting Act) and its CBSC membership obligation is to retain logger tapes of the programming broadcast on their station for a period of 28 days (some broadcasters choose to keep logger tapes for longer periods) and to provide copies of these logger tapes to the CBSC, if requested by it for the purposes of adjudicating a complaint. While it goes without saying that a broadcaster may at any time provide a logger tape copy to a complainant or other individual, broadcasters are under no obligation to do so. Moreover, once the CBSC complaint process is engaged, it is the more so appropriate for the involved broadcaster to respond to any such request by saying that the matter is in the hands of the Council and will be dealt with there.
Canada’s private broadcasters have themselves created industry standards in the form of Codes on ethics, gender portrayal and television violence by which they expect the members of their profession will abide. In 1990, they also created the CBSC, which is the self-regulatory body with the responsibility of administering those professional broadcast Codes, as well as the Code dealing with journalistic practices first created by the Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada (RTNDA) in 1970. More than 430 radio and television stations and specialty services from across Canada are members of the Council.
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All CBSC decisions, Codes, links to members’ and other web sites, and related information are available on the World Wide Web at www.cbsc.ca. For more information, please contact the National Chair of the CBSC, Ron Cohen, at (###) ###-####.