Ottawa, December 20, 2000 – Following its approval by the Annual Meeting of the CBSC National Executive, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has released its Annual Report for the year ended August 31, 2000. “It was,” said CBSC National Chair Ron Cohen, “a year of extraordinary activity, both in terms of the substance of the matters dealt with and the sheer volume of complaints and decisions. While the individual number of files opened (810) was somewhat reduced, there were no large clusters of complaints about an individual program as in the past two years. As a result, the number of individual matters dealt with increased substantially.”
The current Annual Report (as well as those of the previous 5 years, for those who wish to compare the CBSC’s annual information) is electronically accessible on the CBSC’s web site.
In all, the CBSC issued 80 decisions this year, 31 of the formal variety, the full texts of which are posted on the CBSC web site and 49 of the “Summary Decisions” variety (which constituted matters dealt with in previous CBSC jurisprudence), which are not. The Annual Report summarizes all the public decisions by subject area.
Summaries of all CBSC decisions are also separately available on the CBSC’s web site in the section on the broadcaster Codes. The Code clauses are themselves supplemented by Commentaries which incorporate references to the CBSC jurisprudence established in this year’s decisions as well as those of all previous years. A hard copy version of the resulting Annotated Codes is available for purchase from the CBSC Secretariat.
As National Chair Ron Cohen pointed out, “The work of the Council extends well beyond the making of decisions. The CBSC Secretariat responds to all letters and e-mails received by the Council, even when the complaints ought to have been directed to another body or where they have no relationship to broadcasting at all. In our replies to all such letters, we take the time to inform consumers of the nature of the work the CBSC does. It is there to be responsive to public concerns. The more people who know that Canada’s private broadcasters offer them a recourse in the event of any concerns the better.”
As always, the Annual Report includes the customary breakdown of complaints by region of complaint, language of program, source of program, type of program, and Code clause(s) in question. Information relating to the texts of the Codes themselves, the history of the CBSC, the members of the five Regional Councils and their biographies, and so on is permanently available on the CBSC web site.
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