Ottawa, March 14, 2002 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning the broadcast of the feature film Wildcats on June 10, 2001 at 4:00 pm EST on the specialty service the Women’s Television Network (WTN). The CBSC National Specialty Services Panel found that the coarse language was inappropriate for broadcast in the afternoon and that the program required advisories alerting viewers to the coarse language and nudity.
The comedy film stars Goldie Hawn as the coach of a high school men’s football team. The movie contained two short scenes involving male nudity in one and female nudity in the other. The Panel did not find these scenes problematic even in the afternoon (in the sense of being intended for adult audiences) since the nudity was brief, somewhat humourous in its presentation, and was not, in any case, paired with sexual activity. It did, however, decide that viewer advisories should have been present to alert viewers of the presence of nudity.
The movie also contained numerous instances of coarse language, including the f-word. In a number of cases the broadcaster had gone to the effort of muting the f-word, but on others, for no apparent reason, it had not. The Panel pointed out this inconsistency and explained that the broadcaster had the choice of editing out all instances of the word or of airing the film unedited after 9:00 pm. It is the position of the CBSC that the use of such language renders the film “intended for adult audiences”. Consequently, the 4:00 pm unedited broadcast of Wildcats was in breach of the scheduling provision of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Voluntary Code Regarding Violence in Television Programming.
The Panel also found WTN in breach for failing to provide any viewer advisories at the beginning of or during the film. While the film was appropriately rated as 14+, as the CBSC has previously explained, classification icons and viewer advisories constitute essential components of a package that are collectively necessary as a part of the broadcasters’ Violence Code safeguards for public viewing. They are tools provided to audiences to help them make informed viewing choices on the basis of their and their families’ needs and tastes. The absence of any viewer advisories in WTN’s broadcast of Wildcats constituted a breach of that Code.
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 500 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 (###) ###-####.