Ottawa, October 29, 1999 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning comments made by talk show host Peter Warren on CKNW-AM (Vancouver). The complaint stemmed from the host’s on-air acknowledgment on a second show that he had stated a month earlier on a prior show that “Born-again Christians [are] the scum of the earth”. While no listeners complained about the original statement in the required time frame, with the result that the logger tapes for the first show had been recycled, a listener complained of the on-air acknowledgment of the host on the second show in response to an impromptu interrogation on those earlier comments by a caller to the later show. The listener complained that the comment was a “scurrilous attack” on Christianity.
The B.C. Regional Council considered the complaint under the human rights provision of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Code of Ethics. A majority of the Council found that “by accusing a named religious group as being the ‘scum of the earth’, the broadcaster has made statements which were abusively discriminatory in contravention of Clause 2 of the CAB Code of Ethics.” The Council noted that
[i]t is troublesome ... that the Council must adjudicate on such a serious comment based, not on the original statement by the host (which might have been more carefully crafted by him), but on his hasty acknowledgment of having made the statement as a result of an impromptu interrogation on those comments by a caller. While the Council is not unsympathetic to the pressures of live talk radio and the fact that Mr. Warren may well have been taken off guard, it cannot for those reasons alone let the admitted discriminatory comment escape review. In this regard, the Council notes that the host did not end the exchange with a simple acknowledgment, the statement “Yeah, you’ve got the right person but you’re on the wrong topic”; he went on to add (almost self-righteously) that “I did say that. I said it on air and I said it more than once.” In the majority of the Council’s view, this constituted more than a mere brush-off but indicated that the host had reasserted his position.
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 (###) ###-####.