Ottawa, March 14, 2002 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning the broadcast of the movie Police 10-07 on the specialty service Showcase between 7:00-9:00 pm EST. The CBSC National Specialty Services Panel found that some of the scenes with a threatening component and others showing the results of off-screen violence were not suitable for children, but did not consider theses explicit enough to require that the movie be broadcast only after 9:00 pm. It did find, however, that Showcase failed to air viewer advisories throughout the broadcast alerting viewers to the violent content.
The movie follows the Montréal police squad in its investigation of the serial killing of homosexual men by a method known as auto-erotic strangulation. Many of the scenes with any violent content showed only the results of criminal acts that had occurred earlier and, in any event, the National Specialty Services Panel concluded that the few scenes of violence were integral to the plot development and “did not amount to violence for violence’s sake.” While the content and themes in Police 10-07 were not suitable for young children, the Panel reiterated that not all broadcasting fare before 9:00 pm need be appropriate for all audience age groups.
While the movie began with a viewer advisory, advisories did not appear again until the final two commercial breaks in the two-hour broadcast. The Panel determined that this was clearly in breach of the viewer advisory provision of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Voluntary Code Regarding Violence in Television Programming:
The provision of oral-only viewer advisories towards the end of the film’s second hour seems almost to have been an afterthought and was clearly inadequate in terms of the Code requirements. Apart from anything else, the inadequacy of the gesture is exacerbated by the fact that the film was nearing its conclusion and that many of the most disturbing scenes appeared well before these advisories.
The Panel reiterated what the Council has said on numerous occasions, namely, that broadcasters have a duty to provide viewer advisories to assist audiences in making informed viewing choices.
The Panel also expressed its concern with the broadcaster’s response to the complainant. Although the complainant did not identify the film title, her description was sufficiently narrow (between 6:00 pm and 8:30 pm) that the broadcaster ought to have been able to identify the film with very little trouble. The Panel concluded that, by failing to make any attempt to identify the program, Showcase did not live up to its CBSC membership requirement of broadcaster responsiveness.
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 (###) ###-####.