Ottawa, March 15, 2002 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council today released two decisions concerning news broadcasts on last year’s Tour de France bicycle race. One decision concerned the 6:00 pm newscast that included an item about a man who drove his car through a crowd of spectators watching the race. The other decision involved a news update relating to this story during the broadcast of the family drama program Touched by an Angel. The CBSC Prairie Regional Panel found no breach of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Voluntary Code Regarding Violence in Television Programming with respect to the newscast, but did find one with respect to the news update (and teaser for the 11 pm newscast of that story). The news footage in question showed a car ploughing through a crowd of spectators and one person flying over the hood of the car after being hit. In the newscast, the clip was twice replayed in slow motion.
The CAB Violence Code requires that broadcasters use “appropriate judgment in the pictorial representation of violence”, and caution “in the selection of, and repetition of, video which depicts violence.” In its review of the 6:00 pm newscast, the Prairie Panel noted that the CAB Violence Code also provides that broadcasters ought not to sanitize the news; they stated that the story was
unpleasant and uncomfortable but neither too graphic nor too grisly, even in the context of an early evening newscast. [...] The Panel draws a distinction between a news item that is, by its nature, sensational and the broadcast of a news report that, otherwise having the ability to stand on its own, has been sensationalized.
The Panel also commented that the triple repetition of the clip was excessive and in poor taste, but not so graphically violent as to be in breach of the Code. It also applauded the broadcaster’s commitment to provide viewer advisories during future presentations of similar content.
The Panel reached a different conclusion, however, in terms of the news teaser on the same story. The update appeared during a commercial break at 7:30 pm in the program Touched by an Angel. It featured the same video clip of the car being driven through the crowd and the person being thrown over the car. The Panel found a breach of the CAB Violence Code due to the different expectations of audiences watching a newscast versus a family drama series. With newscasts
[v]iewers are accustomed to bad news, unpleasant news, disturbing news, concerning news and shocking news. While caution and good judgment must be exercised by broadcasters in the video clips illustrating those stories, television viewers are inured to a level of disturbing news hour expectation. In stark counterpoint, audience expectation when parents are watching family-appropriate television [...] does not include disturbing news footage, such as that of the car ploughing into spectators at the Tour de France.
The Panel determined that there was no need for the broadcaster to run the video clip at all during Touched by an Angel. Choosing to run the clip a second time in slow motion had further exacerbated the situation.
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 470 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 (###) ###-####.