Ottawa, March 14, 2002 – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning the broadcast of the feature film The House of the Spirits based on the novel by Isabel Allende. The two-hour long film began at 8:30 pm EST on the specialty service Bravo! Although the great majority of the movie appeared after the Watershed hour of 9:00 pm, the CBSC National Specialty Services Panel determined that a program beginning before this hour will be considered a pre-Watershed broadcast for all relevant Violence Code purposes, which include the presence of violence, sexual activity or coarse language. The National Specialty Services Panel explained its position regarding any
broadcast that straddled the Watershed hour, beginning before it and ending after it and containing, on either one side or the other of it, material intended for adult audiences that ought not to be shown in a pre-Watershed time period. [...] It must consider whether the broadcaster would be “protected” by the Watershed principle if the scenes that might be considered to be exclusively adult-oriented only fell after the 9:00 pm limit. It concludes that this was not the intention of the codifiers and that the adoption of such a principle would create a serious blurring of the Watershed, which would be in the interests of neither the public nor the broadcasters. [...]
[P]arents have become entitled to develop a sense of security regarding what they and their families may tune in before that hour. Once they have made their viewing choices on the assumption that the broadcaster’s pre-Watershed programming is free of adult matter, the Panel considers that parents are entitled to maintain their confidence in the program they have selected without being shocked by an about-face in the content part way through that broadcast.
Despite reaching the above conclusion with respect to the Watershed issue, the Panel did not, in the end, find that any of the scenes in this particular film, The House of the Spirits, were intended for an exclusively adult audience. It acknowledged that the rape and torture scenes were disturbing and not suitable for children, but not sufficiently graphic as to necessitate their broadcast only after 9:00 pm. Consequently, the Panel did not find Bravo! in breach of any broadcaster Codes.
The Panel also underscored the responsibility of viewers to use the tools provided by the broadcasters to facilitate informed viewing choices:
It would not be reasonable to conclude that viewers should abdicate their responsibility to take the fullest advantage of these viewing aids. It may be a question of time and effective media education but it is a step that must be taken. Broadcasters still have their own obligations relating to the Watershed and other Code-related standards but viewers must play their role in the exercise of the viewing options that broadcasters have equipped them to undertake.
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 (###) ###-####.