OTTAWA – Shortening an assistant manager’s title to “ass man” or airing listeners’ icky-personal life misadventures is okay, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council said today.
The CBSC released two decisions about two different recurring segments on the Dean Blundell Show, the CFNY-FM (102.1 The Edge, Corus Entertainment, Toronto) morning program, finding that neither violated the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Code of Ethics because they contained sexual innuendo rather than unduly sexually explicit material.
Reads the release:
The CBSC received complaints about an example of each of two segments, one known as “Gay Jeff” and the other as “Wha’ Happened?” In the “Gay Jeff” segment, the program hosts spoke with Jeff, a gay man who talked about his life experiences. On the January 22, 2009 segment, Jeff spoke about a relationship he had had. The dialogue include a number of double entendres and sexually suggestive comments made. For example, there were references to an “assistant manager” being an “ass man”, a comment by Jeff that he “already got all nine that [he] needed from him” and questions posed to the female producer about whether she would sleep with a reality television star. The “Wha’ Happened?” segment was a contest in which listeners had to phone in and recount unusual stories that had happened to them.
On March 20, 2009, one woman described how she had been strip-searched after committing an act of vandalism, another told the hosts that her boyfriend had accidentally cut off her nipple with a weed whacker, and yet another described her visit to a Mexican gynecologist.
In both cases, the CBSC received complaints that the sexual content of the segments was inappropriate for morning radio. (Ed note: No word on whether the folks who complained are still listeners...)
Continues the release:
The CBSC’s Ontario Regional Panel examined the complaints under Clause 9(b) of the CAB Code of Ethics, which prohibits the broadcast of “unduly sexually explicit material” at times of the day when children could be listening.
The Panel concluded that the examples were simply insufficiently explicit to amount to “unduly sexually explicit” content. This is not to say that they might not be understood by some young persons; it is rather that the sexual dialogue was not anything like the “in your face examples” [previously adjudicated by the CBSC]. And material that is on the cusp is protected by the application of the principle of freedom of expression, which takes precedence over material that is not clearly in breach of a codified standard.
The Panel was a little concerned, however, about the depiction of Mexicans in the “Wha’ Happened?” segment “because the hosts affected a Mexican accent and suggested that a Mexican doctor would use crude tools, such as salad tongs. However, “the panel concluded that the comments were not so negative as to constitute unduly negative stereotyping under the CAB Equitable Portrayal Code, nor did it find that the segment was degrading to women.”
