OTTAWA – Global B.C. news reports about police officers did not violate any broadcast standards, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) has determined.
A viewer complained about the top three stories on the 6:00 pm newscast of CHAN-TV (Global B.C.) on March 23, 2009. The first story was about the testimony at the Braidwood Inquiry into the Dziekanski taser incident at the Vancouver Airport of one of the RCMP officers involved in the incident. The report suggested that Mr. Dziekanski’s mother had attempted to speak to the testifying officers, but had been ignored. Then, an RCMP spokesman was quoted in the report as saying that was not true.
The second news story was about the same RCMP officer’s involvement in a motor vehicle accident in which a 21-year-old man had died. The RCMP Corporal had been arrested for drinking and driving and had been suspended from his job, but charges had not yet been laid.
The third report was about the fatal shooting of a man by the Vancouver Police Department (VPD). A bystander claimed that he had captured video of the incident with his cell phone, but that a police officer had erased it. The report also mentioned that the bystander had been smoking marijuana for medical purposes.
The viewer claimed that the Corporal’s vehicle accident and suspension had been raised in order to call into question the credibility of his testimony at the Braidwood Inquiry. The viewer did not object to this, but he argued that the background of the bystander in the VPD case should also have been mentioned, given that the man was, the complainant alleged, a pro-marijuana advocate who had had previous run-ins with the police.
The CBSC’s British Columbia regional panel examined the complaint under the Clause 5 (News) of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ code of ethics and Article 1 (Accuracy) of the Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada’s code of (journalistic) ethics, both of which require news to be presented accurately, comprehensively, fairly and without bias. The panel also applied Clause 6 of the CAB code of ethics, which requires the full, fair and proper presentation of news. After finding no code violations with respect to Global B.C.’s presentation of the three stories, the panel made the following observations:
“Regarding the first story, the Panel disagrees with the complainant; it finds not a modicum of anything that could be characterized as ‘uncontained hostility [or] obvious bias’ [as alleged by the complainant]. […] In the second report, […t]he Panel agrees entirely with the pertinence of reporting on such an issue relating to a person integrally involved in the death of [Dziekanski], although it does not agree with the complainant’s assertion that the story was told ‘to impeach his credibility as a witness’. It may relate to that, but it may equally relate to the character of the police officer, his attitude toward the law, his stability, reliability, competence, and so on. […] [In the third story,] the broadcaster was cautious and correct in reporting the [cell phone video] story as it did, and it had no responsibility to seek the impeachment of the [bystander’s] assertions at the time of the report”.
