OTTAWA – Alcohol- and sex-related activities at Spring Break events should not have aired before 9:00 pm, the Canadian Standards Broadcast Council (CBSC) has ruled.
The CBSC received a complaint from a viewer about the broadcast of a program called E!’s Wildest Spring Break Moments in December 2008 and May 2009 on CHCH-TV, when it was still known as E! and owned by Canwest Media. The show included numerous scenes of young men and women in various states of undress, participating in various contests and stunts, such as wet t-shirt contests, oil and pudding wrestling, and sexual position contests. There were frequent close-ups of breasts and buttocks, but any actual nudity was pixillated. The scenes were interspersed with clips of comedians making humorous or sarcastic comments about the activities being shown on screen, and many of those comments were sexually suggestive.
The program aired at 1:00 pm on both occasions, and the viewer felt that the program should not have aired in the middle of the afternoon, especially without a viewer advisory or classification icon. The broadcaster explained that it had included a viewer advisory and a PG rating on its December 2008 broadcast, but that those viewer alerts had not been included in the May 2009 broadcast due to human error. The CBSC Ontario Regional Panel noted that a PG icon had in fact appeared on the May 2009 broadcast, but viewer advisories did not.
The Panel decided that the program should only have aired after the ‘watershed’ hour of 9:00 pm, in accordance with Clause 10 of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Code of Ethics which requires that sexual content intended for adults only be shown between the hours of 9:00 pm and 6:00 am.
The Panel made the following comments in its decision:
"[A]lmost every segment of the hour-long program was aggressively suggestive of sexual activity and that, collectively, the impression inevitably left on viewers is raucous, libidinous, relationship-less sexual coupling. The Panel finds no inherent problem with the broadcast of such programming; its question is only when it may be aired. The Panel finds that the constant barrage of the sexual message renders it utterly inappropriate for a pre-Watershed broadcast. […] The Panel wishes to make clear that the pixillation of genitalia during the program did not diminish the explicitness of the sexual content. […] The breach is in the consistent sexual content at 1:00 pm, which is neither helped nor hindered by the pixillated visuals."
The Panel also concluded that the program should have been rated 14+ rather than PG due to the constant sexually suggestive content, and it should have been accompanied by viewer advisories at the beginning and coming out of every commercial break, as required by Clause 11 of the CAB Code of Ethics.
