OTTAWA – The CRTC has upheld a ruling by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council over questionable content that aired on Corus-owned radio station CFNY-FM (102.1 The Edge).
A listener appealed to the Commission in February after the CBSC determined that comments made during the March 20, 2009 broadcast of The Dean Blundell Show did not violate any broadcast codes, as Cartt.ca reported.
The complaint concerned an approximately 10-minute segment entitled “Wha’ Happened?” which aired at 8 a.m. The segment is a recurring contest in which callers are asked to share bizarre stories about things that have happened to them for a prize, such as concert tickets.
In this episode, three women chose to call the station to recount their stories: Ashley told of how she and her friends were arrested for vandalizing the car of a friend’s cheating boyfriend; Brenda of her fiancé’s accidentally cutting off her nipple with a weed-whacker while she suntanned naked; and Hyper-Lee described her visit to a Mexican gynecologist. The complainant alleged that “inappropriate sexual material” was regularly being aired during daytime hours, and recommended that this program in particular “be terminated with the greatest enforcement as soon as possible.”
The CBSC examined the complaint under four separate clauses of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Equitable Portrayal Code and Code of Ethics and found no violation of any of these codes on the basis that the content in question was sexual innuendo only.
The Commission determined that the primary issue is whether the broadcast in question was consistent with the Canadian broadcasting policy objective set out in section 3(1)(g) of the Broadcasting Act which states that “programming originated by broadcasting undertakings should be of high standard.” The CRTC said that there was no violation of established broadcast standards in a decision issued on Thursday.
“The Commission understands that the content of the program is likely to be offensive to some; indeed, it can best be characterized as juvenile”, the decision reads. “However, even if the program may be distasteful to some Canadians, it finds no evidence that the program crossed the line into the realm of unduly sexually explicit material that would warrant regulatory intervention.”
The CRTC also said that “response to this program is clearly a matter of taste, one best managed by audiences exercising choice.”
