BURLINGTON, ON – Crossroads Television System (CTS) has dropped religious talk program Word TV from its schedule after claiming that the show breached the network’s code of ethics.
Word TV producer and host, Dr. Charles McVety, said last week that CTS was being pressured to censor Word TV. In a statement on Monday, CTS called those comments “inaccurate and misleading”, and said that not only did Word TV fail to keep its agreement to comply with the CTS code of ethics, it indicated a refusal to comply in the future. The broadcaster also said that “numerous attempts” to work with Dr. McVety were unsuccessful.
In December, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council found that Word TV breached various broadcast codes by its treatment of issues such as homosexuality, Islam, Haiti and euthanasia, as Cartt.ca reported.
CTS said that it has “a responsibility to set high standards for programming” and created a code of ethics that in some cases, demands higher standards than those established by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and other media standards organizations. The CTS ethics code includes fundamental principles and general policies designed to ensure integrity and high quality programming “that can be trusted to cover important and timely topics, even contentious ones, in a fair and balanced framework”.
An article on Word TV’s website says that 20 prominent Canadian leaders “vow to fight Canada’s censor board that has pressured CTS Television to remove Word TV from the air”. It also calls on the CRTC and Prime Minister Stephen Harper “to uphold our basic human rights and to cease and desist all actions of political censorship”.
“I don’t know how they want me to talk”, Dr. McVety says in the article. “I thought I lived in a free democratic country and that political censorship was reserved for totalitarian regimes. The first thing a dictator like Hugo Chavez does is silence voices of opposition. Iran, Cuba, North Korea and other despotic regimes all move swiftly to suppress voices of dissent. Canada criticizes China heavily for human rights violations of denying free speech while Canada practices heavy handed political censorship.”
Under the tagline "Television You Can Believe In", the faith-based broadcaster CTS operates stations in Burlington, Calgary and Edmonton with repeater transmitters in London and Ottawa.
