OTTAWA – The defunct Doc Mailloux’s open-line talk show on Montreal’s CKAC violated several broadcaster codes with its explicit sex talk, its degrading remarks about women, and racist comments, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) announced Thursday.
Breaches were recurring on the show, but the CBSC noted that CKAC’s parent company Corus Entertainment had implemented strong measures to prevent such problems in the future and that Doc Mailloux was no longer on the air.
The CBSC ruled that six October 2006 episodes of the show, broadcast between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. weekdays, breached Clause 9(b) of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Code of Ethics, which prohibits sexually explicit dialogue on radio at times of day when children could be listening.
On the show, callers talked about their sex lives or the sexual abuses they had suffered in the past. Mailloux frequently encouraged extremely detailed descriptions of these encounters.
The CBSC pointed out that “it is the time of day, and not the sexual substance of the discussion, that is at issue.”
The Council noted the host also frequently used words that are commonly considered coarse in contravention of Clause 9(c) of the CAB Code of Ethics, which prohibits airing such language at times of day when children could be listening.
A third problem with the episodes was that the radio host consistently described women in abusive and degrading terms and made corresponding generalizations, and used disdainful and degrading language about any male who was attentive or willing to care for children.
The CBSC found that the cumulative effect of such comments constituted breaches of both the Human Rights Clause of the CAB Code of Ethics and the article of the CAB Sex-Role Portrayal Code prohibiting degrading comments made on the basis of gender.
Mailloux was also abusive towards different racial or ethnic groups, including Maghrebins, Arabs, Central Americans, African Blacks, Russians and Japanese in violation of Clause 2 of the CAB Code of Ethics, which prohibits abusive or unduly discriminatory comments on the basis of race, colour, and national or ethnic origin.
