OTTAWA – Comments made by Ottawa radio host Lowell Green about Islam and its practitioners have violated the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Code of Ethics, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) has found.
The CBSC received a complaint from a listener who was concerned about Green’s depiction of Islam and Muslims on the December 3, 2007 broadcast of the ‘Lowell Green Show’ on 580 CFRA in Ottawa.
Prompted by the internationally-discussed Muslim reaction to the teddy bear naming incident in Khartoum, Sudan, the topic of the day on the open-line talk show was Islam, and Green posed the question “Is there something inherent in the Muslim faith that promotes violence and oppression of women?”
The majority of callers answered “yes” to the question, but a few callers disagreed. Green “adamantly” expressed his own view that “almost every act of terrorism around the world today […] is carried out in the name of Islam. […] Don’t tell me this is the work of a few fanatics.”
While Green said on a few occasions that not all Muslims are “like that”, he “reacted negatively” to any caller who answered "no" to his question, including those who were Muslim or had personal knowledge of Islam and attempted, on that basis, to clarify some of his points. In one instance, Green responded to a Muslim caller with the word “baloney!” and in another, told the sympathetic, apparently non-Muslim, caller she had “abandoned common sense” and was being “silly”.
The Ontario Regional Panel examined the complaint under two clauses of the CAB Code of Ethics, Clause 2 (Human Rights), which prohibits abusive or unduly discriminatory comment on the basis of religion (among other things), and Clause 6, which requires the full, fair and proper presentation of opinion and comment. The Panel found a violation of both clauses.
The Panel noted that extending the debate from the teddy bear incident to Islam itself bore certain consequences.
“The broadened nature of the on-air debate does mean, though, that extra care must be taken by the broadcaster to ensure that sweeping generalizations, which are inherently more risky than pointed, focused discussions, do not fall afoul of either of the foregoing codified standards,” the decision read.
The Panel also said that they found no problem with simply addressing the topic, but rather with the way it was handled. With respect to Clause 2, the Panel made the following comments:
“[T]he host has mounted a sweeping, abusive and unduly discriminatory criticism of Islam. It was uninformed and unfair. It conceded none of the diversity that exists in Islam or among its adherents. […] [H]e consistently made it entirely clear that his issue […] was [that there was a problem with the faith and that it] was not the work of a few fanatics, but rather a reflection of the religion, problems and attitudes that he attributed to the “great, overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world.” Moreover, he brooked no contradictory observations of persons who were admittedly Muslim, informed about the religion, or of a different viewpoint.”
With respect to Clause 6, the Panel said that “Green did not merely disagree with opposing points of view; he mocked, ridiculed and insulted their interlocutors. Using terms like “silly” and “baloney”, he denied to callers that which is potentially best in talk radio: fair, interactive dialogue. Although not all broadcasters admit the appropriateness of anything other than pure objectivity on the part of hosts, the CBSC has long upheld the right of talk show hosts to espouse a point-of-view on air. The right to express an editorial perspective is one thing; the exclusion of the opinions of those who would express a conflicting perspective is quite another. […] Disparaging opposing views with condescending, even childish, words such as those noted above is neither fair nor proper.”
