OTTAWA – Live coverage of the Montreal Dawson College shooting on Vancouver’s CKNW could have been “lethal” for the students still trapped on campus as events unfolded, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council found.
The CBSC found the Corus station violated the Radio-Television News Directors Association’s Code of (Journalistic) Ethics. CKNW was airing live breaking news from its sister station in Montreal, CINW, through the Corus Radio Network, during the incident on Sept. 13, 2006.
The coverage contained interviews with students and family members. Two of the interviews revealed the precise location of students still barricaded inside the school. At the time, details were unclear, as police did not know how many shooters there were, where they were located, what the motives were, and how the attack had been organized.
A CKNW listener complained to the council that airing the information of the students’ location “could have tipped the gunman to the whereabouts of the trapped people” and that “lives were put in jeopardy.”
The CBSC’s B.C. Regional Panel agreed, stating, “The consequences might, as the complainant validly assumed, have been lethal.” The panel cited the RTNDA ethics code, which states that reporting should “not knowingly endanger lives … or provide vital information to the perpetrator(s).”
“The Panel notes that the broadcaster not only aired live telephone calls with trapped students but that it also repeated, no less than four times, the locations of those students in the building. The Panel is not suggesting that the station ought not to have either taken or broadcast those cell phone calls from the frightened trapped students,” the decision read. “The broadcaster ought never, however, to have permitted that part of those calls (the students’ locations) to go to air. … Nor should they have revealed those details on air in summaries by the anchor or the reporters thereafter.”
Technology has created new risks to the public in reporting information from criminal events, the panel noted. “Broadcasters must always assume that the perpetrators have access to the information they report.”
The CBSC was created by Canada’s private broadcasters in 1990 as a self-regulatory body to uphold professional broadcast codes, including the RTNDA ethics code.
