AS NATIONAL CHAIR OF THE Canadian Broadcast Standards Council for 18 years, Ron Cohen has seen and heard the most controversial television and radio programming offered on the Canadian airwaves.
Talk show hosts who obliterated whatever journalistic lines there were have been reprimanded, gratuitous violence has been appropriately banished from the airwaves and ignorant, yet aired, viewpoints which were human rights violations were harshly dealt with and apologized for thanks to the codes interpreted, nurtured and enforced by the CBSC under Cohen’s direction.
He spent over 18 years at the helm of the CBSC, the private broadcasters’ standards body. The CBSC wasn’t much of an organization when Cohen, a lawyer by training (and as author of The Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, one of the world's leading experts on the famed former U.K. Prime Minister), took the gig in 1993 after years in film production and chair of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. The CBSC still isn’t that big, with just a four-person staff, but it has between 80 to 100 volunteer adjudicators, who together deal with about 2,000 to 2,200 complaints filed annually with the CBSC, although 2011 was a particularly big year, as you’ll read.
Cohen (pictured below) retired as head of the CBSC at the end of 2011, replaced by former CRTC commissioner Andrée Noel, but under his stewardship, the CBSC grew into a thoughtful organization which knows that abuse of minorities and other groups on the public airwaves, for example, is far more important than Janet Jackson's nipple. Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien chatted with him just before Christmas, as his term expired. What follows is an edited transcript of an entertaining, enlightening conversation.
With the subject matter in mind, readers should be warned there some words in this story some might find objectionable.
Greg O’Brien: When I was getting ready for this interview, your normal level of complaints, I think, works out to something like seven or eight per business day, which seems like quite a few.
Ron Cohen: This year we had about 8,800 complaints, but that’s really exceptional because about 6,600 of those complaints relate to the Krista Erickson interview of Margie Gillis on Sun TV… and will only result in one decision. That decision was just adjudicated so that could be out fairly soon. I’ll be gone by the time it comes out, but annually, it’s always in that 2,000 to 2,200 range (of complaints) and one of the things we take some pride in,, is we reply to every single communication we receive.
So it’s not as though, let’s say, we get 2,000 to 2,200 emails, and for those that we’re not going to treat there may be 500 of those, which either go on to Advertising Standards Canada, or if they’re a non-member go on to the CRTC, or if they’re a complaint about how someone is dressing differently as a host, well, we’re not going to deal with those. But even those, we reply to. As an issue of some real pride and purpose… is the educational component of our mandate. We figured out over time that this would be the best, most affordable, efficient way to do it. So we send out an informative response to every single complaint, every bit of correspondence that we get.
And that’s really important over time because (over almost 20 years) we have probably sent out in the vicinity of 100,000 bits of correspondence to people. It’s a form of education, and it has meant in the current year, for example, 90-plus percent of the complaints we received have come directly to us from the public while in the first few years that I was National Chair, probably 90 percent of our complaints were sent to us via the CRTC.
GOB: It seems you get better known for some of the notorious decisions. The most recent one would be the “Money for Nothing” decision. What goes through your mind when you think back on what happened and see how this exploded around the word – the decision and the reaction to it?
RC: One of the most important issues that comes out of that… is the role of social media. Because what it means is that instantaneously, virtually instantaneously, when there’s an issue that arises, and in this case it was the reaction to the decision, what happens is… we’re very transparent, we get everything on our website… but the issue is that social media transforms anything that we do – and anything that anybody else does – into messages tweeted and Facebooked everywhere. It heightens the reaction to everything.
GOB: Whether or not people know the details or not.
RC: That’s right. And that makes no difference.
GOB: I’ve tweeted this before; that I know only 140 characters worth of too many things.
RC: And how do you take an issue of this complexity and in a sense reduce it to 140 characters? There are issues and problems associated with that, so what happened in this case was that there was a colossal reaction to this decision. Panels have the right to render decisions based on the information that they see, the information that they receive from us. And we expect that. There are panels made up of a combination of industry people and public representatives. And in this case they went in that particular direction. I actually think in the long run it was a very important decision. It taught us a lot of things.
Now, one of the things that came out in that initial decision was that what we have come to call “the other F-word, faggot, is in our view the equivalent of the N-word. So the panel decided that. It also, of course, decided that there was nothing in terms of the context of the song or the age of the song and the renown of the song that protected it.
GOB: A little unusual, though, to get a complaint now about a song that was written in the ’80s?
RC: I wouldn’t say that it’s so unusual. In terms of our experience. The reality is that, first of all, somebody hears it now because the song got played. And the second thing, actually, in this case it’s really interesting, is that it was this version of the song that was heard. There are versions of the song…
GOB: Radio-safe versions.
RC: Right. Radio-safe versions, and it should be pointed out, have been provided by Dire Straits since 1985. So the song came out in 1985, and if you were to go on YouTube, for example, and you check out the live concerts, and this is detailed in our second decision on Dire Straits on “Money for Nothing,” you will find that most of the versions of “Money for Nothing” don’t have the other F-word in them – most of them.
…Bear in mind we have no objection in any way, shape, or form, and no involvement in the issue of what you see on the Internet, what you would even see on the web site of any one of the broadcasters that are playing the song… As to what was heard on this occasion by this person, it was the original version of the song and it wasn’t one of the edited, radio-safe versions of the song… So we go through all of this and say, look, Dire Straits’ (band lead singer Mark) Knopfler realized that even back in ’85… there were objections and problems with the original wording of the song. So he and the band made changes from 1985. And those were not changes that were imposed on them. They were changes that they saw fit to make. That’s an important consideration. So is it surprising?
Well… I would say not so surprising because we don’t know what versions have been playing over the years. You always need to have someone who objects to a particular problem before it comes to our attention. And let me point out that from the time Howard Stern went to satellite radio, for example, we haven’t had a single objection to his show. We deal with satellite radio. We have since satellite radio went on the air. And there were objections, of course, with respect to Howard Stern when he went on conventional radio back in ’97 and we dealt with those but from the time that he’s been on satellite radio we’ve had no complaints about him.
GOB: And the show is basically the same.
RC: Probably the same. I don’t honestly know the answer to that. But the point is it’s a little bit happenstance as to when a complaint shows up.
But let me then get to the next important aspect of “Money for Nothing.” The CRTC said to us, “look, you’re the body with the expertise. We believe that this issue has now become a national issue… and we would like you, because of your expertise, to review the original decision in the light of its national component.”
GOB: The first one was a decision of the eastern panel, right?
RC: Yes, the Atlantic panel. So we formed a national panel of persons of great experience. We had people from every region of the country and members of our board of directors, all of whom have experience in dealing with adjudications. We assembled them all in person in Toronto, except for one who had to be at a conference, so she did it by teleconference – but everybody else was there in person to deal with the matter.
One of the things that is really critically important – and that we have learned – is the issue of context was one that hadn’t really been treated. Why hadn’t it been treated? We don’t tend to research matters that don’t appear in a file. So if we don’t have information in the file that we receive, we don’t deal with it. Imagine if we had to research all of the items – news items about which we get complaints. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, contextual considerations which might arise in the case of a song like this or in the case of a reality program or in the case of a public affairs show.
GOB: You don’t want to be in the position of going into researching the actual stories themselves.
RC: That’s right. I remember a decision on a news story that took place in the area of Delta, B.C. not all that long ago – a question about whether an individual who was being transported by helicopter was likely to die or not because the report had said that he was likely to… and somebody objected to that. Imagine if we then had to start going through the papers – because that’s what it would likely be, the newspapers or even local television stations – in order to determine what had happened with the accident, how severe had the accident been, what were the reasons for these predictions, had in the individual in question, in fact, died?
If we had to do all of that, the small team (of staff at CBSC) wouldn’t be able to get its work done. It’s not realistic. Basically, we take the information that we have, which can also be supplemented by either the broadcaster or by the complainant, we may check to make sure it’s accurate, but we don’t research beyond that. So we didn’t know of the background to the song, Knopfler going into the appliance store in New York City and hearing this guy who was looking up at the television screen and seeing what may have been Boy George or whoever it was on the screen and telling a story – and Knopfler literally asking for a pen and paper at the time.
You go back and there are interviews with Knopfler that you can find on the web and get this information. We didn’t begin with that. So the Atlantic panel didn’t have that background information. They had the song. That’s what they had – the song. What’s really important about the review (of the decision) is first of all that the CRTC asked us to do it and didn’t say, ‘we’re going to react to it.”
Number two, because we put something on our web site seeking submissions from people to provide us with further information about context and so on, we got plenty of it, which was great. We were able, with all that information, to deal with the context issue. When the final review came out, one of the important things is that the panel confirmed the view of the other F-word and it just basically said, no-go. Obviously, in context you can always do it. And the N-word can be used if you’re broadcasting Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, you’re not going to cut anything out of it.
If you’re broadcasting All in the Family, you’re not going to take anything out of it. There are provisions providing for contextual justification (for certain contentious words and images to air) and that’s good. That’s not a problem. We’re happy with that. In fact, we put that in the equitable portrayal code when we drafted it back in about 2007 and in this case what was concluded was that there was contextual justification in this case for this song. That was the revision to the original decision and that’s probably what a lot of people would have liked. We didn’t make any judgment about the fact that this song dated back to 1985. That for us was a non-issue.
GOB: The way I’ve thought of it and the way I’ve talked to it with some people when the first decision came out is to imagine if a news station had talked to that “man-in-the-street” about XYZ singer, whoever it is, and he said those words. The broadcaster would never ever put that guy or what he said on the air.
RC: Well, sure.
GOB: They’d show it around the studio for a laugh but that’s it.
RC: And it’s easy for them to jump on us for those decisions. It reminds me when we rendered the Howard Stern decision, the Ottawa Citizen in an editorial had essentially said, lay off. You shouldn’t be interfering in free speech. So I wrote an op-ed piece for the Citizen in response to the editorial (in late 1997). I said, look, here’s some of what he had to say. It’s a divided decision, indicative of why we have broadcast standards, the purpose that they serve, and so on. I used, in the context of what I had written, a couple of Stern examples. And what do you think they did on their op-ed page, even though the piece was being written by a non-employee of the Ottawa Citizen? They used asterisks even though they were chiding us for having rendered this decision! I just thought that was the most arrogant imaginable thing to do.
My op-ed piece was saying, well, maybe it’s okay for you to run this kind of material, but it’s not okay for the broadcasters to run it. And they asterisked it out!
GOB: I’ve gotten emails myself from people when the odd time an executive I’ve quoted has said the word “bullshit” or something like that, I’ve had people complain in emails to me that that shouldn’t appear in a professional publication. And I respond “Well, it’s what he said.”
RC: And we have since, on the F-word (the original F-word), moved in the direction of use in the context of a news report, where we’ve said, it’s okay if you’re running a live news report, whereas we used to say you couldn’t use it, even in a live news report you be ready to deal with it… Of course, what’s interesting is that in the case of the Academy Awards last year it is interesting that the Americans cut out the F-word that was used by Melissa Leo and CTV didn’t. In any case, I don’t raise that for any important reason but just to say that we adapt and we move as well and it’s got to happen.
GOB: There used to be some stuff that was never ever said on the air, never ever alluded to on the air – just never ever…
RC: Sure. Here’s what I think may be happening. I’m not trying to suggest that broadcasters are not moving in that direction, but here’s what may be happening. As (the CBSC gets) better known, which is inevitable, whether it’s as the result of the “Money for Nothing” decision as you said a moment ago or the result of other decisions for which we have become known, what happens is that more people know that they can complain to us. So does it mean, that statistical sense, that there is more going on or that there are more people who, having heard something, feel that there is a place that they can go and get a result?
What I would say with a note of some pride in this regard is the direction that we’ve gone in on some issues. For example, we’ve become a bit more liberal in the use of the F-word. We understand very well that it’s far more frequent in its use than it used to be. The question that I ask people often when they say, “yeah, but come on, my kid hears that word every day in the school or the schoolyard”, I say, I understand that, and I’m just wondering what happens when you get home and are having dinner that he’s using that word at the dinner table. Oh, no, no, not there. So my point is that before 9:00 p.m. our view is that there ought to be a safe haven.
And this is, again, one of the things that we’ve established over the years. There ought to be a safe haven before 9:00 p.m. And after 9:00 p.m. it opens up, and that’s the watershed… I don’t think that there’s a more liberal jurisdiction anywhere, certainly not in the English-language world that I’m aware of.
GOB: Oh, certainly not when you compare it to the States. I mean I absolutely hate watching movies on any of the U.S channels. I remember seeing The Godfather on American Movie Classics. It was hilarious – all of the stuff that gets bleeped out or cut out. I know the movie. I’ve seen it a lot of times. You happen to get on it a U.S. TV channel and it’s just not right, and I change the channel. We’ve got a much more – I don’t know if adult is the right word – grown up sensibility of the way people are, the way people talk, the way people want to see things. Plus, if your kids are watching… Comedy Network at 10:30 at night and they hear something they shouldn’t hear, well, maybe it’s because you shouldn’t have your kids watching Comedy Network at 10:30 at night.
RC: Parents have responsibility. We’ve referred to a contract between the broadcasters and the public. And the contract essentially is that the broadcasters will provide the public with tools. They will do things like provide viewer advisories… they will provide classification icons on the screen, they will reserve programs with what we call exclusively adult content until after 9:00 p.m. So they provide these tools… not to mention program-blocking technology on the –
GOB: Cable and satellite boxes.
RC: … and the other part of the contract is we expect individuals, audience members, adult audience members, will take responsibility for using these tools to make the appropriate selection so that they will get the content that is appropriate for their homes. The responsibility doesn’t land solely on the back of the broadcaster – and the broadcasters have been very good about providing these tools, but to come back to the issue of the kind of adultness of the programming, I feel very proud about the choice that we’ve made in this regard. It may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s the choice we’ve made… After 9:00 it’s pretty much wide open as long as you tell people that there will be coarse language in the programming. Then they can choose to avoid it if they wish to.
GOB: And at every commercial break. Just not at the beginning.
RC: Absolutely right. The viewer advisories have to be there at every commercial break. Sexual content – our view again is that sexual content that is destined exclusively for adults should be reserved to 9:00. But at 9:00, Bob’s your uncle. Go for it. Again, just tell the people. Our view is that nudity is acceptable at any time of the day or night on television, which is another of the adult views that we have taken. Nudity, including full-frontal nudity of either gender is, from our perspective, acceptable, unless it’s in a sexual content, in which case we just say 9 p.m. But we said it’s okay to show the movie Striptease, the Demi Moore movie, before 9 p.m. because we’ve said there’s no sexual content in the sense of sexual contact. We’re not oblivious to the fact that it’s the intention that this be, shall we say, titillating. We understand that. But still we have drawn that distinction and we have said that if there is actually no sexual activity, nudity we don’t view as a problematic issue.
GOB: You should probably even have an asterisk or something though for movies like that just saying that this is an awful movie and probably shouldn’t be shown by broadcasters anyway… but that’s something else altogether.
RC: We don’t have on television what I had sometimes referred to in Yiddish dialect as a D-chip… in Yiddish the word for terrible television or terrible anything is dreck… So we occasionally have joked that we have no D-chip. That, of course, is strictly a marketplace decision.
Here’s the other thing, though, that I wanted to get at which is important in this context and that is human rights. In the United States, Janet Jackson’s nipple for the 3/16ths of a second or whatever it is that it was on screen became a huge issue. From our point of view, it’s a non-issue because as I said to you a moment ago, nudity is not an issue for us. And that’s all that was. You may call it stupid. You may call it whatever you want, but that’s all it was. It was a nipple on screen for a flash. I mean, we would have said that it could have stayed on screen for longer and we still would not have had a problem. What we have a problem with is when Howard Stern referred to women, for example, whose intelligence was in inverse proportion to the size of their breasts, for example. So we view this as something not reflecting the intellectual and emotional quality of women and unacceptable back in ’97 when he was making those kinds of comments.
When he referred to French Canadians as "pussy-ass jack-offs" and a number of other issues in that first day of programming back in early September ’97, we viewed that as a problem.
GOB: Comments designed to make a big splash when launching in Canada, of course.
RC: We understand Stern’s goal in that regard, absolutely. That’s not the problem. All we were saying is that for us, in this country, comments that are abusive or unduly discriminatory on the basis of sexual orientation, on the basis of gender, on the basis of religion, on the basis of nationality, on the basis of color of skin – those for us are human rights problems. So we’re concerned about that. We’re not concerned with Janet Jackson’s nipple. We were concerned with what Laura Schlessinger used to do with her homophobic comments. Again, in the United States, do what you want, the FCC will deal with that, if at all, or they don’t deal with human rights issues down there.
GOB: It’s inverted.
RC: That’s right.
GOB: They’re so concerned about nudity but the human rights stuff seemingly goes ignored sometimes. It’s odd.
RC: Absolutely. So we were concerned that she said things like homosexuals were aberrant, deviant, dysfunctional, a biological error. Those concerned us. And in our decision we said that, basically, this might be acceptable south of the border but it doesn’t work up here in our environment. And you know something? It stopped overnight. So I’m very proud of what we have done, and there are numerous other examples. In the area of Islam, for example, again, we’ve been very careful. There are comments that are fair to make… and it’s one of the strengths of the system that has been built that we have people who are smart, thoughtful, sensitive about these issues – I don’t believe politically correct. There are things you can say about Islam. There are things you can say about homosexuality. But you can’t just say anything that crosses your mind. So we dealt with a situation with an Ottawa broadcaster whose talk show host…
GOB: Lowell Green.
RC: … made some comments about apostasy (changing of religion), about a man you may remember hearing his name – Abdul Rahman, who was an Afghan, who ultimately had to escape the country to go to Italy because he had wished to change religion and there was a risk that he would be literally put to death for that. So Lowell Green attacked Islam for its position on apostasy and he quoted from the Qur’an – except that he wasn’t quoting from the Qur’an. He was quoting, in fact, from commentaries on it, interpreters of the Qur’an – but when you refer to something as being in the Qur’an…
GOB: It really should be there.
RC: But it wasn’t. So that was an issue where we felt he had gone too far because you’ve got to give people the facts. You can say what you want, but you got to do it on the basis of the facts. Anyway, I’m just saying we have made special, thoughtful, careful efforts to protect Canadian society on the basis of issues like this in the human rights area. Far more important to us than coarse language. Far more important to us certainly than nudity or even sexual content.
GOB: Do you wish you had a bigger club, as in the ability to fine? To say, “look, Doc Mailloux, you’ve been in front of us a bunch of times. We’re fining you, the station, $10,000.” Do you wish you had that ability?
RC: I really don’t because A), we don’t need it, and B), that might provoke a far more litigious perspective on the part of the broadcasters. Now, if we hadn’t been able to achieve an acceptable result, that would be one thing, but we have. Broadcasters play by the rules that we have set up, and I think that’s critically important. So let me respond to you on the example of Doc Mailloux. We had come to the point where after a third transgression of the same type, we said to Corus in our decision that essentially “you have 30 days to indicate to us – we’ve done this a number of times – what steps you are going to take to ensure that this problem will not be repeated?”
We need to have that information within 30 days or you’re out as a member – not Corus broadly, but in that case, CKAC. What in fact happened was Corus actually beat us on that one because before the decision itself came out they had taken the step of repurposing the station.
GOB: They c
