OTTAWA – The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) has found Quebec broadcaster TQS responsible for breaches of contest standards on the French-Canadian version of a European television show know as Call TV.
Viewers of the show were encouraged to call the on-screen 1-900 number or text (SMS) their solutions to the various puzzles that appeared on the screen in order to win cash prizes. Contestants were charged $1 for each 1-900 call or text message, which was ultimately the program’s source of revenue.
The CBSC received hundreds of complaints covering a range of issues from callers’ frustration with the inaccessibility of the program personnel (whom they were induced to call), to concerns about the callers’ bills which frequently amounted to hundreds of dollars, to misrepresentations made by the hosts regarding some of the contests.
Although the broadcaster attempted to avoid responsibility for the program, saying that “TQS is merely the means of broadcasting this paid program” and advising complainants to contact the show’s producers, the Quebec panel of the CBSC ruled that, under both the private broadcaster codes and the broadcasting act, “TQS bears full responsibility for any breach of the CAB Code of Ethics flowing from the broadcast of Call TV.”
The panel found that the program was not an infomercial, as TQS had claimed, but rather paid programming in the form of a series of contests. It also found “problems” with the mathematical puzzles used in the show.
First of all, there were no successful callers among those the program’s producers chose to be on air. Nor were any of the Adjudicators, without any time pressure whatsoever and having the answers in front of them as provided by the hosts at the end of each such contest, able to justify or explain the answers given.
While this has of course raised doubts in the minds of the Adjudicators as to the legitimacy of the foregoing puzzles, what is more important to them is the inherent absence of transparency for the audiences. Audiences ought to be able to know or understand the rules of a contest and the transparency of the outcome, particularly when they are being asked to spend money to enter them. […] Where, contrary to the reasonable and customary examples of the foregoing contests, the inherently dubious outcome is neither evident nor explained, the Panel considers that the absence of transparency renders the conduct of the contest neither fair nor legitimate, as required by Clause 12 of the CAB Code of Ethics.
The contest that the panel said was the “most misleading” was a name-guessing game of July 12 where, in order to induce people to believe that they had a chance and therefore spend $1 per call or text message, the host “continually made the point that the names were familiar, simple, known, common”. The panel concluded that “they were anything but common”.
In a tactic reminiscent of the annoying, gloating, oddly-named dwarf in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin (well-known in its original German and English-translated versions, perhaps less known in its French version, Le Nain tracassin), the Call TV team developed a list of anything but common names. While the correct guesses Marc, David, Jacques and Laurent all fell easily into the familiar, known, common category, the remaining Pancho, Hakan, Gabor, Darko, Lamar and Nanno did not. […] [T]hey were obscure, remote and extremely uncommon to the audience at which the French-Canadian incarnation of Call TV was aimed. This contest was nothing short of misleading and thus in violation of Clause 12 of the CAB Code of Ethics.
