Back in June, as you may recall, not too long after its debut, Canada Live hosted by Krista Erickson on Sun News Network ran an interview with dancer Margie Gillis. I’d vaguely heard of Gillis before, but after the interview ran, it became clear she was some sort of art world darling. The issue discussed was public arts funding. Sun News Network, unsurprisingly, didn’t like it, and questioned whether something as apparently obscure as “dance research” deserved its viewers’ hard-earned tax dollars. People rose to her defense in great numbers. The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council received 6,676 complaints about the interview that called it an unfair treatment of the respected dancer.
According to the CBSC in a published decision, Erickson, though evidently lacking in “courtesy and politeness,” was within her rights as a broadcaster “to be biased and aggressive in their presentation of views and questioning of interviewees.”
This seems fair. This was Sun News Network doing what it set out to do, thumping its chest to call its tribe to attend to their shared agenda. The interview was practically a calling card.
The decision is dated Dec. 15, though the press release announcing it was just released Friday. According to CBSC executive director John MacNab, it takes about that long to write the decision, get it translated, and run it past the volunteer panel that rendered it. If the decision had come out even two days earlier, they might have been able to make some pretty good hay out of it. But now, though they’ll likely try, the hay will have been dampened by the revelation that a broadcast they made a few months later was an embarrassingly inept fiction purveyed as fact.
Every broadcaster has birthing pains of one sort or another. Missed cues, dead air, rolling the wrong tape, etc. But staging a citizenship ceremony in which six of the 10 purported new Canadians are not only not new Canadians but government employees really is beyond the pale.
There have been apologies all around, from Sun as well as Jason Kenney and his ministry. Apparently, it was a bureaucrat’s fault. The two heads who were talking over the apparently hastily thrown-together bit have said they had no idea it was fake, and based on the tapes, no apparent idea that the four who were real had already taken their oaths and were re-affirming for the cameras.
Television news can be a powerful, powerful thing. It gets people where they live in more ways than one, and in ways print doesn’t. The fact that it’s mostly not very effective is a testament to the cowardice of the producers rather than any shortcomings of the medium itself. If they showed dead bodies in Afghanistan, or even dead dogs from puppy mills – if they, in other words, used their medium’s strengths – we’d be talking about it and acting on it far more than we do. But they almost never have. In fact, those dead-soldier images from Vietnam still stand out, 40 years later, as one of the few times TV news has done what it ought to be doing every day. Do you think Darfur would have gone on as long as it did if we were seeing charred babies on the nightly news? For all the talk of new media and its new powers, it’s still the longest of long tails. Outside the world of memes, we don’t tend to stumble on things. Though all those images are out there for us to find, we have to go looking for them. It’s a pull medium, where TV is still very pushy.
Like Sun News Network. They get us talking. Now, most of us know that being talked about is not in and of itself a good thing. After all, The News of the World was talked about extensively. But being debated, being provocative without being dunderheaded, is exactly what we want. Being pushy is what TV does best. Beaming things directly into our kitchens and living rooms in ways that make us unable to turn away can do marvelous things to a complacent citizenry.
And we have the CBSC, and our ability to complain in droves, to smack folks like Sun News Network and those talk radio shows when they do things like suggest judges they find too lenient on sex offenders need to have their relatives raped so they’ll toughen up and understand the law like Dillinger does. In fact, they’ve already received a few complaints about the new Canadians fabrication, but according to MacNab, they need to receive complaints within 28 days, the length of time radio and TV stations are legally bound to keep tapes of everything they broadcast. This latest Sun misstep happened in October.
I hope Sun News Network continues to do what it does (the Gillis-type stuff, not the broadcasting government propaganda stuff), and I hope we as viewers continue to pay attention and call them out when they step over the line by using their complaint form. I also hope the other networks pay attention as well, that they realize where the line is, and spend a little time getting up close and personal with it as well.
Bert Archer writes for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter @bertarcher.
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