Good afternoon. Thank you very much for inviting me to appear before the committee today.
My name is Shari Graydon, and I'm here representing Media Action, Action média. We are a national non-profit organization that is dedicated to raising public awareness of the social impacts of media and to encouraging more responsible industry practice. My written brief provides more detailed information about my particular expertise as a media producer, educator, and author of media literacy books.
I would like to start by saying that I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and the opportunity that this bill is providing to pay attention to violence in the media. I share the concerns behind it and the concerns being expressed by the CTF. In fact, I'm currently working on a new media literacy book specifically looking at the gap between the violence we consume as entertainment and the violence that surrounds us in society, and the disconnect that young people in particular have between those two.
As I hope you've already heard, there is a very significant body of research in peer-reviewed academic journals about the impacts of media violence, which essentially comes to three conclusions. Although there are invariably a variety of variables that influence how people respond to media violence, essentially media violence contributes to increased fear, increased aggressive behaviour, and decreased sensitivity to the suffering of others. That goes obviously not just for television violence but for violence in all media. That's the bad news.
The good news is, and I am sure the broadcasters have told you this, that Canada has a very progressive anti-violence broadcasting code. Unfortunately, the way the code is administered is problematic for at least three reasons.
Although I respect the efforts of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, which administers the code—and indeed I have worked with Ron Cohen and his colleagues—the current process is complaint-driven. In other words, the onus is on consumers to know that the code exists, to know what's in the code, and to complain about the code, and that's how the existing code is complied with. That's how compliance gets enforced, and, necessarily, because it's complaint-driven, all of the enforcement of the code happens after the fact, after the material that breaks the code has already aired. Thirdly, the present way of administering the violence code contains, really, to my mind, absolutely no disincentives to broadcasters to air material that's in contravention of their own code.
In theory, broadcasters can lose their licence if they fail to comply with the violence code. In practice, this is never going to happen. It hasn't happened yet; I would suggest it's not going to. Only once in 20 years has a station come close to losing its licence, and that was the process involving a Quebec City radio station, CHOI, which in fact took five years to play out. The very nature of the humour of shock jock Howard Stern was fundamentally in contravention of the code. It took six years for that process to play out and for Howard Stern to be removed from Canadian airways. So the codes exist to prevent material that's blatantly offensive to Canadians, but in practice it happens after the fact, and it is not, in my submission, very effective.
Indeed, when the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council spoke with you last year they confessed they have upheld 72% of the complaints that have come to them over the last eight or nine years. What penalties have been meted out to the broadcasters who were in contravention of the code? They are essentially required to write a letter to the complainant--the person who knew enough to make the complaint in the first place--and they are required to run two on-air apologies for having broken the code. I suggest this is not really much of a disincentive.
No doubt you have also been told that the CBSC is currently receiving fewer complaints about violence in the media than it did ten years ago. I suggest this is probably not evidence of more responsible or less violent programming; it is more likely due to the fact that increasing levels of violence in other media have led to a greater acceptance of material on television that would have been unacceptable 10 years ago.
Second, there is also much less public discourse about TV violence and media violence today than there was a decade ago, for a number of reasons.
Third, because of this, Canadians are much less aware of the complaint process. Very few people know of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council's existence, let alone that there's a CAB violence code, let alone what's in it.
Finally, the complaint process itself happens after the fact. It takes months to play out, and it doesn't result in any meaningful penalty.
As for the proposed bill, although I appreciate its attention to the issue, I regret to say that I don't believe it will be effective. The CRTC is not currently set up to engage in the kind of monitoring the bill requires. My guess is there are no plans to give the CRTC additional funds to undertake that monitoring. In addition, the violence code is supposed to prevent the airing of offensive material, not study it after the fact.
So I have a better idea, one that would reduce inappropriate violence on Canadian television by more effectively enforcing the existing violence code. It's very simple, and it essentially works on the same principle as the children's advertising code does. And I'll explain that.
The children's advertising code and the process involved is not in fact relevant to the Province of Quebec, which had the foresight 30 years ago to implement a prohibition against advertising to children. However, in English-speaking Canada, we haven't been quite so smart and progressive. When an advertiser in English Canada wishes to advertise to children under the age of 13, that advertiser must submit its commercial to Advertising Standards Canada in advance of it being broadcast. It pays a fee for the service that is then provided. The Advertising Standards Canada people look at the ad. They gauge it against the code. They make sure that it in fact adheres to the code, and then they give it approval. Only when the commercial has been approved is it subject to airing on Canadian airwaves.
My suggestion is that if we genuinely want to prevent inappropriate violence, gratuitous violence--the violence that is explicitly indicated in the broadcasters' own violence code as being inappropriate--from being aired in the first place, we should require broadcasters wishing to air violent material to submit that material in advance of the broadcast. They should have it adjudicated and cleared in advance by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, who would then say that it was in compliance with the code and would give the broadcaster clearance and make it eligible to be broadcast. That would essentially prevent, in advance, the airing of inappropriate material. It would put the onus on the broadcasters themselves, not on members of the public, who typically, as I mentioned, are unaware of the process.
Finally, I would encourage this committee to recommend that all media producers be required to contribute to a fund in support of media literacy programming and resources. Here I am effectively echoing the urgings of the Canadian Teachers' Federation and those of another witness you're going to hear after us.
As the author of two media literacy books for young people, I spend a lot of time in schools speaking to students and speaking to teachers, and it's very clear to me that....
In our democracy, we think of literacy as the ability, the capacity, to read and write critically. Increasingly, kids get much more information from audiovisual media than they do from the printed word. If we don't provide them with the critical tools to be media literate, to interrogate, to challenge, and to resist messages that are not in their best interest from other forms of media, we are essentially abdicating responsibility to the media producers themselves. And I'm sure you all know from your own media consumption that the lessons and the learning outcomes that are being visited upon us through commercial media are not parent or ministry approved.
Thank you. Merci beaucoup.