CBSC Punishes CTV For Stephane Dion’s Inability To Answer Simple Question

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has released two decisions today pertaining to the CTV broadcast of the three false starts of an interview with anchor Steve Murphy and then-Liberal leader Stephane Dion during the October 2008 federal election campaign. Anybody who has watched the video has likely squirmed uncomfortably at Mr.Dion’s inability to comprehend the question posed by Mr.Murphy, and requested that the interview be restarted several times after not being able to properly respond. That interview most assuredly would have had an effect on viewers regarding their voting preference, particularly as the level to which Mr.Dion was flummoxed would certainly unnerve many fence-sitting Liberal voters.

The first decision pertains to the first broadcast of the false starts that preceded the full interview on CTV News on October 9. The second one was related to the rebroadcast on Mike Duffy Live later that evening. The CBSC concluded that the airings violated the provisions of the Radio Television News Directors of Canada Code of Journalistic Ethics and the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Code of Ethics. The painful recollection:

Steve Murphy’s first question to Stéphane Dion was: “If you were prime minister now, what would you have done about the economy and this crisis that Mr. Harper has not done?” Dion started to answer the question, but then asked to start again because it was not clear to him whether Murphy meant if Dion had been prime minister for the last two years or if he were elected prime minister five days later in the general election. Murphy agreed to start again, but he did not clarify the confusing question. He simply re-asked it in more or less the same terms as the first instance. After two more restarts, the full uninterrupted interview followed. During it, Mr. Dion provided information about the Liberal economic plan, the proposed carbon tax, deficits, the green shift, taxes, comparable European national policies, and Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan.

CTV argued that the exchange needed to be broadcast because the public had the right to see how poorly Stephane Dion dealt with the question. But the issue was immediately volatile, and Canadians complained to the CBSC by asserting that Mr.Murphy’s question was awkwardly worded, and that Mr.Dion had comprehension difficulties, particularly as English was not his first language. A CBSC panel reviewed the complaints, and concluded that the question was confusing:

“confusing, and not only to a person whose first language is other than English. In the strictest grammatical sense, Steve Murphy’s question mixes not only tenses (present and past), but also moods (subjunctive and indicative),” so “blame for misapprehension cannot simply be laid at the feet of the interviewee.”

The panel also concluded that the broadcast breached Article 8 of the RTNDA Code because it had promised not to air the interview to the Liberals. The rebroadcast in Mike Duffy Live was in contravention to Clause 6 of the CAB Code of Ethics. Two adjudicators, however, dissented, by saying that the outtakes were newsworthy. The broadcaster has since been ordered to announce the council decision twice in the same time slot as the outtakes were broadcast.

My position on the issue is clear, and has remained unchanged since the initial broadcast. The Dion outtakes were newsworthy because of the level of confusion to which Mr.Dion displayed based upon a simple question. I can allow that the question was not worded in perfect English, and that it is not Mr.Dion’s first language. But that’s really what is at stake in an interview with someone who wants to become Prime Minister of a country where the vast majority of people are unilingual Anglophones, isn’t it? Most Canadians who speak English as a first language understood the question immediately. Mr.Murphy was commenting on the fact that Stephane Dion had been hammering Prime Minister Harper for months on the economy, and asked what he would have done differently, had he been Prime Minister and not Stephen Harper, to create better circumstances for the economy. It was a direct, simple, and basic question that nobody should have required three false starts to get right. Certainly not a man who wanted to represent all Canadians in the highest office.

While CTV may have been handed down the decision by the CBSC because it violated the letter of the law of journalistic ethics, the fact is that they performed a valuable service to journalism by airing that video to Canadians. It was definitely newsworthy, relevant to Canadian voters, and demonstrated aptly how unqualified Mr.Dion was for the position in which he was applying to Canadians.