Ottawa, August 7, 2013 - The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning news reports broadcast on CTV News Channel on February 25, 2013. Two reports erroneously stated that a Palestinian man being detained in an Israeli prison had been participating in a hunger strike when he died. The CBSC concluded that the station broadcast inaccurate information contrary to the Codes of Ethics of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) and the Radio Television Digital News Association of Canada (RTDNA). It also concluded that the error should have been corrected on television because that is where the error occurred.
From the decision itself, re the bolded last line of the release:
The Panel commends CTV News Channel for quickly correcting the error on its website, but Article 7 of the RTDNA Code of Ethics clearly requires broadcasters to correct errors “on all platforms”. The Panel agrees with the complainant’s contention that if an error is broadcast on television, the correction of that error should also be broadcast on television. CTV News Channel’s failure to do so constitutes a breach of Article 7 of the RTDNA Code of Ethics. 2
This strikes me as a bit superfluous; even if the broadcast containing CTV's correction is preserved on their website, the odds of someone stumbling upon it, and thus being corrected, are pretty small. Whereas any correction to a web-story will remain at the bottom of the story forever and be seen whenever the story is accessed. I suspect that's what CTV would have argued.
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