Ezra, The School Board, And The Muslims: Day Three

Well, as my CBSC (and also CRTC) complaints await processing in Ottawa, it's time for a few updates.  Most importantly, Ezra has offered his side of the story, and also an email exchange between himself and  Greater Essex County District School Board representative Scott Scantlebury.

Probably the most important bit from his "Factual background" is this:

-Someone who received an e-mailed memo from the school board forwarded it to me as a potential news item.

[...]

-That memo we received did not include the links to aboriginal, Asian, and African soldiers in the Canadian military. Scantlebury did not advise us of this fact. The quotes we cited from the memo are accurate.

-I have attached my producer’s email exchanges yesterday with Scantlebury. I have only redacted the producer’s name and contact info.

This leaves open the distinct possibility that Ezra's source deliberately removed the extra links so as to, well, sucker Ezra and his production team into the misconstruction that they did indeed put upon the memo.  In fact, this would not be the first time Ezra has been lied to by one of his tipsters.  In an earlier case as well, the result was a CBSC complaint.

Not that such a scenario would make Ezra's subsequent behavior any less reprehensible.  After all, he surely knows that anyone watching his show and slipping him tips must be to some degree sick in the head, and should be fact-checked quite a bit more thoroughly than the effort Ezra gave it.

On the other hand, after his recent anti-Justin tirade, several family members emailed Ezra to say that the whole episode had been entirely innocent.  These emails conveniently disappeared into Ezra's spam folder (can't find the link for that, so I am going by recollection), so discount the man's words appropriately.

Also,  Greater Essex County District School Board Superintendent Sharon Pyke appeared on the Jerry Agar show to discuss the incident.  Sun News has spun this into an apology by the board, but read the entire transcript of the interview and see if you can detect the contrition in it.  I can't.

And, meanwhile and finally, Ezra is still using the false story as a means of hawking merch at one of his websites.  Hopefully, the CBSC/CRTC will take this into account when trying to form an idea of Ezra's intent in spreading this story.

My First CBSC Complaint!

From the submission I filed with them this morning:

In this segment, Sun News Network personality Ezra Levant implies that the Greater Essex County District School Board has sent around an email to its principals exempting Muslim students from Remembrance Day celebrations due to possible conflicts with their/their families' religious beliefs.

As evidence that the exemption caters to Muslims, Mr. Levant points to a number of links in the email, which send the reader to stories about Muslim soldiers serving in the Canadian army.

Mr. Levant then goes off on a ten minute rant suggesting that any Muslim immigrants who refuse to participate in Remembrance Day ceremonies are being dis-loyal to Canada, and denigrating Muslims in general.

However, when you look at the email in question (which can be found here), you will see that the link to stories re Muslim soldiers are followed by links to other, similar stories about Aboriginal CDN soldiers, African CDN soldiers, and etc.

So the rant is based on a falsehood.  There is nothing in the memo that suggests that this exemption was meant to spare the religious sensibilities of any Muslim child/parent   In fact, a CBC story on the email indicates that the exemption was a matter of parents having safety concerns re sending their kids to a public ceremony, given the Ottawa attacks of a few weeks ago.

Surely this piece fails the CAB code provision requiring accuracy, and contains material that discriminates against Cdn Muslims.

Canadian Broadcast Standards Council Dings Ezra Levant Again!

From the release:

The host of The Source, Ezra Levant, showed videoclips of a protest that had occurred outside the Sun’s Toronto office.  The protestors objected to Sun Media’s coverage of the Idle No More movement.  A few days later, Levant replayed the clips, saying that, following their initial broadcast, he had received information from viewers about who some of the protestors were.  He identified one couple by their names, stating that they were “professional protestors” who had engaged in other protest activity.

The CBSC received a complaint from the identified woman, who asserted that she was not the person in the clip as she had not attended the Sun Media protest and had not even been in Toronto at the time.  She also complained that Levant had tarnished her reputation and that of her husband by accusing them of being professional protestors and using the Aboriginal movement to cause a “ruckus”.

The CBSC’s National Specialty Services Panel concluded that Sun News Network breached Clause 6 of the CAB Code of Ethics for including inaccurate information in the talk show.  Levant had acknowledged his error on the February 8 episode of The Source.

The actual decision can be found here.  Its worth noting that Ezra didn't bother correcting himself until after the complaint was filed (not when the error was first pointed out).

I wrote about this one previously.  From the original complaint:

Neither me nor my husband was even in the country when that protest took place, nor have we been anywhere near Toronto since Jan. 1 of this year. After writing Sun to tell them that the information that they aired was false, demanding an apology, Sun actually aired the program again!

There has to be some accountability. This is the just tip of the iceberg in terms of their racist, misleading, and at times outright false programming. 

At the time, I contacted the complainant via email.  They were considering legal action at the time, which I think meant another defamation suit; I don't know what has happened with that.

PS.  I have an theory about who fed Ezra the false names in this case.  Ez, baby, you shouldn't trust that pair with anything.

CBSC Dings CTV

From the release:

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.

Dean Blundell Show Sanctioned For Advocating Violence

Ottawa, July 17, 2013 - The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) today released its decision concerning a conversation broadcast on the Dean Blundell Show on CFNY-FM (102.1 The Edge, Toronto).  The conversation was about a fist-fight that had broken out at the Toronto Remembrance Day ceremony.  The program hosts commended a man who had beaten up a protestor.  The CBSC found that the comments sanctioned violence, contrary to the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) Code of Ethics.

The decision itself says that Blundell's response to the attacker's story "glamorized" violence.

McVety Compares Canadian Broadcast Standards Council To Stalin

...will nevertheless comply with decision. McVety's 5-page rant can be found here. In it, he references Jonathon Kay's defense of Word TV that was itself censored by the National Post. Funny how things go sometimes.

McVety Back Soon

CTS comments on the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council (CBSC) decision against Word TV:

“It is our policy in these circumstances not to air the program until we have assurance from the program that content will be compliant,” they explained. “CTS anticipates that the program Word TV will be reinstated in short order.”

Stop with the insinuations that gays prey on children, and McVety's good to go, in other words.

Worth noting is that the CBSC is a non-governmental body set up by the broadcasters themselves. So all of this very tired talk of censorship and bureaucrats oppressing straight-talking Christians is not to the point. Certainly nobody has, as Jonathon Kay suggests, moved to criminalize Mr. McVety's opinions. This is simply a case of the private sector policing itself--maintaining standards, as it were.