Stern’s return met with reserved reaction from CRTC, CBSC

Despite the media attention, the launch of US shock jock Howard Stern’s Howard 100 station on Sirius Canada is being downplayed by both the satellite radio provider and industry groups. "It’s just another channel in our 100-channel line-up," Sirius Canada’s president and CEO, Mark Redmond, tells Canadian Communications Reports. "We had 99 channels before this, now we’ve got 100." But Stern – the self-proclaimed "King of all Media" – hardly fits the description of the average radio personality. Stern’s appearance on Canadian radio is not an inaugural visit, but rather a second coming. He originally aired in 1997 on Toronto’s Q107 and CHOM in Montreal, and incited thousands of complaints on his first day of broadcast with his anti-French remarks. His show was put on an 8-minute tape delay as a result, but was eventually dropped by CHOM in 1998 and Q107 in 2001. Stern’s former employer in the United States, Clear Channel, was hit with at least $2.5 million in fines during Stern’s tenure, causing them to drop him as well. His move to satellite radio in the US on January 9th was both for the five-year, $500 million contract and to escape the content restrictions of the Federal Communications Commission, whose indecency regulation applies only to broadcast stations. However, he won’t get carte blanche from the CRTC or the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council either. Like Sirius’ Redmond, Ron Cohen, the national chair of the CBSC, won’t make a special case out of Stern’s new offering, at least not at this point. "We’re there to take care of any complaints that arrive with respect to any of our members, including Sirius, including XM and all of our conventional members," he says. Adds Martine Vallée, director, discretionary services and social policy, CRTC: "All licensees are responsible for all the content that they broadcast and it’s their responsibility to adhere to the applicable standards. So we don’t want to sort of pre-judge in a sense. We’re not a censorship body." Indeed, both the CRTC and the CBSC, which counts Sirius as a member, are strictly complaints-based when it comes to examining broadcast content. To curtail complaints and alleviate any potential concerns of the CRTC, Sirius has instituted three levels of access control: it is a subscription service, so subscribers pay to receive it; the receivers are equipped with parental controls that can block specific channels; and the service can be ordered with or without Howard 100 and five other Sirius channels consisting of mature content. The availability of such measures was a driving force behind Sirius’ decision to add Stern in February instead of a month earlier. Past complaints regarding Stern mostly arose because of his morning-drive time slot, which made his show accessible to young listeners. Cohen agrees that restricted access gives satellite a programming advantage over traditional radio in that regard. "I think the complaints are less likely to appear the way they would in the conventional broadcast situation because those people who are subscribing are generally people who want to receive the services they are getting," he says. But will satellite radio be treated differently than conventional services in the case of complaints? Vallée says the commission is currently looking at whether different standards should apply to satellite radio and has not yet made a determination to that effect, although some extreme forms of content will never be exempted from CRTC or CBSC sanction. "As far as prohibition on abusive comment, comments that would tend to result in hatred or contempt, those apply across the board on every service; there is no discretion in that at all," says Vallée. Cohen concurs. "Whether it’s a gender-based comment, or a sexual orientation-based comment, or a comment based on ethnicity, nationality, religion, colour of skin, those are all issues that fall under the same category and the difficulty of access does not relate to those issues," he says. For the record, Stern was never banned from airwaves here, something that Cohen, Vallée and Redmond point out. Should a problem arise, it will be a two-step process for the CBSC to intervene regarding Stern’s show, as it is with any broadcast content in Canada: the content has to cause offence to a listener, and then that listener has to complain. To say what would happen in that instance, such as instituting a tape-delay system, would be purely speculative. "We generally don’t predetermine what actions will have to take in that regard," says Vallée. However, standard practice is to first ask the broadcaster what measures they feel are appropriate. Sirius is also going to wait and see. "I don’t really want to speculate on what we may or may not do in the future and why," says Redmond. "But we have a license and we have conditions of the license and we’ll deal with what comes along." So, even though Stern remarked "the Canadian government hates us" during his first broadcast on Sirius Canada, the government might never have any involvement with his show. Says Redmond: "You don’t have to listen, you don’t have to subscribe, and if you don’t want to listen we can block it out."

Stern’s return met with reserved reaction from CRTC, CBSC

Broadcast | February 10, 2006

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