Supreme Court: Talk-show host can compare anti-gay crusader to Hitler/KKK
A defamation case again Rafe Mair, an outspoken B.C. talk show host, today ended in Mair’s favour in the Supreme Court of Canada.
While on-air, Mair compared anti-gay rights activist Kari Simpson to Hitler, skinheads, and the KKK. At the time, Simpson was involved in a campaign opposed to teaching students about gay lifestyles in the province’s schools.
Being told of the court’s decision, Mair said he thinks “there’s going to be some happiness in the gay community.”
Simpson sued Mair for defamation of character.
* At first, a B.C. court ruled that Mair was within his rights under “free comment;”
* Later, an appeals court overturned the verdict;
* And this past week, the Supreme Court nailed it shut, saying that to prove defamation one must prove malice behind the defamation. It said Mair did not show malice.
Mair, a former right-leaning politician, had hosted his CKNW talk-show since 1984. (Some in the industry referred to him as the King of “Angry White Man” radio.)
Mair was fired by the station five years ago after a female colleague said she had lodged nine harassment complaints against him. An article on Mair’s own web site still calls the woman a “female sociopath.” At the time, Mair told local media “I’m a stubborn, old fart, that’s the trouble.”
CBC becomes first broadcaster to distribute a prime-time show via Bit-Torrent (DRM-free!)
Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC Television, will be using bit-torrent to distribute its popular Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister after it airs on terrestrial broadcast (Sunday night at 7:00 p.m.)
The CBC has dabbled in bit-torrent before — the now-cancelled late-night arts show ZeD torrented its final episode a few years back — but the show’s crew believes this will mark the first time a major broadcaster in North America provides a DRM-free torrent of a prime-time program.
This year’s show really began online. CBC was the first Canadian broadcaster to use YouTube to cast the show where our results were:
- 144 people auditioned
- 500+ videos (video responses made this the largest online political debate in Canadian history)
- 270,000+ views
- 2500 comments
Facebook was big too with over 7500 members joining 50 groups about the show. We also created a dozen behind-the-scenes Podcasts showcasing our 10 semi-finalists who were hand picked from our YouTube search.
‘Shaw keeps bouncing us around dial without warning or explanation’: OUTtv
OUTtv’s chief operating officer Brad Danks read my earlier story about Shaw Television’s offensive placement of OUTtv between porn channels and he contacted me to add additional information:
1) OUTtv does not currently carry any “Adult” content. OUTtv voluntarily adheres to the adult content guidelines set by the Ontario Film Board which is the only body in Canada that sets such guidelines. Shaw has been made aware of these programming changes.
OUTtv’s programming is primarily dramatic television including British hit shows like “Sugar Rush” and coming this fall “Bad Girls”, “Mile High” and “The Graham Norton Effect”.
2) Shaw has changed OUTtv’s channel placement twice in the last 18 months. Originally OUTtv was appropriately placed at Channel 100, then to Channel 200 and now to Channel 370. At no time was OUTtv advised in advance of these changes as required by the CRTC. Furthermore Shaw did not contact OUTtv at anytime prior to or after these placement changes to advise that it had issues relating to Adult Content on OUTtv. To date Shaw has not provided any explanation for the placement changes.
Shaw was asked in writing to return OUTtv to it’s [sic] original placement. Shaw has formally refused without providing any explanation.
Shaw has not returned my calls for comment.
Is Shaw Cablevision homophobic?
It being Pride Week here in Vancouver, I thought I’d tune into OUTtv, the GLB lifestyle specialty channel, to see if they were doing any special coverage. (After all, why go outside to see a parade when you can stay indoors and watch it on TV! {sigh} )
But I couldn’t find OUTtv on my Shaw channel guide. I like supporting upstart Canadian broadcasters, so I called Shaw to add it to my package. Turns out, I already had it.
That’s it, buried way up in the 300s, right between the porn pay-per-view, Hustler, and Playboy. Literally, it has three porn channels above it and three below it.
Huh?!
For the record, OUTtv doesn’t play any porn movies. Not even the soft-focus romantic stuff. I checked the next five days of listings, and the raciest I could see was a newscast in the wee hours where men, far better endowed than I, disrobe while delivering the news. No, really.
Compare that to Showcase, which is on basic cable, which tonight is showing “Emmanuelle” described as a saucy “series following her amorour adventures.”
This probably has a lot to do with Shaw Cable’s Calgary-based CEO, Jim Shaw. When the now-defunct PrideVision launched in 2001, Shaw refused to carry a preview of it on his network. Strange, considering he had no problem with the channel SexTV!
The CRTC later forced him to carry it.
Now, he’s booted the embarassingly tame OUTtv to the dirty-section of the dial, where nobody will see it. (OUTtv was actually a spin-off of PrideVision. The tame lifestyle stuff went to OUTtv; the harder stuff went to a pay-only specialty channel.)
Considering this is “Pride Week,” I think everyone should blog this and apply some pressure. There’s no reason why Shaw Cablevision should be ghettoizing this channel.
UPDATE: OUTtv says Shaw’s been bouncing them around the channel lineup forever.
I have a call into Shaw’s president (the only person allowed to speak on behalf of the company — weird) for comment. So far, nobody’s called me back.
Be very careful when doing an interview with The Globe and Mail
An interesting thing happened recently that got me thinking about the permanence of electronic databases and how old-school media still can’t quite walk the walk when it comes to dialogue in today’s two-way communication environment.
A reporter from the Globe and Mail interviewed me a couple of weeks ago for a piece which ran earlier this week.
His article was overall excellent, but contained an inaccuracy (he said the CBC “endorsed” an existing blog of mine when, in fact, that’s not true). It was an innocent and, to be fair, minor error. Still, it’s an important distinction that leads people to believe that the CBC somehow bought me out.
The reporter, Guy Dixon, agreed with me that the article needed correction and said so in the blog-comments on the Globe’s site. He also tried to get the paper to make a correction to its electronic version.
But here’s the problem.
The Globe and Mail refused to correct the article.
It was an error in fact that both the subject and the newspaper’s own journalist agreed needs correction, but the newspaper refused. I wasn’t asking for a print retraction — only for them to fix the inaccuracy in its electronic edition. A dozen keystrokes.
Why is this important? Here’s why.
In today’s age, electronic versions of these articles are sent to news databases like Canadian Newsstand, CBCA, and so on, and stay there for eternity. The blog comments don’t. This mean the Globe is choosing to deliberately let an inaccuracy stand in the public record. They could, very simply, make a quite note to the article or a correction, but won’t. I’m still unclear why. All the journalist could tell me was that his editors didn’t think it was “aggregious enough.”
If this were a print correction, fair enough. It was a small inaccuracy. Were it print, I’d agree that the newspaper probably wouldn’t want to cede important column-inch space for a small correction. But this is the Internet, folks. There’s no lack of space.
In this way, most bloggers I know are actually more ethically sound in their correction policy! Most will not only make a correction right away, they’ll even indicate with strikethrough what they deleted.
Rather than deal with this again situation, I’ll probably just avoid Globe and Mail interviews in the future.
Use your own caution.
P.S. I’d have posted this directly on the Globe’s comment page of the article, but they’ve closed the comments on the piece. Nice touch.
The Redundant Broadcaster
As on-demand TV becomes reality, cable companies will step up to replace broadcasters.
© 2004 Tod Maffin Inc.
Really, you have to give them credit for trying.
When NBC tried to convince viewers to lock onto their network for an entire evening, branding it “Must See TV,” I’m sure they thought the positioning statement was catchy. And it was. Problem is, it didn’t work.
Fact is, we’re at the end of the generation where people lock onto a station and keep with it for an evening. Today, our loyalty is to specific shows, not network or station brands. Nobody stays home to watch Fox TV; we watch Trading Spaces, then flip to This Hour Has 22 Minutes, then flip again. Digital television’s on-screen TV Guides and PVRs just reinforce the behaviour. We tune in by show brand, not station brand.
Television broadcasters’ reaction to this so far has been to panic, spraying their territory with increasingly opaque lower-right corner logos. They reduce drop ad inventory to add more station promos, reminding viewers that YOU ARE WATCHING US!
It’s silly, pointless, and worse, in vain. Because like it or not, television broadcasters’ role as advertising middlemen is coming to an end. Stepping up to replace them: Cable companies.
First, a bit of background.
The cable companies’ On-Demand systems are a bit pathetic right now. Their movies are passable, but television show offerings are lacking. My cable provider, Shaw (and believe me, if only my house faced a satellite-friendly bearing…), has such riveting television offerings as kids shows and, er, kids shows.
But in time, those media libraries will build up. And economies of scale will kick in when more viewers opt to pick-and-choose programs. Cable providers will drop the price, bundling show-packages where, for instance, you can watch any TV show in history you want on-demand for one night, for $5.95.
Heck, I would pay $75 a month now just to be able to access any show ever aired any time I want. (Which, sadly, is ten hours of back-to-back episodes of the Family Guy.)
And what would happen? TV station brands, as we know them today, will disappear. Independent program producers will sell directly to, essentially, managers of massive hard drives who will serve the video content directly to the cable providers. Broadcasters will be cut out of the loop, and advertisers will have to cozy up to these new content providers – the cable companies.
This, then, will be the TV networks’ biggest challenge in the post-convergence world: Trying to maintain their relevancy and share-of-mind (which, of course, translate into ad dollars) while becoming visually irrelevant in the eyes of their viewers. And advertising agencies and media buyers will be finding a new partner to dance with.
As an advertiser, who do you want to carry your message or your client’s message? You want the player with the closest relationship to the content consumer. And that will be the cable company. Not television broadcasters. Remember that the cable company provides the important role of the middleman — hand-holding, convenient point of contact, a human face, and so on.
Think about it for a moment. If you have digital cable, and you want a particular channel added to your lineup, they don’t have to send a technician out to physically remove the filter on your line, they just have to punch in the address of your box and about ten seconds later, you’ve got it. Also know that if you order a pay-per-view movie and then don’t tune to that channel during its airtime, you’re not billed for it. The system knows what channel you’re on, who you are, and what program you’re watching.
With this profile, cable companies will have the ability to scroll ad banners across the bottom of your screen that are customized to the viewer.
Cable companies will become the power brokers of real-time viewing habit information. Why wait until the next ratings book, when you can get real-time stats of who’s tuning in. Advertisers can run a crawl across the screen bottom in all households with a six-figure income and at least two kids. Rumour has it, some digital cable box manufacturers are considering inserting an artificial “boot-up” time for next-generation boxes, giving cable companies another product to sell.
Now imagine this. You’re in your boardroom with your client or your VP of marketing, watching a big screen tallying viewer response in real-time as your precious million dollar 30-second spot airs for the first time.
Again, this isn’t technology that’s far down the line. The American networks have used a sort of mood polygraph for years now in major elections, where they put a small focus group of voters in a room and make them watch a candidate’s platform speech or performance in a debate. And, using a simple two-button remote control, they indicate if they Like or Dislike what they’re hearing. And for us viewers at home, we see a real-time ticker chart of mood. As soon as a candidate says something controversial or stumbles, the line starts to drop.
Imagine being able to drill down into that chart and break it out into any permutation of demographical and psychographical groups you can dream of.
You’ll be able to. And you think your media buying spreadsheet looks complicated now.
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