The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, which is responsible for keeping Canada’s private broadcasters in line, announced today that all errors should be corrected in the same medium as they first appeared.
The CBSC found that two CTV News Channel reports about a Palestinian man contained an error. It also “concluded that the error should have been corrected on television because that is where the error occurred.”
At the time, CTV corrected the error on its website, but the CBSC ruled that “CTV should also have provided that correction on television …”
The Council cited Article 7 of the Radio Television Digital News Association of Canada’s Code of Ethics as reason for requiring an on-air correction. It reads:
Errors will be quickly acknowledged and publicly corrected on all platforms.
It’s still a rare thing these days to see an on-air correction from a broadcaster. KTVU-TV aired one last month after incorrectly naming the Asiana Flight 214 pilots, and NBC News recently issued an amusingly detailed one after it mistakenly wiped New Hampshire off the map:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Why the lack of broadcast corrections? I looked at the issue in more detail last year when NBC News failed to issue an on-air correction after making a significant editing error in the broadcast of the George Zimmerman 911 call.
Hat tip to Steve Ladurantaye for the CBSC link.
