So a radio announcer in CBC North plead guilty to spousal assault. He was given a conditional discharge, and part of his probation requires that he do one radio show on the CBC, on the public airwaves, about domestic violence.
First China. Then the NHL. Now judges in NWT.
The CBC is seeking legal advice.
“We’re looking at this with the idea that the courts really aren’t part of our programming, and they don’t actually tell us what to do,” John Agnew, CBC North’s regional director of radio and television, said Friday.
Damn straight. What kind of frontier justice they got up there in NWT? They can’t condemn someone to do a radio show.
Can they?
3 Comments
The judge seems to be of the view that the unnamed individual’s employer is also somehow responsible for that person’s actions.
The judge would have been on the right track if he had made the sentencing clearer by saying “you’re responsible for paying for the airtime” as it would apply to a private broadcaster.
An example would be if the person worked for Jim Pattison as a paster-upper of posters on billboards and the judge’s oder was to take out an ad on one of those billboards. But making that happen would not be the responsibility of the great Mr. Pattison.
I think it’s very inventive, much more so than ‘toss his sorry ass in the slammer’ or ‘he needs to go to counselling.’
As with any successful entrepreneur, we should keep our ears to the ground to see where it is we could serve Canadians.
If we don’t experiment with these kinds of relatively painless possibilities and the current ‘maximize ratings’ strategy doesn’t work against American networks, we may vanish into irrelevance. I think it’s better to run with it and see how it pans out.
CBC.ca is having some success. I also think Zed should be revived and perhaps evolved depending on the successes.
Wow I don’t know where to begin on this one…the CBC hasn’t broken any laws but now it’s become subject to this judge’s order?
Plus this subjects the guy to public humiliation. He’s not the only guy who has beat his wife, but he’s the only one who has to go on the air publicly and say so for a whole hour. This brings us back to the days of the stockade.
I guess they could have quietly gone on the air and done a show without saying why, but that wouldn’t be fair to the audience.
Plus aren’t there victims rights issues? If he goes on the air and says “this is part of my court sentence for hitting my wife” then his wife is identified on the air, and that can’t be good for her.
The strange things our legal department deals with on a daily basis…