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The 1990s witnessed a worldwide trend towards the delegation of power and authority over media standards to self-regulatory organisations, alongside growing corporate mergers and a globalising marketplace. This shift has had a significant impact on citizens and civil society organisations, yet it has largely been a silent one, attracting little policy analysis. In 2001, MediaWatch Canada, one of WACC’s partner organisations and the organisers of the Global Media Monitoring Project 1995, sought to rectify this situation. Their report, ‘Watching the Watchers: Gender Justice and Co-regulation in the New Media Market Place’ maps the recent devolution of responsibility for media standards in Canada to determine how organisations like MediaWatch can address gender and other human rights issues in this new context. Since its publication, the report has proved an invaluable tool in the work of MediaWatch and other civil sociey organisations. The results of the report have been presented at a number of academic and industry conferences and used in policy hearings in the federal government. Data from the report is also being used by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. As Melanie Cishecki, Executive Director of MediaWatch explained, ‘This study gives Canadian civil society organisations the information that we need to really push for change im our self-regulatory system. At last we have an opportunity to collectively put our views forward to advocate for positive change. Watching the Watchers provides the building blocks for creating a more democratic regulatory system that will help NGOs respond to the challenges of the 21st century’.
- The Canadian approach to gender and media policy has traditionally been used as an international model of best practice. Based on government legislation which requires that programming 'should be of high standard', the system is designed to operate democratically, as a partnership between government, the media industry and non-governmental organisations. The Canadian codes of practice prohibit any television programme which sanctions, promotes, or glamorises any aspect of violence against women. Further, they prohibit sexual exploitation and sexist language and seek to increase the visibility and involvement of women in broadcasting. However, concern remains amongst organisations like MediaWatch over various gender and media issues including objectification, irrelevant sexualisation, infanticisation, domestication, victimisation, gender role stereotyping and sexual harassment. In fact, these long-standing concerns have deepened in recent years with the advent of what has been termed ‘post morality’. Social convention on standards now seems to work to divorce matters of taste and individual or family morality from the regulatory sphere so that the category of bad taste is to be judged by the market place with the on/off switch of the remote control.
- What the on/off switch cannot address is the systematic sexism of the media. Yet the self-regulatory system has not made great strides in this area. Power imbalances in the abilities of individuals or groups to speak and be heard in and through the media remain entrenched and the explicit codes of conduct used in self-regulation do not define their ambit widely enough to address this systematic discrimination. It is impossible to lodge a complaint in Canada about a programme’s overall tone. Instead, complaints must refer to specific instances when a programme violated the codes. This fact, combined with the impossibility of complaining about the exclusion of a certain viewpoint, works not to combat, but to reinforce media bias and discrimination.
- Where the Canadian self regulatory system functions more effectively is with regard to the issues of degradation and dehumanisation, that is, material which degrades the human dimensions of life to a subhuman or merely physical dimension and so contributes to a process of moral desensitisation. The infamous Howard Stern show, which attracted hundreds of complaints, was taken off radio in Montreal (although is still aired in Toronto) and a number of case decisions have found against the US broadcaster. The unrelenting use of terms such as ‘piece of ass’, ‘dumb broads’, ‘fat cows’, ‘dikes’ and ‘sluts’ in these cases was deemed to be both exploitative and unacceptable.
- One of the reasons for the strictness of the self-regulatory system in this area is the general consensus on the link between dehumanisation and violence. Violence against women is a very complex area of media regulation since it hinges on definitions of ‘gratuitous’ violence. In the Canadian system, scenes of violence are judged according to whether they could have been edited without sacrificing any artistic integrity, and ought to have been long enough to make their point but not so long as to amount to violence for its own sake. The difficulty is often that violence is one of the premises of the programme itself. While there have not been a large number of cases of violence against women under the relevant code, it is clear that when violence against individual women is key to the narrative, the current self-regulatory system offers no protection.
- The decisions of the self-regulatory system on media and gender issues must, by necessity, take into account content, medium, audience and prevailing community standards. The issue of what the broadcaster intended to be the effect of the programme or the way in which the listener or viewer understood the programme are not ultimately what matters. Rather, what reaches the airwaves is the issue. Ultimately the self-regulatory system turns upon a construction in law called the ‘reasonable person’ – an informed and right-minded member of the community. Yet something more is required. The challenge facing all stakeholders in co-regulation is to broaden the 'reasonable person' test and to base it on wider research. Failure to do so reinforces the worldview of those who create and control the media which, as many feminists have pointed out, and as verified by the Beijing+5 Platform for Action, still largely excludes women.
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