Dr. Laura Slapped in Canada

Great Debates
1

So what do people think about this:

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ruled today that the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Show breached the industry Code of Ethics for her references to gays and lesbians.

An extract from the Council’s press release:

As a result the radio stations in question will likely have to install a 5 minute delay on her show, or take some similar measure to monitor her statements before broadcasting them.

And, before people start talking about government censorship, bear in mind that this is a voluntary industry standard, not a government agency.

2

god, when you said “slapped” I had a pleasant daydream with LS being the reciever in that “slapping” scene in Airplane! :smiley:

3

And, PLEEEZE don’t call her “Doctor”, she has no right to that title, and using it is false advertising & practicing Medicine w/o a license. :smiley:

4

And from a recent GLAAD press release:

5

She does hold a doctorate in physiology, so she’s as entitled to use the title as anyone else whose earned a doctorate. of course, it used to be those who were not M.D.s would have the taste and sense not to use the title in polite company. Of course, it used to be those who posed for naked pictures didn’t launch screeds against pornography, either.

6

Is Rush Limbaugh syndicated in Canada? If so, what about his propensity for playing fast and loose with the facts?

I am no fan of radical talk radio, but this still smacks of censorship IMO.

7

OTTO: Unless you have a MEDICAL degree, you do NOT call yourself “Doctor”*. Of course, she could add PhD to her name, if she liked. But she is not practicing physiology, she is giving advice, and in a way that seems like it is Therapy. If you had a PhD in English Lit, but started giving Medical advice, it would be illegal, as you would be considered holding yourself out as a “Doctor”. If her degree was in any way related to the advice she is giving, then, MAYBE, an occ “Doctor”, might be OK.

  • and certain Churches call their Pastors w/ DDs Doctor, also.
8

Daniel, I agree that she might be misrepresenting herself, but Ph.D.s DO refer to themselves as Doctor. I work in the anthropology office at a medical school (it’s medical anthropology & history) and I can assure you that the professors do indeed use the title of Dr., although not as much as a medical doctor would.

I can’t stand Dr. Laura. I think that the CBC has every right to do what they did, as far as I can tell. Canada is not subject to the First Amendment, so yay for them.

9

**
Is Rush Limbaugh syndicated in Canada? If so, what about his propensity for playing fast and loose with the facts?

I am no fan of radical talk radio, but this still smacks of censorship IMO.
**

I don’t know about Limbaugh, but Jerry Fahlwell is under the eye of Canadian Broadcast Standards. If he states something they judge to be untrue, they will remove that show from the line-up and play a re-run in it’s place. However, it’s a very fine line as to what is considered an untruth and merely an opinion.

For example, a few months ago Fahlwell stated that if a piece of Canadian legislation passed (I believe it was called C23) that clergy would be forced to perform same sex marriage. Now, this was untrue on many levels. First of all, the legislation was secular and didn’t apply to religious institutions. Also, the legislation did not approve gay marriage. Rather, it treated gay and lesbian couples as common law spouses. So a couple couldn’t go up to a clerk, get a license to marry. Rather they can only co-habitate for a certain amount of the time before they would be able to accrue certain legal rights.

So, according to Canadian Broadcast Standards he had stated a clear untruth except he phrased it as, “I believe this will happen”. In other words, he phrased it as an opinion and they had no choice but to let the episode air. If he had stated it as “fact” the ep would have been shelved.

In the case of Dr. Laura she is stating these things as fact. She claims that homosexuals are “abnormal”, “aberrant”, “deviant”, “disordered”, “dysfunctional”, “an error”. Now, in the case of “deviant” or “abnormal” she is technically correct. Homosexuals deviate from the norm. However, she cannot say the same for “disordered” and dysfunctional" because the APA, AMA, etc. have been quite clear that evidence does not support the view that homosexuality is a disorder and they state that homosexuals are functional. So she stated a fact that she knew was untrue.

She has also stated that a majority of homosexual men are predatory against young boys. However, statistics do not support this. Initially she was in the right, technically. That’s because she was simply reading from letters that claimed gay men were pedophiles. So, in other words, she was passing along an opinion. However, she then went on to state it as a fact. That’s a clear untruth.

Yes, it is a form of censorship, but people in the information business are not allowed to lie and misrepresent data. She has a responsibilty to research her fact and correctly represent it. Just as a news agency in the US has the responsibilty to present the truth. Do you recall the GM crash tests that one news show aired (was it NBC?). They represented the tests as actual GM test film that had been suppressed. In fact, they were only re-enactments. Had this fact come to light before the show error, it is reasonable to believe that the show would hav been pulled or changed to reflect the video as reanactments.

10

I would say that Dr. Laura oughtn’t to be censored here or anywhere. Our truth is strong enough to combat her lies without government intervention.

However, let us just say that the poor silenced Dr. Laura is not exactly high on my list of causes to fight for… I have approximately 7,934 causes I need to do some work on first, including doing a searching critique of the Polynesian rutabaga industry and wiping out postnasal drip.

11

I would just like to say that she didn’t used to be this bad. When she first got started, she was just giving basic advice. But it seems like in the last 6 months to a year, she has suddenly gotten much more confrontational with callers. “Take all his toys away except for two of them, for a year!” she told someone recently who called to say that they’d just found out that their son had stolen a Pokemon card from another kid. I thought this was a little extreme, to say the least.

I think it’s all started to go to her head, the fame, the money. I don’t think she gets much feedback anymore from people around her, to the effect that “hey, you came on a little strong today”. In the entertainment industry (because that’s what Dr. Laura is, is entertainment), after you get famous, you slowly but surely become surrounded by yes-men and suckups. The exact same thing happened to Roseanne Barr.

If it’s an industry standard, then I don’t think Dr. Laura has a “free speech” beef. If you’re gonna play the game, sometimes you’ve gotta play by the rules of the kid who owns the football.

It might be the best thing in the world for her, make her stop and think a little. I don’t think that asking her to “tone it down a little” is exactly the same thing as “censoring” her.

I’m surprised more stations haven’t dropped her, actually.

12

The fact that this is connected to a “voluntary industry standard” is not really comforting. There has been an orgy of amalgamation (what a great phrase! I’ll have to use that again) among the highest-level owners of broadcast and print media. There has been concern, and rightly so, that such media could come to reflect the biased perspectives of these powerful interests and that there will be few or no alternative views given broad voice. Of perhaps greater concern, at least for me, is that the biased views will not be the sinister pushing of (for instance) Ted Turner’s political agenda, but that the news will reflect ONLY those views most marketable, i.e. those views that have the widest social acceptance.

Naturally this newspeak will be accomplished under the rubric of giving people what they want, avoiding “unfair or improper expression of opinion” (am I the only one that finds such a concept problematic?), and of course protecting our children from ideas that don’t fit into the vision of society we want.

The above isn’t aimed at the CAB specifically, but setting a precedent for squelching opinions based on their social palatability puts a dangerous censorship power in the hands of the corporate office. Better if the standards DID come from the government - then they’d have to conform to civil liberty protections.

And let’s not pretend that it’s okay to state “fact” but not “opinion”. EVERYTHING would have to be stated as opinion, or else the broadcasting industry would be charged with setting epistemological standards! I’m a little skeptical of their capacity in this regard. How many damn ghost story shows do we see every year presented as fact?
But if everything is presented as opinion, do we really have to say it every time? If we scoured the continent could we find a single person who mistakes Laura Schlessinger for a journalist anyway? For that matter, how many people take even what journalists tell them as gospel?

So what’s the point of censoring this particular ass, except to shut her up for the gratification of those who don’t agree with her? Excuse me, I meant the orgiastic amalgamation of those who don’t agree with her.

13

I have to join those who are concerned over the deletion of information that’s determined to be “wrong” or “innaccurate.” Who makes that determination? There aren’t many things that are so black-and-white as to make this something that’s even possible to do.

And please keep in mind, this is coming from someone who despises “Dr.” Laura. She’s an out-of-touch megalomaniac who obviously dislikes people, particularly “the little people” who are her bread-and-butter. She makes life-changing recommendations and broad, sweeping generalizations after a 25-second phone call. What is this? And who are the people that lap this stuff up?

14

While I hate the good Dr. Phrenologist’s guts…

This “finding” is nothing more than jackboot censorship. From the postings of our Canadian members of the teeming millions, the Great White North doesn’t need to be protected by bureaucrats (or five second delays) from the rantings of a hypocritical gym teacher.

(by the by, her nude pictures… how are they? Erotic? Boring? Stupid?)

Before Reagan, U.S. broadcasters were compelled to offer dissenting opinions, an “equal time” rule - a procedure imposed by the FCC to counter, IIRC, the vicious anti-Semetic venom spewed by Father Coughlin in the 1930s on his radio show.

But Reagan got rid of that, choosing the free market (and ignoring the public ownership of the airways). The result is what you hear now, shock jocks talking about stuff that would make Marines blush, Rush Limbuger, and Dr. Nora.

15

Nixon, those pics actually weren’t too shabby. She was a little skinny, but not at all bad looking.

16

The big problem I have with this censorship is the one-sided nature of it. It’s not like the left is a paragon of reason and accurate speech - BOTH sides are guilty of playing fast and loose with the facts. They do it all the time, and always have. Real, honest debate and commentary is very rare.

Now, if you selectively censor one side of the debate, you can seriously skew the perceptions of the public, who no longer get to hear opposing viewpoints. Or if you set a standard of absolute accuracy for one side of the debate, while letting the other side say whatever they want, the same thing happens - the public gets an even more distorted view of the ‘truth’ than they would get if you just left both sides alone.

17

This is more damage control than censorship. What Dr. Laura says is dangerous. I know that I’m going to get screamed at for saying that (it sounds quite Orwellian, even to me), but I think there is a difference between censoring Dr. Laura and censoring more legitimate endeavours.

By censoring her show, the CBSC is not protecting its own interests, the interests of the government or the interests of big business. It is protecting people; vulnerable human beings who deserve protection.

Homophobes have provoked this censorship. If they could walk around keeping their opinions to themselves and behaving within the law, then these kinds of measures would not be necessary. But they have proven over and over again that they feel compelled to go out strolling with their baseball bats in hand. They are parents who neglect and abuse their children if they come out of the closet. They discriminate in the voting booth and at the workplace and verbally harass and threaten.

There cannot be freedom without responsibility, and these people are abdicating their responsibility to treat gays with equality. Therefore we are justified in taking away their freedom to hear that intellectual poison on the radio.

18

Kyla said:
…I can assure you that the professors do indeed use the title of Dr…

This is just a minor query. Isn’t a professorship a higher achievement than a doctorate?
So for a professor to call themselves a doctor would be a step down surely?

19

Acht Jah!

Zit iz Dr. Laura and the homophobes zat halft provoked zis zenzorship. She (und her kind) are dangerous! Zay abuze zer kinder mit baseball bats!

Zay should not be allowed to vote! Or hold jobs! Zay must keep quiet und wear zee yellow star at all times!

Better yet, transport, Jah, transport, zat is the solution to “people” with whom we disagree!

Jah, za final zolution.

20

**
And let’s not pretend that it’s okay to state “fact” but not “opinion”. EVERYTHING would have to be stated as opinion, or else the broadcasting industry would be charged with setting epistemological standards!
**

I didn’t say that was the proper way to view things. I was just stating that it was how certain parties in Canada viewed it. Some viewers protested Fahlwell’s statements and the response was that he stated it as an opinon and therefore barely met their standard.

Also, I have to admit that I’m looking at this from a historian’s perspective. If I were to write a paper that manipulated facts or utilized questionable sources, then it’s reasonable to expect my peers to blast me and journals to refuse to buy my paper.

To me it’s the same thing, Dr. Laura uses a question source (Family Research Council) for her “clinical comments”. To me it’s the same thing. The television stations are businesses and have certain rights to establish programming standards. Some may refuse to air her show because it will not meet their standards of truthful programming. Yes, it seems arbitrary, but it’s not a complete squelching of ideas that you would find in a true censorship situation. She is still free to say whatever she wants, but the stations are under no obligation (other than a purchase agreement) to air it.