August 19, 2002, Monday

TORONTO _ Canada's TV censor has ruled that a Chinese Central Television report on a multiple-murder case that was rebroadcast on a Chinese- language Canadian specialty TV channel breached industry codes on violence and ethics.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council said Friday that the Dec. 16 rebroadcast of the CCTV report on Talentvision TV, the Chinese-language specialty channel, breached the Canadian Association of Broadcasters' codes of ethics and violence and the Radio-Television News Directors Association of Canada's code of (journalistic) ethics.

The offending CCTV news rebroadcast, outlined in the CBSC's report, repeatedly displayed a blood-soaked crime scene and concerned a man with [claimed] ties to the Falun Gong [group] who confessed to killing his family in mainland China [Editor's note: Jiang's regime controls all media in China and has fabricated many lies to slander Falun Gong to make justifications for the unprecedented persecution against peaceful Falun Gong practitioners. The killer in this story has nothing to do with Falun Gong. Falun Gong treasures life and prohibits killing. ]

[...]

The CBSC found the CCTV report's characterization of the Falun Gong as an [Jiang regime's slanderous words omitted] to be, in the words of the panel, "unfair and improper" and in breach of the industry ethic codes.

The panel also took exception to the news report persistently tying the defendant to the Falun Gong and its activities and also cast doubt on his apparent TV confession. (The CBSC did not have further details on terms of the man's sentence.)

"There was not any justification to identify him and his criminal act so constantly as Falun Gong-related," the CBSC said in its ruling. "It must also be admitted that it would be most unusual, in a North American judicial environment, to have an accused making such confessions in a television interview as Fu Yi-bin made on this news segment."

[...]

The CBSC said the Chinese TV report represented an undue "biased" attack on the Falun Gong.

The Canadian censors reserved their strongest judgment for the CCTV report's scenes of the blood-soaked apartment where the alleged murders took place, insisting that this breached the CAB violence code.

"In the case at hand, there are no fewer than four separate video clips of the blood-soaked apartment. In the view of the panel, the point about the particularly gruesome nature of the family murders was achieved by the use of the clip once," the ruling said. "The additional airings were excessive and constituted inappropriate repetition of violent footage in a news report."

[...].

Having breached voluntary industry codes, Talentvision will have to announce the CBSC decision on air during primetime within 30 days, ensuring that the decision is translated into Mandarin.