Lex Ferenda

Two British events to take note of:

1. The first OpenNet Initiative conference, being held in Oxford on Friday May 18. Free registration, but they’d appreciate you declaring your intention to attend ASAP. I’m going (hopefully).
2. The Open Rights Group (ORG) are having a party on Wednesday April 11 in London. It’s an awareness-raising event primarily, and the centrepiece is this great raffle. Anyone can participate, whether you’re attending the party or not. I can’t make it to the party but it is coming together as a great event…

TV on the train?

The GO train is putting its passengers a little closer to their living rooms by installing TV screens on its rail cars.

The screens are showing news, weather, entertainment and sports highlights, but are designed as an advertising vehicle with the expectation they’ll raise $8 million for the transit authority over 10 years.

GO trains are commuter services in and out of Toronto; they use nifty little hexagon-shaped double-decker coaches on a few different routes.

I’ve seen the ‘infoscreen’ model in great action on the City-Airport Train (the expensive one) in Vienna, and found it quite funky, especially coming from an airport to a city, as it gave the essential information in a very clear fashion.

One innovative thing about the GO plan is that they will broadcast the accompanying audio on the FM band, so you can ‘listen in’, but those that don’t want to listen don’t have to. Am very curious as to how they’re doing this and what sort of regulatory hurdles they had to jump through. And, indeed, what is ‘it’? Essentially closed circuit slideshows with a coordinated-yet-separate low-power FM signal, I guess. It’s complicated by the fact that one of the frequencies they mention (88.5) is already occupied by CKDX (”Foxy“).

Of course, I have an instinctive hostility towards new attempts to bring commercial messages into neutral public spaces. Not least when they are already publicly funded, and the blurb says things like:

With the increasing competitiveness in the television advertising market, it’s key for advertisers to ensure they spend their ad dollars wisely. By offering television advertising in a captive environment of active upscale professionals we can guarantee advertisers are getting the reach they need to increase their bottom line.

Eeugh. And I thought getting on a train was just using a public service to get to work/college. No, apparently you’re getting into a captive environment of active upscale professional. Silly me.

More information on the project and the outline schedule.

I wonder if they could show reruns of the classic(ally awful) Train 48???

After the fuss on Trócaire’s ad (see Eoin’s detailed discussions and hundreds of links: 1 | 2), this month’s batch of decisions from the Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCC) brings some interesting news. Fairly inevitably, in my view, the ‘Europe Direct’ radio ads were found to have been in violation of the infamous s 10(3) of the Radio and Television Act 1988 (as incorporated in the advertising code policed by the BCC under the 2001 Broadcasting Act). The complaints were made by Patricia McKenna and Anthony Coughlan - both with a long-standing interest in this area (McKenna is a Green MEP and campaigned against every European treaty; she also was the person behind the McKenna case on public funding of referendum campaigns; Coughlan is an old reliable of European campaigns and also went all the way to the Supreme Court regarding party political broadcasts and referendum campaigns - the poor BCC was the other party in that case! (Coughlan v BCC).

A key case behind the Trócaire controversy was Colgan v IRTC (’pro-life’ advocacy on a radio ad); and lo and behold, the BCC opens its weighing up of the submissions with

In assessing this complaint the Commission has paid particular regard to the decision of the High Court in Colgan v. I.R.T.C. [2000] 2 I.R. 490.

and thus we know where this is going.

The Commission tries to draw a line between political and non-political:

The Commission is of the opinion that the EU can be considered a political ideal and therefore, advertisements directed in favour of, or promoting, such ideal may be considered to be political. However, informational advertisements not directed in favour of, or promoting, such ideal, may be considered not to be political.

(Any thoughts on how this framework would affect Trócaire’s original ad?) In any event, even with the ‘informational’ opt-out, it’s still a far-reaching principle.

Applying that framework, the BCC finds that three of the ads (in a series of nine) were OK (’Team Europe’ speakers available, protections under environmental law and food safety standards), but the other six weren’t (€55 bn received by Ireland, Euro means value for money, EU aid to other countries, Erasmus student exchange, etc). And included in the six we find the radio ad that I heard first, and spat out my tea over:

“Did you know that telephone calls and airfares cost less now than they did 15 years ago? European Union legislation has created more competitive markets and forced down the prices of airfares and telephone calls.”

Apart from the appalling understanding of legal and economic theory, this was hardly ever going to survive scrutiny under s 10. The case of the Commission wasn’t helped by Commissioner McCreevy having said that the campaign would “show the benefits of EU membership”.

In fact, I think the Commission played this one fairly badly from start to finish. The original tender states that the project was for

the broadcast of a series of radio advertisements in all licensed local radio stations to highlight the Europe Direct information facilities

whereas clearly, the final text of the ads went much further than that, and tried to throw in some ear-catching advocacy on the wonders of the EU as a lead-in to ‘highlighting’ the information facilities.

So, six months (!) after the complaints, and five months after the campaign finishes, we find out that the ads shouldn’t have been broadcast. And one might ask - what’s the point of that? The same tender document indicates that the Commission paid €360,000 for this particular run (the tender was just for Ireland, although other projects existed across Europe). The ad agency made its money. The radio stations sold their time. The Commission got its message across without any interruption or interference.

If the content was so harmful as to be a violation of the requirements of s 10, what is the remedy? Surely both Commissions (Broadcasting Complaints and European!) have some explaining to do, given the thousands of listeners who have now heard this powerful but illegal message? I have many, many problems with section 10 (not to mention with the communications strategy of the EU) but this sort of situation makes a laugh of the legislation. A once-off campaign is run, and six months later it’s decided that the campaign was in violation of the law. And the justification for the law is the protection of the sensibilitites of the listeners.

Tell me this: if the statements of the Europe Direct project were so objectionable, should we assume that the State has failed in its duty to protect its citizens from the horrors of political advertising?

Between this, and Trócaire, and the various fusses over political advertising, and Michael D’s suggested amendment, my question is simple. Is it not time to scrap s 10(3) and to come up with something that actually works, with clear definitions of ‘political’ in the legislation and some measure of predictability for the listener, broadcaster and advertiser alike?