Angry in the Great White North

From the Calgary Sun, Ezra Levant writes about Telecaster, giving well-deserved credit to Stephen Taylor:

Ask a thousand Canadians what a "telecaster" is, and 999 would probably think it was a 1950s word for a newfangled TV set. But Telecaster is actually the name of the agency that screens TV ads.

Instead of advertisers having to get approval from every single TV station in the country, Telecaster is their one-stop shop. Canadian TV stations outsource their judgment to Telecaster, which is in charge of basic standards -- no profanity, for example.

Telecaster approves political ads, too. And so, what is a rubber stamp when it comes to toothpaste and shampoo ads becomes a powerful political censor when it comes election campaigns.

The problem is that Telecaster is run by a Liberal partisan, James Patterson:

Over the last three years, according to Elections Canada data dug up by blogger Stephen Taylor, Patterson made a whopping 17 donations to the Liberal Party, totalling more than $4,300.

That's more than most MPs give to their own parties. That's an extreme partisan.

One of the donations was even made in January 2006, just days before the last election. That's important, because Patterson was in charge of censoring TV ads that very moment. And censor he did.

The evidence suggests that Patterson is unable to separate his political views from his work with Telecaster, and that he's applying different rules to make advertising difficult for the Conservatives:

That was when the Liberals rolled out their attack ads, claiming Stephen Harper was going to put "soldiers in our streets". It was absurd, and it backfired.

The point is Telecaster, run by Jim Patterson, didn't censor them, even though they used images of Stephen Harper without his permission.

But when the Conservatives produced a response to those attack ads -- showing video clips of Liberal MPs admitting their own attack ads had gone too far -- Telecaster censored the ads. Telecaster ordered the Conservative ads off the air.

And of course, this double standard is going to apply to these ads just rolled out by the Conservatives:

All this came out in the open last week when Telecaster refused to allow the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association to run a TV ad briefly showing Harper's own image -- even though the CRFA owned the footage themselves. Telecaster told the CRFA that they couldn't show a picture of Harper without his permission -- a ridiculous requirement that Harper does not want.

We know where this is going.

Patterson, the big Liberal donor, is getting ready to block Tory ads in the upcoming campaign. He knows thin-skinned Stephane Dion, the new Liberal leader, won't grant permission to the Tories to use footage of him saying foolish things.

And saying foolish things is a Stephane Dion trademark.

So what can we do about this? I'm going to assume that Patterson is secure in his position. In any case, a wholesale cultural change at an institution so infected with bias towards the Liberal Party is going to take a long time. Finding people who are actually apolitical is tough, since in Canada someone who doesn't support any party is typically labeled a Conservative -- I suppose that's what you get for calling the Liberal Party Canada's natural governing party.

So the trick might be to bypass Telecaster altogether if Telecaster throws up roadblocks. News programs can show the ads as part of a story without any interference from Telecaster. So get on to your local news people and tell them this is an interesting story. And, of course, there is the internet. If you have a website, link to the ads or to any of the bloggers who have embedded the videos. Put links up on forums and message boards. Email your like-minded friends. Email your Liberal friends. Get the word -- and the URLs -- out there.

If we're lucky, Telecaster simply won't amount to much.

Thanks to reader Selma for the heads up on Ezra's article.