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QCTV breach just a puff of smoke

Who would have thought ads from an American drama made in the 1950s could get an Aussie TV station in trouble in 2009?

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dragnet20300x240Just when you think you’ve heard it all.

Brisbane’s community channel QCTV (Briz31) has been found to have breached its licence for airing an episode of 1950s US cop drama Dragnet which contained three old advertisements for a now-defunct cigarette brand, Chesterfields.

At the time the show was produced, it was sponsored by the tobacco company and featured actors from the show promoting the cigarette brands with plugs including “I go for regulars. They’re best for me because they have the taste and mildness that I want.”

When QCTV aired an episode of Dragnet last September, it included the ads which were part of the original broadcast.

The Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act 1992 prohibits tobacco advertising on television.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority found that, technically, QCTV breached its licence but that it did not intentionally broadcast tobacco advertisements and that the breaches were a consequence of a breakdown in its internal editing procedures.

ACMA also found that this is the first time the QCTV has been found to have broadcast tobacco ads. No other Dragnet episode across its 23 week broadcast had broken the rules. As Chesterfields cigarettes are no longer in existence it also ruled it could not be considered promotion for the product.

ACMA does not propose to take any additional action against QCTV at this time.

Source: ACMA

12 Responses

  1. You all have valid points on this topic however, the legal aspects of airing the product itself becomes the issue, besides the fact that they had a video tape/CD/or whatever that contained commercials.

    Regardless of the age of the commercial content it still remains an illegal act to air such a product on Australian airwaves. If you are supportive of such product exhibition, that’s just like saying “it’s only old-time pornography pictures and women don’t look like that anymore”. Get my drift? If it is forbidden then it should be forbidden period; no exceptions.

    There’s also the issue of where did this tape come from. As I know the media industry quite well, it becomes a matter of knowing that there is not a media distributor around that sells programs with commercials in them unless its a program about commercials; so where did this video copy come from and did they have the rights to air it? Is the station accepting home-recordings of programs – which is night register or licensed for broadcasting, or are they recording programs illegally and broadcasting them without proper clearance.

    I know we all want to be entertained, but this is like downloading music illegally from the Internet and not paying any royalty fees to the principle owners of the content.

    1. That’s highly speculative. Nostalgic television has been running on community TV for years no doubt from appropriate distributors. It isn’t at all like downloading music illegally nor should we be suggesting so…

      Ads were produced as part of Dragnet in the 50s. QCTV’s only error was in not editing the ad out from the stock it received, which it conceded and which is now on record.

  5. The problem is simple – advertising tobacco on Australian TV is illegal. QCTV inadvertently advertised tobacco during Dragnet, which is the whole crux of the issue. If the current push to bad advertising alcohol on TV is successful, then showing an advertisement for alcohol on TV will become illegal, too. It’s not the act of smoking that caused the problem with QCTV – it’s the fact that they broadcast something that is deemed illegal. The judge decided to be lenient on them for a variety of reasons, so they were lucky.

  7. Seriously, hats off to ACMA on this one. It’s good to know the Communications watchdog is ready to pounce on any infraction, regardless of how ludicrously insignificant.

    Not taking action on an advertisment for a defunct cigarette brand in a 1950’s program broadcast on community television.

    They’re like coiled springs over there at ACMA.

  8. This is stupid, like the idiots wanting to edit out smoking in classic movies to be more PC, if it had the right warnings then I don’t see the problem, it’s part of history.

  9. I’m guessing the complaint would involve the encouragement to smoke, rather than a specific product. And yet surely this is not much worse than watching old shows like “Get Smart”, which regularly feature actors smoking?

  10. So does that mean that if a channel airs a fake ad for a fake cigarette product, it can be fined for promoting said non-existant product?

    Is it the advertising of an act (smoking) that is illegal or the advertising of a product (in this case Chesterfield) that is illegal?

    Surely if the product is no longer for sale (and hasn’t for quite some time), it would be the same as advertising a product that never existed in the first place.

    Someone at ACMA has wayyyyyy too much time on their hands.

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