Obama, all action, no words on TEN.
ACMA has ruled that TEN failed to caption the Obama Inauguration, which is required of news programmes.
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under News
Networks looking to screen the live Michael Jackson Memorial on Wednesday morning would do well to take a lesson from today’s finding by ACMA that TEN failed to provide captioning for its live broadcast of the Obama Inauguration.
Commercial networks are required to provide a captioning service for ‘all television programs transmitted during prime viewing hours (6pm -10:30pm) as well as television news or current affairs programs transmitted outside prime viewing hours.’
TEN’s live coverage of The Inauguration of President Obama, broadcast on the 21st January failed to characterise the broadcast as news given it was not a typical news bulletin and was a one-off event, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
Upon review, TEN acknowledged that the broadcast was ‘news’ within the relevant definition and should have been captioned.
“By not capturing this event, TEN has not only breached its regulatory obligations but deprived its hearing impaired audience of fully participating in this historic moment,’ said Chris Chapman, ACMA Chairman.
(Do you think the ACMA Chairman actually meant “by not captioning this event”?)
The finding by ACMA followed a written complaint it had received.
Amongst its steps to address the issue, TEN has agreed to review its current process to ensure that relevant programmes are captioned in accordance with the Broadcasting Services Act.
Source: ACMA
12 Responses
@Ryan try typing words as they are spoken and i reckon you’d make a few typos too
On the topic of captions my gym has captions turned on and Nine or WIN Tv has horrible captions they spelt words in the news bulliten yesterday such as Elephant is elkafant?!?! Lucky there was an elephant on screen and I knew what they were talking about LOL.
“(Do you think the ACMA Chairman actually meant “by not captioning this event”?)”
Nah i think the wording was correct. This is the same man who blamed the media for a blacklist ‘conspiracy’ once it leaked after over 13 months of warning from experts.
Since Obama’s speech was live, and overseas, the time delay would be quite large. Not sure which way i would rule though. But since there are practically no consequences for ACMA’s rulings to TV networks, it doesn’t really make much difference anyway.
Well done ACMA – you’ve really layed down the law once again… And not a minute too soon either….
Oh god I can’t believe this!! TEN had by *far* the best coverage of the Obama Inauguration … I’ve still kept a copy on my TiVo because it was absolutely stunning looking, in full HD glory you can’t believe how amazing this coverage looked direct from CBS. There was no requirement for TEN to do this but they did it anyway.
(Ryan I don’t think you understand how captions are made … your comment sounds like “milk comes from the supermarket!”)
Craig while I see your point, there is still lots of other options on the day to choose from, so I really really don’t want TEN to get in trouble for what was essentially never scheduled to be broadcast and turned out to be the best option on the night for 99% of viewers.
CK.
Just a note to poster ‘ryan’, captions aren’t a ‘text-to-speech’ feature on your TV set, rather it is actually someone typing text and it being broacast – and with live programming, it is live.
@ryan: How do you think those captions get there?
I think they use a shorthand keyboard, and predictive text, for live captioning.
Though maybe the technology is even better than that these days.
captions! um hello people we can just press a button on our remotes to get it these days!!!! pull your head out of your a**es acma!
So how do they do live captions of news events like this, but if the others managed it why not TEN?
“failed to characterise the broadcast as news given it was not a typical news bulletin and was a one-off even”
Its not like channel 10 didn’t know it was going to be on, it wasn’t breaking news, So TEN should of CC it.
Slaps to Ten for not doing its job but it’s not as if Ten had exclusive coverage of this event, it was covered on the other networks too and the complaining viewer could have changed channels?