NBN slapped over missing News captions
Newcastle-based network NBN failed to provide adequate captioning services during news broadcasts of the Victorian bushfires.
- Published by David Knox
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- Filed under News
Newcastle-based network NBN, an affiliate of the Nine Network, failed to provide adequate captioning services during news broadcasts of the Victorian bushfires last February.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority found that deaf and hearing impaired viewers would have had difficulty comprehending the coverage as a result of some missing captions.
Commercial networks are required to provide a captioning service for all prime time shows plus news and current affairs outside prime viewing hours.
NBN Evening News lacked captions on February 11th because GTV9 failed to provide a captioning service as a result of incomplete scripts and because there is no live caption service in place at NBN.
It was the second time NBN Evening News has breached its captioning obligations.
In response to the current breach NBN has proposed to install a ‘live’ caption service for its news service from January 2010.
Source: ACMA
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- Tagged with NBN Evening News, NBN News
6 Responses
What happened with this is that NBN took GTV Nine News live for the first 20 or so minutes of the broadcast over a couple of nights. This was right in the serious part of the bushfires as events were still unfolding. The fact that NBN doesn’t have live captioning processes is surprising though.
Good Morning America is airing on Nine Sydney and Win Wollongong and as at 3:45AM neither station has Closed Captions as they should, as GMA is a news program. Nine has a message that apologises that subtitles are currently unavailable. Win doesn’t have the apology.
If it’s the second breach why don’t they give them a serious fine? No penalty it would seem. NBN is just going about business in their own timeframe.
The poor buggers who have to caption it would not have a clue what Ray Dinneen says 99.9 per cent of the time anyway…….
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Well this is what happens when the News isnt live. I mean the hosts are the same but the News is different wherever you are. Central Coast get one feed, Newcastle get another as does the different major regions in NSW. In saying this, this is one of the best local news services around except for the fact they do national stuff first which s**ts me.