UCSD Healthcare shut down the broadcast of Student Run Television for almost four days after receiving complaints from Thornton Hospital patients that the station aired “inappropriate” pornographic material on May 15, according to station members and administrators.
Campus officials said they discovered that the Preuss School also received the station’s transmissions after investigating the complaints.
“There was no other alternative available to campus operations, because the risk of exposing the Preuss School children to indecent material was deemed sufficiently high enough and it was of sufficiently high priority to warrant the temporary disconnect of SRTV,” said Nicholas S. Aguilar, director of Student Policies and Judicial Affairs. “Had there been an alternative to that, it would have been used.”
The ensuing delay, which kept SRTV from broadcasting until midday on May 19, was a result of the university’s investigation and the time required to install a content filter to remove the station from the Preuss School and UCSD Healthcare, which both subscribe to Triton Cable, Aguilar said.
“I really think we have a right to be told something if they’re going to kick us off the air,” said Revelle College junior Chelsea Welch, the station’s programming director.
Because Thornton patients and employees who found the material offensive have refused to describe it, according to Welch and station manager Jared Lindo, SRTV members have yet to figure out whether the broadcast was part of regular station programming or if a break-in occurred.
Though SRTV members contacted campus police to notify them of a security breach, they say they found no signs of forced entry. SRTV’s security system, which requires each person to use a personal code to gain entry into the station and keeps a record of those who enter, also showed that no one was in the studio when the incident happened.
“Our number-one concern is to see what the offending content was,” Lindo said. “We can’t fix the problem if we don’t know what it is.”
Closed-circuit cable stations like SRTV are exempt from Federal Communications Commission guidelines, which state broadcast stations may not air “language or material, that in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive … sexual or excretory organs or activities.”
The regulations ban all obscene materials and restrict the airing of “indecent” or “profane” content between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.
Though the station is exempt from the FCC regulations, it voluntarily adopted the daytime content policy earlier this year.
SRTV’s 40 hours of replay material televised during daytime hours is programmed into a password-protected computer and does not contain any indecent material, according to Welch.
While original complaints allege the broadcast was obscene, Aguilar said an investigation following the incident found no violations of campus policy or federal law on the part of the station.
“We acted on the nature of that complaint,” he said. “Subsequently, I think it was determined that the material was permitted for broadcast over a cable station, as long as it is at a time that there is a high degree of certainty that only adults will have access.”
Both Welch and Lindo, who believe that some of the station’s replay content may offend viewers, said Triton Cable users had the responsibility of being aware of what they had subscribed to. They argue that the decision to end all of the station’s transmission was not made by campus administrators, but by Thornton employees without prior approval.
“The idea that someone has the power to simply unplug us from the campus is the most upsetting part, regardless of what was being shown,” Lindo said. He said that in the past, offended viewers submitted complaints through the station’s A.S. adviser for internal resolution.
Aguilar denied the allegation that campus officials were not made aware of the decision. However, the campus has no official protocol for dealing with content disputes, Aguilar said. The development of one will be the focus of an ongoing review, sparked by the incident, that looks into campus broadcasting policies.
“It’s unfortunate that this material was broadcast, and it’s unfortunate that the campus had no alternative but to temporarily disconnect SRTV in order to ensure that we were not exposing the minor students at the Preuss School to material that clearly was not intended for [minors],” he said.
SRTV officers said they plan to hold a meeting with Thornton and Triton Cable officials to attempt to identify the source of the offensive content and develop procedures for handling viewer complaints.
