Broadcast Standards and Practices
In the United States, Standards and Practices (also referred to as Broadcast Standards and Practices or BS&P for short) is the name traditionally given to the department at a television network which is responsible for the moral, ethical, and legal implications of the program that the network airs. Standards and Practices also ensures fairness on televised game shows, in which they are the adjunct to the judges at the production company level. They also have the power to reprimand and to recommend the termination of television network stars and employees for violations of standards and practices.
"Standards and Practices" redirects here. For other uses, see Standards and Practices (disambiguation).The Standards and Practices department of censored one of Jack Paar's jokes on the February 10, 1960, episode of The Tonight Show.
NBC
In 1999, a contestant who lost on a Jeopardy! Teen Tournament game on a questionable ruling during Final Jeopardy! was ordered to be brought back for the 2000 College Championship.
Jeopardy!
The September 11 through September 14, 2001 episodes of Jeopardy! aired only on a few stations in the United States due to continuous coverage of the September 11 attacks wholesale pre-empting the show throughout the United States and Canada outside of a few non-news carrying independent stations airing it. As Jeopardy! has rules where the funds for the cash prizes won by contestants on the series are only issued a set period after the episode has aired (and where the show's confidentiality agreement regarding the results of a game has not been breached), the program's Standards and Practices had to issue a one-time exception for those contestants (along with others who had won cash and prizes on sister series Wheel of Fortune on the same airdates [which also has the same policy regarding the timing of the awarding of cash and prizes]) due to the extraordinary circumstance where the results were unseen until cycled into the show's weekend rerun feed or aired on Game Show Network years later, while the four Wheel episodes aired in the Washington area late night Sunday, September 16, 2001 on WJLA-TV in a two-hour block.
breaking news
A January 30, 2008 episode of Jeopardy! resulted in Arianna Kelly being brought back on an episode on July 8, 2008 when officials found questionable calls during game play against her during that episode.
On occasion, an answer will have a different correct question when the show was recorded compared to the time the show airs. When that happens, the date of taping will appear on screen as the answer is read in order to comply with Standards and Practices. An example of this was during the second 2014 first round match: the answer in the $400 My Present Government Job category in the Jeopardy! round was, "Kathleen Sebelius, Insuring America, one person at a time." The correct response was "What is the Secretary of Health and Human Services?" However, she had resigned from that position in April 2014, between the taping of the match in March 2014 and the July 22, 2014 broadcast. The show posted a disclaimer, "Recorded in March 2014," as the category was being read.
Jeopardy! Teen Tournament
In the , the term network ombudsman (also referred to as office of the network ombudsman) is used for this department.[9]
Philippines
Keith Adler. Advertising Resource Handbook. East Lansing, Mich.: Advertising Resources, Inc., 1989.
Erik Barnouw. A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting, vol. 1. NY: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Broadcast Self-Regulation, 2nd edn. Washington, D.C.: NAB Code Authority, 1977.
CBS/Broadcast Group. “Program Standards for the CBS Television Network”, in Television as a Social Issue: The Eighth Applied Social Psychology Annual, ed. Stuart Oskamp. Newbury Park, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1988.
George Dessart. “Of Tastes and Times: Some Challenging Reflections on Television's Elastic Standards and Astounding Practices”, Television Quarterly (New York), 1992.
George Dessart. “Standards and Practices”, in Encyclopedia of Television, 2nd edn. Ed. by Horace Newcomb. NY–London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 2186–8 (1st edn. Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997).
Alice M. Henderson & Helaine Doktori. “How the Networks Monitor Program Content”, in Television as a Social Issue: The Eighth Applied Social Psychology Annual, ed. Stuart Oskamp. Newbury Park, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1988.
Sensitive Theme Programming and the New American Mainstream. New York: Social Research Unit, Marketing & Research Services, ABC, n.d.
The Museum of Broadcast Communications