Although chum decided not to air the Howard Stern television show, it remains tied to the terms of the contract with cbs-owned Eyemark Entertainment.

Jay Switzer, vp programming for CHUM Television, will say only that they own the show for one year, but chum reportedly paid between $35,000 and $40,000 per episode for 52 shows, leaving it absorbing a $1.8-million to $2.1-million loss.

The decision to not telecast The Howard Stern Show and to cease broadcasting his radio program on chum-owned chom-fm comes less than two months after crtc commissioner Andrew Cardozo filed a Stern-related public dissension on a chum licensing decision.

In a July decision granting chum’s request to suspend its condition of licence governing sex-role portrayal and the depiction of violence on Bravo!, Cardozo questioned the approval, saying that chum should not be granted freedom with one licence when it is challenging Canadian Broadcast Standards Council codes with its chom licence.

When asked if either the dissension or positioning for the upcoming Television Policy Review Hearing played a role in the decision to end Stern broadcasting, Switzer says ‘not directly.’

‘We understand this will be much discussed on the industry side. We don’t necessarily feel it’s appropriate, but it will happen. The real reason is that we had issues with the show including the context for satire, parody, balance, degradation, equity and sexual portrayal, and in the end we made a unanimous decision to walk away.

‘We’re talking about one hour on one station at midnight. Relative to our business it’s not significant revenues and it’s not significant cost.’

In Alberta, Stern’s tv show will not be airing on A-Channel as originally planned. ‘What we were clearly looking at was whether it was going to meet the codes,’ says Jodi Craig, A-Channel’s program manager. ‘We’re members in good standing with the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council… and we just didn’t feel that this show would fall comfortably within those guidelines. We made a decision that this is not the direction that we wanted to go with regard to our programming.’

While chum had the national rights to The Howard Stern Show, A-Channel bought the rights for Alberta and Manitoba through chum. ‘But their decision [not to air the show] is independent of ours,’ Craig says. ‘We certainly can continue to air the program if we so wish, but we do not.’

With a file from Meg Mathur.