A breach of captioning is to be disregarded, says media watchdog.
Seven News Adelaide has been at the centre of another investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority over poor captioning.
In July ACMA found the programme in breach for inadequately offering captions for deaf and hard of hearing viewers -the second by Seven News Adelaide in six months.
Now another broadcast from December 2024 was investigated following a viewer complaint.
The bulletin, comprising 44 minutes of news footage consisted of 39 segments.
ACMA’s review found that 7 segments, comprising approximately 8 minutes and 4 seconds were not readable, accurate or comprehensible.
There were hanging captions from the previous live sport broadcast, the appearance of meaningless (junk) words that were unrelated to any spoken or visual content, and some spoken content was not captioned.
Seven maintained while the error was evident on home user television sets it was not present in the control room or the NPC [national playout centre] presentation monitoring.
“The scheduling of Live Cricket flowing directly into a Live news bulletin using Lexi captioning had not been encountered previously for two reasons. Lexi captioning was introduced during winter 2024 in Adelaide – no cricket was scheduled at that time. Regular programming (The Chase) normally precedes Seven News.”
ACMA accepted that the occurrence of the technical issue in this instance could not reasonably have been foreseen, as the technical issue was not apparent to the Seven or in the captioning service provider’s control room until the ACMA drew the matter to the Licensee’s attention.
Accordingly the breach is to be disregarded.