CBS Chairman and CEO George Cheeks spoke of “mistakes” due to the lack of closed captioning during a telecast of Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny’s opening performance at the Grammy Awards on Sunday.
Cheeks weighed in on the show’s subtitle — and Bad Bunny’s Grammy acceptance speech for Best Urban Album — after fans complained about the use of “[SINGING IN NON-ENGLISH]” AND “[SPEAKING NON-ENGLISH]” during the broadcast.
Cheeks, in response to a letter sent by Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), wrote that he took “full responsibility” for the controversy and acknowledged that there should have been bilingual subtitles at the ceremony, Variety reported .
“Unfortunately, mistakes were made in the captions of her performance and her acceptance speech afterward,” Cheeks wrote.
“We worked with a subtitling provider who did not meet a standard we should be held to. However, we should have monitored the situation more closely. A real-time bilingual subtitler (English and Spanish) should have been used, and the words used on the screen were insensitive to many. I take full responsibility for what happened.”
Cheeks added that the network’s captioning team updated the captions before the Grammys aired a second time on the West Coast and for videos on its streaming platform.
“Our teams are now reviewing the subtitling process for all live entertainment events on the network to ensure we are correctly subtitling Spanish-language content,” the CBS chief wrote.
The caption chaos began when Bad Bunny opened the ceremony with a medley of “El Apagón” and “Después de la Playa,” songs from his Grammy-winning album “Un Verano Sin Ti.”
Garcia, in a letter to Cheeks earlier this week, described himself as a proud Latino immigrant and criticized the network for not providing Spanish subtitles during the original broadcast of the ceremony.
“To too many Spanish-speaking Americans, it seemed disrespectful to our place in our common society and our contributions to our common culture. For the deaf community, this failure has been damaging,” Garcia wrote.
Garcia later added, “I am pleased with your efforts to address the concerns, including captioning the replays of the show, but I urge you to take serious action to address the failures that made this mistake possible.”
