GETTING A NEW TV CHANNEL off the ground is an enormous challenge. Getting a news channel going is even bigger.
But getting one up and running strictly on donations? That’s ambitious.
But, that’s what Canadian producer Paul Jay and his supporters are working on: The launch of Independent World Television News.
Jay was creator and executive producer of CBC Newsworld’s debate program counterSpin, which has since been cancelled. He is also an award winning documentary filmmaker and founding Chair of Hot Docs!, the Canadian International Documentary Film Festival.
But the state of TV journalism is irksome to him and many others, so much so that he and a number of backers are launching a brand new news channel, with a targeted launch date sometime in 2006.
While insisting its coverage will not simply be biased to the left, politically, in response to the right-side screamers from Fox News, the list of IWTNews supporters showcase the port side of the political spectrum.
The channel will have no ads nor will it charge for subscriptions. Jay is raising $7 million in seed money to launch the channel, where he’ll ask 500,000 people to donate $50 a year to make the channel work.
Will it? www.cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien recently had a chat with Jay to figure out his intentions. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: I’ve had a look at the web site so I know a little about what you’re all about but tell me in your own words what IWT News is and what your goals are.
Paul Jay: IWT News is not-for-profit television journalism – news and current affairs. That’s a pretty broad definition. There will be a prime time news show, documentaries, debate, political satire. We think a lot of what we’re going to do will appeal to the same kind of people who watch the Jon Stewart Show (The Daily Show, on The Comedy Network in Canada).
The essence of the idea is that for-profit television journalism, necessarily, is leaning towards a model of less reporters, less foreign bureaus, and more emphasis on short, what-are-supposed-to-be-meant-as-entertaining pieces. We think there’s a significant market out there for people who want some substance – and substance with some courage.
The problem with CBC – which normally is thought of as the broadcaster which would have filled this void, and still do, certainly more than the private broadcasters do – is the budget cutbacks at CBC and the threats of privatization have pushed it to compete for the 70% of market which may not want the type of channel we’re talking about right now.
But, we don’t need to broadcast to the 70%. We’re interested in the 30% we think that are very interested.
I produced CounterSpin for years so we know, having done that show, that we would have a base audience of approximately 100,000 a night. But, in times of crisis, our numbers could go up as high as 400,000.
So, the thesis to our network is that there is 25 to 30% of the population that would be interested and we think on a regular basis we can get a piece of that 30% – which wants uncompromising journalism and are interested in world news and current affairs and politics.
Then, when times of crisis happens, we’ll be there and then we’ll make inroads into the 70% who are more interested in entertainment programming right now.
GOB: Okay. And the CBC doesn’t do this now?
PJ: The CBC, in order to defend its position, they think – and I’m not sure I agree with them – that they have to worry about the 70% of those concerned primarily with entertainment programming so they’re putting a lot of effort there… and maybe they have to. Maybe that is the strategy a big public broadcaster has to follow.
We don’t.
The 25 to 30% seem to have a hunger for this because the interest in it already seems quite substantial.
GOB: How do you know?
PJ: We launched our web site on June 15th, just to start the drumbeat, to start putting our toe in the water to see what kind of support there would be for this and during the first two weeks of the web site, something close to 8,000 have put their names down on our e-mail list, but maybe most significantly, we’re up to 400 individual donors – people who have actually given money.
GOB: Who are the donors? Are they individuals or organizations?
PJ: Just people giving 50 bucks or 25 bucks – and a large number of $100 donations, which we’re kind of surprised about because we’ve been saying we need half a million people to give $25.
GOB: Do you intend to rely on donations going forward, or do you envision subscription dollars?
PJ: The funding is layered. We were not expecting any Internet money at this point. It’s all happening much faster than we thought. The original funding model was to start funding from foundations, wealthy individuals and some union money.
The money we won’t take is corporate and government.
GOB: So how much have you raised?
PJ: About $600,000 now in seed money, from three U.S. foundations, the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation and the CB Haas Trust and the Canadian Auto Workers. Then there’s about $100,000 donated from wealthy individuals and small donors.
The plan is to raise $7 million in seed money, mostly from foundations, not-for-profit entities and so on, which is part of why we were in Hollywood doing this Hollywood party thing.
GOB: I heard you were there.
PJ: There was a lot of press on it there.
The gist of it is we raise $7 million in seed money and that partly gets us into position to launch a world-wide fund-raising campaign.
We’re planning to have events, not on the Live 8 scale but smaller versions, you could say in some of our key countries (Johannesburg, London, Toronto, New Delhi, New York, Berlin) to create a huge world media event in countries with big English-speaking populations.
And that’s when we’re going to ask half a million people to give us fifty bucks ($25 million). And, if we do it right, we think we can surpass that. We think that’s actually a modest figure to hit.
GOB: Can you go over the timing of these events and when the launch might be?
PJ: We think sometime in the 2006. So, if we hit our fundraising targets and have our money and raise seven mil’ over the next 10 months, then we’ll probably have the events within 15 months (with the channel launch to follow).
And, over the course of the 10 months raising money, we’re going to start some sample programming – producing news items that will be on the web, as well as we’re making deals with existing channels that want to carry some of our programming.
GOB: Can you say which ones?
PJ: The only one I can talk about is the American one, Link TV, in San Francisco. It’s in about 25 million U.S. homes. The Canadian channels or partners I can’t say.
GOB: What other kinds of programming will IWT News have?
PJ: We’re planning to launch a North American traveling debate show, sort of like CounterSpin on wheels, where we’re going to go up and down North America having town hall debates on the big story of the day and how the media is covering that story.
We need a network that has the guts to go after everybody, so it’s not just a question of attacking U.S. foreign policy, which certainly is an issue. Good journalism goes after those who are in power, period.
When the Globe and Mail broke the Liberal Party scandal story in 1999, if we’d been there, we would have been on it the next day, if we hadn’t broken it ourselves. However, Canadian television didn’t touch the story until the Auditor General’s report came out.
Why? Where were they? It’s not like the Ottawa press corps didn’t know about corruption in Ottawa, so where were they?
GOB: When you say that you’ll be going after everybody, IWT News has been described as “left-leaning” or something like that and the people listed on the founding committee are most often described that way, does that really mean you’re not going to have your own sacred cows or anything like that?
PJ: The only sacred cow for us is that we better go after everybody. We’re going to do journalism the way it’s supposed to be practiced, where you don’t hold back and you go after every story which is of concern to your viewers.
So, our partisanship will be to what we think are our viewers’ concerns and nothing else. And that’s why we think you need independent economics.
GOB: Is this mainly a response to Fox News or the point of view you might find on CBS or CTV?
PJ: I would say Fox News is the extreme but in the U.S., the problem is less Fox than the main networks because more people watch the main networks than Fox by a large number.
If you break down the way the main networks have covered the war in Iraq, a whole host of issues, from the environment to every issue you can name, there’s no journalism that gives you some depth of understanding. More importantly, there are some issues in front of us that require a sense off urgency from us – that if you really understood how serious a situation is, you’ll feel some need to act.
Look at the U.N. report from a while ago that said 85 million Africans could be dead in two decades as a result of HIV. And we know from the same report that much of Asia is in the same situation. So we’re talking about 80 to 150 million people could be dead and we can hear that story and it goes in one ear and out the other?
I don’t blame the listeners for that. I blame the way the stories are being presented. They’re not presented as issues that could be a crisis. Where’s the sense of urgency in the way that’s reported to us?
GOB: I often come at new things like this from a personal level, so I’m curious how you would appeal to someone like me. Someone whose personal politics are a little right of centre, but I haven’t watched a regularly scheduled TV news show in something like five years. I don’t watch the six o’clock news, I don’t watch 20/20, 60 Minutes, nothing. I don’t watch television news.
PJ: Where do you get your news from?
GOB: I read four newspapers a day and I’m on line all the time. I’m not sure why I tuned it out.
PJ: You’re a very interesting target for us. The issue is not whether you’re a left winger or right winger, for us the issue is: ‘are you politicized’? Are you interested in news and current affairs? That’s our target.
A lot of the articles written about us are calling us a left wing CNN and all that and we never call ourselves that. We were called unabashedly left wing – when I actually said the opposite. Whether I’m left wing or not is not the issue here.
I have been refuting the idea that this is a left wing network.
If you had reported the day after Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations that what he said wasn’t true, and you could have because it was knowable then. His own head of security and analysis told Powell, there’s not a shred of evidence of any weapons in Iraq.
Two weeks later, (Powell’s underling) resigned from the State Department in protest as did three other people. It was knowable then. If you had reported it then, everyone would have said “that’s just left-wing”. No. The fact that he didn’t tell the truth in front of the U.N. is a fact. It’s not a left wing fact, it’s not a right wing fact. It’s a fact.
Now, if you want to, you could have a debate that might break left-right where some might say “he lied, but it was necessary to do so.”
You can have a debate on whether he was right or wrong to lie, but you can’t debate that he lied. And journalism needs to be able to say “that’s a fact, and if people say ‘you’re left wing because you’re saying these facts, then so be it.
But, we would go after Clinton or Chretien. Personally, I’m glad Chretien kept us out of the war in Iraq, but that doesn’t mean I’d hesitate for a second to reveal his part in the scandal.
