OTTAWA — The Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations (CACTUS) identified a major omission in the Broadcast and Telecom Legislative Review panel report released at the end of January in that there was no mention of the community element in Canada’s broadcasting system.
While Recommendation 52 in the report (officially titled Canada’s Communications Future: Time to Act) maintains the existing definition of the Canadian broadcasting system as consisting of “public, private, and community elements”, there is no mention of the sector throughout the remaining 235 pages of the report, says CACTUS.
“Everyone acknowledges the crisis in local news and information, yet the huge potential of the community sector to fill this gap — due to its lower cost structure and involvement by local stakeholders — is neither understood nor acknowledged,” said CACTUS executive director Cathy Edwards in a press release.
CACTUS says this oversight in the Yale Report is part of a long-standing trend. Neither the 2017 Creative Canada Policy Framework nor Shattered Mirror reports made more than passing mentions of the community element, CACTUS adds.
“The only reference in the Yale Report to the stranglehold that the CRTC has allowed cable companies to maintain on community TV is that half of the money (about $70 million) that was supposed to support communities to make their own audio-visual productions has already been siphoned off to support the Independent Local News Fund (the ILNF),” reads the CACTUS release.
“Far from flagging this problem and the need for full funding for community media, the Yale report recommends at Recommendation 71 that more of this ‘levy’ should be diverted to support local private news. The report doesn’t acknowledge where the ‘levy’ is coming from. The community element is just a black hole to be raided to support failing legacy news infrastructure. There is no vision to build more cost-effective, accountable and dynamic local institutions,” the release adds.
To hear an interview with Edwards about the Yale report, along with Barry Rooke, executive director of the National Community Radio Association, please click here.
