(Ed note: We ran this column back in May 2012 with our overall investigation into the CBC. Given the Corp's news this week – that it will still air, but has lost control of, NHL hockey – we thought it made sense to give it a re-print, as it were, on November 27, 2013.)
AT CBC ENGLISH TELEVISION’S fall 2012 programming launch last Thursday, you could hear how the massive recent budget cut – along with the constant hectoring of the Corp. by so many Canadians – has taken its toll.
Head of English Services Kirstine Stewart, host George Stroumboulopoulos and CBC sports host Scott Russell all felt the need to insist the broadcaster’s drive and energy had not abated and remind everyone how they’re still strong, “still here”, or not going anywhere and “reports of the CBC’s demise are greatly exaggerated,” said Stewart. “We won’t be retreating, we are moving forward.”
No one doubts any of that. I mean, what would any of us do or say if we were put in the same position? Your budget has been hacked so shows have been cut and people fired. Your content strategy is always questioned, even mocked. Your editorial focus or perceived bias is constantly under fire, and the final big, profitable sports property, the National Hockey League, is assumed to be on the way out the door in a couple of years. And if that happens, well…
If I was in Ms. Stewart’s or anyone else’s CBC shoes, I’d put out shoulder to the wheel and soldier on, too, if I may crowd a couple of clichés into one sentence. What other options are there available to them? “Keep Calm and Carry On”, right?
I HATE BIG GOVERNMENT REPORTS. Hate ’em! I have read and reported on more bland, bogus government “research” and “studies” on telecom and broadcasting and new media and culture and so forth, that I shudder every time a new one is announced.
Committees call witnesses, politicians grandstand by hectoring government officials or businesspeople with twice their intelligence and experience, Facebook pages and blogs and online surveys are now done sometimes and then six-to-18 months later, some swell, and swelled, volume of pages is released to a bit of fanfare (or none at all). Then most of the time, these reports are filed and NOTHING happens from them. They are shelved and forgotten. Ignored.
A very few, such as the 2006 Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, have lasting effect and make the transition from report to policy, as parts of the TPR report did.
But for most others? Pfft. Take, for example, the Standing Committee on Industry Science and Technology report on e-commerce released last week. I thought of assigning a reporter to read through and cover it, until I read a bit of it myself. It’s long, boring, dimwitted and tells no one anything. Government won’t act on it because there is nothing to act upon. The recommendations are vague and simplistic or already done. The NDP addendum at the end of the report makes a few interesting suggestions, but those aren’t going anywhere either. What a gawdawful waste of time and resources.
So to hear myself call for a Royal Commission on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is peculiar, but it’s the best way forward. Perhaps an Investigative Commission of Inquiry is a better idea, something with focus, with teeth, where the recommendations are not suggestions, but demands. So much has changed in the CBC’s 75 years, in the 44-years since the Broadcasting Act was written (within which the CBC’s existence and mandate is enshrined), and in the 21 years since the Act was updated in 1991, we need some big ideas, crowdsourced and directed.
Such a Commission of Inquiry will be a lengthy, difficult, emotional, cathartic, potentially wonderful public process to figure out if Canadians: a) want a national public broadcaster or public content creator; b) how much they want to pay for one; and c) what such an organization would look, sound and feel like, what it would produce, and how it would serve Canadians. It will need a strong chair.
We’re on record here saying we believe the CBC is already moving down the right path, pushing into the burgeoning, splintering digital era as best it can, as quickly as it can – that new media and new technology is finally letting the CBC properly meet its mandate. But even so, that is part of the problem. It is only going as quickly as it can – not as quickly as it should. Like other large organizations struggling with change, it has enormous legacy costs and commitments that it can not just abandon.
WHAT WOULD A PUBLIC BROADCASTER look like if we were to create one today? Would a single transmission tower be constructed? Would we look at the cost to secure land, buy equipment, run hydro to hundreds and hundreds of transmitters and maintain them and think “that’s crazy” when we can just go with IP distribution? The Corp. has already said it will keep all of its radio transmitters (most love CBC Radio) and 27 OTA TV transmitters. Many Canadians still want their media off-air, so CBC and other broadcasters stick, rightly, with old media transmission while preparing for an unknown distribution future. But for how long do we keep the towers humming?
Maybe CBC TV, or CBC Video, should only do news and current affairs and leave the entertainment programming to other content houses in Canada? Maybe Canadians want to see entertainment and kids and sports remain on a new CBC? Everyone has an opinion about our public broadcaster, which came through loud and clear with the Cartt.ca INVESTIGATES series on CBC. Nothing else Cartt.ca has done has produced such feedback – and that’s just from people in the biz. Beyond that, if you ask 100 Canadians what the CBC is and what it should be, I bet you’ll get 100 different answers.
To those who say “privatize the CBC”. Well, you’re fools. Who on earth would buy it? Under such a scenario, the government stipend is gone and so is Hockey Night In Canada. How could a privatized CBC continue after that except as a skeletal shadow? Heck, who would protect the CBC’s priceless archive of our country’s history?
EVEN WHEN CBC DOES try new things, like CBCMusic.ca, detractors leap out. Private broadcasters insist the new service (which from a consumer point of view, is pretty nifty) is unfair, while our Minister of Heritage, James Moore, has praised it.
But even while praising the CBC and CBCMusic.ca, Minister Moore got some facts wrong about the CBC’s cutbacks when he said half of the jobs now being eliminated were already planned to be trimmed prior to the federal budget cut. According to the senior execs at CBC we’ve talked to, that isn’t true. While a number of CBC folks were about to be reassigned and/or retrained as the Corp. pursues its “Everyone Every Way” mantra, layoffs had not been planned until the budget announcement. So how does the minister overseeing the CBC get such information wrong – and say it while on CBC TV?
And even when the Corp. does seemingly innocuous things, like send 14 people to the excellent Banff Media Fest, it gets raked over the coals. We’ve asked the organizers and have been assured the comparison of CBC numbers headed west to other broadcasters are flat out wrong (there are more than 20 attending from Bell Media, for example), but have been repeated so much now, they have become “fact”. The efficiency of going to one place to get tons of work done rather than go to tons of places to get the same work done is overlooked by these writers who influence thousands with their lazy musings.
All of this just adds to the Sisyphean stones which CBCers have to push up their hills every day.
I realize this clichéd diatribe is a bit all over the place. Even repeatedly re-reading it is making me a little dizzy. Perhaps that proves my point, though. That there are so many questions about the CBC itself and its role in an ever-changing media world with so many moving and morphing parts, we need a national public process to decide what it is we want our public broadcaster to be, to clarify its direction and point where we’d like it to go.
What do you think? Are we on the money or off our rockers – or somewhere in between? Please let us know at editorial@cartt.ca.
