Wade Rowland - Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Service

Saving the CBC

Balancing Profit and Public Service

PRAISE FOR WADE ROWLANDS
SAVING THE CBC

This book should be read by everyone who gives a damn about Canada and the publicly owned broadcaster that unites us in telling our own stories on radio and television. Wade Rowland convincingly documents the slow, politically-directed erosion of the CBC, and he has the expertise to show us how to save, and expand, this vital component in Canadian life. Will we listen to him? I hope to God we have enough sense to do so.

Farley Mowat

Consider this an impassioned polemic debate is far too sedate ignited by the CBCs degradation in recent years and fed by cold rage against the main culprits, yet with a surprising optimism about future possibilities.

Rick Salutin, author and columnist at The Toronto Star

This is a thoughtful and timely roadmap to guide Canadians who still love public broadcasting but who despair of the present condition of the CBC. Instead of a lament, we now have a plan that can make our CBC a model for how a public broadcaster can inspire, attract and engage us all. You must read this book: Wade Rowlands vision can restore a CBC we can be proud of again.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, Director, Journalism Program, University of Toronto (Scarborough)

Wade Rowland understands public service values and knows the CBC well, especially English Television. His book makes an insightful contribution to a necessary public debate about our most important cultural institution, and his recommendations are largely aligned with the priorities of the 175,000 Canadians who support our work.

Ian Morrison, Spokesperson, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting

If youre looking for the first principles required for effective public broadcasting in Canada in the twenty-first century, Wade Rowland has articulated them here with clarity and eloquence. No excuses left for failure to act except for that most Canadian of realities: the lack of political will.

Kealy Wilkinson, Broadcast Consultant and Executive Director, Canadian Broadcast Museum Foundation.

.ll.
LINDA LEITH
PUBLISHING

Copyright 2013 Wade Rowland

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Cover design: Debbie Geltner
Cover image: Krister Shalm
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Author photo: Christine Collie Rowland

Legal Deposit Library and Archives Canada
et Bibliothque et Archives nationales du Qubec .

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Rowland, Wade

Saving the CBC [electronic resource] : balancing profit and public service / Wade Rowland.

Includes bibliographical references.
Electronic monograph.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-927535-12-7 (HTML).--ISBN 978-1-927535-13-4 (HTML).-- ISBN 978-1-927535-14-1 (PDF)

1. Public broadcasting--Canada. 2. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I. Title.
HE8689.9.C3R67 2013 ------ 384.540971 ------ C2013-900043-7

.ll.

Linda Leith Publishing Inc.
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www.lindaleith.com

Saving the CBC

Balancing Profit and Public Service

WADE ROWLAND

.ll.

To the spirit of public broadcasting,
and those who struggle daily to
preserve it.

Unlike the Internet, broadcasting is not about supplying a library to which the public has access. Broadcasting assembles a congregation. It is comparable to a concert hall or other meeting halls in our larger cities. Broadcasting is designed to provide a communal experience, an experience that helps build consensus by its very nature, a consensus that should impose the disciplines on talent that ensure that its standards will be high enough to serve that function.

Richard Nielsen, 2012

CONTENTS

3 Ask the horse!
Whats wrong with ratings?

If not ratings, then what?
Defining quality in public broadcasting

Introduction

This is a book about public service broadcasting, and in particular about a crisis facing Canadas public broadcaster, CBC/Radio-Canada. Familiar to generations of Canadians as the mother corp, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has been debilitated by radical bloodletting at the hands of successive federal governments. Between 1985 and 2010, while total federal government expenditures rose by about fifty percent, funding for the CBC was slashed by nearly two-thirds. In the decade of the 1990s alone, the corporation lost a third of its public funding and personnel. Whether this took place in the cause of deficit-reduction, or for ideological reasons, or simply through neglect, is by now a moot point. Today, the corporation faces new fiscal problems that it simply cannot survive. It has become clear that if Canada is to retain a public broadcaster worthy of the name, the CBC will have to be fundamentally reformed, and soon. Previous attempts by corporation managers to adapt the service to shrinking revenues have failed. Current plans to reintroduce advertising on radio would be a disaster. Something different is needed.

The CBC currently operates on a budget of about $1.5 billion a year, roughly two-thirds of which comes from a federal subsidy (its Parliamentary appropriation), and the rest from advertising on its television services and website, cable pass-through fees, and other private sources. With that revenue it supplies Canada with two trans-continental television networks (one in each official language); five cable specialty channels including all-news services in French and English; extensive websites in both languages, including a digital music service with 40 music streams; four continent-spanning terrestrial radio networks in French and English, and channels on the Sirius satellite service. In the north, the CBC broadcasts in six native languages on both radio and television. Until mid-2012 it also maintained a radio service aimed at overseas audiences, Radio-Canada International. All of this involves staffing and maintenance of studio facilities in most major urban centres along with the 1,200 associated transmitters. As of this writing, CBC employs 7,285 full-time staff, 456 temporary full-time staff, and 979 contractees.

To put the $1 billion CBC subsidy in perspective: it is less than eight percent of total revenues for television in Canada and less than twelve percent of total public expenditures on culture (Savage 275) .

MOMENT OF TRUTH

There are several possible scenarios for the imminent collapse and possible restructuring of the CBC, all of them involving a drop in already precarious revenues below sustainable levels. The most obvious possibility is a simple decision by the federal cabinet to impose further substantial cuts to the public broadcasters Parliamentary appropriation, something it could do at any time. But the most likely is this: sometime during the next two years it is probable that the CBC will lose the bidding contest for the rights to broadcast NHL hockey to one of the countrys wealthy commercial television networks. When that happens, the corporation will face an unprecedented financial crisis, because Hockey Night in Canada , a CBC television mainstay since 1952, provides more than forty percent of total advertising revenue and accounts for roughly 350 hours of prime time broadcasting, a Canadian-content chasm that will have to be filled.

Normally, faced with a crippling financial shortfall of this kind, the obvious response would be to turn to the federal government for emergency assistance. Pleading their case, CBC executives would point to the pitifully low current subsidy, and the historic underfunding of public service media in this country. Both Liberal and Conservative governments have in the past been responsible for the starvation-level financing that afflicts the public broadcaster, but the present Conservative regime in Ottawa is less sympathetic to the idea of public broadcasting than any federal administration in memory. Prominent members of the party, including the Prime Minister, are on record as favouring privatization of the CBC, or at a minimum, some of its functions Radio 2 being a preferred target, along with English-language over-the-air television service. There is every reason to expect that the government will use the financial crisis as a reason to radically alter the character of the CBC, either through direct intervention in the form of privatization, or a continuation of the kind of benign neglect that has taken the corporation to the brink opponents of public broadcasting need only stand by and watch it twist in the wind to see their goal realized.