The public enemy
The CBC doesn't serve Canadians. It hurts them
Kevin Libin - September 11, 2006
In our previous edition, I raised a troubling incident at the CBC. It involved an Aug. 4 report by National correspondent Christina Lawand in which two clips--one of a Muslim-Canadian decrying civilian deaths in the Hezbollah war, and another of the prime minister saying he wasn't "preoccupied" with "predictable" opinions of certain groups about his Mideast policies--were taken out of separate contexts and spliced together. Using other TV footage, blogger Stephen Taylor exposed the fact that Harper actually said he was "unconcerned" about support from pro-Israel Jews. Lawand's snip-job made it look like he didn't care about dying babies.
We received letters from outraged Canadians, and I guess the CBC did, too, because on Aug. 21, National host Diana Swain expressed "regret" on behalf of the network for the misrepresentation. That was remarkable enough. But what's most noteworthy about the episode is what it says about our so-called public broadcaster.
Let's admit it. There isn't a thing that's "public" about Canada's public broadcaster except that we all pay for it. For years, CBC defenders have argued that the term somehow meant the network was more responsible to Canadian audiences than other broadcasters. Nonsense. The Crown corporation is as dependent on ad lucre as any corporately run media firm. More importantly, when bloggers and private publications are acting as a check against your biased, erroneous reporting, as in the Lawand incident (or many others), it's hard to sustain the holier-than-thou myth.
The CBC isn't even responsible for delivering anything particularly unique. Ottawa created the CBC in the thirties to serve the "public" interest by providing a balance to U.S. programs dominating the airwaves. Yet, today, we have dozens of TV channels airing Canadian programs. The top Canadian shows--Corner Gas, Canadian Idol, Trailer Park Boys--come from private networks.
Nor is it public in the sense that medicare is--that is, providing free, non-commercial service to Canadians everywhere. The CBC's cable channel, Newsworld, charges viewers a fee (through their cable bills)--even as it feeds on public subsidy. Last year, taxpayers paid for the CBC to set up a subscription-based satellite radio service, Sirius Canada (in partnership with the American firm, Sirius), and for the extra CBC channels that the network's created for it. For the CBC to use its budget--two-thirds of which comes from taxes--to foray into private, for-profit markets is like letting public hospitals divert funding away from treating patients to finance the construction of private, pay-for-service clinics.
Scratch that--it's worse. Medicare is a public monopoly, so those publicly funded clinics wouldn't harm the private sector. By contrast, the CBC uses its budget to fund aggressive attacks in commercial markets against entrepreneurs. When other networks create a hit, the CBC buys the glitziest American show it can find to steal audience share--as it did when it scheduled the U.S. reality show, The One, against CTV's Canadian Idol. On TV, cable and the web, the CBC siphons away hundreds of millions of ad dollars that would otherwise go to private media. And its new satellite radio enterprise competes directly against privately owned XM radio for subscribers, and against terrestrial radio firms for listeners.
Most importantly, a broadcaster can't claim to be public when the public is so clearly uninterested in it. The CBC's audience share is less than five per cent. Worse, studies have shown that public broadcasting viewers are disproportionately affluent. Put simply, taxpayers now subsidize heavily foreign, commercial-grade programming that benefits a handful of well-heeled enthusiasts, all while hurting private businesses. Where, exactly, is the public service in that?
As you'll read in this issue's cover feature, Ottawa has decided this absurd situation must change. Remarkably, it didn't seem to matter which sources reporter Cyril Doll interviewed--whether on the left or the right, not one of them thought the CBC's current situation was tolerable.
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