Drawing on over three decades of experience, one of Canada's leading literary journalists asks the question: Do we want a public broadcaster? In Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Service (Linda Leith Publishing, 2013) Wade Rowland points to years of chronic underfunding and the potential loss of broadcast rights for Hockey Night in Canada as signals that it's time for reform. Rowland argues that not since the Great Depression has there been such opportunity for public service broadcasting in Canada to compete on the world stage. But, he says, this will require radical change.
We asked Wade Rowland to talk about the CBC of his youth, today's younger audience demographic, and what vision he holds for the CBC of the future.
Julie Wilson: Tell us about your earliest memories of the CBC. How has a national broadcaster kept you connected to your regional roots and national identity?
Wade Rowland: In my childhood homes in Regina and Winnipeg, the CBC was always on the radio. More than any other influence, it shaped my sense of what it means to be Canadian. Listening to network broadcasts gave you the feeling that you were part of a larger, transcontinental audience that shared some essential values. It has always been the role of public broadcasting to foster that kind of value consensus in the nation, and as the country continues to be more and more strongly characterized by multiculturalism, the role is more important than ever.
My friend Richard Nielsen, one of the country’s most experienced television producers, describes the audience for broadcasting as a congregation, as opposed to the atomized, individual users of digital media found on the Internet. I think that’s a good description and it suggests that at some fundamental level we are “singing from the same hymn book” when we’re engaged as an audience. That communal experience is important to nation-building.
It's also important in these days of corporate, monopoly broadcasting that values and aspirations beyond the narrow populist, consumer-friendly template used by commercial media be represented somewhere within the media ecology. Only a public broadcaster is in a position to challenge prevailing mores and ideas and expose inconvenient truths, because its sole purpose is to serve its viewers and listeners, rather than advertisers.
JW: You understand the practicalities of supporting measures that entice, say, a younger audience. It's more the way that metrics are used to situate CBC within the commercial market that you take issue with, is that right?
WR: I would strongly recommend to anyone who wants to understand the economics of the broadcast industry that they have a look at the book, or essays on the subject I’ve posted at my website, www.waderowland.com. But in a nutshell: CBC television is not a true public broadcaster because it relies for about half its income on television advertising (as opposed to government subsidy or some other form of public financing). The problem with depending on advertising revenue is that it situates the broadcaster in the commercial TV market in which the commodity being produced is not programs, but audiences.
In other words, programs and their content are incidental to the real market transaction, with the sale of audiences to advertisers. In this market, the nature of program content is irrelevant, so long as it produces the right ratings numbers for the advertisers.
In commercial broadcasting, value is judged according to how well a program serves its advertisers. This is a formula balancing size, demographics, and cost. The highest quality, most desirable audience-product in this market is the one that produces the highest numbers of the right demographic at the lowest cost. This of course places continuous downward pressure on program expenditures—hence the shift away from expensive drama and documentaries to cheaper, junk current affairs and reality programs. In news it means a shift from expensive enterprise reporting and documentaries to inflammatory commentary and panel confrontations. I call this the Gresham’s Law of commercial media—over time, the bad drives out the good.
JW: There's an entire generation of youth (and not much older) who don't pay much attention to media outside of YouTube and grab a lot, if not most, news and culture items from social media. It's a different sense of both broadcasting and public. What role does the CBC play for them?
WR: Once again, you’ve raised a very complex issue! YouTube and social media in general are of course very powerful and can be tremendously useful as disseminators of information and for the maintaining of contacts with family and community. The problem is that there is no curatorial process involved, so that YouTube is to public broadcasting what a flea market is to a museum or art gallery, or what a used book store is to a university library. Both are fun, and both perform useful functions—but we’d be crazy to get rid of the curated resources.
As well, there is reason to believe (although the academic jury is still out on this) that social media, in the almost infinite diversity of their offerings, reinforce processes of individuation and atomization in society, which leads to alienation and conflict. In other words, some worry that they weaken social cohesion, that they move us toward a situation where, in Yeats’ words “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…”. Of course, others argue just the opposite, but I think the weight of evidence is building on the side of alienation. Research shows that genuine community and close personal contact are what makes people happy.
Incidentally, I think there is a role for the public broadcaster in performing curatorial functions in the digital world, as I describe in Saving the CBC.
JW: What do you think could be the CBC's soonest saving grace?
WR: I think we have reached the stage where nothing but a major overhaul of the broadcasting industry is required. We need new legislation to clearly separate the roles of commercial media and public service media, and to ensure that each is adequately supported.
Most Canadians are unaware that their taxes are supporting subsidies to private media giants like Bell and Rogers that match the public subsidy given each year to the CBC (about $1 billion). What I suggest in Saving the CBC is that CBC get out of commercial sponsorship on TV (and withdraw its request to the CRTC for ads on Radio 2), and turn that entire market over to the private industry. In return, we should expect a transfer of some or all of those massive private broadcasting subsidies to the public broadcaster.
I also suggest that CBC get out of professional sports, including hockey, and turn that over to the private networks. They can do the job just as well; fans would miss nothing. The windfall in advertising and subscription revenues this would mean for the private sector would be partially clawed back to further boost the CBC subsidy.
The Broadcasting Act that governs the nation’s broadcast ecology is more than 20 years old. In that time, absolutely everything in media has changed. Parliament needs to make an urgent priority of bringing the Act up to date. If things are left to drift any further, we are very likely to lose the CBC in any recognizable form, as it merges further into the commercial markets and eventual privatization.
JW: You see this reform as an opportunity for the CBC to compete on the world stage. Does that optimism necessitate a visionary leader at the helm of the CBC?
WR: The media world of today is characterized by a corporate-sponsored move to globalization—movies and TV are being made more and more to serve international rather than national or regional markets. A good example of this is the current Iron Man Hollywood blockbuster, which is versioned specifically for the world’s biggest media market—China. Anything that might offend Chinese censors has been removed; special China-friendly scenes have been included.
When Canadian commercial networks like CTV and Global produce “Canadian content” drama (and they do so only under regulatory duress, and with the carrot of government subsidies), their programs are carefully deigned to have an international look and feel, so that they will sell outside the (relatively small) Canadian market.
Only a publicly-financed public broadcaster can afford to buck this trend, and make programs that are truly Canadian in that they reflect the unique values, interests, and aspirations of this country and its people. Those kinds of programs, if well made, will find an international market on their own terms, and represent Canada as it truly is, rather than as a generic setting for some derivative, focus-grouped script calculated to maximize advertising revenue.
For most of its long and sometimes illustrious history, the CBC was led by people who understood and were committed to the purposes of public broadcasting. It is only in recent decades that leadership has been delegated to politically pliable accounting specialists who could be relied upon to quietly oversee the decimation of the corporation’s human and financial resources. Between 1985 and 2010, while total federal spending rose by 50%, public funding to the CBC was slashed by nearly two-thirds. And in 2011, the government imposed a further 15% reduction in funding over three years.
And now, as I detail in the book, the corporation is likely to lose the bidding war for NHL hockey rights to the enormously wealthy commercial networks. That’s half its advertising revenue, and about 400 hours of “Canadian content” programming.
I, along with a lot of other knowledgeable people inside and outside the corporation, think that this current financial crisis is likely to be terminal, unless Parliament intervenes in something along the lines of the way I’ve suggested.
Yes, we need leadership, both CBC corporate and political, to get this done. Both are available; they need to be mobilized. To help, people should be writing letters and signing petitions.
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About Wade Rowland: Ranked among Canada's leading literary journalists, Wade Rowland has had produced more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from television journalism, organized crime and international environmental law to his current concerns, which include communications technology, the philosophy of science and the sources of human values. Dr. Rowland teaches in the Department Communication Studies at York University. Visit him at www.waderowland.com.