Fixing English-Canadian TV
by Natalie Flemme, media analyst
July 12, 2006
As recent articles on this site have shown, English-Canadian television is in sad shape. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation loses money making "Canadian" programs that Canadians don't want to watch, while private broadcasters rake in huge revenues by running American programs and blacking out the American channels on cable television so that their broadcasts replace the broadcasts of the people who made the shows in the first place. Private broadcasters make only token efforts to produce Canadian programs in English, so they end up with low, low programming costs and big, big revenues, thanks to the willingness of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to protect them from competition.
Recently private broadcasters have even been allowed to act in restraint of trade. Rogers and CTV broadcast the 2006 World Cup jointly, as they will the 2010 Olympics. Just another step in the plan to keep the CBC (already barred from showing baseball) from making a buck. In other words, the CRTC has decided that part of the taxpayers' duty is to subsidize private broadcasting.
In Canada there are continual calls for the CBC to be shut down. On the face of it, that's not a bad idea. The CBC is supposed to promote Canadian culture but can't even manage to be part of it. But what about private broadcasting? What function does it serve?
The answer to that one is easy – it serves the function of letting friends of influential people make easy money. Hmm – what would happen if we changed this script? What if we got public and broadcasters to swap roles?
That's right – why not rededicate the English CBC as a purveyor of popular American programming and rededicate English private broadcasters as producers of "predominantly and distinctively Canadian" programs, as the Broadcasting Act now requires of the CBC? In fact, there is every reason to do this. First of all, the English CBC would become a profitable corporation and would no longer need subsidies from government. Taxes could be reduced, leaving consumers with more disposable income. This income could then be put to productive use instead of being used to make sure Bell Globemedia. ChumCity, CanWest, and Rogers Communications have no competition.
Secondly, everyone claims that private industry is more productive than government, so why not give it the job of producing new, non-American programs? English-Canadian culture would suddenly be vibrant and creative, right? I don't know why Stephen Harper hasn't thought of this before.
There would be some structural changes, of course. The CBC would have a few more channels, while the private broadcasters would have a lot fewer. Unfortunately, the current mass suicide of the Liberal Party of Canada means that Ben Mulroney would still have a job for a while, only in public broadcasting this time. But you can't have everything, or so they say.
In fact, English-Canadian private broadcasters have been having everything their own way for quite some time. Apart from being protected from competition, they're also not held to exacting standards. Remember when OmniTV wasn't allowed to broadcast in English, let alone show American programs? That requirement disappeared after Rogers took over. Having to work for a living for a change would be good for the characters of private broadcasters.
Of course, the CBC would continue to have no competition, so its people's characters wouldn't improve any. But at least we'd be able to watch entertainment programs on CBC without cringing in embarrassment. The benefits just keep on coming.
Fixing English-Canadian TV © John FitzGerald, 2006
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