BLUEPRINT FOR CBC'S FUTURE IS RIGHT BEFORE OUR EARS Antonia Zerbisias – Toronto Star It's not really clear exactly what hauling CBC's top management before the House of Commons Heritage Committee Thursday will accomplish.
By now, president Robert Rabinovitch, TV executive vice-president Richard Stursberg, radio vice-president Jane Chalmers and human resources vice-president George Smith have probably rehearsed every well-massaged answer to every possible question so thoroughly they'll come off looking as the concerned public broadcasters they didn't during the lockout of 5,500 employees.
After all, isn't CBC Newsworld carrying the hearing live?
Just last Monday, during an interview with CBC Radio's Anna Maria Tremonti, Rabinovitch stumbled over the L-word, quickly changing it to "work stoppage" — as if he hadn't had a hand in stopping the work.
But now the lockout is old news. CBC worker bees are back, production is humming, and "Big Ticket'' programs are back on the schedule.
Insiders tell me that radio is getting extra staff, to come up with the material that would have been generated in August and September. Proposals involving travel, which would have been nixed last year, are getting the green light. There's even a special $65,000 "enterprise'' budget for Parliament Hill-based journalism.
But it's not all lovey-dovey.
For example, Stursberg who, upon his appointment last year, demanded that an interview clip he gave CBC-TV News be erased (it wasn't), has recently and repeatedly sought a desk in The National's newsroom.
Two things are worth noting here. First, Stursberg appears to believe he has the authority to revise the news record. Second, he is a political appointee's appointee. He has no business in the newsroom of an organization constantly battling to maintain its independence, or the appearance of its independence, from the party in power.
Stursberg is relevant in this discussion because of a document he drafted in 1996 — a controversial memo that not only proposed a radical restructuring of CBC, but also helped to torpedo the recommendations of a 229-page task force report on broadcasting. Focusing on Canada would have helped the public network find new life in the 21st century, rather than become the limping, lagging political punching bag it is today.
The report recommended, among 94 other things, a funding formula for an overhauled and "overwhelmingly Canadian" CBC that would have taxed Canadians on use of cable TV, satellite systems and even long- distance telephone services.
At the time, Stursberg was president of the Canadian Cable Television Association, the lobby for the cable industry. Although Toronto cable subscribers had swallowed 10 increases in basic rates in the previous 10 years, Stursberg defended consumers by claiming an increase was unacceptable.
Which no doubt it was. But at least the task force had proposed a CBC funding model based on a TV usage formula — not unlike the BBC which depends on what is essentially a tax on every TV set — rather than drawing on general government revenues.
And so, another broadcasting study, like so many before it, and like 2003's Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage's 872 page Our Cultural Sovereignty since, collects dust.
Also last week on Tremonti's The Current, there was a satirical piece mocking all the models that have been proposed for CBC. Among them, the corporate-sponsored type (as if oil companies would finance David Suzuki's attacks), the beg-a-thon (programming interrupted by Jian Ghomeshi singing for his supper), and the pay TV model.
Indeed, there's more CBC model-searching going on than on any degrading "reality'' show.
And it's just as realistic.
The pay model was proposed by Stursberg in his 1996 memo. He wanted to see CBC hived off into specialty channels — for example, news, drama & entertainment, documentary — all, of course, on cable or satellite.
Now, as CBC-TV's vice-president, he talks of business models and references private sector measures as if he were not a public broadcaster at all.
You have to wonder whether Stursberg's ideas will come up at the Heritage Committee hearing this week.
His was essentially the same model proposed by National Post columnist Andrew Coyne last week, also on The Current. It's a view he has espoused on CBC before, and on Global TV, which is owned by the same company that owns his paper.
"I think one of the things that CBC has to look at is moving away from the flagship model into a kind of constellation of different channels — like Newsworld, maybe have an Artsworld, a Sportsworld," he said, pointing to HBO as a model.
Never mind that HBO operates in a market more than 10 times the size of Canada's and does not produce news. Indeed, much of its programming is repeated repeatedly.
As for the rest, (a) there isn't enough money to support such a model (b) we already have privately-owned channels doing arts and (c) we may have more sports channels than we need.
Besides, it wouldn't be public broadcasting anymore if CBC were no longer a common public space operating in the public interest on the public airwaves, now would it?
All this jawing about CBC models, which fails to account for economic, cultural and industrial realities, is nothing much more than ideology and politics at work. For instance, there is a constant cry for CBC to stop bidding for Hockey Night in Canada and let the private sector have it — as if CTV and Global would drop lucrative U.S. simulcasts of Survivor or Desperate Housewives finales during Stanley Cup season.
It will never happen, especially if the Leafs are losers. And to put the playoffs on cable, where many Canadians can't watch them, is, well, unCanadian.
So what to do?
The model for CBC-TV could not be more obvious. It's CBC Radio, which is at times innovative, at other times intelligent and at other times still, irritating. But it's popular. And it works. And nobody, at least hardly anybody, gripes about it.
To give CBC-TV the funding it will need to make this happen will take a huge act of political will. It will also take vision.
Ottawa may be too short-sighted for that. As for CBC-TV's current top management, it must be tough for them to see out of those big black eyes. |