BROADCASTER DISASTER
by Daren Foster

***Newsflash: Canada's private broadcasters in trouble! No details at 11 as all local programming has been axed.***

A funny thing happened on the way to the economic apocalypse.

Along with the country’s manufacturing base, Canada’s public and private television broadcasters teetered toward the brink of extinction. Fear and outrage followed, provoking loud calls for swift government action and intervention. At least for the manufacturing base. For the broadcasters? Not so much. Canada has broadcasters?

Well yes, yes we do and to be fair, this isn’t the first time our broadcasters have sent up S.O.S. flares. In fact, it’s been a fairly regular occurrence throughout the years and the more things change, it seems, the more it all stays the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose as the Radio-Canada audience would put it.

For those of you keeping score at home, Canada’s main and largest public broadcaster is the CBC. It is a publicly funded, crown corporation, not government run entity as many of its detractors claim when they go around screeching Communists!, Welfare Bums!, Liberal Party Propagandists! In return for receiving taxpayer money to run its TV and radio operations, the CBC is mandated to pursue a less ratings-oriented direction, offering up instead regional programming and giving access to a wider cross-section of voices than audiences would find on more advertising-driven outlets. The very non-commercial nature of such a mandate dictates that the CBC be adequately funded from the public trough. However, this has not been the case, as politicians both red and blue have been happily slicing and dicing away for the better part of the twenty-five years.

On the flipside of the spectrum are Canada’s private broadcasters of which there are.. let’s see now, there used to be.. 3? But after an orgy of consolidation and takeovers under the ‘synergy’ banner over the past decade, only 2 remain standing if a little wobbly. Canwest Global and CTVglobemedia receive no government money except the annual funding for producing Canadian programming. And the tax breaks that come also from producing Canadian programming. Aside from that, the private broadcasters have to rely exclusively on the free market mechanism of garnering advertising revenue. Well, not exactly free market, considering that since 1972 they have been allowed to intercept signals coming from the U.S. These simulcasts air the same show at the same time as an American network but contain Canadian commercials. Outside of all of this, Canada’s private broadcasters are completely on their own.

To be fair, the right to simulcast has come at a price. In return for this privilege, the private broadcasters are compelled to plow some of the profits back into indigenous programming or so-called Canadian content and they do, to the tune of nearly $620 million last year. Combine that with $775.2 million they spent to acquire the rights to American shows and it is an economic burden that’s heavy to bear. A burden the private broadcasters have shouldered with nary a peep or complaint to the regulatory body that oversees such matters, demanding a rollback to their Cancon commitments, year in and year out. Not a peep.

At this point, I should draw a distinction between the two private broadcasters. CTV, the television arm of the CTVglobemedia conglomerate, emerged as Canada’s first private network broadcaster in the early-to-mid 1960s. While its contribution to the Canadian television landscape has been spotty, there is a sense it has at least attempted to adhere to the spirit of its requirements. The results haven’t always been pretty (check out a post-Get Smart Don Adams in Check It Out to see what I mean) but overall one can’t complain too loudly about their conduct. They did what many said couldn’t be done and produced a successful Canadian sitcom, Corner Gas. They plucked the DeGrassi franchise from a disinterested CBC and made a hit of it. Recently, CTV has unlocked the secret of developing bland police procedurals that U.S. networks seem to crave, first with Flashpoint and then The Listener. The rules never stipulated that Cancon had to be creatively groundbreaking.

The other private broadcaster of note, Canwest Global has a much less stellar track record of bringing Canadian dramatic programming to air. Like CTV, Canwest’s beginnings were full of stops and starts until the iconic Izzy Asper gained control in the mid-70s and Global TV became the nation’s third “network” although it never fully gained network status until 1997. A technicality, I’m sure, and in no way a ploy to try and avoid regulations that other actual networks had to comply with. In its 30+ years of existence as a broadcaster, Canwest’s lone programming triumph is as the original home for SCTV. Everything else? Mere television flotsam and jetsam, half-hearted half-measures to keep government regulators satisfied if not happy.

Canwest’s real achievement has occurred in the last decade as a second generation of Aspers assumed control of the company and went on a spending and swapping spree buying newspapers, radio and TV stations, and digital networks while managing to skirt media concentration rules in the process. CTV got into the act after it was bought up by BCE and the two behemoths proceeded to consume everything in sight until there was very little left on the table. Synergy, they called it, and all done in preparation for the changes the internet was going to inflict on the media landscape. No one was quite sure what kind of changes they would face but owning everything seemed like the best strategy to deal with it.

And they waited. And they waited, restructuring and tinkering as they waited. And waited some more, all the while watching their newspaper readership and basic network viewership dwindle. When the economic tsunami rolled in last year, the private broadcasters reported a staggering 93% drop in profits from the previous year and did what every business worth its salt was doing: ran to the government for help. They received a surprisingly (or not, depending how you look at) sympathetic hearing from the very same government that was simultaneously refusing to advance the CBC money to help it weather the economic storm, forcing it to shed 800 employees as a start.

The private broadcasters’ first demand from the government was to allow them to extort money from the cable and satellite companies for the privilege of showing the network’s over-the-air offerings. Understand here what they’re asking. They want to charge us extra money to watch programming consisting of almost entirely all American fare that we would be able to watch at no additional cost directly from the U.S. if the broadcasters weren’t able to pirate the signals and call it simulcasting.

That’s right. We’re trapped and are now being asked to pay extra for being in prison!

Here’s what I think should happen if this transpires. The cable and satellite providers should tell the private broadcasters to go fuck themselves and not show any of their programs that come with this new price tag. Their disappearance from the dial would scarcely be missed. CTV might create a slight void as it’s carved out a faint but perceptible identity. Canwest Global’s absence wouldn’t leave behind even so much as a ripple.

If the private broadcasters think that, like GM or AIG, they’re too big to fail, they should think again. Canadians would be better off without them as they now stand. I say let `em die, sell their assets and give all the local stations they gobbled up back to the communities from which they sprang and let truly civic-minded professionals figure out how television broadcasting will fit into the post-television world. Let’s dance on the graves of the private broadcasters and turn our attention to building much more vital public broadcasters.

Don’t get me wrong on this. Despite living in downtown Toronto and sipping on the occasional latte and eating sushi on a regular basis, I’m no slavish, downtown Toronto, latte sipping, sushi eating CBC lover. I’m sure it’s an organization top heavy with management that doesn’t always spend its allotted funds wisely blah, blah, blah. But I do think it does remarkably well considering it operates on a fraction of the budget that most other developed countries spend on their public broadcasting. And no, the CBC’s track record on non-news and information programming is sketchy at best, sketchy being a double entrendre as the network has excelled in the past with sketch comedies like The Kids in the Hall and This Hour Has 22 Minutes and as for the rest? Sketchy, is what I’m saying. King of Kensington meet Check It Out. There are times after watching a CBC offering that makes you wonder if those in charge of creating and developing dramatic programming at the network actually ever watch much TV themselves.

Still, I’d much rather put my lot in with a revamped and financially reinvigorated public broadcaster than with private entities that seem to view broadcasting as little more than a license to print money. Now it seems that well has dried up and we should stand firm in not allowing them to dig for new sources of water. (Please excuse my analogy.) Let’s seize the opportunity to put them out of our misery.