May 25, 2024
This week MediaPolicy continued its practice of ripping and rewriting Doug Shapiro’s blog on the future of premium entertainment programming.
The former television executive’s prediction is that Netflix’s direct-to-consumer disruption of popular television will soon —much sooner than he previously predicted— be followed by the next wave, the YouTuber “self-broadcasting” disruption.
You can read the MediaPolicy post here.
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Last month Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge announced her CBC re-think panel. We will no doubt have to wait a few months to hear what the panelists have rethought. They carry on their work in the shade of an election of a Pierre Poilievre government that will mark the end of nearly a century of English-Canadian public broadcasting.
When St.-Onge made her roster of experts public, MediaPolicy remarked upon the diversity of backgrounds, but mostly the deep experience in media and public broadcasting. The noteworthy outsider is David Skok, CEO of the online business news outlet The Logic.
The panel is not a political car rally, nor is it particularly representative of the Canadian population. The appointees are mostly technocrats and industry insiders. And, as Saskatchewan’s Peter Menzies points out, they mostly hail from the spiky-fenced Laurentian redoubt of central Canada.
Will the panel be hobbled by its own industry expertise? Menzies throws out a dare to the panel: surprise me.
Senator Andrew Cardozo also wants to widen the CBC discussion. On May 21st he rose on the Senate floor to kick off what he hopes will be a robust debate. Having followed the Senate’s 2022 deliberations over the Online Streaming Act, I have come around to taking the upper chamber very seriously as the forum for sober second thought of Canadian legislation. Given the low-brow political theatre to which MPs have descended, the Senators now render themselves indispensable.
On the CBC debate, Cardozo has invoked what the Parliamentary manual calls “an inquiry.” That means he gave a speech and invited other Senators to do the same. Fingers crossed.
Cardozo is pro-CBC. His argument is that we still need a national media institution that provides a place to share Canadian community and Canadian content that contributes to our national narrative. Far from the CBC being eclipsed by the explosion of a global media universe, Cardozo says that while the Internet may have provided us with boundless alternatives to the $1.4 billion public broadcaster it has also fragmented and segregated us into mini-communities more than ever.
He also puts out some of the more obvious questions about what Canada looks like without an English-language CBC.
For instance, how will Canadian democracy survive in the absence of CBC News and —keeping in mind Poilievre’s other promises to kill federal funding of journalism as well as repeal Bill C-11— the possible collapse of mainstream news media?
And, post-defunding, will English Canadian voters tolerate the continued funding of French-language Radio-Canada ?
And what does a rethought CBC look like anyway? As Cardozo points out, every Canadian imagines their own CBC or at the very least has an opinion on which CBC services ought to walk the plank:
As I wind up — I know you’re waiting for those words — here are a few ideas: divest CBC Radio 2 and return the licences to the CRTC; drastically increase programming that advances dialogue, such as “Tout le monde en parle” and “Cross Country Checkup,” so that Canadians can hear each other and from each other; include at least one news story — a national and regional newscast — about local news in various areas in the country; increase the ability for all political parties and supporters to have substantial and unfiltered airtime; increase the number of small‑town bureaus, whether using small studios or part-time stringers; consider the world as the oyster, with world-class programming that brings in the best and brightest from around the world to talk about topical issues, and do this a lot more — programming that will be sought the world over; lastly, develop a five-year digitization plan to make all programming digital and, importantly, create programming that will be primarily for the digital world.
The Senator wrapped up with a lyric so stirring it might have made it onto rock-and-roller Kim Mitchell’s old radio program “damn, I wish I wrote that”:
I want to close with one thought: In today’s world — the hyper-information world; the social media world; an increasingly polarized world, both internally in many countries and between countries — we need to seek ways to bring people together. Cancelling the CBC is easy. Cancel culture is easy. Cancelling our culture is easy. I challenge you, colleagues, to focus on putting forward new and bold ideas that will help build up our country in the new hyper-information age that we live in and face in the years ahead.
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Senator Andrew Cardozo
Getting back to Senator Cardozo’s thoughts about ‘cancelling the CBC…’
The journalism put out by any Canadian newsroom can result in actual cancellations. Irate readers cancel their subscriptions all of the time. Perhaps that’s a clue to appreciating the popularity of the “defund the CBC” thing: if you can’t cancel your free CBC newsfeed, maybe you and your friends can cancel the newsroom itself. I think Cardozo has it right about the defunders. This is their cancel culture: nobody should listen to what they don’t like.
News organizations including CBC News are never going to be the perfect newsroom to each Canadian. There are just too many news stories to cover, too much reporting to be done, too many taboos to be picked at, and too many mistakes to be made. All on deadline.
If ever there was a demonstration of this basic conundrum of news journalism, it’s CBC’s coverage of the post-October 7th Gaza Conflict.
On May 16th an anonymous CBC news producer, who recently walked away from her temporary stint with the public broadcaster, published her side of what she describes as the newsroom’s suppression of legitimate journalism covering the Palestinian narrative. It’s a first-person piece: there are no rebuttals from the suppressors.
The next day, CBC News Editor in Chief Brodie Fenlon responded here.
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