Guest Columnist Richard Stursberg
November 13, 2024
When you’re right, you’re right. And if you were right a long time ago, you’re vindicated.
It’s possible that former CBC executive Richard Stursberg is feeling just that, 13 years after leaving the public broadcaster where he served as the head of English language services from 2005 to 2011.
At the CBC, Stursberg’s calling card was that “audiences matter.” His single minded mission was to capture for the public broadcaster, especially in English language television, an audience commensurate with its role as Canada’s leading cultural organization (and its billion dollar Parliamentary funding).
To outside observers, he seemed to be at odds with everyone and not really minding. First there was the lockout of CBC staff in 2005. Then he grabbed the rest of the organization by the scruff of the neck and piloted a revolution in the CBC’s entertainment programming, for example embracing audience-pleasing reality television (remember Battle of the Blades?).
With an all-Canadian line-up, in five years Stursberg moved the needle significantly in CBC’s share of the national television market, closing the gap with CTV and its prime time schedule of hit US shows. Then he fell out with his new boss, CBC President Hubert Lacroix. And so on: read all about it here in his memoir, The Tower of Babble, ranked by the Globe and Mail as one of the best books of 2012.
Along the way, he made some friends, allies and enemies. The enemies he cheekily dubbed “The Constituency,” an assortment of CBC traditionalists and media watchers who might also have been described as “those who rip Richard in public.”
After he left, the CBC lost NHL hockey rights to Rogers and with it a whole lot of eyeballs and connection with Canadian audiences. Netflix ate up market share for Canadian entertainment television. And then Google Search and Facebook devoured the digital ad market. Stursberg tells more of that story in another prize winner, his 2019 book, The Tangled Garden. The job of keeping CBC relevant today is twice as hard as it used to be.
These days Stursberg continues to have his fingers in different cultural pies. He is outspoken on his support for major reforms to the definition of Canadian content, favouring a “cultural theme” test of distinctive Canadian programming over the traditional headcount of Canadian talent.
As a past reinventor of the public broadcaster, it’s his 2024 views on the reinventing the CBC that are worth soliciting in its hour of crisis. As conservative commentator Harrison Lowman recently projected, “CBC, your days are numbered.”
MediaPolicy asked Stursberg, what is to be done? This guest column, his advice to incoming CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard, is his response.
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Advice to the new President of the CBC, Marie-Philippe Bouchard
By Richard Stursberg
Welcome to the job.
Given your deep knowledge of public broadcasting you are ideally placed to do well, but you will have significant challenges. Here is some unsolicited advice on how you can succeed from one who also believes in the importance of the CBC/Radio-Canada.
The Structure of the Corporation
First, your most important challenge will be English television. It is the central problem, not because Pierre Poilievre wants to shut it down, but because it has fallen to its lowest audience share ever. Put bluntly, with the exception of the recent Olympic Games, almost nobody is watching it. There are very few viewers for any of its shows, including news. Your presidency will succeed or fail depending on whether you can solve the problem of English television.
Second, it is important to understand the CBC is not a normal corporation and lacks a normal Board. It cannot decide its own fate. The overall strategy of the corporation has to be approved by the CRTC; and it cannot raise capital without the agreement of the Treasury Board. It lacks many of the powers of a normal corporation. This makes change very difficult. To succeed you will have to have the Minister of Heritage and the Prime Minister on-side for whatever you plan to do.
Should English TV be Fixed?
The Environment
The TV landscape in English Canada is in serious difficulty. The big conventional networks — CTV and Global — the major private sources of local and national news, have been shedding staff for over ten years and losing money. Their ability to commission Canadian drama and comedy is compromised. They are spending less and — for financial reasons — what they are doing is increasingly American in look and feel.
The cable industry has been losing customers for many years and with them, the fees that they pay to specialty channels. As a result, they too are significantly cutting back their staff and ability to commission Canadian shows.
The groups that own the vast majority of the conventional and specialty broadcasters are in trouble. Corus, the parent of Global, is essentially insolvent. Bell Media, the parent of CTV recently wrote down its broadcast assets by just over $2 billion. It is not hard to imagine that in another five to ten years the English Canadian broadcasting industry will — with the possible exception of the sports channels — no longer exist.
Their loss will mean that CBC TV will be the only broadcaster still producing Canadian drama, news, comedy, public affairs and documentary shows. If we value hearing our own stories told in our own voices, there will likely be nowhere else to see them.
Social fragmentation
The emergence of algorithmically driven social media has encouraged polarization and social fragmentation. Canadians increasingly live inside filter bubbles that act as echo chambers. Disinformation, deep fakes and AI generated falsehoods have compounded the problem. The space of common ground and shared assumptions has grown ever narrower as distrust spreads like a stain across public discourse.
As divisions grow more fractious, it is increasingly important that there be places that can bind the country together and create shared understandings about who we are. They need to provide stories, ideas, news and art that allow Canadians to celebrate, explore, discuss and make sense of their country. And, they need to be true. Truth is an essential component of patriotism.
The CBC is the last great cultural institution in the country that is in a position to do this. It can only do so, however, if its programming is trusted and popular. Unless it reaches big audiences it cannot create the large scale shared space that will provide the counterweight to the endless fragmentation of social media.
One initiative that the CBC might take is to address the challenge of disinformation by creating a news and public affairs portal that hosts not just its content but also that of all the other media in the country that are governed by traditional journalistic standards of truth and fairness. This could include other broadcasters, newspapers, magazines, on-line information sources and bloggers that are committed to ensuring the accuracy of their reporting. The portal’s promise — its brand — would be truth.
The other thing it must do is provide galvanizing programming that speaks directly to Canadians to foster debate and conversation about who we are and want to be. It must take on large projects that transcend the current divisions — whether regional, ideological or social — and provide Canadians a place to laugh, argue and cry. This is very difficult to do.
Can English TV be Fixed?
It will be very difficult. Your most important source of revenue aside from the Parliamentary appropriation is advertising, which has collapsed. At the same time, you are facing brutal competition from the vastly rich, foreign owned, unregulated streamers — Netflix, Apple, Amazon, etc.– who bear none of the costly cultural and social burdens that you do.
Business as usual cannot succeed. To save English TV you will have to develop a radical new plan for its future. The plan needs to reinvent its news and entertainment properties and find significant new sources of revenue. The creation of such a plan will be challenging. Substantive change will be met with criticism from all sides.
How Should the Plan be Developed?
It is important to develop a set of principles to guide the creation of a plan. These might include the following.
1. Focus on what the private broadcasters cannot do. They do not need competition from a publicly supported CBC. They are in tough enough shape as it is.
The space that the privates can no longer occupy is very large. Delivering what they cannot will make you more distinct and give Canadians more reason to view your programming.
2. Focus on serving audiences. The measure of success must always be whether Canadians are watching your shows. They pay for the CBC and can reasonably expect to be offered programs that they will want to watch. There is no public broadcaster without a public.
3. Focus on developing new sources of revenue. Television advertising is dying. Google, Facebook and the other big digital companies have taken it all away. Make a virtue of necessity and get out of ads for your drama, comedy and documentary programming. This proved a very successful strategy for radio and would certainly make CBC TV much more distinctive and attractive to audiences.
You will need to develop a new revenue plan. It can be based on sponsorships, whether from corporations or foundations, charitable giving, levies on the streamers and/or internal reallocations.
4. Ensure that the money you are given by Parliament is allocated fairly and sensibly. The French service receives 44% of the government money. This means that French speakers get a per capita subsidy of $70 per person, while the rest of the country gets $23 per capita. Given your biggest challenge is on the English side, this is both unhelpful and unfair. Only a French President can change it.
5. Do not try to please everybody. You can’t. Instead, focus. Be bold. Take risks. Make big bets.
Some Facts About English Canada’s Media habits
Every week Canadians spend about 20 hours on the Internet and 30 hours watching TV, whether traditional TV or streaming services. These are their most important leisure activities.
CBC English radio continues to perform well. It takes a 16% share of all radio listening and is number one in most markets.
CBC English TV has collapsed over the last ten years. It now has a share of roughly 4% of all TV viewing. Its share is equivalent to that of a specialty channel.
Although CBC likes to brag about the reach of its digital service, it is very lightly consumed. Compared to radio and TV, it performs poorly. Canadians spend about 17 minutes per week on CBC.ca., which is a share of just over 1% of their time spent on the Internet.
What are the Key Elements of a Plan?
Local News
Much of local news has vanished; Canada has entered a local news desert. Most small town and community papers and supper hour newscasts have died. All market research indicates that local news is the most important form of news, since it is about the events that directly affect people’s lives. Where local news dies, electoral participation falls and local corruption increases.
Consistent with the principle of doing what the private sector cannot, CBC should expand its local news presence. Recently (November 12, 2024), it announced a significant expansion of its local news presence.
To strengthen its local news further, it would be wise to leverage its strength in radio and have radio promote to and complement the CBC’s local news sites. This has proven a successful strategy in some very small towns in western Canada and Ontario.
Strengthening local news would also help your national news. There is a powerful correlation between local shows on radio and Canadians’ propensity to listen to the national ones as well.
National and International News
The National needs to be refocussed. Some evenings it draws less than 200,000 viewers at 10:00. CTV typically draws two to three times as many viewers for its late night news at 11:00, although in fairness The National gets many more viewers on Youtube and CBC Gem.
Aside from the Globe and Mail, almost nobody except the CBC has any foreign bureaus or investigative capacity. The National — and the News Network — could be dramatically strengthened by using these resources to shift the focus of their journalism. Instead of “telling” Canadians the news, they should give priority to making sense of it by providing background and context.
By way of example, the recent coverage of the US election focused on it as a horse race. There was much discussion of polls, performance at rallies, the Electoral College, more polls, swing states, etc., all accompanied by hand wringing and pearl clutching. Through it all, there was little or no discussion of what a Trump victory might mean for Canada. What will we do when he starts to deport “illegal” migrants when they appear at our border looking for sanctuary? How will we respond to his demand that we turn on the “tap” and divert our water to the parched southwestern states? How do we respond when he withdraws from NATO? The point of foreign bureaus is to make sense of what is happening in other countries for Canada.
In a similar vein, the coverage of the health care crisis focuses on Canadians’ lack of family doctors, overcrowded emergency rooms, and long waits for elective surgery. It does not explore how Canada might fix its broken system by looking at what other countries get right. Why are France, Sweden, Denmark and Norway doing better than we are?
A promise to answer these kinds of questions and embrace Solutions Journalism would go a long way to restoring the relevance of The National and The News Network.
Entertainment and Documentaries
Like the news, the entertainment and documentary shows are doing poorly, particularly the newest ones. The older shows are holding up better: Heartland (season 18), Murdoch Mysteries (season 18), This Hour Has 22 Minutes (season 45?). The newer shows like Crime Scene Kitchen and My Mum Your Dad (a dating show) draw hardly any viewers.
The problem with the new shows is that they are not unique; they do not fill any unmet need. Similar offerings can be found on lots of specialty channels. They are also not particularly Canadian.
A new strategy must be based on commissioning shows that Canadians cannot get anywhere else. They need to be big, daring, appointment pieces that speak to our unique history, dreams, fears and sense of humour. They need to be about us, our neighbours, fellow citizens and friends. To be relevant, they must be distinctly Canadian and squarely rooted in Canada. The private broadcasters will never do this.
By way of example, one of the CBC’s most successful series was Canada: A People’s History. It drew tremendous interest and precipitated great controversy. For years, it was used in schools and with immigrants to help explain who we are. Surely the time is right for an Indigenous People’s History of Canada. To achieve reconciliation, it is essential that people understand the truth of what happened from the point-of-view of Canada’s original inhabitants. Like its predecessor, it would be a multi-part series that starts with first contact and comes up to the present day. Inevitably, it would be expensive, controversial and — if done properly — galvanizing. Nobody else in Canada has the resources or the expertise to make it.
As for fiction, one can imagine a show about our relationship to the US. The premise is simple. The southwestern states have run out of water (which they have). Canada has more fresh water than any country in the world. The Americans face an existential challenge: they must save Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and southern California. They must have the “tap” turned on even if it means war. Again, no private broadcaster would make this; they could never sell it in the States.
Radio-Canada has been very good at producing extremely popular shows that reflect Quebec in all of its remarkable diversity and energy. Every Sunday night “Tout le monde en parle” (Everybody Is Talking About It) provides a funny, charming and thoughtful window into the cultural, social, political, athletic, musical, business and religious life of Quebec. It is the most successful talk show in Canadian history. It is must see viewing. Why is there no English equivalent?
To do these kinds of things, you may have to restore the financial balance within the English network. Over the last ten years roughly $200 million has been stripped from English TV and radio to finance digital, the worst performing service.
Conclusion
English TV can and should be saved, but it will require difficult and bold restructuring. It will need a plan that is based on making great shows that speak to English Canadians’ desire to see themselves and explore their country in ways that are exciting, beautiful and moving. Whether news, documentaries or entertainment shows, table stakes for programs are — in the current intensely competitive environment — quality, originality and relevance. Nothing less will do.
The plan must also ensure that the necessary resources are in place to make it happen. This is likely to involve very controversial decisions about the reallocation of money across the corporation and within English services. It will also require the development of new sources of funds (the major banks could easily sponsor an Indigenous People’s History of Canada).
Although you have a deep understanding of public broadcasting, I understand that your experience is principally on the French side of the corporation. The English and French markets are very different, both in terms of their levels of competitive intensity and the kinds of conventions that underpin successful TV. It might be a good idea for you to move to English Canada for a few months. Watch all the shows and newscasts, both those that are working and those that are not. Talk to everybody: the employees of the CBC, the heads of the big English media companies, the audience measurement experts, the independent producers, everyone.
Use all that you learn to make a real plan, one with teeth and targets, recognizing that it will take two to three years to bear results. Then, find yourself a media executive who agrees with you and has the skills, contacts, experience and daring to execute it.
Once the plan is ready, make it public. It is essential that Canadians understand and support what you are trying to achieve. Let them see that you understand what they need and want, and that you are daring enough to try and deliver it. Let them hold you accountable for the spending of their money.
Building a public constituency for your plan will provide a powerful counterweight to the forces that will resist change. You will need all the friends you can find.
The plan may also be a good answer for Mr. Poilievre – if elected – and his Heritage minister. You will also need them.
Bon courage.
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