When in doubt (and you’re on the right) threaten to kill the public broadcasting beast. At least it’s a plan. Or sounds like one.
In the U.K., it’s part of Operation Red Meat: a frantic attempt to pacify ragers in the PM’s party out to sack Boris Johnson. It’s so familiar that the Financial Times simply says, “Auntie’s being put through the wringer again.”
This is a hopeless tactic in the U.K., and within hours the minister involved backed off. Would you want to become known as the destroyer of the source for Doctor Who? Even people who say they don’t want to pay for BBC News feel deprived if they’re cut off from it and drop their objections. There have been experiments proving it. But the hardcore still hate the BBC, so you toss them some verbal red meat hoping they’ll forget they were about to bite off a haunch of Boris.
Canada is entirely different, yet somehow similar. Nobody watches CBC News, or at least, fewer than any other network. Yet Canadians still support it — provided, it seems, they don’t have to watch the thing. I’d swear I’ve seen surveys proving this too, but I admit I’ve been unable to find them. In that case, it falls in the category of unshakable myth.
So when Erin O’Toole was running for Conservative leader and courting the ragers (a.k.a. the base) he swore he’d “defund” (a strange word to borrow from Black Lives Matter) the CBC. He meant CBC Television and digital. He exempted the French version, Radio-Canada, which francophones actually watch, along with English radio, which has passionately devoted followers. They are an aging demographic, so O’Toole may’ve decided to outlast them rather than outrage them.
By last summer’s election, he’d dialed that back to “reviewing” the CBC.
What makes these proclamations even hoarier is that broadcasting itself is dwindling to nothingness before our eyes (and ears). This month, in a course on Canadian media that I teach, a student said she’d heard about a time when people used to “tune in” at a particular hour to catch a program they’re interested in, rather than stream it at their leisure. If, like me, you still have cable, you feel yourself turning into a museum object in real time.
Cord-cutting is expanding just behind the rate of some new COVID variant. Cable is down to about 50% of households, and you can guess which half. Broadcasting is almost as dead as, well, broadcasting, which began as an agricultural term for sowing seeds by striding through a field and flinging seeds in as wide an arc as possible — like Jean-Francois Millet’s heroic 1850 painting, “The Sower.”
What happens to public broadcasters when there’s no more broadcasting? Good question, nobody really knows. Probably they become content providers like others, via whatever distribution, like streaming, there is.
There’s no great need for former public broadcasters to make drama or entertainment — there’s already a surfeit. The interesting question is news.
News is essential for democracy, and it’s expensive to produce. I’m talking about news news, not blabby opinion, like this here that I’m doing. The funding model for the past century was basically newspapers through ad revenues. That model is dead, with some gargantuan exceptions like the New York Times. Could public bodies akin to CBC/BBC play a role? I’d say the CBC already is. Its digital news operations — especially its straight articles, much like newspapers run — have found an audience among the young, who may have never heard of The National or watched its vaunted anchors.
Perhaps because the old guard at the top didn’t understand the new media, they let younger people develop it, who may’ve moved intriguingly toward a new model, but require proper funding to go farther. I’ve been trying to avoid the terms “socialism” or “public funding,” but my will is fading.
We may be in for debates much like those of the 1920s and ’30s, which led to… the CBC and BBC.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
