On the face of it, the Conservative Party’s current obsession with the CBC borders on buffoonery.
But it isn’t. It can be seen as a ghoulish attempt to demonize the public broadcaster, to isolate it and, one suspects, an attempt to batter the CBC into compliance. Or one could imagine an even more ominous scenario: the possibility that the current battering is the minority Conservative government’s manner of preparing the public for a major cut to CBC funding and the eventual beleaguerment of the CBC as a fringe broadcaster.
In recent weeks the president of the Conservative Party of Canada wrote to the CBC to question its impartiality because of pollster Frank Graves saying he had advised the Liberals to “invoke a culture war,” and raising the issue of possible bias in the fact that Graves appears on CBC, and the CBC uses the services of his polling firm. Next, CBC was accused of helping to launch a “faith war” and “foment religious division,” thanks to an item on The National about a new book, The Armageddon Factor, by Marci McDonald, which explores ties between the right-wing religious movement and the current government.
Such is the ferocity and frequency of the attacks on the CBC that one might wonder if, along with diminishing the CBC’s status, the side-effect here is to elevate the role of private broadcasters. These are strange times in Canadian broadcasting. Local television has been eviscerated as private broadcasters point to shrinking revenues. CanWest’s broadcasting area is now in the hands of Jim Shaw, CEO of cable giant Shaw Communications Inc.
Thinking about the Conservative Party’s sometimes bizarre obsession with CBC, and in this context, I was reminded of a remark by NDP culture and heritage critic Charlie Angus last year on CTV Newsnet’s Power Play: “This is a government that seems to bend to the will of Jim Shaw and Videotron when it comes to television policy.” Now, not everything that Charlie Angus says or claims is plausible. His recent complaint to CBC Ombudsman about the CBC’s hiring of Conservative pundit Kory Teneycke to do regular commentary, was absurd. But one wonders if he had a point about Shaw’s clout with this government.
This is just speculation – paranoid speculation, even – but how long will it take before the new, Shaw-owned national broadcast giant complains about unfair competition from a subsidized public broadcaster?
Jim Shaw is on record as a harsh critic of the CBC, particularly in the matter of how money from Canadian Television Fund (CTF) was going to underwrite CBC programs. When this issue was at its height in 2007, Shaw pointed out that CBC got about 37 per cent of the relevant “envelope” of CTF funding, while simultaneously getting about $1-billion a year as a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster. In 2008, Shaw wrote directly to the Prime Minister to complain about the CRTC’s review of satellite and broadcast regulations, saying they undermined “innovation, investment and fair competition.”
Whatever might be going on, we should all be clear about one thing – Canada would depreciate as a country if the CBC dwindled into a fringe broadcaster, something like PBS in the United States. All that whining and heckling about CBC’s $1-billion budget amounts to a misrepresentation of CBC’s role in Canada. CBC-TV is a public/private hybrid, earning about 40 per cent of its revenue from commercials. It offers multiple services in two languages on TV and radio. As for the allegations of Liberal bias, they are ridiculous. As Rick Salutin pointed out the other day, any viewer of the CBC-TV news these days sees an elaborate attempt to reflect the views of the right.
The CBC has made many mistakes. Sometimes it admits them. And there is nothing unusual about a public broadcaster being in conflict with the government of the day. The BBC had fierce battles with the Blair government. And one clear thing has emerged from the current controversy over the CBC – the impression given by its haters that it is an anomaly. Public, state-funded broadcasting is no such thing. It is what democracies have, and cherish. The airwaves are owned by us, the public, and public broadcasting has a perfect, logical right to exist.
Public broadcasting should show us the best of our own storytelling, news and entertainment, and do those tasks that private broadcasters balk at. To many Canadians, CBC-TV and radio have traditionally represented an oasis of good taste and common sense in a media world gone mad with celebrity coverage and other forms of mindless frivolity.
God only knows what the Conservative Party is up to in its buffoonish attacks. But we have to ask – who benefits from battering the CBC?
