The federal broadcasting regulator has made a titanic mistake in ruling that CBC must phase out its showing of foreign movies in prime time, the public broadcasting company said yesterday.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission renewed CBC's licences on Thursday but delivered a multipronged attack on the public broadcaster. Among the conditions the CRTC laid down for renewing the licences was that after 2003, CBC can no longer show blockbuster foreign films in prime time.
The CRTC specifically singled out the movie Titanic in its written decision as a film to which CBC holds the rights.
There's only one problem: CBC does not hold the rights to Titanic. CTV Inc. and privately held network TVA Group Inc. co-own the English and French rights respectively to one of the biggest blockbuster movies in history.
"At the public hearing, various intervenors expressed concern about CBC television recently showing American feature films in prime time. Some examples are Titanic, Forrest Gump, Schindler's List, The Client, and The Pelican Brief," the CRTC ruling said.
CBC said yesterday the federal broadcasting regulator should check its facts before going public with information.
Sheila Gervais, CBC's director of public relations, said the issue of CBC owning the rights to Titanic became a concern in Ottawa after it was raised in public hearings earlier this year by certain private broadcasters, even though the corporation didn't own the rights. The film, she said, stuck in people's minds and worked against the network as it argued that it should retain the right to show foreign films in prime time.
"As far as I am concerned, it all started with Titanic and everyone glommed on to it," she said.
"The CRTC ingested the position of the private sector that we were buying all these big movies. We don't have a big lobby, and sometimes things that get into the public record become [part of the]lexicon."
Indeed, the Canadian Press reported as fact yesterday that CBC won the bidding war for Titanic.
The CRTC admitted yesterday that it made a mistake in publishing that CBC bought the rights to Titanic, but said that did not play into its decision to change the rules.
"They are right; we made a mistake," CRTC spokesman Denis Carmel said.
But he defended the CRTC's ruling that CBC should phase out blockbuster foreign films.
"The question is whether it should it be the role of the public broadcaster to air foreign feature films and jack up the price of the bidding war in the process," he said. "What triggered this was when they bought the rights of Forrest Gump and aired it without advertising. The private guys said we can't compete with that and we don't think it is proper taxpayers' money is spent on that."
The CRTC's decision, CBC said, will cost it $250-million over the seven-year term of its licence. The corporation will not only lose revenue generated from advertising during the airing of foreign films, but it will have to replace those movies with more expensive made-in-Canada productions that will potentially bring in less advertising revenue.
A number of the private broadcasters who stand to gain from the CRTC's decision to ban foreign films on CBC deferred comment yesterday to the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. Officials at CAB were unavailable.
Kevin Shea, president of the Global Television Network unit, said that although his network is not a big buyer of foreign productions, he doesn't believe the ban will have a big impact on the pricing of foreign films.
"One might argue there is one less buyer with fairly deep pockets in the market, but the distributors have prices in mind and if they don't get their price, they don't sell it or they will sell it to pay or specialty TV. The number of buyers in the market is only one factor."
In addition to ordering CBC to stop showing blockbuster films, the CRTC told the corporation to reduce its coverage of professional sports, expand regional news and entertainment coverage and devote more time to children's and arts programming in French.
CBC president Robert Rabinovitch indicated that the corporation will challenge the conditions or somehow work around them.