National Post (National Edition)
A clash of mediocrity, cluelessness
As a subsidized CBC opinion-maker, you ask, what do I think of the CBC’s recent foray into subsidized opinion-making? Well, naturally, I’m torn.
On the one hand, the case for forcing the taxpayer to foot the bill for my double lattes seems to me airtight. On the other hand, in my day job as a paid propagandist for the corporate media I am bound to object to the state broadcaster using the taxes we pay to steal the audiences and the advertising dollars that are rightfully ours. You see my dilemma. The CBC is taking the food off my table that the CBC put on it.
But why take it from deeply compromised me? My corporate masters have grown increasingly vocal in their own right over the subsidized threat the CBC poses to our beloved industry. The latest skirmish is over the CBC’s recent expansion into the opinion business. Hang on, I hear you saying: hasn’t the CBC always been in the opinion business? Have you listened to The Current? Yes, only now it’s labelled as such.
More important, the opinions it is now publishing online are delivered, not in the oral tradition of, say, At Issue, but in textual form — just like, well, like this. You will instantly grasp how this changes everything. It’s one thing for the CBC to be competing with the private broadcasters, as it has since time began, i.e. 1960. But now, heaven preserve us, it’s competing with the newspapers.
So the demands have grown for the government to rein in the CBC: cut its funds, forbid it from selling ads online, stop it from publishing opinion pieces, something. This week witnessed the spectacle of representatives of the Globe and Mail and Rebel Media — special pleading makes strange bedfellows — appearing together before a Commons committee to press their case. But the argument has also been made, with increasing vehemence, by my fellow pundits. It’s one thing, they say, for the CBC to make bad documentaries and worse sitcoms, but what’s it doing monkeying around in our business?
All I can say to these latecomers is: where have you been? Some of us have been making the case for defunding the Corpse for, um, decades, at a time when most of my media colleagues were instructing the public in the worship of the CBC as The Only Thing that Keeps Us Together. But then, as they say, when the watering hole starts to run dry, the animals tend to look at each other differently.
Only it’s just a wee bit self-serving, isn’t it? I don’t doubt the CBC’s presence in the marketplace, propped up by $1 billion-plus in public funds, eats into our digital ad sales. But the problems of the newspaper business run a lot deeper than one statefunded website, and while there are lots of reasons to take away the CBC’s subsidy, saving the private newspaper industry isn’t one of them.
The main reason to cut off the CBC’s parliamentary grant is that the circumstances that once justified it have vanished. In the early days of television (and radio) it was technically impossible to charge viewers directly for the programs they watched, or to exclude those who did not. That left two possible sources of funds: either advertising, or the state. Neither has proved satisfactory — advertising, because of its bias to the mass audience over more specialized tastes; public funding, because it made it possible to neglect the audience altogether. But for a time there was a bona fide market-failure case for public broadcasting, as a way to mimic the range of offerings in a well-functioning market.
With the advent of pay television, that argument began to dissolve. With the proliferation of first hundreds and now, thanks to the Internet, tens of thousands of video (and audio) sources, it has disappeared entirely. There are any number of higher uses for a billion-plus in scarce public funds than to underwrite a television network. At the same time, for a public broadcaster — er, platform-agnostic content provider — to be financing itself from advertising defeats whatever lingering purpose it might have. In its own interests, as much as those of the taxpayers, the CBC needs to move the bulk of its offerings (there can be exceptions) to a subscription model.
That won’t be easy, as it has not been for our industry. But our own failure to cultivate a paying audience is exactly that: our own. It is indeed a testament to the industry’s manifold shortcomings that it keeps looking around for others to blame. It’s the CBC now, it was Google a while ago and it will be someone else before long. But it wasn’t Google that forced us to make unreadable websites and unusable apps, and it wasn’t the CBC that induced us to give away our content for free, any more than either is to blame because so much of what we produce isn’t worth paying for. We made this mess — we didn’t need any help from others.
I have to imagine the people running our industry know this. Indeed, I suspect the current campaign to “level the playing field” is driven less by any hope the current government will trim the CBC’s wings than it is preparing the way to argue for putting newspapers on the public dole as well. We might then combine the private media’s historic commitment to mediocrity with the CBC’s entitled cluelessness. Naturally I am one hundred per cent in favour.