CBC Sports has found its ‘niche’

Continued from B5

“We had to reinvent ourselves, we had to recreate what it was, where our proper niche was and I, quite frankly, think we’ve found it,” Greg Stremlaw, executive director of CBC Sports, says in an interview at the Toronto studios.

“And it’s right on mandate with the public broadcaster’s mandate; it dovetails nicely with the overall strategy.”

All of that makes sense. Putting aside the larger questions of whether the CBC should exist as a generalinterest broadcaster or whether it gets too much money or whether it should compete for advertising dollars, if it is going to televise sports, then amateur athletics is the right niche and it can bow out of the spending wars that have taken place for broadcast rights for big professional leagues.

As Stremlaw put it: “We are acquiring rights, it’s just not the same kind of rights that we might have done 10-20 years ago and that’s OK because I think as a public broadcaster that suits us very well.”

But ... about the hockey. When Rogers went nuclear with its NHL bombshell in the fall of 2013 and the CBC meekly announced that it was part of the deal — but only as a vessel for Rogers programming — this was explained in a number of ways. It would keep Hockey Night in Canada on the CBC and people liked that tradition. It would allow the CBC to promote its other shows on the NHL broadcasts. And it would keep the public broadcaster from having to spend money to fill the hundreds of hours each year that would otherwise go to hockey. At the time, under a Stephen Harper government that was not exactly CBC friendly, this was no small consideration. Ottawa wasn’t about to cut them a cheque so they could buy a bigger movie inventory for those winter Saturday nights.

But the Harper government was replaced by the decidedly more proCBC Liberals of Justin Trudeau and the broadcaster’s budget even received a substantial boost. And the CBC is still showing Rogers’ hockey programming and allowing Rogers to make money off prime-time hours on its main network. The original four-year deal to use CBC for part of Rogers’ NHL schedule has since been extended to five years.

The average NHL viewer probably does not much care. There was outrage in the early days over the choice of broadcast talent, but now that Ron MacLean has resumed the main host duties and Don Cherry is still there talking up good Canadian boys, Hockey Night is back to appearing much as it always was on the CBC.

But fundamentally, it is not. All the talk about the public broadcaster’s higher purpose is undercut rather a lot when it is gifting its airtime to a competing private conglomerate, no matter how many promos for the Baroness von Sketch Show that Bob Cole has to read on Hockey Night.

At some point, the CBC has to say what it should have said the first time Rogers proposed using its network. It can say no.