CBC trying to stickhandle through TV coverage
Partnership with Rogers still at odds with company’s identity as public broadcaster
At the CBC’s downtown Toronto studios this week, in a presentation on the broadcaster’s upcoming schedule designed to impress potential advertisers, they promoted Pyeong-Chang 2018 with a sizzle reel of highlights.
There were the slo-mo shots of speedskaters bending into a turn, freestylers flipping through the air, and many shots of Canadian medallists celebrating and beaming and wiping away tears, all of it accompanied by soaring music, softening even the jaded cranks in the room. (Points to self.)
In an inspired touch, the music was overtaken for just a second near the end by the “tink” of a puck hitting the post — that moment at the end of the women’s gold-medal game when the United States looked like it was about to score into an empty net. Tink. Cut to the Canadians scoring the winner, and scene.
The Olympic reel had a notable absence, for obvious reasons. No Sidney Crosby or Carey Price or Jonathan Toews. But the lack of NHL players in the CBC’s Olympic promos happen to make a useful parallel when one considers the changes at CBC Sports: there’s no NHL there, either. And, as the national broadcaster spent so much time in its presentation touting its importance to Canadians and the unimpeachable goodness of its public airwaves, it’s worth wondering: just how much longer are you going to let them be annexed by Rogers, anyway?
It has now been three-plus years since Rogers Communications stunned hockey in this country by spending $5 billion to buy national broadcast rights for the NHL for a dozen years. It was primarily about striking a blow in the TSN-Sportsnet wars, but the weirdest part of the deal was the part where the public broadcaster would let Rogers use its main network to keep showing hockey games on Saturday nights and in the playoffs, even though the private company would produce the programming, sell all the advertising and keep all the revenue. We’ll get back to that part shortly.
In the ensuing years, CBC Sports has pivoted into a focus on “high-performance” sport. This includes the Olympics through 2024 and year-round programming like Road to the Olympic Games, but the broadcaster announced this week that it also bought the rights for the next World Aquatics Championships, World Gymnastic Championships and the IAAF Worlds.
“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, the 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 general-interest 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 for broadcast rights to 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.”
Quite so.
But ... about the hockey. When Rogers went nuclear with its NHL bombshell in the fall of 2013 and the CBC meekly announced 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 pro-CBC 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 air time to a competing private conglomerate, no matter how many promos for the Baroness Von Sketch Show 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.