Decision to cut sports on local TV is disastrous
Television cameras and a reporter from CTV News were there to record the moment when student athlete Kaitlyn Schenck crossed a major threshold.
The women’s basketball player from Wilfrid Laurier University was on the team playing against Western. She took a running layup shot that made her only the third female player in Golden Hawk basketball history to crack the 1,000-point plateau.
CTV News “showed the moment when she reached the milestone,” recalled Jamie Howieson, co-ordinator of communications for athletics and recreation at Laurier.
It was a time of great pride for Schenck, her family, and her team.
Sport is full of dramatic, character-revealing stories like that. Incredible dedication and years of hard work can lead to ecstatic triumph. A stroke of bad luck — recall when a medal eluded boxer Mandy Bujold, after she got sick at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — can throw an athlete into a pit of disappointment.
But these are stories that won’t be told here anymore. Not on television.
This week, CTV announced layoffs at local stations in Kitchener, London and Windsor. Sports coverage was the target.
Whether it was high school track and field or a Jr. B hockey game, the TV cameras always brought validation and excitement.
“It’s a big deal to see themselves on TV,” said Craig Hynes, the volunteer girls’ rugby coach at Waterloo-Oxford District Secondary School in Baden.
He also appreciated the “feelgood” tone of sports stories, describing them as a relief from the mostly negative news that can dominate an evening news broadcast.
Some people feel angry about this decision. Bell Media, which owns 30 local TV stations and 34 specialty channels like TSN, announced revenue growth in November of 4.1 per cent and an adjusted profit of $183 million in its latest quarterly report.
One day after that announcement, the company said it would cut 380 positions, citing pressures on the industry. Eight employees were laid off in Kitchener.
I contacted Bell Media but did not hear back before deadline.
Curtis Clairmont, president and director of hockey operations for the Waterloo Siskins Jr. B hockey team, said CTV’s coverage of his and other local hockey teams keeps people engaged “in one of our iconic sports.”
He hopes “advertisers (will) speak with their dollars” to persuade CTV to change its mind.
There are other reasons to speak up about this disastrous decision.
Television stations can’t just do whatever they want.
There’s a public stake in the airwaves, and in what they broadcast. That’s why radio and television is regulated by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which demands a certain amount of local news programming.
Broadcast companies have “a duty to ensure that news reporting and analysis continue to be properly funded so that Canadians, as citizens, understand events occurring around them every day,” says a policy of the commission.
That’s as true for hockey and football as it is for politics and crime.