Public friend, private foe
Source : National Post
Oct 27, 2001
Editorial
After reading the report released this week by Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a lobby group with the ostensible mission of supporting public broadcasters, one wonders if truth in advertising does not require the group to rename itself Enemies of Private Broadcasting. Its recent report, Follow the Money: Who Paid for Canadian Television 1990-2000, is an assemblage of specious arguments meant to discredit the market-driven – i.e. viewer-driven – competitors to Friends' beloved CBC.
Friends' argument in Follow the Money may be summarized as follows: Since 1990, Ottawa has cut funding for the CBC (bad). Over the same decade, Canadian private sector broadcasters have been largely profitable (very bad). While it cut CBC's budget, Ottawa has doubled funding for Canadian programming through a maze of subsidies, tax credits and grants (good). Lately the CBC has discovered it can supplement its reduced budget by scooping up most of this state aid (good). But since the CBC has gorged itself on Cancon subsidies, this must mean private broadcasters are not producing enough Canadian content (very, very bad). Of course to appreciate Friends' perspective on the state of Canadian broadcasting, you must do more than just follow its tortured logic; you must also buy into a belief system that regards requisitioning public funds in the name of Canadian content to be a virtue, and the ideal television guide to be one that includes nothing but Canadian shows.
By using government funding data as a proxy for Canadian content in programming, the Friends' report limits itself (without admitting as much) to an analysis of television entertainment such as dramas, documentaries and comedies. Based on this limited sample set, the report's authors declare that private broadcasters such as CTV and CanWest Global (the parent company of this newspaper) are underproducing Canadian content and, therefore, enriching Hollywood producers at the expense of Canada's cultural industries. But the mere fact that private networks are broadcasting U.S. shows is not indicative of some sort of market perversion. American producers of dramas and situation comedies enjoy evident comparative advantages – theirs are better written and produced than ours, and funnier. Moreover, if one looks past the limited purview of the Friends' analysis, one finds that Canadian private broadcasters supply large amounts of domestic programming in areas where Canadians actually prefer a local product. Domestic news programs, for instance, outdraw foreign ones four-to-one in Canada. But since these categories do not qualify for government handouts, Friends ignores them altogether.
Like its regulatory soulmate, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Friends shudders at the thought that Canadians might be allowed to consume what they like, rather than the cultural fibre the CRTC and Friends wish to prescribe. While demanding more Canadian content from private broadcasters, the group's report makes no mention of what Canadians wish to see. In 1990, Canadian viewers spent 36.7% of their television-watching time tuned to Canadian programs. According to figures released by Statistics Canada this week, that number has grown, albeit slightly, to 39.2%, in 2000. During the entire decade that Friends claims has been marked by a worrying erosion of Canadian programming at the hands of private broadcasters, viewership of domestic shows has actually increased.
Global is singled out for special criticism among private broadcasters by Friends because, in 1997, just 41% of its program expenditures were on Canadian programming (by comparison, CTV spent 57%). But in 1997, Canadians spent 40% of their television viewing time watching Canadian shows – so the amount spent by Global on domestic shows seems precisely appropriate. If Canadians were demanding complete Canadian content, then one would have expected CBC's viewership share to have expanded greatly between 1990 and 2000 as viewers abandoned foreign programming for the home-grown variety that is CBC's specialty. In fact, the Friends own data show that CBC's share of viewers fell by 40% over the decade.
The emergence of the multi-multi-channel universe in Canada during the 1990s has happily given Canadians much greater control over what they watch. Unhappily for Friends and the CBC, Canadian viewers have revealed catholic interests. They prefer U.S.-made dramas and comedies and domestic news and public affairs. To the extent the for-profit broadcasting industry is attuned to meeting these consumer demands, and it can do so without the need for massive amounts of taxpayers' money in the form of cultural subsidies, this is unalloyed good news. The only people who might disagree are those whose statist views have metastasized into an active ill will toward private broadcasters.
