There is nothing wrong with your TV set ... by Hugh Winsor

by Hugh Winsor

The next battle in Canadian television will not be found on your screen but in Parliament's lobbies and the networks' boardrooms.

It seems everyone is confused about Canadian TV except the viewers, most of whom still shun Canadian programming to the point that the 10 most watched shows on our national networks remain American ones. That fact notwithstanding, a vigorous debate has been joined in recent days about the amount, cost and popularity of Canadian programming.

Today in Ottawa, Canada's private broadcasters are gathering for their annual rave of self-congratulation. But they cannot dispel the dark clouds hovering over their deliberations, especially the slump in advertising.

The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a pro-public broadcasting lobby group, has just released a study that seems damning on the surface, but its findings are being dismissed by the private broadcasters. Meantime, CBC president Robert Rabinovitch is trying to get attention for changes he's been implementing, but the audience (based on viewing trends) seems to be clapping with one hand.

Throw in the possibility of a tougher, slimmer Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission down the road, plus a parliamentary probe of Canadian TV, and we have an interesting confrontation in the making.

Using data from the CRTC and the Canadian Television Fund, the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting contends that expenditure on Canadian programming by the conventional networks has actually declined over the past decade, although overall spending on Canadian programming (including the CBC and specialty channels) has increased.

The group argues that the conventional networks are taking some of the increased public funds and using them to buy foreign programs under a headline, "Our tax dollars are going to Hollywood."

CTV president Trina McQueen took issue with the way the lobby group measures Canadian content, because it doesn't include money broadcasters spend on news, public affairs and sports – some of their most watched Canadian programming. The Friends' report didn't count programming spending on specialty channels, either, and that is misleading because the specialties tend to have a higher proportion of Canadian content and many of them are owned by the conventional networks.

There is truth on both sides of the argument, although Ms. McQueen is on dicey ground in a week that CTV cut its news budgets. Although total TV watched by Canadians has not changed, what they have been watching has – the specialty channels are rapidly displacing the conventional channels and now have 38 per cent of the total audience.

This has major ramifications for the broadcasters and for public policy: How do you communicate values or priorities if the audience is so splintered? How do you treat the CBC if it has lost half its market share over the past decade, much of it to specialty channels?

In a speech to the C. D. Howe Institute last week, Mr. Rabinovitch did some justifiable boasting about the CBC's news performance since Sept. 11, arguing that, in times of tension, Canadian viewers turn to trusted Canadian interpreters. (The CBC's audience reached 1.7 million, compared to 1.2-million for CNN in the days after the attacks.)

But he also repeated two elements of the CBC mantra that are now in question. Public broadcasting complements private broadcasters because it takes risks that the private broadcasts can't or won't. And the economics of program production dictate a major role for the public sector to safeguard a Canadian space.

Private broadcasters are unlikely to undertake, say, the CBC's history series, and their public affairs programming is more restrained by conflicts of interest. But the argument about safeguarding Canadian space is being challenged.

Canadian private TV, specialty and pay channels have increased their overall market share to 61 per cent from 54 per cent in the past decade, but the increases in their share of the audience for Canadian programming is more dramatic. By 1999, three-quarters of Canadians watching Canadian programs watched them on private TV.

According to Michael McCabe, the outgoing president of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, the traditional model, where Canadian private broadcasters simply rented money-making U.S. content and used it to cross-subsidize money-losing Canadian content, is not going to work in the digital world.

He sees a time where the only place private broadcasters can make more bucks is in Canadian programming. But there's a catch: They want to be relieved of regulation, want their programming to be market driven, and want more money from the Canadian Television Fund.

The coming battle is a contest of values and numbers, without the visuals of Afghanistan or Ground Zero. But it will be fought just as hard.

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