Source : Barrie Examiner

There's a lot of pot stirring going on in the Canadian media these days - mega mergers and takeovers, and changing priorities at the CBC.

It all makes me very nervous.

The corporate shuffling and CBC policy shifts may well produce efficiencies and in some ways, bigger may be better. But, as a hungry consumer of news and public affairs on TV, radio, print, and the Internet, the principal thing I care about is whether I will be better informed by what I see, hear and read as a result of the changes.

In the media, the only thing that counts is content. And I'm hardly reassured by the CBC bumping The National on occasion this summer for an amateur hour American music talent contest, even if that contest was a program disaster and was cancelled after two episodes. Nor do I find it encouraging to hear CBC executives bemoaning the scheduling awkwardness of having the news in ripe prime time at 10 p.m.

As an unabashed admirer of the concept of public broadcasting, signals coming out of the CBC TV Executive suite these days scare the living daylights out of me. A fundamental policy deviation seems to be emerging that suggests a lower priority for things like documentaries, news and current affairs. Bumping The National for an American singing contest is an example. In itself, it was a short-lived and relatively minor move, but it's a worrisome indicator of a new CBC mindset that is obsessed with audience size and commercial potential rather than public service. "We're looking at it as a long term strategy," says one senior CBC TV executive. "It's always an unfortunate situation when you have a newscast on at 10 at night; that does make it vulnerable to scheduling issues."

But journalism is the sustaining cornerstone of a public broadcaster. Weaken that by lusting for audience tonnage and commercial appeal, and the CBC becomes more like the private TV channels. That ill serves the viewers for, among other things, it inevitably means Canadians will get less probing journalism and subjugate what there is to the pressing needs of pop programming as happened with the bumped National. It also ominously blurs the distinctions between private and public broadcasting.

In the private sector, apprehensive vibrations about how Canadian news consumers are served by their media have popped up in a recent series of blockbuster deals that smack of a bewildering all-in-the- family complexity and the advantages of owning your corporate rival. Under one deal, The Toronto Star bought a chunk of Bell Globemedia which, in turn, owns The Star's rival, The Globe and Mail. In a more recent transaction, Bell Globemedia, which owns CTV as well as The Globe and a bucketful of TV specialty channels, would also own the rival CHUM stations and CHUM's specialty channels.

On the eve of the deal, CHUM chopped 281 news jobs at stations across the country and slashed news programs, presumably to make the deal more financially alluring. A few years earlier, CanWest Global bought the Conrad Black newspapers across the country, thereby owning the country's largest newspaper group as well as a TV network.

One result of CanWest's editorial merging and converging envisages is its withdrawal from the Canadian Press, which would be a significant financial blow to Canada's co-operative news agency.

All these actions impact on the quality and quantity of knowledge we have about what's going on, and I fear they could represent a triumph of efficiency over effectiveness. There are undoubted bottom-line advantages through convergence and integration - or multi-tasking - but news organizations have a special obligation to the public that goes beyond the bottom line and that most other businesses don't have.

The health of our society depends on how good a job the media do in acting as the bridge between the governed and the governing. But budget cutting temptations inherent in incestuous corporate relationships could bode ill for this role and for the ordinary Canadian news consumer. And that's what worries me.

A ray of hope, however, lies in the promise of Bell Globemedia head Ivan Fecan who recognizes the concern and has promised to "keep the news divisions completely separate to ensure diverse voices and the journalistic competition that serves the public interest."

Lets hope that's a promise kept.

For privately-owned media as well as the publicly owned CBC, serving the public interest is a compelling responsibility that must ensure that our news and current affairs coverage expands and enriches our knowledge of what's going on.

Knowlton Nash is a former CBC anchor and a member of the Osprey Writers Group.

© Barrie Examiner