Source : Washington Post

by Steven Pearlstein

TORONTO – Not long ago, it might have been said that a Canadian was someone who tuned in the CBC.

Its French-language soap operas virtually cleared the streets of Montreal. Its newsroom largely set the country's political agenda. Families on remote farms and in Arctic igloos turned to it for friendly, familiar voices at supper time. For much of the country, Saturday night revolved around its hockey double-headers. A bastion of Canadian culture at a time when fear of creeping American influence is running high, its prime-time programming is 90 percent home-grown.

But these are less heady days for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. The president of the government-owned corporation has just been eased out by the prime minister, as has the head of its English-language television division. And like other broadcasters, the CBC is slowly losing its audience to scores of new specialty channels on radio and TV.

On top of that, the union representing its 3,000 journalists voted today, by a margin of nearly 5 to 1, to join a strike by 2,800 technicians already in progress. By early next week, the network could be effectively shut down for the first time in its history.

"My morale right now is in the Dumpster," said Hana Gartner, the normally feisty host of the network's nightly magazine show. "I'm worried. I don't like the way this play is unfolding."

A key behind-the-scenes role in the drama is being played by Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, whose long-standing animosity toward the network stems from unflattering coverage he has received from its news staff and a perception that the French-language arm of the network is blatantly sympathetic to the separatist movement in Quebec.

Chrétien cut the CBC's subsidy by 30 percent in the mid-1990s, and last year he introduced legislation to have the president of the CBC serve at the pleasure of the government rather than, as under current law, for a fixed term (the proposal was later dropped). More recently, his public complaint about aggressive CBC coverage of a controversy involving the prime minister's office and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police led to the suspension of the reporter on the story.

"The Chrétien agenda has been to hobble the CBC," charged Ian Morrison, who heads the 48,000-member Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a public broadcasting advocacy group. "He is the most hostile prime minister since the network was founded."

"Things right now are very dark for the CBC," said Patrick Watson, a former producer, director and program host who later served as chairman of the CBC's board of directors. "Externally, there is no longer a political will to finance a really robust public broadcasting establishment. Internally, there is no vision and no
commitment to cutting edge excellence ....

"It's sad really, because it was such a great institution."

Americans know the CBC by some of the successful imitations it has spawned. Long before CBS launched "60 Minutes," the CBC's "This Hour Has Seven Days" was producing hard-hitting journalism that attracted 60- and 70-percent audience shares. And National Public Radio's flagship "All Things Considered" was a direct imitation of CBC Radio's "As It Happens."

"For many years the CBC was simply an astonishing place to work – probably the best public broadcasting service in the world," said Jeffrey Dvorkin, the former managing editor for CBC English-language radio who now heads NPR's news and information division. "But its lost that now, and there doesn't seem to be much of a will to restore it."

To some degree, the CBC's current predicament was inevitable.

The network was created in the 1930s in an effort to stitch together a sprawling, sparsely populated country that spanned six times zones and spoke three languages, and whose citizenry identified more closely with its provinces than with the federal government in Ottawa. With few private alternatives, the CBC believed its mission was to try to be all things to all people – a Canadian ABC, PBS, NPR and CNN rolled into one. By the late 1980s, the government was pumping in the equivalent of $1 billion a year into the network.

But in recent years, the urgency of that mission has been eroded, particularly in television. Canadians began to flock to U.S. television, either beamed across the border or picked up by Canada's cable systems and private broadcasters. Two rival broadcast networks emerged in English-speaking Canada and another in French-speaking Quebec, and there is a burgeoning number of Canadian cable channels catering to narrower interests. As a result, the CBC now attracts less than 10 percent of English-speaking viewers and 20 percent among French speakers.

Despite these dramatic shifts – and the accompanying cuts in its government funding – the CBC has been reluctant to give up any part of its mission. Instead, it has tried to survive by continually trimming budgets, doubling up on assignments and outsourcing work to private firms. Local news coverage has been cut sharply, and last month it was announced that three more foreign bureaus – in Paris, Mexico City and Cape Town, South Africa – would be closed. This week, the network announced that production would be canceled on a much-touted television movie, "It Must Be Santa," despite investment of nearly $3 million in setup costs.

At the same time, more emphasis has been put on developing programs that will attract advertising dollars, which now account for 50 percent of English-language television revenue.

According to many present and former CBC executives, these efforts may have got the network through a series of budget crises, but they distracted it from developing a sustainable role for itself in the 100-channel world. And over the long run, some say, they may have eroded public support by making CBC television less daring and less distinctive.

"Meeting the exacting demands of a commercial marketplace forces you into a ratings game, which really isn't consistent with the CBC's public policy mandate – or with the kind of cutting-edge programming that the CBC was once famous for," said Ivan Fecan, now the head of the rival CTV network who spent decades at the CBC as a radio and television producer. "CBC can be the centerpiece of Canadian television by concentrating on doing the things that can't and won't be done by private television."

But outgoing network president Perrin Beatty, whose bid for another term was blocked by Chrétien, rejects the stripped-down strategy advocated for it by its private sector competitors and – reportedly – Chrétien's allies on the CBC's board of directors.

"The argument has been made that we should be the programmer of last resort, that we should be doing what nobody else wants to do," Beatty told an interviewer recently. "That is a formula for marginalizing the public broadcaster."

© Washington Post