Source : Toronto Star

by Dalton Camp

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has a new president, Robert Rabinovitch. Of the many CBC presidents since Davidson Dunton, Rabinovitch is the first who is a stranger to me. But his tenure at the corporation will be the most critical of all among those who served before him.

The CBC has fallen from grace. If it has any friends in the government, they are largely anonymous. For openers, however, it should be noted the CBC has been treated shabbily by successive administrations, downsized, underfunded, abandoned to the jeremiads from the back benches and the self-serving carpings of the print media. The new president need not waste his time seeking out friends, either in Parliament or on newspaper row. His only true allies are those in Friends of Public [now Canadian] Broadcasting, who are heavily outweighed and outnumbered by the armies of commercialism.

The official opposition, representing a good part of half the country's geography, is pledged to privatize the CBC. Given that, and a party in power that frankly doesn't give a damn, we can best measure the size of Rabinovitch's challenge. As for the Canadian people, placid and docile as they may seem, perhaps they can be summoned to support the survival of their declining asset, one of the very few left to them as a result of the government's massive garage sale of publicly-owned properties.

The hard truth about the CBC, now on life-support systems improvised during coffee breaks, is simply that no one in power, or with power, wants it to survive: not the Prime Minister or the finance minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the separatist Bloc Québécois, or Tory Leader Joe Clark. This leaves only Alexa McDonough and the New Democratic Party - or most of it - a party in somewhat the same condition, alas, as the corporation itself.

In the wider world of big business, where making money is believed a matter of ethics and the Golden Rule is thought to be a slogan for shareholder relations, business leaders are resolutely lukewarm about public broadcasting. Where once they feared the CBC would be run by politicians, many of them are now happy to know their fears have been realized. This is the result of a palace coup in which the Prime Minister and his colleagues have managed to hijack the corporation without firing a shot, but simply by withholding funds.

There is good reason for all this hostility on behalf of the nation's major stakeholders in politics and commerce. People I know who resent, dislike and fear the CBC, have as their reason that they have been mistreated or misrepresented by the corporation's journalists. There is another way of saying this: because it is publicly-owned and not privately held, the CBC, while not free of bias or error, was and, hopefully, still is more independent and less subject to external and internal influences, edicts and eccentricities than is the print industry. By definition, the CBC is likely to be more objective, more indifferent to political considerations, less concerned about financial implications with respect to the story – especially those concerning consumer or environmental issues – than are its competitors. It is more difficult to "get even'' with the CBC, to avenge one's pride or conceit.

Until the corporation was savaged by the deficit warriors, it was a world-class news gathering organization. It raised and gave opportunity to some of Canada's best journalists and offered satisfying careers to producers, directors, technicians and hosts of others. It elevated the standards of the news business and set the tone for editorial responsibility and reliability throughout the country. It made for better journalists and journalism.

For the Canadian people, it was a bargain. To others in the news business, the CBC was a threat, its pay scale too rich, its unionized work force too powerful. It was also competitive in the marketplace and drove critics to the despairing view it should drop its hockey coverage and do chamber music.

In his open letter to the incoming president, Patrick Watson, an icon from past glories in public broadcasting, offered some advice: Stop commercial advertising on CBC-TV and make the most of the fundamental mandate - covering Canada for Canadians. This is what the corporation does best and what, in fact, people need most - reliable, factual, in-depth coverage of events of the day. To be free at last, at least on one channel, of incessant advertising, promotion and all the white noise of consumerism, would indeed be a huge blessing to which Canadians, engulfed as they are in a continent awash with commercial content, are richly entitled. Canadians could then watch their own national service free from the outrageous and unrelenting assault upon their privacy and dignity by a consumer culture that would interrupt coverage of the Second Coming for a deodorant commercial.

© The Toronto Star