Source : Canadian Press

by John McKay

TORONTO (CP) – A former CBC executive who claims the network's English-language TV service should be shut down because of dismal ratings is out of touch and out of date, says a spokeswoman for the public broadcaster.

Robert O'Reilly, who departed last May as executive director of Montreal-based Radio Canada International, was quoted in Friday's National Post as saying CBC-TV has become a drag on the entire corporation and should be shut down as soon as possible.

"CBC English television is no longer a mass media broadcaster, but a specialty service offering generalized programming fare of significantly lesser depth, breadth and imagination than it did a decade ago," O'Reilly told a broadcasters' conference in London, England, last Tuesday.

He added that the service could be relaunched after five years once it had been completely redesigned.

"Obviously, nine out of 10 Canadians would disagree with Mr. O'Reilly's comments," Martine Menard, director of corporate communications for CBC, said Friday. "We just really felt that his comments were out of date, out of touch."

Menard maintained that CBC English television is an essential service and is "holding its own very well" among Canadian conventional networks, despite O'Reilly's remarks about low ratings.

Ian Morrison, spokesman for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a pro-CBC lobby, goes further, calling O'Reilly "out to lunch."

He points to statistics that show the CBC English TV network offers more than 27 hours of Canadian programming in prime time each week, while private counterparts CTV and Global can boast only an average of eight hours, a minimum required by the CRTC, the federal broadcast regulator.

As for viewer numbers, Morrison points to 1999 statistics showing that only five per cent of Global's audience watched its Canadian shows, which means the network's audience was watching U.S. programming 95 per cent of the time. The respective numbers for CTV, he says, were 12 per cent and 88 per cent.

By comparison, CBC attracts about 85 per cent of its viewers with Canadian shows, he said.

"You take CBC television out of the mix and what you're left with is the United States, essentially."

O'Reilly has been a broadcaster and policy-maker for more than three decades and once was CBC's director of communications and broadcast services.

Radio Canada International is a CBC-administered service that operates in English, French and five other languages on short-wave, satellite and the Internet.

© Canadian Press