Source : National Post

Editorial

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's English language television network is an anchor that threatens to sink the whole CBC, according to Robert O'Reilly, who headed CBC's short-wave radio service until June of last year. Mr. O'Reilly recently told a broadcasters' conference in London, England that CBC's English TV network "should be closed as soon as possible and practical." Once closed, Mr. O'Reilly would revamp the CBC and relaunch it in five years. We disagree only on this last point. The service should be sold off for good, putting an end to the massive public outlays it gobbles every year.

Mr. O'Reilly, who has been in broadcasting for 30 years, points to the English language television network's low ratings as proof of its irrelevancy. At any given moment, an average of about 5-million Canadians are watching television. Of these, roughly 5% are tuned to CBC's English network or its affiliates. The CTV English network, by contrast, garners 9.5% of viewers. The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, a lobby group that supports the CBC, has, by its own calculation, determined that CBC's share of viewers has fallen over the past decade by 40%. Much of the decline can be attributed to the multi-multi-channel universe. The additional choice has, according to Mr. O'Reilly, left the CBC in a position where it 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."

This analysis is correct. Most Canadians prefer U.S.-made dramas and comedies for entertainment, and Canadian private broadcasters for their news and public affairs. The residual audience was large enough to support the English-language CBC in the days when the service had little competition. But now that its target audience has been diluted by dozens of new channels, the CBC has become, as Mr. O'Reilly says, "a specialty channel." Yet it is a specialty channel that operates with the budget and staff of a full-service network.

This newspaper believes and has said before that the entire CBC should be broken up and sold. But Mr O'Reilly's proposed half-measure would be an acceptable first step.

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