Put it on pay

Two incidents in the space of a week neatly illustrate the confusion at the heart of the CBC’s current mandate. The first was CBC management’s controversial decision to bump The National to a later time-slot, in order to show simulcasts of an American “reality” show. The second was a Senate committee’s recommendation that the CBC should abandon all such ratings-driven attempts to compete for advertising dollars, replenishing the lost revenues out of public funds.

The first was justified by management as an attempt to broaden the CBC’s audience, in fulfillment of its mandate to bring Canadians together. The second was justified by the committee chairman, Joan Fraser, on the grounds that the CBC should “fill niches that no one else can or will fill.”

You can see the arguments on both sides. If the CBC offers only populist, mass-appeal programming, of a kind available on every private network, it defeats the purpose of public funding: Why pay taxes for something the market already provides? But if it serves only a narrow or elite audience, it can hardly justify public funding: Why should the many pay for the tastes of a few?

To avoid being skewered on either horn of this dilemma, the corporation has tended at various times to claim both as its mission. Alas, it has succeeded at neither. As a general-interest broadcaster aiming at the broadest possible audience, it suffers the embarrassment of an audience share somewhere south of 5%. As a specialty service devoted to programming of the highest possible quality -- well, what can I say? The CBC’s staunchest defenders don’t believe that any more.

To be fair, this is not only a matter of management blunders. It’s a reflection of the world the CBC now finds itself in, a very different world than its founders could have imagined. Even a CBC in its Platonic ideal form would be helpless to stop its audience share from dwindling, as indeed has been the fate of every private network: a 500-channel universe will do that to you. And while the CBC’s programming more and more resembles the cheesiest private fare -- its fall schedule contains no fewer than four reality shows, most of them borrowed from abroad -- the best, most innovative, most challenging programs are increasingly found on private channels like HBO and Bravo.

Does that mean we should just turn out the lights on the CBC? Not necessarily. There are still talented, creative people working at the CBC, and a hard core of devoted viewers. The problem is that the first has become disconnected from the second. There is no necessary reason why the CBC should not be able to satisfy both the demands of the audience and the dictates of quality. But the two will not be reconciled so long as the CBC remains dependent on either of its present sources of finance: advertising or public funding.

The case against the advertising model has been made often enough. Television networks that finance themselves by sales of commercial time are not making programs for viewers: they are assembling audiences for advertisers. The distinction is an important one. Nielsen ratings can measure the size of the audience: how many are watching which programs. They cannot measure how intently they are watching, or how much they value the experience.

This has given television, and the television audience, a bad name. For most other goods or services, you can find producers willing to serve every kind of taste, high or low, broad or narrow. You can buy the mass-market version, go upscale or avant-garde, even have one custom-made -- provided you’re willing to pay the price. But traditional broadcast television, because it is “free” to the viewer, precludes this possibility.

Is public funding, however, the answer? No. Often touted as the remedy for advertising’s ills, public funding in fact suffers from the same affliction: both divorce television from its audience. Secure from the pressures of serving “the market,” public broadcasters need not concern themselves with viewers at all. That may seem liberating at first. But aside from certain existential questions -- why make programs, if not to be seen? -- it leaves them at the mercy of their political patrons.

Fortunately, there is another alternative. It is to charge viewers themselves, directly: that is, to turn the CBC into a pay channel, like HBO or Bravo. There’s already a working prototype, in the form of Newsworld. If it seems a stretch to ask viewers to pay the full cost of the main CBC channel, that is perhaps an argument against trying to carry on with a single general-interest network, in the traditional “flagship” mode. Rather, the CBC’s best hope of survival might lie in a constellation of several specialty channels, each with its own subscription fee: Artsworld, Sportsworld, etc.

This is a solution both CBC-lovers and CBC-haters should be able to get behind. CBC-haters, because they would be spared having to pay for a channel they rarely watch. CBC-lovers, because they would would be spared having to give a toss what CBC-haters think.