Living without the CBC

One benefit of the current lockout at the CBC: we are spared endless coverage of the CBC lockout. Lord knows the Corporation has always been acutely fascinated with itself -- who can forget the night the network devoted two-thirds of the National and all of the Journal to the closure of a few stations? -- but for anyone outside the CBC and its cultlike followers, the lockout barely registers as news. Even the Toronto media can scarcely manage an obligatory chorus of It’s What Keeps Us Together before its attention begins to wander.

Neither side in the dispute can fail to be aware of this, even allowing for the extraordinary reservoirs of self-delusion that sustain the public broadcasting cult. The union may be doing its best to inconvenience the viewing audience, but that assumes the existence of a viewing audience to be inconvenienced. The news is not that the CBC’s audience numbers have declined since the lockout began. It’s how low they were to begin with.

Actually, it’s not news at all. Six years ago, during a previous CBC strike, I wrote: “As it is, the CBC's English TV service pulls less than 10% of the viewers in prime time. Is it likely that the government will spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on the corporation as that ratio dwindles to 5%, and 2%, and beyond?” Well, it has dwindled to 5% since then, and it’s headed to 2% before long. Yet the funds have still flowed, regardless -- until now. If, as some CBC supporters fear, the strike marks the end of CBC TV as we have known it, it will not be because of all the viewers it has driven away, but because of how little it was missed.

This is only partly the CBC’s doing. To be sure, the network has long seemed uncertain of its mandate. Is it a general-interest programmer serving the broadest possible audience (“it’s what keeps us together”) or a special-interest programmer filling niches unserved by the private market (“only public television will do this”)? Mostly it has tended to be neither: elitist without the excellence, populist without the popularity.

But declining audience share is not a phenomenon limited to the CBC. As the number of channels has multiplied, limited only by the CRTC’s obdurate protectionism, all the networks have seen their numbers fall. For that matter, television itself is losing “market share” to the Internet, to DVDs and other competing claims on people’s time. With each passing year, that will only accelerate.

So the issue, at least in policy terms, is not the quality of the CBC’s programming, but its relevance: whether there is any necessity to it, or anything achieved by it. We can debate whether more people should be watching the CBC. What is beyond dispute is that they aren’t.

And audience share is not the only measure. After all, the CBC’s defenders might say, the whole reason public broadcasting was invented was to provide the sort of programming that private broadcasters would not, ie those catering to minority or elite tastes. And for a time that was true -- not because markets are inherently hostile to minority or elite tastes (there’s a market for anything, as long as the price is right) but because there was no way for viewers to pay directly for the programs they wanted to watch. In the age of broadcast television, audiences were not so much the consumers as the product, to be packaged and sold to advertisers.

But today? Try this little test. Take a look at the following list of programs from last week’s listings, all of them shown in prime-time. See if you can tell which ones were on public television, and which on private:

It’s a Great Game (about Canada’s national women’s soccer team)

Live at the Rehearsal Hall (Jacksoul performs)

Exotica (a 1994 film by art-house favourite Atom Egoyan)

Jawani (“Music, culture and religion in the Sikh community”)

The Blues (This week: The Road to Memphis).

Richler, Ink. (A talk show about books and authors).

The Daily Planet. (What’s new in the world of science.)

Trailer Park Boys. (A largely improvised, sublimely profane mock-documentary).

Scream! The History of Anaesthetics.

Turning Points. (A series looking at pivotal moments in world history. Tonight: “Showdown at Suez.”)

CFL Football (Calgary Stampeders at Toronto Argonauts).

Love’s Labour’s Lost. (Kenneth Branagh’s 2000 adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy.)

Talk Politics. (Interviews with leading Canadian political figures.)

Give up? Actually, it was a trick question: they’re all on private television. In today’s world of pay TV, movies-on-demand and pay-per-view, you can find programs catering to every conceivable kind of taste, high or low, broad or narrow. And while that is not yet true on radio -- one reason CBC Radio still enjoys both critical respect and a popular following -- it will be, as satellite and Internet radio replace traditional broadcast stations.

Which is what will ultimately settle the issue. If the CBC were pulling in big numbers, there would be little reason to subsidize it: it could support itself, as a pay channel (or a constellation of several). That in fact it attracts so few viewers raises the question of what the subsidy is achieving. But with the increasingly widespread availability of the sort of programming the CBC is supposed to provide, and so rarely does, the debate is over. It might have been needed at one time, but it isn’t any more, and never more obviously than when it isn’t there.