Let the viewers decide

It’s only been forty days, but already the CBC lockout has produced more fresh thinking about the corporation’s role and purpose than in the previous forty years. So naturally the government is stepping in to put an end to it. After all, let people start questioning old dogmas about the CBC, and they might start thinking anew about other things.

What may have finally prompted this intervention was a published broadside by the corporation’s former chairman, Patrick Watson, calling for the whole thing to be shut down, on the grounds that the culture of “profound management ineptitude” within the corporation was too deeply rooted to ever change. This was not entirely unprecedented: some years ago the former head of Radio Canada International recommended much the same thing.

What is novel in Mr. Watson’s prescription is what he would do next: Put the CBC’s licence out to tender. “The disaffection of citizens,” he writes, “is at a level now where the government can close down the whole institution without electoral risk, publish a clear description of what it expects a genuine public broadcaster to do ... and declare that the licence will be given to the lowest bidder whose proposal convincingly meets the requirements.”

I have my doubts about Mr. Watson’s specific suggestions for what a “genuine public broadcaster” should do, which apparently involve endless repeats of children’s soccer. But in broad terms, he is surely right that part of the solution involves a serious injection of competition and choice. The question is what sort of competition, and whose choices? Right now the corporation competes, erratically, for advertisers’ dollars. In Mr. Watson’s vision, the contenders for the CBC contract would compete instead for government dollars. What’s missing in either scheme is the audience.

People tend to think of public funding and advertising finance as opposed. But in fact they have much in common. Both evolved as solutions to a problem of television’s technological infancy: namely, the impossibility of charging viewers directly for the programs they watched. But both were what the boffins would call “workarounds” -- they put a patch on the problem, without actually solving it. And as such both have proved unsatisfactory, if in different ways.

Under advertising finance, programming is not produced and sold to viewers: rather, viewers themselves are the product, to be packaged and sold to advertisers. The effect is inexorably to focus programmers on quantity, as opposed to quality. What counts is how many eyeballs happen to be watching at any given time, regardless of how intensely they may be watching. Hence the familiar evils of private broadcasting: the tendency to the lowest common denominator, the indifference to specialized tastes, the monotonous sameness, all in pursuit of the broadest possible audience.

If viewers are pandered to under advertising finance, under public funding they are ignored altogether. In theory, a publicly funded broadcaster, without the necessity of courting advertisers, is free to serve the viewing audience, or rather audiences, in all their diversity. But that depends on those in charge both intuiting audience needs and responding to them, in the absence of any incentive to do so. Occasionally, miraculously, they do. More often they serve other masters, with other agendas: governments, their friends, themselves.

Still, it was probably useful to have publicly funded broadcasters, as an alternative to the advertising-funded variety, especially in the days when there were only three or four to choose from. But now? It isn’t just that there are literally hundreds of channels available, and thousands more on the way. Much more important is the advent of pay TV, even pay-per-view. When viewers can pay directly for what they watch, the old imagined conflict between “mass and class” disappears. Provided viewers are passionate enough about a particular sort of programming, measured by their willingness to pay for it, it will be provided.

It isn’t just that broadcasters have more incentive to serve the audience under such a scheme. It’s that the audience itself changes. People behave differently when they pay for something than when they get it for free. It’s the difference between HBO and ABC. Viewers of pay channels are both more demanding and more committed than viewers of traditional, over-the-air television. They have made an investment in taste, and wish to see it pay dividends.

There is, then, no longer any necessity, even in theory, for public funding of television: better, more diverse programming can be had in other ways. There is no longer any reason to force the majority who don’t watch the CBC to pay for the minority who do. Wean the CBC off its dependence on advertising? By all means. But wean it also off the public teat. Put the CBC on pay, and let it serve at last its true master: discerning, demanding, passionate viewers.