I do not know the first words Bernard Ostry said as a child, but I am confident a digest of them appeared some days later on the op-ed page of a newspaper.

It seems every time the TVOntario chairman makes a speech, a longish excerpt somehow finds its way into one or another of the Toronto papers.

On the one hand, Ostry astounds by his prolificacy. On the other hand, he often says the same thing. Private broadcasters cannot satisfy the public interest, because they are driven by profit. Only selfless state-owned broadcasters can truly serve the common good, free of grubby bottom-line concerns. Oh, and more money, please.

The rise of global media conglomerates, he warns - Time-Warner, International Thomson, Rupert Murdoch and so on - producing and distributing their programs internationally, threatens to puree all national distinctions into a ''bland, culturally neuter'' effluvium.

A handful of broadcasters will turn us all into citizens of nowhere: the ''universal and homogeneous state'' of which George Grant warned. The only way to defend local particularism is for public broadcasters the world over to combine their efforts, ''in their own self-interest'' - oops, ''and, of course, in the public's. This is indeed a shift. The old case for public broadcasting was never more than a ''merit good'' argument: people don't know what's good for them, so we must give it to them, at their expense, even if they don't watch it, and we do. This offends some democratic sensibilities. So here's the new twist: it's not that people in our own society are too ignorant or stupid to choose for themselves, but in the new world of global television, those appalling masses overseas might choose for them. Elitism has given way to chauvinism. That's progress, I suppose.

SOCIAL OBLIGATION

There are any number of ways to attack this argument. Ostry still seems to believe that profit is a private reward, divorced from the public interest. It is not. Profit is a social obligation - to produce more for society's use than one uses of society's resources - which is its own harshly collectivist means of enforcement: the enterprise that does not generate profit ceases to exist.

Likewise, Ostry believes markets produce ''nearly identical products; one soap or soap opera is much like another.'' Soap operas may indeed be alike, but markets in general have no such tendency. They accommodate the most individual of tastes. Television tends to conformity because broadcast television, the technology of the medium's infancy, is a good for which the market fails: you cannot force those who watch a program to pay for it. Hence the need for advertisers, and hence the bias to the mass audience. But that is a stage, thanks to pay-per-view, we are now leaving.

NO EVIDENCE

I could quarrel equally with Ostry's subscription to the ''awful power of the media'' thesis. To add to its ability to control elections, create demand, and corrupt the youth, the media is now the destroyer of cultural distinctiveness. First the television, then the cuisine.

This is one of those things that everybody knows, but for which no argument or evidence is ever produced. The editor of the Oxford English Dictionary has noted that regional dialects, for example, have multiplied: ''The notion that the English language is becoming homogenized is simply a myth of the media . . . The principle of social differentiation has not been deflected by the Wars of the Roses, the invasions of the Vikings and the Normans, the Civil War in England, the Industrial Revolution. Nor will it be changed by the mass media.''

But I think I will content myself by noting the essentially anti-aesthetic nature of putting art at the service of local ''identity.'' It is as much a perversion of art to bend it to the particular as it is to self-consciously reach for the universal. Art can serve only truth: the discovery of the universal in the particular.

Great art tells a great story, which will interest the people of one region as much as another, no matter its local detail. If, as Ostry fears, the media empires substitute placeless pap for rooted substance, they will find themselves as starved of viewers as the most irredentist Canadiana on the CBC or TVO.