Mr. Watson can be forgiven for wanting to get the Cancult mob off his back. Even as he left, he was eulogized in the Toronto Star as "the man who helped kill public broadcasting," on the usual charge of having failed to stop the Tories from slashing the CBC's budget. That the corporation is a wretched mess not even the most in- defatigable "it's-what-keeps-this- country-together" cheerleader can now doubt. But here's a little secret: It always was. And here's another: This has nothing to do with "underfunding." Contrary to popular myth, CBC funding did not fall during the Tory years, not even in real terms. From 1984 to 1993, the CBC's parliamentary grant climbed from $816-million to $1.11-billion, a rise of 3.5 per cent per year, compared to average annual inflation of 3.2 per cent. So perhaps now is an appropriate time to ask once again a question that the CBC's defenders have never satisfactorily answered: Why exactly are we spending all this money?

The standard non-answer, as delivered in The Globe last week, is that the CBC's role is to offer "a particular, distinctive kind of broadcasting . . . that the private sector cannot." Presumably this means programming of such indisputably high merit as to be incapable of attracting an audience. If so, this would be an argument for those of superior taste to support such programming out of their own pocket. It is not clear why others should be required to join them.

Even if the CBC's programming were occasionally to scale the heights of adequacy, that would not be warrant enough, in a liberal society, for forcing people to pay for it. To make the case that something should be publicly funded, you have to show that people do want it, but are somehow prevented, by a short- circuit of the market's normal processes, from making that preference known in the usual way. Mere quality or specialized interest are not normally evidence of this. If that were so, there would be no market for Rolls-Royces.

Actually, for most of its history, you could make that argument about television. The crucial factor was not so much the small number of channels, but the impossibility of charging viewers directly for each. Instead, private television was forced to rely on advertising to pay its way. The bias to the lowest common denominator that we have come to associate with private television is in fact strictly a function of this early broadcast technology.

Under advertising finance, the audience is the product, to be packaged and sold to advertisers; programming is more or less a byproduct. Viewer preferences could be measured only in the crudest sense, of how many had the TV tuned to one program or another. The intensity of those preferences - not only how closely they were watching, but how much they might be willing to pay for each program - could not be measured. So, naturally, broadcasters gravitated toward the largest possible audiences.

In such conditions, it was at least theoretically defensible to call upon the state to simulate the array of choices normally offered in a well-functioning market. But now that viewers can be charged a different price, not only for each channel, but for each program, that rationale falls to the ground. Premium channels are swarming onto the screen, offering just the sorts of high-quality, minority-taste programming that supposedly "the private sector cannot." The CBC, like the CRTC, is obsolete.

That's true now, even in advance of the famous 500-channel universe. But the coming supernova of choice makes the CBC question more pressing. Maybe we still want to spend a billion dollars a year of public money on television production. Maybe, when there were only three channels, the CBC was the right vehicle. But with 500 points on the spectrum, does it really make any sense to pour all that money into one?