Thursday's edition of The National devoted nearly 10 minutes, or about half the show, to the earthshattering news that CBC management would indeed make the cuts in spending required by the February 1995 federal budget. As CBC's coverage of itself goes, this qualifies as something near restraint: the last time around, when several local stations were closed in December 1990, the National gave it fully two-thirds of its schedule -- 14 minutes -- plus the whole of the Journal.

As always, however, the corporation's dedicated news staff went about their duties with consummate unprofessionalism. While no one on-air went quite so far as the Ottawa CBC reporter who actually screamed aloud at the Heritage minister, the general tone of the coverage was as if some important national catastrophe had occurred.Yet, strikingly, the corporation could find almost no one outside its own ranks to complain about it. The closest was the woman-in-the-street who mused thoughtfully that the CBC was "part of who we think we are." That's about the size of it: part of who we think we are. The notion that the CBC plays some vital role in "telling us who we are", or indeed that the CBC is who we are, is one of those obvious untruths about the country that the Canadian establishment has learned to hold in its head, in defiance of every available bit of evidence. Thrust a microphone in their face, and the public is obliged to pay deference; but in the privacy of their own living room, the reality is very different.

Any serious discussion of where the CBC goes from here must begin and end with the acknowledgment that we are in a post-CBC era. Perrin Beatty may proclaim that "we are Canada's broadcaster," but if that ever were true, it is not true now: not with an average audience share in prime-time of less than 10 per cent. All that cutting $300 million and 2500 jobs will do is to prolong the agony for the 7,000 that remain. Unless, that is, the corporation can bring itself to embrace far more radical changes than Mr. Beatty and his troops have produced.

Ignore the minutiae: after the dust has settled, the CBC will still be financed in much the same way as before, by a combination of parliamentary grant and advertising sales. All that will have changed is the relative weight of each. Yet whatever their differences in origin, public versus private, the two means of raising revenue share the same essential feature: both excuse the viewer from paying directly.

The inability to require payment of television viewers was the great problem of television's infancy, to which the sale of advertising was an unhappy solution. At a stroke, it transformed the dynamics of television from the provision of programming to viewers to the provision of audiences for advertisers.

And since advertisers are interested only in the sheer size of an audience, or at best in its demographics, the choices on offer leant towards the sort of bland or titillating fare that a large number of viewers might casually tune in -- so long as it was free -- rather than the demanding programming that a small number of people would be prepared to pay quite a lot to see. This was especially true when there was room on the frequency spectrum for only a handful of stations.

In that world, there was a strong case for public funding of broadcasting in general, and for a flagship broadcaster such as the CBC in particular.

Understand: it was not, as so many CBC supporters insist, that the general public had a duty to underwrite the CBC, whether they watched it or not. It was to mimic the diversity of choice that would otherwise obtain in a normal market: to provide to people the sort of programming they would want and be willing to pay for, but could not, owing to the technological limitations of early television.

That day has passed. There are now dozens of channels, and more on the way, many providing just the sort of diversity and quality that would once have been associated with public television -- because viewers who want those things can now pay for them. Public funding is no longer needed, and if it were, it would be unwise to direct it at one tiny spot on the dial.

The choice for the CBC, then, is clear. It can join the multi-channel, pay-TV universe, as a subscription service, like Bravo or A&E. Or it can muddle on, neglected and unloved by its public, unto its inevitable end.