If admitting you have a problem is the first step toward solving it, then perhaps things are looking just a bit up at Canada’s public broadcaster. Catherine Tait, CBC’s spectacularly out-of-touch Brooklyn-based president, is gone. And CBC’s new five-year strategic plan, revealed this week by recently installed president Marie-Philippe Bouchard, correctly diagnoses several of the Crown corporation’s problems: Young people don’t consume its content very much, and nor do western and rural Canadians, and nor do new Canadians.
The new plan proposes appealing to “non-users (and) dissatisfied users” with “different programming and editorial output.” It intends to “return to the regions” a broadcaster whose resources it seems to realize have been too concentrated in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Can’t really argue with any of that: When your public broadcaster leaves great swaths of the population feeling something between indifference and hostility, “different programming and editorial output” is job one.
The whole thing is written in fluent corporate-ese, like a pitch to shareholders — appropriate enough, perhaps, since Canadians own CBC, whether they like it or not. But parts of the plan sound more like a rebranding exercise than a comprehensive content-based overhaul. And where the plan does talk about new content, it often sounds more interested in building market share as the job in itself, rather than a byproduct of excellent content.
“Not every content and format has to be suitable for everyone, but everyone should find something that suits them,” the plan states.
That would certainly make it easier to justify CBC’s ongoing existence. But a broadcaster is not an all-you-can-eat buffet. If significant numbers of TV consumers ever cared which network or production company was creating their favourite entertainment, surely that time has passed. Nobody hangs on tenterhooks for the latest offerings specifically from HBO or Netflix. I couldn’t have told you who made even some of my favourite recent shows, or indeed on which service I watched them.
We heard in recent years about kids binge-watching Friends the hit ’90s NBC sitcom. I doubt one in 10 could tell you what NBC even is. And conversely, nobody ignores a good show because they have some beef with the producers or the network’s C-suite or its corporate strategy. Considering much of CBC TV’s non-fiction content is already produced or co-produced by third parties, it’s entirely reasonable to ask if CBC’s subsidy would be better spent (if at all) on simply helping creators make content, and never mind where it eventually shows up.
CBC News is another kettle of fish. Many conservatives will talk your ear off about its Liberal or left-wing bias. Whatever you think of those allegations, it’s a problem when the public broadcaster’s national newscast is the lowest-rated in the land. It’s a problem when a fair chunk of the population considers your news content unwatchable, unlistenable, unbearable. It doesn’t matter if it’s fair or not.
That said, British conservatives have plenty of complaints about the BBC’s news offerings as well. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and his permanent smirk are well positioned to crash into 10 Downing Street at some point in the near future, and its party platform proposes scrapping the mandatory licence fee Brits pay to operate a television, which is BBC’s primary source of revenue. (Last year, BBC News apologized to the party for labelling it “far right,” saying the description “fell short of (its) usual editorial standards.”)
But BBC has many more arrows in its quiver to fire back. It can accurately claim Brits watch content on BBC iPlayer more than every other video-on-demand service combined; that all 10 of the most-watched programs on Christmas Day last year were on BBC; that 80 per cent of Brits went to BBC for election night coverage in 2024. I got talking to a Brit the other day who was nearly misty-eyed about watching David Attenborough’s Planet Earth documentaries on BBC with his family.
In the face of a would-be Canadian Conservative government that vows to defund CBC entirely, Mother Corp. has no similar comebacks. CBC won’t even divulge how many subscribers there are to Gem, its iPlayer equivalent, and it’s a safe bet it’s not just being modest. Indeed, I shudder to think how modest those numbers might really be. And it occurs to me the only things I’ve ever watched on Gem weren’t even Canadian, never mind CBC productions — so what were they even doing there?
What is CBC still doing here? That could make a good title for its strategic plan, actually.
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
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