Archive for August 2006

If The One had been solely a CBC production, one suspects that would have charged ahead to do what they could to promote the career of George Stroumboulopoulos, but thankfully sense kicked in at ABC and it has been cancelled. When I read this welcome news in last week’s paper, I noticed that it ended on the usual, ‘CBC is searching for a vision in the age of the internet’. To find this vision, it would help if CBC had a sense of its history, and a sense of traveling around the country without satellite hookups for broadband reporting.The idea behind The One it was reported, was to raise Stroumboulopoulos’ profile so that cable-less rubes would not be shocked when The Hour debuts on the main network in the fall, following The National. Why this type of thing is required, I don’t know. I do know that The Hour is already unwatchable due to it’s too cool for school attitude. I don’t need to know anything happening in the world badly enough to have it portioned out in bullet point cool to learn about it. I do know that CBC used to have great shows that treated young people as intelligent (Big Life, CounterSpin) but undoubtedly these were repeatedly cancelled due to low ratings. Why the CBC needs to chase ratings is a good question.

1. A Public Broadcaster
The public should demand greater funding for the CBC so that it doesn’t have to chase ratings and so that it can feel free to broadcast esoteric programing of limited appeal. This itself is a very old idea, so why are we still talking about it? Why hasn’t this happened yet?

But given enough resources, to match the ideal the CBC needs to recognize that there are 24 hours in a day and this is the time of VCRs and TIVO. There should be plenty of room on the schedule for all sorts of weird stuff that broaden our perspective and who cares if some it will be on at 4am? Young people know how to set VCRs. Something as wild as the gay-fisting show might have a place on the channel. It would be offensive to some (hell, to many), but shouldn’t public broadcasting aim to smooth out our preconceived notions by helping us become well-rounded? Shouldn’t contemporary sophisticated people at least understand what such a thing as gay-fisting is, even if it’s not their cup of tea? There should be no room for ‘I don’t know’ in today’s world. CBC, help us broaden our minds, not limit them by giving us what we think we want!

2. From Coast to Coast
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was developed to provide a coast to coast radio network in the 1930s, when this was a new technology whose benefit and advantage was obvious. But what kind of broadcasting is of interest to 20 year olds? Wi-Fi. CBC used to have a station of antennae and powerful broadcast equipment in New Brunswick which put out the network’s short-range radio signal. This station was shut down during the 1990s after the internet made it obsolete. If they thought that was worthy of investment why not Wi Fi as well? Take a laptop or a Blackberry to the rural corners of the country and you’ll be lucky to find a signal. My recent experience traveling through the East Coast on summer holiday brought this to mind – I did find signals but they were weak and didn’t really work that well. But it seems to me that if the people from the 1930s were still around, they’d be arguing for a network of wi-fi towers that stretch from sea to sea. This would also have the benefit of bringing broadband internet access to the rural communities along the US border and further an international image of being considerate.

What we are seeing, in Toronto at any rate, is the Ontario Power Commission taking up this challenge. The electric company. Ok, fine. Let’s not be limited to the idea that the official broadcasting corporation should be limited to only broadcasting, or that the power company should be limited to supplying electricity. In Toronto’s case, the wi-fi connectivity is coming as a side-effect of the new power meters, which will broadcast their information using this network. So this is an added benefit. But Toronto is not Canada, and Toronto already has the infrastructure to support widely available broadband internet access. My point is that the rest of the country does not, and the CBC is uniquely mandated to take this up if they so chose.

As it is, the CBC is stuck in the old media models, of television and radio, while treating the internet and such connectivity as an afterthought. I for one don’t understand why their radio programs, which are free to listen to when broadcast through the air, become commodities to be bought, sold, controlled afterward, so that programs like Ideas get a ‘best of’ treatment for the podcast, dolled out on a week to week basis. The CBC archive should be openly available to download. Haven’t we already paid of this content through inadequate allocation of public funds and the patience to sit through McCain food ads?

As it is, what is available on the CBC Archive webpage has been edited – selected and packaged and available only if you use Windows Player, eliminating many Mac users who probably make up the right audience for such content – cultural workers who could really use this content. This web-page was set up in 2003, reflects a corporate relationship with Microsoft which is counter to the public-good (they should be taking advantage of open-source software), and is now obsolete in light of YouTube and Google Video’s use (and thus, standardization) of Flash video, which can be played on anything.

3. Rights
It’s come up before that the CBC cannot treat its archives the way most of us would like because of the contracts signed with the performers etc, entitling them to fees for re-broadcasting, fees which the CBC cannot afford. This is an intolerable situation and something needs to be done about this.

4. Vision
In short my vision for the CBC is the following: as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, they should invest in contemporary broadcasting of wi-fi so that internet connectivity from sea to sea is possible. As a public institution, it makes more sense for us to collectively pool our resources (through the usual proper funding allocation derived from tax revenue) so that individuals aren’t burdened with the costs of bringing satellite internet hookups to the lake-shore cottages of the country. As a public broadcaster, they should feel free to program a wide variety of material that reflects the interests and cultures of this country: enough of the white-bread mainstream hockey Shania Twain specials. Where does the CBC reflect the Indo-Canadian perspective? How does the CBC reflect the Aboriginal perspective? With 24 hours in a day, there’s room for 24 different one-hour shows, or 48 different half-hour shows. Further, with the internet, available through their coast-to-coast wi-fi network, they could have internet-only programs. The CBC should have one of the richest server farms in the country, loaded up with their digitized archives, so that fifty years of broadcast history is available to historians and curious citizens. In the Age of the Internet, there should be no excuse for ignorance and none for lack of historical perspective. Such conditions exist today because for too long information has been controlled by editorial shaping, itself not a bad thing (in light of criticisms of Wikipedia) but one where bias can’t often be easily unmasked.

The CBC of the 21st Century should reflect the interests of a well-rounded, highly learned population. George Stroumboulopoulos is in the unfortunate position of being the poster boy for the CBC’s own sense of cultural inadequacy, a sense that can only exist by treating the Canadian public as only being interested in superficiality, rather than acknowledging their appetite for things which help them grow as individuals and further an in-depth understanding of what’s happening in the world.

Finally, to end on a positive note:

5. CBC Radio 3
Is a success on all these counts. Radio show, podcast, esoteric programming, the hint that the host is familiar with such subversive things as drug use and gay erotica (that is, he need not be gay to be cool with its existence), CBC3 shows that CBC knows how to do this. It need not be constrained by limited thinking or a need to broadly appeal to hockey fans. More programing like CBC3 would help the corporation become the 21st Century institution it is destined to be.