There is little reason to suppose that recent protests against the CBC's plan for Radio 2, here and elsewhere, will ultimately make any difference in what the CBC does. Yet, weeks after two columns on the subject in this space, I continue to hear from readers and unhappy CBC listeners. Their responses uniformly express anger, frustration and dismay about what they perceive as a patronizing attitude from CBC senior management, which seems in the end to come down to "we know what's best for you." Not only do many CBC listeners dispute that, they increasingly question whether CBC management even knows what's best for the CBC.
This unhappiness is reflected in a range of concerns but tends to focus on three overlapping issues: mandate, content and process. There is a deepening concern about the character of the CBC and its role in the country it was created to serve. A frequently expressed view is that the public broadcaster, as a national institution, should be seen as no less important than other great offices or departments of state which exist to preserve, promote and protect the nation and the national interest. Over the last 30 years, other departments of government, often for reasons of prestige, glory or political advantage, have expended hundreds of millions of dollars with relatively little -- even by those standards -- to show for it. During the same period, as one writer put it, Ottawa "thinks nothing of 'blowing' several hundred million dollars on hosting the G-8 summit and what do we get? Communiques and photo-ops."
In the meantime, of course the CBC has been "nickelled and dimed" to death with resources, particularly at the regional level, greatly constrained. The result, inevitably, is to whittle away what little remains of the broadcaster's mandate for public service.
In such circumstances it is not surprising that the CBC has been hamstrung in many ways. What is more remarkable is that, especially in radio, it has continued to do so much and so well. A striking illustration of this is provided by the experience of many Canadians when travelling to other parts of the country: Until now, wherever one was, one could experience the pleasure of finding local CBC radio stations, and with its familiar and characteristic programming, the feeling of still being at home. These days, they have greater difficulty finding CBC stations while travelling since so much of CBC programming now sounds indistinguishable from that of the private stations. And the greater the pressure to be "competitive" with private radio, also undercuts the CBC's role as a public service.
The notion of competing with private broadcasters is intelligible even if destructive, but there is another problem, less intelligible and, potentially, more destructive. As a recent Free Press feature story on Chris Boyce, CBC's new director of English language programming makes clear, we are dealing with a new set of programmers at the CBC with their own cultural ideology, and who see themselves as omniscient when it comes to deciding what CBC needs and will broadcast.
Boyce, for example, has no particular problem with those CBC listeners who oppose the reduced time given to classical music. He simply dismisses them as "elitist." He doesn't "buy" into the argument that "one kind of music is inherently better or smarter than other kinds." As the new voice of CBC radio, he could hardly be clearer. Nonetheless, being unable to recognize the difference in sophistication, breadth, depth, emotional force and staying power between, say, Beethoven's 9th Symphony and a Paris Hilton song to be forgotten this time next year, or Shakespeare's Hamlet and graffiti spray-painted on a wall, suggests a failure to in anyway appreciate the qualities which have, over centuries, distinguished great art, architecture, music and literature. Among those qualities has been their ability to speak to increasingly diverse populations over hundreds of years and, in the case of music -- until the early 20th Century -- with neither recordings or broadcasting to keep them alive. That the director of programming for CBC does not get or "buy" into that distinction is an astonishing commentary.
As a personal opinion -- though it smacks of inverse snobbery -- he's entitled to it, but foisting it as a policy on the public broadcaster without prior public discussion or debate is something else. And when you're at three per cent of the listening audience, as in the Winnipeg area, dismissing classical music as no more significant than any other music is hardly the true blue of audio democracy. Given that the CBC operates at arm's length from parliament and is free, rightly, from direct political interference and direction, and given that the senior management of the CBC is beyond reconsidering its present course and is manifestly impervious to public criticism, one might fairly ask: Who constitutes the elite in this situation?
wnwfp@mts.net
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