CBC to take Radio 2 off the air, advocacy group says

OTTAWA — CBC/Radio-Canada will stop over-the-air broadcasts of its Radio 2 service and make it an “exclusively on-line music offering,” advocacy group Friends Of Canadian Broadcasting said at a news conference on Thursday. Speaking on Parliament Hill, spokesman Ian Morrison outlined a series of cuts that he said will be presented to the CBC’s board of directors during a meeting in June. Other planned cuts, he said, will affect local programming, including cancelling afternoon radio shows in places such as Thunder Bay, Ont. and halving regional news broadcast in four regions of Quebec. He said the cuts would also involve “chopping” morning children’s programs, such as Arthur, and potentially cancelling TV shows such as Best Laid Plans and Republic of Doyle. “If Canadians who love the CBC take a stand now and reject the planned cuts we are exposing today, we could force Mr. Lacroix and others installed by Prime Minister Harper to go back to the drawing board,” he said. Morrison said the watchdog group learned about the CBC’s plans through “very honourable people” from inside the CBC who took “some risk.” “People we trust, people who have advised us in the past and have not let us down,” he said. CBC spokeswoman France Belisle said in an email Thursday that the “assertions contained in Friends' release that were announced last month are accurate. The rest are speculation, inaccurate and misinformation.” Last month, CBC announced a round of job cuts and other reductions throughout the organization. The announcement did not mention moving Radio Two online, or cuts in children’s programming or local programming beyond cancelling planned expansions. CBC said in a press release at the time that it would “maintain its presence and news-gathering capabilities in the regions.” CBC also said at the time that the ad revenues it had received from advertising on its Espace Musique and Radio 2 stations had been “much lower-than-expected.” In 2013, CRTC ruled that paid national advertisements would be allowed on the two previously ad-free stations. Morrison said the cuts his group publicized Thursday did not occur due to CBC losing rights for Hockey Night In Canada, because financially the corporation is better off under its deal with Rogers Communications Inc. than it would have been had it retained the rights. Rogers announced last year that it had secured the exclusive national broadcast rights to NHL coverage in Canada for 12 years for $5.2 billion. CBC will carry Hockey Night in Canada on Saturdays and throughout the playoffs for at least the first four years of the contract, a deal under which Rogers is responsible for funding the hockey broadcasts and receives the advertising revenues. Under its last contract with the NHL, CBC was in a “break even situation” when they were paying $120 million a year for the rights and had bid more than $200 million a year before losing the rights to Rogers, Morrison said. “Where CBC would have been in trouble is if they had to put on 300 or 400 hours of new prime time programming and pay for it,” he said. “The real reason these cuts are happening is because in 2012 the Conservative government … imposed a 10 per cent cut.” The federal government cut $115 million in CBC funding over three years in the 2012 federal budget, as well ending a $60-million content-creation subsidy that it had been getting every year since 2001. In its quarterly report for the period ending Dec. 31, 2013, CBC said it lost $40 million on revenue of $190 million and government support of $230.6 million, with expenses of $461 million. Morrison said that his organization intends to “make this issue a major issue in the next general election.” — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca, and editing by Peter Henderson at phenderson@thewirereport.ca CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story referred to Friends of Canadian Broadcasting as Friends of Public Broadcasting.

CBC to take Radio 2 off the air, advocacy group says

Broadcast | May 22, 2014

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CBC to take Radio 2 off the air, advocacy group says

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