CBC ‘dimmer star’ in media landscape, conservative event hears

OTTAWA — When talking about CBC/Radio-Canada’s role in the media landscape, the public broadcaster is a “pygmy amongst giants,” and more focus should be aimed at large telecom companies, Dwayne Winseck argued Saturday during a debate about whether to “pull the plug” on the CBC. “Over the last three decades, the CBC has actually become a much dimmer star against a much bigger media universe,” Winseck, a Carleton University communications professor and head of the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project, said while facing off against iPolitics publisher James Baxter and radio personality and Rebel Media co-founder Brian Lilley at the Manning Centre Conference in Ottawa. Founded by Reform Party creator Preston Manning in 2005, the centre, and its three-day annual conference, supports “conservative and libertarian activists and ideas in Canada,” according to its website. Winseck said he wondered “if we’re actually looking at things through the wrong end of the telescope with this focus on the CBC. Should we really be focusing on the CBC when evermore of our economy, society and every day life is dependent on mobile wireless and broadband Internet connections?” In his defense of the country’s public broadcaster, Winseck said the CBC “is a pygmy amongst giants — it is not a colossus,” pointing to figures demonstrating that in 1992 it accounted for 5.3 per cent of total media revenues. “Today, it accounts for less than half of that amount,” he said, adding that “based on revenues in Canada, Google is now bigger than the CBC,” and that Facebook Inc. is about half its size. “But what really stands out is the extent to which we have five companies standing at the apex of the Canadian economy,” Winseck said, noting that BCE Inc., Rogers Communications Inc., Telus Corp., Shaw Communications Inc. and Quebecor Inc. make up nearly three-quarters of all media revenues. “Carriage is king, not content,” he said. The CBC has gone too far outside of its mandate, Lilley said, echoing comments he made in front of the House’s heritage committee last year that the public broadcaster should be sold off and made to compete on equal footing with the private sector. Lilley said that many things that have been held up as part of the golden age of CBC, such as Hockey Night in Canada, began in the private sector and were bought out. “That’s what they’re doing now and they’re doing it in a new way. They’re doing it by expanding yet again into more areas, whether it is running a music division that competes with Spotify and other music streaming services. They’re starting a television streaming . That’s not in their mandate. To have a streaming service? Where did Parliament ever ask them to do that? The answer is, they didn’t,” Lilley said. He did not offer any further details about the streaming service he was referring to. The CBC hasn't many any announcements about launching a television streaming service, while such a service wasn't included in either its five year plan or a recent update. Baxter disagreed that the CBC should be sold off, instead arguing in favour of breaking it into regional pieces so that it lost its Toronto-centric focus — which Baxter and Lilley both said led to anti-conservative bias. During his appearance in front of the heritage committee in their study of the local media and communities in September, Baxter called the CBC an “uber-predator” and said “because of the nature of its web content, the CBC is not out there competing with The Huffington Post and CNN. It is competing directly with The Globe and Mail, Postmedia, and yes, iPolitics,” according to a transcript. “Is it time to pull the plug? No, but I’d say it’s time to pull hard on the reins. The CBC has not had a mandate review since 1991 and that was before AOL was a thing,” Baxter said Saturday, adding that he thinks the right “should want a robust a CBC” but one where “there would be local boards, appointed partly federally, partly provincially, partly in big cities by the municipal governments.” — With reporting by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@thewirereport.ca and editing by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca

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CBC ‘dimmer star’ in media landscape, conservative event hears

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