Toss out sports. Ditch drama. Why the CBC needs radical change to survive

But what will it look like?

Well, if some analysts are proven right, imagine this scenario in Canada — not in the next 50 years, but in a mere five years:

It will be a Canada without viable daily newspapers, stripped clean of effective local news and public accountability, even more awash in empty-headed American media than now, increasingly reliant on outdated commercial media models under siege from foreign companies and barely aware of its own weakened Canadian public broadcaster — so impoverished, neglected and mismanaged that a new book about the CBC warns that it may soon “die a slow death on the outskirts of the media world, (fading) into a kind of zombie-like half-life.”

The outlook for journalism is even more dire in the United States. In addition to the financial carnage within its own media industry — featuring closures, bankruptcies and endless downsizing — Donald Trump and his administration have targeted journalists as “true enemies of the people” and have vowed to increase their attacks if he is re-elected this November.

And beyond North America, authoritarian leaders are taking their cue from Trump. Independent journalism worldwide is in crisis, attacks on journalists are being encouraged, and hate speech and distorted information are increasingly destabilizing countries.

There can be little doubt that, at this chaotic moment in history, democracy in every corner of the globe is on the run.

So that is the context in which we find ourselves here in Canada — and that is the starting point for an excellent new book that examines the uncertain future of Canada’s public broadcaster.

Dramatically titled “The End of the CBC?”, the book was written by two respected journalism professors who point out that the “CBC has been one of the great nation-building successes in Canadian history.”

But without radical change, they write, “the CBC has come to the end of its rope … maintaining a presence everywhere but increasingly unable to compete anywhere.”

The authors are David Taras from Mount Royal University in Calgary and Christopher Waddell from Carleton University in Ottawa. They state from the outset that their focus is on the English-language service of CBC, not Radio-Canada, and many of their recommendations apply directly to CBC Television.

Overall, they argue that a commercial-free CBC should discard “much of what it does today” — such as drama, comedy, sports and music — “in favour of playing a more concerted and focused role” in only some areas:

“The CBC needs to shed much of its old skin and become solely a news and current affairs organization, dedicated to producing high-quality, dependable, and fair news and analysis.”

The book comes at a very critical time for the CBC, and for Canadian media in general. Beginning this spring, the public broadcaster will appear before its regulator, the CRTC, and seek a renewal to its five-year broadcast licence.

In a sharp analysis of what they see as the negligence and ineptness of both governments and CBC senior management over the years, the authors leave no doubt that the blame for the CBC’s current crisis should be widely shared: “Decades of funding cuts, political interference, decisions to boost private-sector broadcasters and downgrade the CBC, and poor management have taken its toll.”

But the book’s thesis is inspiring in that it provides a pathway to dealing with two enormous challenges confronting Canadian democracy:

How to help salvage the country’s collapsing news media?

And how to turn Canada’s public broadcaster from being a recurring “problem” to becoming an essential “solution”?

It recommends making international coverage — “interpreting the world for Canadians” — a first priority with more journalists abroad. And it suggests enriching its national and local coverage by concentrating on a narrower range of themes but done with more depth.

Significantly, it also suggests a greater spirit of collaboration and partnership with what would traditionally be regarded as CBC’s fierce commercial rivals such as newspapers, online and other broadcast networks. It should be “a new CBC,” they write — one that doesn’t compete for advertising with its commercial competitors, that shares its journalism with other news organizations and that uses its public resources and prominence to strengthen and promote other local news and online outlets.

Whether or not its recommendations are widely embraced at the outset, the book is certain to stimulate debate.

However, I must confess that any book with the title “The End of the CBC?” was bound to give me the creeps. My association with the CBC – as a news and current affairs journalist, producer and executive — lasted nearly 35 years, so I didn’t read this book with any sense of contrived detachment.

At the CBC, I was privileged to be at the centre of many of its major initiatives. I was executive producer of “The National” when we redesigned it in 1982 for its decade with “The Journal.” I was brought back in the same role in the mid-1990s to scrap the unsuccessful “Prime Time News” and return it back to “The National.” In between those assignments, I worked abroad as a producer with cherished CBC correspondents such as Brian Stewart, Don Murray and Joe Schlesinger.

In other words, I was lucky — except for one thing. Between 2000 and 2007, I was editor-in-chief of CBC News and was forced to preside over several rounds of painful budget cuts that affected our news and documentary journalism to its core.

And sadly, as I learned from this book, that pattern has not ended:

“Despite the injection of $675 million to the CBC over five years announced by the Trudeau government in 2016 and the extensive handwringing about fake news and its negative effects on an informed citizenry, CBC management has been cutting the money allocated to news. It declined in each of the budget years 2017-18 and 2018-19 … This has also led to the elimination of positions in news bureaus at home and abroad.”

Some things never seem to change, do they?

“The End of the CBC?” is a book that should be read by anyone who cares about how journalism and democracy intersect.

If there is ever to be a funeral for public broadcasting in Canada, as this book fears may one day happen, let it be said as part of the eulogy that this was a squandered opportunity of historic proportions.

As philosopher John Ralston Saul was quoted in the book as saying: “Everybody who is smart in bureaucracies and governments around the Western world now knows that public broadcasting is one of the most important levers that a nation state has to communicate with itself.”

Given this, we should remember that the CBC’s overall price tag is incredibly inexpensive.

CBC and Radio-Canada broadcast in English, French and eight Indigenous languages, and operate roughly 120 conventional TV and radio stations, and numerous websites.

But it receives one of the lowest levels of funding for a public broadcaster in the developed world — one-third of what the BBC gets per capita, and one-fifth the funding for Norway’s public broadcaster.

In fact, CBC/Radio-Canada costs each Canadian only about $3 a month (compared with Netflix at $14 a month).

We should think of that the next morning we spend $3 on one cup of coffee and argue about the dire state of Canadian democracy.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM ‘THE END OF THE CBC?’

1. “News and journalism (in Canada) are in a deep crisis … (After) years of budgetary uncertainty, a lack of policy vision by governments and by the CBC itself … the public broadcaster will either be reimagined and reinvented or die a slow death on the outskirts of the media world … It will fade into a kind of zombie-like half-life.”

2. “The CBC exists in a kind of limbo, maintaining a presence everywhere but increasingly unable to compete anywhere … Decades of funding cuts, political interference, decisions to boost private-sector broadcasters and downgrade the CBC, and poor management have taken its toll.”

3. “The entire point of turning to a public broadcaster for news is to find insights, expertise and in-depth analysis that are difficult to find anywhere else. Unfortunately, cutbacks have meant the downsizing or elimination of news bureaus, fewer investigative stories, and the elimination of a number of specialized beat reporters in areas such as the economy, environment and justice who have the knowledge and contacts needed to dig more deeply into issues.”

4. “In 2017, Canadian broadcasters spent substantially less on news than they did on sports, a trend that is likely to accelerate. The facts on the ground are terrifying. According to the Canadian Media Guild, some 12,000 media jobs have vanished in the last few decades.”

5. “Advertising is a critical handicap. The CBC has been doing everything it can to ram as much advertising into ‘The National’ as possible —to the point where there are now more ads in 30 minutes of the hour-long news program than during the 30-minute ‘CTV National News’ at 11:00 p.m. This ad-cramming has undermined the integrity of ‘The National’ and made it extraordinarily difficult for programmers.”

6. “The CBC can no longer do everything and be all things to all audiences … This means that the CBC must give up competing in areas such as sports and music, where specialty channels and streaming services dominate the horizon, or trying to compete against expensive mega-dramas that appear on global streaming services … The CBC needs to give up visions of being the primary outlet for telling Canadian stories to Canadians on television in drama, entertainment and comedy.”

7. “News remains the fulcrum and lifeline of democracy … The CBC cannot retreat from being a main news provider. In fact, this role needs to be reinforced and become the tip of the spear for a new CBC. The backdrop is, of course, the crisis that is enveloping the Canadian news media generally.”

8. “The new CBC would provide citizens with news and current affairs programming and online content that goes beyond the fluff and provides citizens with “must-have” news. Having shed its other responsibilities, the CBC will now have the resources to be truly excellent in the one area most crucial to the health and future of democracy.”

9. “There are several areas that we believe a public broadcaster should concentrate its attention on in the post-broadcast world, whether it be on radio, television or online. First is interpreting the world for Canadians. The private-sector media has almost completely withdrawn from covering the world through the eyes of Canadian journalists, substituting content provided by foreign news organizations and their journalists, which may or may not relate to Canadian experiences.”

10. “The CBC needs to shed much of its old skin and become solely a news and current affairs organization dedicated to producing high-quality, dependable and fair news and analysis in areas such as the economy, Canada and the world, health care, Canadian culture, and most important, the political life of the country. It needs to do investigative journalism, produce the accountability news that holds people and institutions responsible, and do the essential work of democracy.”

David Taras is a professor in Media Studies at Mount Royal University, Calgary. Christopher Waddell is a professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University, Ottawa. University of Toronto Press