Todd Mundt

od Maffin has posted the full text of a speech that CBC President Robert Rabinovitch delivered in Toronto today.The speech gives a good sense of where the CBC is right now, but I think it’s particularly frank about the issues facing CBC English Television.

CBC’s English Television receives a little more than a quarter of the Corporation’s total Government funding. The rest of its budget, more than 50 per cent, is derived from commercial operations — advertising, subscription fees, program sales. How can you call yourself a public broadcaster when over 50 per cent of your budget comes from competing with the private sector? The reality is that CBC Television is only partly a public broadcaster.

This tension between the commercial and public missions of the network has never been resolved, and perhaps it never can. The result is a network that presents a confusing picture to Canadians. You can see it in the audience statistics and in the lack of viewer loyalty to CBC English Television. Canadians see CBC Radio and the French Radio-Canada radio and TV channels as distinctly Canadian - the services that tie the country and culture together. CBC TV is the oddball. The key here isn’t the commercial nature of the TV network. Radio-Canada’s TV network is commercial. The problem is a lack of distinctiveness at English Television.
Rabinovitch suggests greater investment by the government to buttress the corporation’s services, and a major new initiative to develop Canadian drama for television, much as Radio-Canada has launched on French television.

Major initiatives will be expensive to launch, however. Over the years, CBC has succeeded in wringing significant cost savings out of operations; Rabinovitch quotes impressive numbers in both one-time and continuing savings. But savings have their own costs, so to speak… and CBC English Television is a weaker organization today than it once was.