As CBC defunding looms, the network doesn’t know what to do
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Summary
Richard Stirsberg is a former broadcast executive who spent a good deal of time talking about his time at CBC. He talks about the good, the bad, and the ugly of his time in charge of the broadcaster, and why he thinks it's a good idea to try to fix it instead of just scrapping it.
Transcript
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conservative leader pierre balieff certainly takes a great deal of delight in talking about
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defunding cbc it's something that gets the crowd going as well at his rallies across the country
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there was a time when saying you would defund cbc would be something that would well make a lot of
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canadians sit up and take notice maybe make them angry nowadays though it's something that delights
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conservatives while much of the rest of the country kind of shrugs their shoulders hello and welcome
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to the full comment podcast my name is brian lily your host and today we're going to take a look at
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canada's national broadcaster will it be defunded is it a good idea to defund it and what would it
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look like if we tried to fix it instead of just scrapping it our guest on today's program is
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someone who knows all about cbc the good the bad and the ugly richard stirsberg is a former broadcast
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executive he was vice president of cbc radio canada from october 2004 until august 2010 he was in charge
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of english services both the radio and tv side he tried to bring about changes to cbc but
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well as you'll hear in the conversation it didn't always go so well he's also the author of the
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2012 memoir the tower of babel that spent a good deal of time talking about his time at cbc richard
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stirsberg joins us in toronto today richard thanks for the time my pleasure before we get into the state
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of cbc and a certain apple munching politicians views on it um i did want to ask you about you know
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your time there because you were hired for a specific purpose you were hired to do what you'd
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done at telefilm canada to go in and make shows that canadians wanted to watch you had some success
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you had a lot of blowback before we get into the blowback and the internal pushback tell me about
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the success what was it like going into cbc with a mandate to make shows canadians actually wanted to
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watch well uh the the backdrop to it is that uh the cbc had been losing uh cbc television is what
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i'm talking about now cbc television had been losing market share uh oh i don't know for the
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last 30 years and share had been consistently dropping and uh the general view at the time
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and certainly was my view was that the cbc was paid for by all canadians so it should make things that
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were broadly popular and it should make things that were canadian that neither cgv nor global
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nor anybody else could really afford or you know had the desire to make and so um there was i think
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it's fair to say a certain resistance because there was a kind of theory within the cbc at the time
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that if you were to make popular shows then inevitably uh they would be kind of uh stupid or of low quality
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uh and that if you were to make clever shows inevitably uh they would not be popular because
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um the audience wouldn't get it now i i thought this was this was completely wrong-headed and that
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uh the great challenge of television like the great challenge of movies is to make beautiful
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shows that are clever and popular and that there's no inherent contradiction so part of the difficulty
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was that there was this kind of uh culture within the cbc and the culture was corrosive in the sense
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that you know you could never win with a culture like that if you made popular shows that meant that
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you were stupid and if you made uh shows that nobody watched then you had a different problem so part of
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the difficulty was to renovate the culture and at the same time to change the entire strategy with respect
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to how we were making shows so we started uh a process of making shows within the kinds of conventions that television
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that canadians like in television which are essentially american conventions um so canadians like to see
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shows that were structured in particular kinds of ways all particular kinds of formats we opened up uh there was a huge uh
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you know business that the cbc had ever wanted to touch in unscripted shows
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and uh they were looked down upon too as kind of reality shows
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and what came out of that was uh a series of of new kinds of shows that uh the cbc had not really done
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before so we did little mosque on the prairie uh we did things like dragon's den which is on to this day
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um and we we started building um shows that were either you know traditional procedurals or situation
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comedies or uh unscripted shows of one variety or another and the response was was interesting the
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response was great uh at a certain point we had uh managed to position cbc television as the number two
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uh watched television service uh in prime time in the country after ctv with all canadian lineup
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whereas ctv's lineup was you know basically almost an all-american lineup yeah so they they bid on the
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big popular shows out of the states that's been their business model for years so you're you're up
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against shows that are part of the the wider zeitgeist and you managed to say bypass global which
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buys up the the secondary shows out of the u.s and and and and we were very successful and so
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a number of interesting things happened as the cbc's shows got more popular uh we we would survey
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canadians on a regular basis and see what they thought of the corporation in terms of you know
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whether it mattered to them whether they thought it was distinctive and so on and so forth and as the
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numbers got better canadians attitudes towards the cbc became more and more uh positive and the other
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thing that happened which was fascinating to me was that uh we also surveyed our own employees to find
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out what they thought of overall strategy and not surprisingly i think um as the shows got more popular
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um they had they became uh happier uh in terms of their work inside the corporation so um it's uh and
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i don't think that's altogether surprising i mean people like success you know nothing succeeds like
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success and when they feel like they're working for a place that's successful and that's engaging uh
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you know uh canadians then that they feel better about their own work and they feel better about the
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place so that's what it was i want to ask you about that that antipathy that you know that idea that
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oh popular is going to be bad i mean the most popular show for decades on cbc was hockey night in
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canada you don't get more base and more popular than just saying here's a hockey game guys have at it
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but that's right like it and it was good quality broadcasting at the same time so how where did this
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idea come from that well no we've just got to you know make something for our friends in the deepest
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darkest annex in downtown toronto and to heck with everybody else i don't know brian i mean i think that
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it's it's i found it i found it puzzling when i got there i'd never really kind of seen uh that sort
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of a culture in any place i've ever been before so i don't really know how to account for it but i do know
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that uh what happened was when we started to get successful then as i say the culture itself began
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to shift and people began to say oh that's great we can actually do this and we can actually make
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these kinds of shows and we're positive about the way in which the uh uh the strategies evolved
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i i remember when your book tower of babble came out um interviewing you and you told me a story about
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how you were touring the newsrooms and trying to tell them don't look don't be a stereotype and
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then you got to one newsroom and they actually had the stereotype example that you were using
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leading off their newscast do you remember that i can't remember what was i think it was about uh
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goat goat farmers uh oh goat cheese goat cheese yeah they used to do things on goat cheese and i said i
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don't you know yeah it's really going to be gripping enough leading off the six o'clock news with a
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story about your local organic goat cheese maker um you know it's it's a different mindset than what
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people were watching everyone and and what people people want to know for the number one thing they
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want to know in terms of local news is issues that involve uh basically uh questions of security and
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that's why people are interested in fires they're interested in you know crime they're interested in all
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these these sort of questions uh as to how is their own community how is their own community doing
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so you know we started to shift that around a bit the other thing that was uh interesting for me i don't
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know if you remember this or not was but this links a little bit back to um the current criticisms
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which is you know people said well the problem with the news department is
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it's uh it's uh it's very left-leaning it advantages the liberals and uh it's full of communists
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and uh so i i myself want to know was the what's the news uh particularly the television news was it
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was it was it was it fair was it uh was it you know balanced and so we undertook a big study we
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actually hired you know a number of top experts the people professors from ubc york university university
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of washington the pew center and the university of amsterdam to design a study that would look at the
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extent to which the news was in fact fair and the way we did it was to compare our coverage of the
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conservatives with our coverage of the liberals uh against the baseline of how global and ctv were
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covering and uh what we found much to my complete amazement um was that the belief about the cbc news
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on the part of the conservatives and you know they were raising a lot of money uh um arguments that the
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cbc was hopelessly biased against them was exactly the opposite that we uh in fact gave more coverage to
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uh the conservatives uh than did either global or ctv and that we treated them slightly more
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positively than we treated the liberals now was this before or after the change in government
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because your your time it this is during this is during the this is during the harper government so
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we did this around 2008 and uh but the thing that really struck me was so i i thought well this is
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pretty interesting people will be fascinated because you know the general view i think
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shared certainly within the conservative party was that we were unfair to the conservatives
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so i thought well okay fine what we'll do is we're going to take all this research we'll put it up
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all online and i'll put all the data online and people want to reanalyze the data they can do that
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themselves and i'll make all the experts who actually designed the study and did the work
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available you know people want to talk to them and find out what what really happened so i thought
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this was gonna like be uh you know uh an enormously interesting kind of news uh piece and i became even
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a little bit worried that the liberals would say that we were bending over backwards to be nice to
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conservatives because of financing issues but the weirdest thing that happened was nothing happened
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i don't even remember that story yeah absolutely nothing happened nothing happened we put it up we
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put it right on the very front of the website we uh we did a big press release around it as i say we
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put up all the data we put up all the experts and absolutely nothing happened nobody expressed any
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interest nobody called and said they wanted to get briefed nobody said they wanted to talk to the
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experts etc etc it was completely it was completely amazing but it but it went to one of the
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kind of mythological things which is a lot of the talk i think and that i think is probably true
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today a lot of the talk within the conservative party about the biases cbc is really talk that's
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designed to raise money from um supporters of the conservative party rather than talk that is based on
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you know some actual you know real thoughtful evaluation of how the news is treating people the
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the idea that there is a bias at cbc though that there is a downtown toronto or montreal bias that's
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not something new the oldest example i can find i think it's from 1964 it's on cbc archives and it's
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then ccfmp doug fisher who went on to become a great columnist for the telegram and for the or for
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the telegraph and for the sun um and he was elected for thunder bay and he was he was up there with the
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ndp predecessor complaining about cbc and ottawa so cbc reporter went and interviewed him and his comment
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was it's metropolitanism they care about what happens in downtown montreal and toronto and ottawa and then
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there's the rest of the country is that fair well i think that uh it's interesting um
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i was very much of the view that that that's a different kind of bias the metropolitan bias from
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the kind of political uh you know an ideological bias that it was accused of one of the things
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that's fascinating to me is that uh in terms of radio if you have a local radio station covering you
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know as we have in toronto for example so you get metro morning in the uh you know in the morning and
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then you get the afternoon drive show so you have heavy coverage of local stuff what happens is that
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the uh the propensity of people in toronto then to listen to the national radio shows goes up and we
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saw that in every single market in the country so that if there's a strong local presence then people's
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enthusiasm for the national shows goes up as well so one of the things that became
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important to me was actually to start rebuilding um the local uh supper hour television shows
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and for two reasons one of which was that i thought that would also lift the national news uh in the
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same way as it did for radio and secondly uh you know doug fisher is right it's very important to
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uh to cover the country in its entirety and suddenly that would have given us more local stories that we
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could play nationally and so on and so forth so i think that's a that's a fair point the difficulty
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of course is that it's very expensive to do that it's extremely expensive to do that the french do it
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more effectively than the english and that's in large measure because the french are much better
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finance than the english and so on smaller region for the majority of their their audience yeah much
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uh much much smaller region and uh and they have you know right now i think the numbers are that
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the french health the french services are financed at the level of about 70 dollars
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per uh capita and the english services are financed about 23 dollars per capita and so not surprisingly
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they have better local presence uh because it's smaller and they have more money per capita
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yeah but i mean look part of my problem with and and you know that i have many problems with cbc
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um but one of them is that you know continually hearing well it's not financed properly enough and
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we don't have money for it but then they go off and they have spent enormous amounts of money
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um basically turning their website into a newspaper to compete they've spent a ton of money
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on a cbc streaming music service that for years would you would go on it and i would do this for my
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stories and it would promote the latest pop music and so there were essentially you know competing for
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listeners for elton john and beyonce songs with spotify except cbc is free to the listener they still
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have to pay for it free to the listener whereas spotify you have to pay for it um even on the local
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news they've gone into markets that they never had a direct local presence like hamilton and built up
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an online station competing with the private sector so there's all this attempts to compete while in in
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new ways while not doing the core job in my yeah well i mean i think that uh would it be desirable uh
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for cbc to get out of advertising yeah i think it would and i say that for a couple of reasons one
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of which is that uh i think it's uh i think it's it's not wrong when people say that the cbc should not
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be competing with the private sector for advertising revenue particularly given the sort of advertising
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markets now but the other reason is you know when it comes to uh television more and more what we're
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seeing is that people have been trained to not watch ads so whether you're pvring your way through
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it or whether you're subscribing to streaming services there are no ads and when there are no
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ads what it does it opens up certain ways in which you can make television shows that are more creative
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that are more interesting and that are more imaginative so i think that would be desirable but
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again it comes down to it comes down to a problem of money uh you know if i were to compare the amount of
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money that cbc gets from the government to you know what the bbc gets i mean the bbc gets about seven
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times as much money per capita so they don't have to have ads they don't have to look for other sources
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if you go on a bbc website in the uk you don't get ads on the news story yeah that's what i'm saying
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that's exactly what i'm saying that's exactly right but that's because it's much better financed
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by the british government and has been historically than cbc i mean they have
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if i recall the numbers correctly about seven times as much money per capita that the cbc has
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so let's talk about this issue of of defunding it um it's do you think that pierre polyev is saying
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this just to raise money or do you think that he will look at defunding i can't remember if his promise
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is all of english services or just english television i think it might just be english television but english
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television um that's what he was talking about do you think he's doing this just to raise money or
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is this a real possibility well i think i think he he he certainly is doing it to raise money it's very
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funny to tell you a story so doug finley you recall doug finley when he was the head of uh
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a great character yes a great character fantastic character anyhow uh after i'd left the cbc it was a
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couple of years two or three years later uh the senate and he was now a senator and he'd asked
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they were doing a look at the cbc and asked if they'd come down and talk about it and i said uh
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sure and uh so he said hello to me and he said oh i said it's nice to see you and he said i read
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your book he said it was terrific and i said oh thank you thank you and i said you know you're in it
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because you would spend all your time you know writing letters to uh your supporters telling them
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what a terrible group of people we were at the cbc and raised money and he laughed and he said my he said
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that's exactly right he said that was my best money raise money raise raising thing i could
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possibly say every time i attacked the cbc money would pour in the door well what he would do is uh
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without fail he would release those fundraising letters to the media before they landed in anyone's
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mailbox so that he would get even more publicity out of it you know the entire gallery would write about
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it was yeah so you know good politics well and and it was so you know we had a laugh about that
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but i mean it clearly that was working extremely well for the conservative base and so i presume it's
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working well for the conservative base now um you know i mean the problem i think so i'm sure that
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that's part partly just a fundraising thing and uh seemed to work well in english canada and he knows it
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won't work well in french canada that it would be in fact the catastrophe yeah if he were to if he
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were to say anything like that about french canada so you know my guess is it's largely a fundraising
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thing it's largely a way of animating you know the the base more than anything else but would anyone
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notice if cbc television were defunded i mean the radio service is something different and i think there's
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still some good parts on there it's you know i i may pine for the days of zosky but that's a long time ago
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yeah but the tv side would anyone notice if they just lost their funding uh well i mean people will
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definitely notice i mean there'd be no doubt about that you know every time that you turn around and
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you say well maybe we should close a station in some small place that's not working well then the level
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of screaming and carry-on just is like you know it goes on and on so i'm sure that people would notice
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uh is it true that the you know the the numbers for english services have gone down in terms of
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the number of people watching yeah the answer is yes and you know but again i come back to the same
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thing like this there is something there's something very odd about what's going on right now you know
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uh english television and the numbers for ctv the numbers for global numbers of everybody have been going
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down uh and partly that's because of the level of competition that you know you have essentially
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these very large very very well healed huge american services whether it's disney plus or whether it's
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amazon or whether it's netflix you know operating uh in canada without really uh any obligations whatsoever
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with respect to canadian television uh so it's been it's been it's been very difficult and it's the
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difficulty is compounded by the fact that uh you know the organization remains dramatically under finance
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but i mean i think they are losing viewers especially on the news side because regardless of your study
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a lot of people who don't live in the downtown areas whether they vote conservative or not just
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don't feel like it speaks to them anymore and those who do vote conservative feels like it treats them
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with disdain i mean in the 2019 election they sued the conservative party for doing the same thing other
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parties had done that they'd never sued and they they launched it but a week or so before
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i i i don't know how you don't read into that that there was a a determined attempt to
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besmirch the conservatives in that election campaign well i you know this is way after my time and uh so
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i don't really have a view about that but uh but i would say that you know i i think that i i agree that
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it's very very important that uh that the cbc not be patronizing that the cbc be exactly the opposite of
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that that it be an organization that speaks to all canadians of whatever kind of ideological event they
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happen to be and that it speaks to them respectfully without a doubt um but i come back to the thing you
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know like it's there's a kind of you know big national cultural question that underpins all this which
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really is what do we want by way of a public broadcaster if if we don't want one fine then
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wind it all up wind up the french side wind up the whole thing on the other hand if you want one
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if you think it's important that we have a great public broadcaster as the b as the british have the bbc
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then you've got to fund it properly and you've got to make an arrangement whereby there's some kind
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of understanding between the government and the corporation as to what's going to happen what they
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do with the bbc which is very interesting is every 10 years they sit down and the government and the bbc
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essentially make an agreement as to what it is that the bbc is going to be about
00:25:10.620
and then they say okay how much is this going to cost and then they agree on what the price is going to be
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and then they strike the budget that way and the budget is struck for 10 years that's the so-called royal
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charter approach the problem with the cbc right now is that there is no consensus whether it's from
00:25:28.060
the conservatives or from the liberals as to what they want the cbc to be right they say oh you should
00:25:34.220
focus on you know small towns you should not focus on your big metropolitan areas well if you start to
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wind up you know metro morning in toronto people will be going crazy but so you know is it a broadcaster
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of last resort is it supposed to do things that are uh you know only the things that the private
00:25:56.300
sector can't or won't do uh is it you know there's there's no consensus and and and at some point you
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have to sort of say well if you really want one let's have an agreement as to what it is that it's
00:26:09.980
supposed to do and let's finance it properly all right let's take a break here and talk about that
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because there is as you said the wider issue beyond just cbc the very survival of media in
00:26:22.220
this country as a whole is up in there so we'll talk about that when we come back
00:26:30.380
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think richard while we're talking about the future of cbc the fact is the whole media landscape is
00:27:48.300
well falling apart let's be blunt it's yeah we're all wondering can we survive and if we can then how
00:27:55.740
nobody has a clear answer um you know unless you're the globe and mail where you just okay well find the
00:28:02.860
richest family in the country that can lose money in perpetuity and still be wealthy yeah outside of
00:28:09.740
that model you know whether you're post media toronto star uh ctv global go down to the united states you
00:28:19.980
know there was some thought well jeff bezos taking over uh the washington post would save it well
00:28:25.580
they've had trouble too so it's we're trying to find a a new way to go about it so if you were
00:28:33.500
structuring cbc now and and i've argued that we don't need a national public broadcaster but you take
00:28:41.820
the other view and a lot of canadians you know especially on the radio side have a very uh deep
00:28:47.660
attachment but what should they be doing then because uh you know we we talked earlier about the ads um
00:28:55.980
there are all these services that compete with the private sector how how do we create a media
00:29:01.740
environment where one organization getting a billion plus a year from the government
00:29:08.060
isn't cannibalizing the private sector that still needs to exist and serve their markets as well
00:29:15.900
how do we how do we design that well let's uh i think it depends on the model that you want let's
00:29:22.860
say for example uh well just let me back this up for one second as you may or may not know i actually
00:29:28.540
wrote a book it was a lot of it was about this called the tangled garden which spent a lot of time
00:29:34.380
looking at the collapse of uh of news financing uh as a result of the loss of advertising revenue which
00:29:41.580
is what you're referring to and the and and and what it argued the book argued is that it's it's
00:29:47.580
fundamental to a democracy that we have strong and competing sources of news uh you know they did a
00:29:55.660
we had a long look at post media and post media obviously is in gigantic uh financial trouble and
00:30:00.540
has been in huge financial trouble for years and so one of the things that the book argued is that
00:30:07.820
what we should do is we should treat news private sector news in the same way as we true we would treat
00:30:14.620
you know the production of television shows by the private sector in other words that what we would
00:30:19.500
say is we would say well you know what we need to do is make sure that there are tax credits available
00:30:25.660
and the government went a small way towards doing this um so that you know is it more important that
00:30:33.100
we have news or that we have cooking shows my answer would be it's more important that we have news
00:30:39.740
so the government put in place some small tax credits now in quebec the quebec government has
00:30:44.540
effectively doubled the value of those tax credits um for news operations and so now uh
00:30:51.660
then and what do these tax credits go towards hiring people or is this the subscription tax credit
00:30:59.180
no uh no that's that's a smaller thing this is the digital subscription tax credit these are labor-based
00:31:04.060
tax credits and so the way they work is they simply take up a certain percentage of the costs of your
00:31:10.460
labor and the labor is defined as being the journalists the editors the people photographers
00:31:16.300
the people who are actually putting the news together uh i i my guess is that you know that's
00:31:24.140
going to be the sort of central way in which is this is going to work i mean there are some enormous
00:31:28.780
things that the new york times seems to be able to make enough money from subscriptions that they can uh
00:31:34.620
they can they can survive and they can make money i'm not sure that's going to be true in canada well
00:31:39.420
those fall off when trump's not in the news well they do they do fall off that is you know we we all
00:31:46.220
looked with hope towards what the new york times was doing and then as soon as they stopped bashing
00:31:51.820
donald trump rightly or wrongly that i mean that's what the audience wanted and they started to lose
00:31:59.420
you know we we've all looked at these models and they're all leaving us perplexed well that's why i think
00:32:05.660
that the better model to look at in canada is a model where we say okay how is it that we finance
00:32:12.220
television shows in this country how is it we finance movies and we finance them largely with
00:32:17.820
with government subsidies one variety or another so you know why we wouldn't say we'll put you on the
00:32:23.740
same footing the news on the same footing as we do cooking shows uh i don't know i mean it seems to me
00:32:29.260
that would be a sensible thing to do is there a way to do that where the public doesn't look and say
00:32:35.100
well you're just in the pocket of the government now because well i think i can tell you since the
00:32:41.820
um was it 500 million over four years spread it around all the mostly print um organizations
00:32:50.620
we get that thrown in our face all the time uh how anyone believes i'm in just intruder's pocket is beyond me
00:32:56.700
uh when you read my material but but they still that is still said to me and and by the way i know
00:33:04.140
people who are on the opposite side politically of me in their writings and and they get accused of
00:33:08.940
being in the side of everyone's pocket inside everyone's pocket as well it's it's part of it but
00:33:14.060
there is a perception that the news isn't being fair because the government is subsidizing everyone
00:33:18.940
yeah well i mean the the the truth of the matter is tax credits are automatic the government has no
00:33:27.740
say in whether you get the money or not you file it's the same way you would file a tax return the
00:33:33.500
tax department looks at it and says that's fine these are okay off it goes they're automatic there's
00:33:39.260
no subjectivity associated with saying you're going to get this amount of money but that person over there
00:33:44.140
is not going to get this amount of money so it's all nonsense i mean at a certain point it's all
00:33:48.460
nonsense um you know and and even if you look at uh if you look at things like just to come back to
00:33:55.420
the cbc news study we're talking about from 2008 you know people said oh well you know because the
00:34:00.620
government subsidizes the cbc's news therefore it must be in the pocket of the government and the
00:34:06.700
answer was no it's not and it never has been uh so you know i don't people could have perceptions
00:34:14.700
for whatever they want but when the perceptions are untrue there's not very much you can do about
00:34:18.860
it just say is that except to say that's not true and here's how they actually work well i mean and
00:34:26.300
maybe it comes down to is it a a partisan bias or that metropolitan bias that we were talking about
00:34:34.460
earlier there was um united conservative party held their big um annual general meeting in calgary over
00:34:43.340
the weekend and i happened to catch a big conversation on cbc about the very controversial parental rights
00:34:54.620
uh um agenda item that passed and i thought why do they keep saying that this is controversial every
00:35:01.980
single poll from leger from angus reed shows that vast majority of people support this it's about 14
00:35:08.620
percent are on the other side and 78 or so are on the the side of what the motion was about but every
00:35:16.460
time cbc brings it up they call it controversial and and we could go through a whole list of things where
00:35:23.820
maybe it's on a cultural side or it's the metropolitanism they just it's this view of
00:35:30.620
will explain what the world is like to you right well that's a slightly different point from the
00:35:36.620
point about you know whether people think that you're in the pockets of the government because
00:35:40.380
you're taking tax credits that that's that's that's a that's a different point altogether and you know
00:35:47.340
i i i don't disagree with you that like for example um i'll give you an example from uh from my own
00:35:55.900
experience there was the people had tended to be quite patronizing uh about um evangelical christians
00:36:06.060
and uh and you know i and i would i would say well why why are we why are we being patronizing about
00:36:12.300
evangelical christians the fact of the matter is eventual christianity in places like alberta had been
00:36:18.540
fundamental in terms of the social political environment of alberta for many many years uh
00:36:25.100
and continues to this day i said you know we can't we can't we can't adopt these kinds of
00:36:31.580
attitudes we have to treat everybody with respect and we have to respect you know what it is that
00:36:37.500
they're doing now if that's beginning to slip then i think that's an unfortunate thing and
00:36:42.540
i think your general point would be right yeah it's uh and look cbc is not the only media outlet
00:36:48.780
that does this and i'm sure you could find examples within post media as well but you're the one that
00:36:54.300
we all fund or not you anymore but cbc anymore i mean you can send me some money brian if you'd like
00:37:00.060
to i'd look forward to that yeah just uh put put the um the address in the chat here and we'll uh we'll
00:37:05.660
have a check on the way okay good so if you were advising any of the politicians on this issue
00:37:12.540
um what would you say to each of them to uh chagmeet singh to justin trudeau and especially
00:37:20.620
to peer polyev as as he's going to go into the next election saying he'll defund the cbc you know
00:37:27.180
that some cbc journalists are going to take the bait and yeah and be very aggressive towards them and
00:37:32.220
then he'll say see this is why we need to do it so what what would you say to each of them and then
00:37:36.940
i'll ask you what you would advise cbc these days uh well i would i would say that i would say to each
00:37:43.180
of them look you know the fundamental thing is what do you want you know right now the play it's kind of
00:37:50.940
riddled with contradictions what do you want do you do you want a cbc that is going to be a cbc that
00:37:57.180
doesn't compete for advertising dollars for the private sector do you want a cbc that is more focused on
00:38:03.900
national international and uh investigative news as compared to local news do you want a cbc that's
00:38:11.820
deeply local in character do you want a cbc that is actually a counterweight to all the american drama
00:38:17.420
and comedy that we're swamped with what do you want because it's you know at the end of the day
00:38:23.820
what matters is i mean i may have a particular view about that but what matters is that the that the
00:38:30.380
government and the parties have a view on those issues and then to be able to say fine this is
00:38:35.740
what we believe the cbc should be or if you don't believe there should be a cbc that's fine too but
00:38:40.380
then you know don't just say we're going to get rid of english television get rid of law right well
00:38:46.140
you should say that that would be detrimental in in quebec people would go nuts and uh but i mean i think
00:38:53.260
that at the end of the day my advice to them would be to say if you want we can talk through what the
00:38:59.900
options are and we can talk through what that would cost absolutely we can do that but at the end of the
00:39:06.380
day you know this is this is ultimately a political decision and people have to have coherent views on
00:39:13.420
and we haven't had a coherent view on what the future of the cbc should be from any of those parties
00:39:19.020
for the last 50 years you know we just haven't had it's neither fish nor fowl no that's what i mean
00:39:25.180
that's exactly what i mean and we say it's a counterweight to americanism and then we've got cbc's
00:39:29.660
version of family feud and there's nothing particularly canadian about it at least battle
00:39:35.180
of the blades you know we can all relate to it i love battle of the blades that was my show
00:39:40.700
it was your show but it was also a popular one hey you know what we got for battle of the blades
00:39:45.340
this is an unimaginable number now we were getting three million viewers a night yeah and i mean it
00:39:51.980
was like it was bigger than a hockey note in canada and um you know it had become a kind of national
00:39:58.140
sensation where everybody was talking about it and everybody was wondering who was going to get
00:40:02.540
eliminated and how it's going to work out all right but i you know but i but i but i come back to it
00:40:06.940
i think it's at some point what needs to happen it's that there needs to be a coherent conversation
00:40:12.700
about the future of the cbc and it's not something that we've had so you know i had a particular
00:40:19.420
view but my view is really neither here my view has always been i thought it should be a big popular
00:40:23.580
service like that if we can get out from under you know advertising so much the better uh what would
00:40:29.900
it cost it certainly will cost if you want to do it properly it would cost more than it costs now we
00:40:35.820
should you know but that's just one view i mean that's just one of you and ultimately it has to be
00:40:42.140
a political decision it has to be a decision that canadians collectively take as part and parcel of uh
00:40:48.220
you know voting on uh uh voting during an election what um what would be your advice to
00:40:56.460
the folks at cbc headquarters to people like katherine tate who uh has has been rather aggressive towards
00:41:04.060
towards towards polyev i mean look he's been aggressive towards cbc but she's been aggressive
00:41:09.420
in a way that i don't recall maybe a few times hubert lacroix was upset with me but you don't really see
00:41:16.940
you know cbc president lashing out so i and i think as i said the journalists many of them will
00:41:24.700
will take the bait what what would your advice be to them if you were having a a nice little coffee clutch
00:41:29.740
oh well i i think that i think that there's there's two these are two completely different
00:41:36.380
things the president of the cbc has a certain responsibility to defend the corporation that's
00:41:41.820
one thing journalists have a different responsibility which is to report the news in a way that's fair and
00:41:47.980
it's accurate unless it's being identified as some form of you know opinion piece um so i would say
00:41:54.620
that that as between the two you would expect slightly different levels of conduct and slightly
00:41:59.980
different preoccupations as to what their responsibilities are richard it's been a fascinating
00:42:06.780
conversation and uh i had not read your second your not your second but your recent book on the media
00:42:12.460
i'll have to look that up the tangled garden i recommend it to you brian actually actually interestingly
00:42:19.180
the uh you know the relatively uh conservative donner foundation shortlisted it for uh its prize
00:42:28.860
uh you know they give a prize every year for the best book on public policy written by a canadian
00:42:34.380
and so it was shortlisted for uh the prize the the winner was somebody who wrote a book about
00:42:39.340
pipelines which i thought was less interesting but there you go well you and i are media folks and
00:42:44.620
media folks like talking about media thanks so much for the time richard okay
00:42:49.020
i hope it's worthwhile full comment is a post media podcast my name is brian lily your host this
00:42:55.100
episode was produced by andre prue with theme music by bryce hall kevin libban is the executive
00:43:00.860
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00:43:13.260
friends about us thanks for listening until next time i'm brian lily