People walk through CBC's headquarters in Toronto, in January.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Many Canadians experienced a brief pang of regret at the announcement this week that the CBC will cease to broadcast National Hockey League games on Saturday nights, as it had been doing since 2014 under a sublicensing agreement with Rogers Communications.
The demise of any 74-year-old tradition in Canadian broadcasting, even one that had largely become redundant in a sports-saturated media environment, is bound to evoke certain emotions. Hockey Night in Canada united generations of Canadians around the tube.
Still, the arrangement between CBC and Rogers was always a losing proposition for the public broadcaster, which ceded hundreds of hours of its prime time schedule annually to a private competitor in exchange for the right to promote some of its own programs. With little to show for it, given the ongoing decline in the English-language CBC’s market share.
Its French-language counterpart, Radio-Canada, got out of the game of broadcasting NHL matches in 2014 and has never looked back. Francophones have not become any less enamoured of hockey and appear to be willing to pay to watch it.
The question of whether Canadians should be able to watch NHL games for free on public television has been settled. Faced with scarce resources and rapidly evolving viewership habits, CBC/Radio-Canada must define a small set of priorities and stick to them. That means radically rethinking its raison d’être in the 21st century media universe.
Unfortunately, the report on CBC/Radio-Canada tabled this week by the Senate Transport and Communications committee does little to advance this objective. Despite hearing from more than 60 witnesses over the course of more than a year, all the honourable senators managed to deliver in their 67-page report was seven vaguely worded recommendations.
Senators want CBC to bring in outside experts to analyze fairness, balance of news reporting
Senate Transport and Communications committee chair Sen. David Wells, left, delivers his opening remarks during a news conference in Ottawa on Wednesday.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The first involves amending the outdated Broadcasting Act to add “the reflection of local communities and audiences” to CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate. But without defining what that means, and setting hard targets for the broadcaster to meet, such an addition would change little. As it is, CBC/Radio-Canada’s bosses seem to exercise unlimited discretion in interpreting the mandate and no higher authority appears to ever hold them to account.
In testimony before the committee, former CBC executive vice-president Richard Stursberg suggested adopting the British model under which the BBC’s Royal Charter is renewed every 10 years. “It is a contract negotiated between the government and BBC to provide it with clear direction and stable funding,” Mr. Stursberg noted. “At the end of the seventh year of the 10-year contract, a process begins to define the next Royal Charter.”
Provided it is transparent and non-partisan, such a process need not compromise the public broadcaster’s independence. And it would make CBC/Radio-Canada’s management accountable and improve public trust in the institution.
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Speaking of trust, the Senate committee also recommended that CBC/Radio-Canada periodically retain outside experts to conduct analysis of the public broadcaster’s news content and current affairs programming “in order to assess its fairness and balance.” It apparently did so once before in 2010. But concerns about bias in some CBC/Radio-Canada’s news content have only grown since then, despite the broadcaster’s denials.
Such criticisms are hardly unique to Canada. In an age of increasing political polarization, public broadcasters across the West have faced accusations of harbouring a liberal bias with news content that either ignores opposing points of view or depicts them negatively.
BBC director-general Tim Davie resigned last fall amid a scandal over the editing of a BBC documentary on Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. A leaked video of two journalists at the French public radio network meeting with Socialist Party officials, in which one of the journalists commits to “taking care” of a rival politician, recently sparked two months-long inquiries into impartiality at France’s radio and TV public broadcasters.
Before the Senate committee, CBC/Radio-Canada president Marie-Philippe Bouchard dismissed the allegations of bias in the public broadcaster’s news content, insisting its journalists adhere to “strict journalistic standards, practices (JSP) and guidelines that are, in fact, ensuring a pluralistic approach, a diversity of points of view in our coverage.”
Yet, any objective viewer of CBC/Radio-Canada’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Freedom Convoy, the potential discovery of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools or the war in Gaza might contest her “we are beyond reproach” reply.
CBC/Radio-Canada’s JSP include this contention: “We do not promote any particular point of view on matters of public debate.”
To prove it, it should submit to mandatory audits of its news content by an independent external body. For instance, France’s Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique recently sent a warning to two public networks for under-representation of the right-wing Rassemblement National in prime time.
Similar scrutiny would not hurt CBC/Radio-Canada.