Post-Christmas thoughts about the CBC’s future
A visit to Lyon last week got me thinking about how dominant religions absorb and erase competing rites and traditions. France’s second city has been an important focus of Catholicism from the first century onward, but before that Lyon was a centre of worship of the Roman god Mithra. Scholars are divided as to the extent of early Christian syncretic borrowings from the cult and traditions of Mithraism, but other pagan appropriations are in plain view around Christmas time. The streets of old Lyon were festooned with coloured lights and pine boughs, traditions which derive from pre-Christian...
Read MoreA lame Senate report on the CBC’s future
Early in the twentieth century, the American journalist Walter Lippmann and the philosopher John Dewey butted heads over how a modern democracy could possibly govern itself, given that so few citizens had the time, ability, or inclination to study the complex issues of the day. For Lippmann, the only non-violent answer lay in governance by an intellectual and technical elite that would rule, in the public interest, on the basis of “manufactured consent,” a consensus built around “necessary illusions” created at election times using the tools of modern propaganda. Dewey...
Read MoreWhat Bill Chambers Needs to Know About Public Broadcasting
CBC brass, apparently stung by criticism of its plans to pull out of production and focus on digital, mobile media, have taken to lashing out at critics in an unseemly way. The latest example was posted Thursday night on the corporate website, and it is highly revealing. In an otherwise mostly ad hominem attack on one of the many critics of the corporation’s survival plan, Bill Chambers—who bears the title Vice-president, Brand, Communications and Corporate Affairs, CBC/Radio-Canada—makes the following statement: “There is no archetype of public broadcasting. Public broadcasters...
Read MoreHow a Strong CBC Can Help Our Private Broadcasters
New research on the impact of national public broadcasters has the potential to inject a fresh theme into the ongoing discussions in this country around what to do about the struggling CBC/Radio-Canada. The first of two recent studies draws on a wide range of data from 14 countries world-wide, and was pulled together for the BBC by U.K.-based Inflection Point research group. It was designed to test competing theories about public service broadcasting frequently heard in debates over the relevance of these services, here in Canada, and around the world. One is that public broadcasters,...
Read MoreIs the subscription television model the answer for the embattled CBC?
A friend recently sent me this link to a Macdonald-Laurier Institute debate between Mark Starowicz and Andrew Coyne, two of the country’s most respected journalists. The topic was “Does Canada still need the CBC?” It seems to me that Starowicz, arguing for the “yes” side, mopped the floor with Coyne. But there is more to be said about Coyne’s suggestion that CBC television ought to be dismantled, and spun off into a constellation of self-supporting cable specialty channels so that viewers could select what they wanted to subscribe to, rather than paying for...
Read MoreAbout Wade Rowland
Ranked among Canada’s leading literary journalists, Wade Davies Rowland has written more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from television journalism, organized crime, and international environmental law to his current concerns, which include communications technology, the philosophy of science, and technology and human values. Full author bio.