Posts Tagged "financing public broadcasting"

A lame Senate report on the CBC’s future

Posted by on Jul 27, 2015 in Articles-Blog, uncategorized | 0 comments

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...

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Elegy for a Star: If Solomon, why not Lang and Mansbridge?

Posted by on Jun 14, 2015 in uncategorized | 0 comments

Evan Solomon was fired because he broke a rule in CBC’s journalistic practices handbook that prohibits corporation staff from using their positions to gain a private benefit. Solomon’s violation of this rule was not only obvious, it was egregious: he connected an art dealer with the rich and powerful he’d come to know through his job, and collected ten percent on every sale that resulted from the introduction. It earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars, until the arrangement ended badly over, of course, money. Neither the exact meaning of this “no benefit” rule, nor its exact...

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Are broadcasters on the web “unfair” competition for newspapers?

Posted by on Aug 1, 2014 in Articles-Blog | 0 comments

Bob Cox’s editorial on the CBC’s new strategic plan is a welcome contribution to the dialogue concerning the future of public broadcasting in this country.  (Mr. Cox is Publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press and Chair of the Canadian Newspaper Association.) It raises issues that have been the subject of debate in Europe for some time, and which need to be resolved if the inevitable restructuring of the CBC is to have the support of the country’s newspapers. Some context will, I hope, further clarify the issues. When the BBC was took to the airwaves in 1922 as the world’s first national...

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How a Strong CBC Can Help Our Private Broadcasters

Posted by on Jun 12, 2014 in Articles-Blog | Comments Off on How 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,...

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Is Subscriber-TV a Solution for Beleaguered CBC?

Posted by on Jun 10, 2014 in Articles-Blog | 0 comments

As the CBC and its supporters search with growing urgency for solutions to the public broadcaster’s critical funding problems, an idea gaining some traction is that CBC television be dismantled, and spun off into a clutch of subscription-based cable specialty channels. That way viewers could select what they want to subscribe to, rather than paying for the public broadcaster as a monolithic institution. And there would be no need for advertising, which most advocates agree is antithetical to the goals of public service broadcasting. It’s an idea that has strong initial appeal. For one...

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