THE CBC was created in the 1930s to continue building Canada and bring our nation together through a common consciousness the way the railway had united our country physically and economically. Its formation addressed the challenges of Canada’s geographical breadth, small population, two official languages, regionalism, multiculturalism and vulnerability to overbearing American media.
The CBC was built on the prototype of the BBC as a socially responsible, centralized, non-commercialized medium subject to periodic review and public scrutiny.
The founding principles were: universality — it would be available to the entire population; universal appeal — all interests and tastes would be addressed; inclusiveness — attention would be given to historically disadvantaged minorities; internal competition — the goal was good programming rather than high ratings; public funding — costs would be paid through taxation rather than pandering to advertisers; and independence — it would function in a non-partisan way at arm’s length from government.
Though times have changed, what has not changed is the profound difference between publicly owned and privately owned media.
Publicly owned media follow a public service model, address their audiences as citizens and are more characteristically European.
Privately owned media follow a corporate enterprise model, address their audiences as consumers, and are more characteristically American “flash, crash and trash” media.
Publicly owned media are primarily devoted to providing enrichment and enlightenment, and to being a “village commons” that requires effort rather than relaxation from their audience, provoking thought rather than providing amusement.
Privately owned media are primarily devoted to delivering entertainment for financial profit, and thus are market-oriented and consumer-driven.
Like all Crown corporations, publicly owned media seek to identify what is best for the public good, and then find a means of offering it. Privately owned media seek to identify whatever will make the most money for their stakeholders, and then find a means of offering it.
Publicly owned media foster a unique and distinctive cultural identity, encourage local cultural industries and artists, reflect full demographic diversity and cultivate a “community of communities.” Privately owned media produce or procure what some target market wants and sell it to them so aficionados can consume their own tastes and opinions.
The CBC has been subjected to withering criticism as inefficient, costly, archaic and biased, and has been on life-support for a while, crippled by budget cuts from $1.5 billion in the early 1990s to $1.2 billion today, the loss of Hockey Night in Canada and other sports, and the explosion of online and platforms.
But more than anything, the CBC’s critical state is due to the triumph of corporate economism, the shift from a “culturalist discourse” in which cultural production is cultural activity, to an “economist discourse” in which cultural production is commercial enterprise.
Economism confines value to monetary exchange value, and dismisses any other kind of value such as social responsibility. And when culture is monetized and commodified, any media product or public service that does not make money deserves to die.
Even news and journalism are commodified as theatre, information conflated with entertainment, assessed only by market share and profitability. Fox News, anyone?
Regrettably, economism tends to ignore “market externalities,” those costs not calculated in the financial transaction between seller and buyer, such as the monetary and social costs to law enforcement, health care, and social welfare produced by violent media, or the social costs of political polarization wrought by privatized media.
As the Media and Communication in Canada textbook explains, private ownership “imposes commercial constraints on communication. Communication as a commercial enterprise creates pressures to maximize entertainment value and to minimize difficulty and complexity, and to provide communication in an advertising- or consumption-friendly environment.”
Or as cultural theorist Raymond Williams put it more pithily, “Freedom in our kind of society amounts to the freedom to say anything you wish, provided you can say it profitably.”
However, there are compelling cultural counterpoints to neoliberalism’s desire to privatize society as much as possible, and leave to the public sector only what is not lucrative. To defund the CBC, as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promises, is to abandon an organization built to promote Canada’s collective cultural good, and to surrender Canadian culture to crass economism.
Dennis Hiebert is a professor of sociology at the University
of Manitoba.
