Broadcasting in Canada was for years considered a privilege, a Trust, after all the airwaves are there for the benefit of all the people and to help maintain fairness and decency on the public airwaves through the years oversight was provided by first by, the CBC(a conflict); then the Board of Broadcast Governors(BBG)-a( loose aggregation-of political appointees) and finally the CRTC, today’s referee!
My broadcasting career began in the era of the BBG. It was loaded with political appointees and did not provide good, effective oversight.
It operated in a state of somnolence. Television was an infant but radio was a grown-up and as such attracted some very shrewd owners who were miles ahead of the BBG. One day, probably over a scotch and soda two major media owners with the connivance of a Senator hatched a plot whereby they would enter the Toronto Television market via Barrie. The transmitter would be in Barrie but the programming would be Toronto-centric!
Fortunately, the plot was foiled by a sharp-eyed Globe and Mail reporter. The BBG said it was astonished. That was in the 1960’s a decade that would see the BBG consigned to the dustbin of history and the arrival of a new sheriff, with a promise to do right as a trustee of the public airwaves.
Obviously, administering the Broadcasting Act in the 50’s and 60’s was no job for old men and this inducement-prone posse was replaced by the Canadian Radio-television Commission, commonly referred to as “the commission.” With advent of cable, satellites etc. Telecommunications was added in the title but Canada isn’t a country where acronyms accurately reflect titles, so it remains the CRTC!
As I recall the debut of this new bureaucracy was impressive. It ushered itself in with alacrity and strict governance.
Pierre Juneau was not a Chairman to be trifled with and people like Ted Rogers, one of the broadcasting newbies with plans for an empire, quickly came to heed the arrival of the new regime.
Rogers, who in the early 70’s owned two radio stations in Toronto was called on the CRTC carpet for promise-breaking.
As a licensee he was cited for violating commitments made in his Promise of Performance that coincided with the granting of a name change to one of his radio stations-CHFI-AM to CFTR. The TR standing for Ted Rogers or Toronto Radio take your pick.
It was Roger’s position that his failure to meet the news commitment he made was a numerical mistake and if the CRTC’s numbers were different than his then he would accept the Commission’s and they could all put it down to a mistake!
But Commission Counsel turned aside Ted’s claim, saying “no Mr. Rogers it is not a mistake, it’s FRAUD. You could have heard a pin drop in the Hearing room and the usually unshakable Ted Rogers was gob-smacked and that was a couple of decades before “gob-smacked” became part of the lexicon! I’m sure that at that moment he didn’t have to look hard to visualize the plans for his empire meeting the same fate as the late, not so great BBG. This dramatic moment in the nation’s capital on that cold day in the fall of 1972 clearly demonstrated CRTC plans to bring discipline to an undisciplined Broadcasting Universe.
Given only an 18 month extension of his Broadcasting license instead of the usual five years and thankful the CRTC didn’t cancel his license altogether Ted went to work. The ensuing year and a half began the most exciting era in Radio broadcasting. News, clearly a major concern of the Commission took centre stage in Toronto and across the country. Competition intensified, scores of jobs were created in all aspects of Broadcasting. Music programming which to that point was a copy of the American model, was forced to become far more creative when the CRTC imposed the 30% Canadian requirement on practically all music played on radio! Owners chaffed under Juneau’s CRTC but they all made money. Despite complaints not one radio license was mailed back to the CRTC! Ted Rogers got his empire, so did Allan Waters along with others and Canadians were well served by the diversification of programming motivated by the highly competitive climate under the watchful eye of the New Sheriff. But nothing lasts forever!
Fast-forward to 2015. AJ (after Juneau) we watched a blizzard of Chairs preside over the emasculation of the CRTC and suborn the pillaging of Radio and Television broadcasting in this country. Confounded by new technology and its own pathetic leadership the CRTC has been run roughshod by the Media Mogles.
The tragedy is that ownership of those precious airwaves not longer rests with the people but with the shareholders of Bell, Rogers, Shaw.
Today, promises made by the Media beneficiaries of CRTC largesse have no value. The job prospects in the industry are diminishing and the pay is absolutely pathetic. My career path was nurtured by the need of broadcasters to employ more than warm bodies and that need was enhanced by competition. Today there is no competition in the large markets because all the radio stations are owned by two or three conglomorates. Today the employees of the Radio-Telelvision industry are in worse shape than major league baseball players were before Curt Flood and subsequent free agency.
They are slaves to a system that cannot and will not improve their status. All of this is the result of CRTC failure to properly referee the public airwaves and temper the greed that has devoured and eroded what once was a good place.
The capitulation of the CRTC to the Media giants will not be reversed. Bell, Rogers and Shaw run the show and what they want, they get!
This Regulatory agency, like the Competition Bureau reminds me of the Wizard of Oz. After giving away the store, today the CRTC occupies itself with silly questions like–“what does local news mean to you? Is it important to you?” and preparing to entertain 12 applications for diversified programming and conducting meaningless surveys about whether Broadbands provide the data speed they claim.
Meanwhile, having been given the password to the safe, Bell, Rogers, Shaw et al continue to empty it..
For instance the CRTC has finally enforced what Ted Rogers (under CRTC insistence) committed to doing thirty years ago, namely giving cable subscribers freedom in choosing the cable channels they want to pay for. Today’s CRTC gives Media Mogols the right to dictate choice. In fact(then) what the CRTC managed to get Rogers to agree to was this: that when computers make it possible cable subscribers will be able to choose the channels they want to watch–no exception.
We are not surprised that the CRTC version(2016) gives that right to the cable companies.
Of course Bell(probably) the meanest of all the cable operators has come up with a laughable BASIC grouping. Rogers isn’t much better.
Shaw just got handed more CRTC largesse so we wouldn’t expect that company to give cable suckers an even break.
Short of a cataclysmic financial reckoning Canadians are never going to regain control of the Public Air waves.
On behalf of their shareholders, Bell, Rogers, Shaw devoured our birthright, under the sleeping beauty we call, the Canadian, Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission!
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holidayatlarge 
BEYOND BELIEF……#26
2017/07/09 Leave a comment
It’s been a year since we last posted. #25 was about the lack of honest, common sense oversight by the CRTC, the Canadian equivalent to the Federal Communications commission in the United States.
In the intervening 12 months not much has changed regarding CRTC oversight but the world has undergone a cataclysmic redo.
Hilary was Trumped. Kim is trying to get his short fingers around America’s neck and the Democrats are wandering around Capitol Hill in a state of OZ.
CNN has switched from being the CLINTON NEWS NETWORK to an updated version of WKRP. It’s a fact that Les Nessman was more balanced than Wolf Blitzer, and the KRP panels were more credible and far less strident and unbalanced.
In fact CNN has become the poster child for those media outlets who embrace the telling and re-telling of the Anti-Trumps. In a lifetime of media experience I have never witnessed such blatant unprofessional story telling by the so-called legitimate press! If it was just Fake News we had to contend with that’s easily handled, rather it’s the drumbeat of propaganda being passed off as the REAL story. Propaganda dressed up as REAL news is designed to elicit from the viewer/reader strident emotionalism. Unfortunately for America it reaches and motivates the simple-minded.
The fact is you don’t have to fake the news, there are enough stories that are real honest brain busters that make you wish they were fake.
Example one: Paul Ryan, whose inability to gather together enough votes in the House of Representatives from among the majority members of his own party to pass legislation relating to a made in America health plan has delivered the unexpected. He has issued an order to female members of the Media covering the House that they MAY NOT come to news “briefings” in sleeveless dresses and tops. A JOKE? Apparently not!!!
Example two: in the great State of Arkansas, once ruled by the Clintons for a couple of decades a law has just been passed that states a woman, “…who has been Raped must seek the permission of the Rapist before she can have an abortion.” A JOKE? Definitely NOT!!!
The Blog rests: who needs Fake news when you have the examples cited that ..”make you wish they were fake.”
Surely they can’t be real? Surely they must have originated in some third world nation of despots and misogyny.
Filed under daily comments, Uncategorized Tagged with fake news, sleeveless, WKRP