Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Transport and Communications
Issue 7 - Evidence - May 1, 2003
OTTAWA, Thursday, May 1, 2003
The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 10:49 a.m. to examine the current state of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the media's role, rights, and responsibilities in Canadian society; and current and appropriate future policies relating thereto.
Senator Joan Fraser (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications is currently examining the state of the Canadian news media. We are looking at the appropriate role of public policy in helping to ensure that the Canadian news media remain healthy, independent and diverse in light of the tremendous changes that have occurred in recent years — notably globalization, technological change, convergence and increased concentration of ownership.
[Translation]
Our first witness today is Mr. Patrick Watson, former chairman of the CBC, who has lenghty experience as a journalist, filmmaker and writer.
[English]
Thank you very much for meeting with us today, Mr. Watson. I understand you have an introductory statement and then we will proceed to a question and comment period.
Mr. Patrick Watson, former Chair of the CBC, as an individual: Madam Chair, I was very much impressed by the testimony of your two witnesses yesterday and I am largely in agreement with what they had to say. I have a few modifications to propose and a couple of new thoughts to put on the table.
It seems to me that the predominance of advertising as an influence over our journalism is probably at the core of the challenge that faces this country in ensuring the best kind of journalism for Canadian citizens upon which they can make the decisions that a citizen in a democracy has to make.
The concerns at the top of your list about cross-ownership and multiple ownership are serious. The proposal Mr. Kent made on Tuesday that it would be easy and appropriate for governments to forbid, or at least be very careful about, cross-ownership between broadcast media and print media at the very least deserves reconsideration. He is also right in saying that if something has been declared legal and is operating legally, it is difficult to turn it around.
The issue regarding multiple ownership is a concern. Mr. Kent's notion that there might be a way, through a contract of commitment with owners of multiple newspapers, to ensure that editors of second, third and fourth newspapers belonging to the same proprietor have some kind of guaranteed arm's length between them and the proprietor is interesting and certainly merits being pursued.
I do not think it is quite as crucial as it might have been some years ago, and it is not because in the last 40 or 50 years the culture has come to the point where the servitude of all of the popular media to the advertiser is almost total. There are some interesting exceptions in specialty magazines, in our national newspaper The Globe and Mail and in a few instances of public broadcasting or quasi-public broadcasting. However, on the whole the culture has succeeded fairly well in transforming the idea of citizen, which for me as always had a capital ``C,'' into consumer, which for the world of commerce has a capital ``C.'' That cultural transformation is sufficiently profound that I do not think that transfers of ownership or restrictions upon multiple ownership or cross-ownership are in themselves going to have a profound effect.
In my view, the only effective way to provide a countervailing voice and a watchdog voice in the world of journalism is through public enterprise. To that extent, it would be very valuable for Canadian society to return to the classic idea of the public broadcaster and insist that the CBC be nothing but a public broadcaster and not the hybrid that it is now.
Until recently, the CBC radio service has deported itself as a service for citizens. Yet it has now seemed to adopt the mindset characteristic of all the major television broadcasters that the task of the broadcaster is first to get a big audience — which is not always in accord with the idea of serving an audience — which is the purpose of the public broadcaster. CBC Radio One is now talking about the importance of getting to younger listeners. I agree with this, but the quality of what is put on the air in order to win the younger listeners is the essential issue. If, in order to get younger listeners, you deliver to them the same kind of popular rock music that they can find on a dozen other stations, you are hardly functioning as a distinctive public broadcaster. I do not think you are serving the citizenship.
CBC television has, since about 1975, when you saw the beginnings of a serious cultural change in the mindset of the programmers there, been out to compete with the commercial broadcasters. It is very difficult for a citizen, in looking at our major television services now, when they see a strong Canadian program, to know where it has come from because all of the major programming is so cluttered by advertising that it is very difficult to tell who the broadcaster is. CBC television has lost its distinctive appearance.
We want to return to standards of journalism. I hasten to say that CBC television journalism is way ahead of anything else on this continent still. Its traditions are very strong. Even though it has been starved and has seriously reduced its numbers and its reach, it is still a splendid service. However, it is a service embedded in a network whose preoccupation with audience numbers, getting to younger audiences, and selling advertising cripples its capacity to be a distinctive service to which Canadians can turn whenever they want to know they are home in a broadcasting environment.
I also have to suggest that in the field of newspapers it is time to reconsider the idea of a public newspaper. Thirty- two years ago, I was appointed by then Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier to head a national task force on citizen participation in the democratic decision-making process. We crossed the country looking for the ways in which citizens were involved and made to feel welcome in the national decision-making process.
In that regard, we came up with a number of proposals that we wrote into a classical cabinet document. We also made a presentation package that was shaped like a big pillowcase, only instead of being made of cotton it was made of richly textured paper and bore the flag on the outside. I forget what we printed on it, but it was mostly the flag. This envelope contained a number of artefacts that would have existed had our proposals been brought into being. For example, one of the artefacts was a nice big poster that said, ``Take the Train for a Dollar a Day.'' What we had determined to be one of the great obstacles to real citizen participation in Canada was the fact that Canadians do not travel enough, do not know the rest of the country and have not lived with other Canadians. We decided to ask the government to persuade — force, fund, otherwise lead — the railroads to put two passenger cars on every freight train, one of which was to carry bicycles and baggage and the other with just hard wooden seats. People could board that train at 10:00 in the morning and disembark at 4:00 in the afternoon. They would ride their bikes into the local communities where they would stay overnight in hostels. The primary access to those trains for $1 a day would be to families with kids who are old enough to ride a bicycle, or to hike. We made the poster to suggest that this had already happened and it was interesting to see people come into the office when we were finishing up the project who said, ``I didn't know that existed. That is great. I would take my family on that in a minute.''
Among the artefacts in that pillowcase was, I believe, the first and only edition of a public newspaper in Canada. It was edited by the late Peter Gzowski. It was edition number 1, dated approximately June 1971. I am sorry to say that I could not bring my copy with me because I lent it to a prominent Montreal architect and never got it back. It has to be in the archives somewhere and I suggest that it would be interesting to get your research staff to dig out a copy in order that you could look at some of the proposals in there — particularly the proposal around the national newspaper.
I believe that the concerns about a publicly funded newspaper that have been expressed in the past are very serious and must be taken as such. The idea of having a state newspaper is anathema to any serious journalist or any good democrat. We have a nationally funded public news service with an arm's-length relationship that works pretty well. We have an extraordinary institution in this country called the Institute for Research on Public Policy, which was funded some 30 years ago by an endowment of $40 million from the federal government and then largely left alone to determine its own policy. That institute brings together policy thinkers from all across the country, and internationally, and is an important source of policy re-evaluation for the country.
I do not see any obstacle — except superstition — to having a publicly funded newspaper that is supported by an endowment rather than an annually renewable grant from Parliament. It would have financial independence and its board would be composed of journalists from across the country — a mandate that is clearly specified in an act of Parliament. It could function not only as a source of news about those aspects of our national life and our international relations that are not well covered in the popular press and popular media, but also serve as a watchdog on the existing press.
Part of its mandate should be to look through the daily and weekly output of the national press and assess the quality of reporting. There is not enough of that. There is a bit of it in the two annual editions of the Ryerson Review of Journalism, which is done by students. That magazine contains some interesting analysis. If that were raised to the level of top journalism in the country and was seen to be a function of the citizenship of this country, it would make an immense contribution. Perhaps the conventional press would object at first; yet by and by they would get to like it, and their journalists would be on the board and it would open the way, I believe, to higher standards and quality of journalist throughout the whole spectrum.
To summarize, I do not think that regulating or restricting ownership — while important and useful — can ever have a radical effect because of the predominance of advertising in the culture. The answer is some kind of public enterprise, and I am throwing out two examples for your consideration.
[Translation]
Senator Losier-Cool: As a Francophone living in New Brunswick, I have a very specific concern regarding the CBC. I want to deal with the primary mission of the CBC. You talked about the very specific mandate of the CBC, namely that programming must have some Canadian content. Francophones living in a minority situation sometimes deplore that their expectations are not being met regarding the primary mission of the CBC.
Let me give the very specific example of the news broadcast. In my area, the eight o'clock news broadcast has a large audience. Unfortunately, I deplore it, but according to what I have seen and heard, the news broadcast in French is almost a cause of assimilation for our Francophones. We cannot find a Canadian vision in what Radio-Canada is offering us. So we watch the news in English and we prefer to listen to Peter Mansbridge instead of Stéphane Bureau or Mr. Goujon. I do not believe that the role of the CBC is to compete with the private sector. You said that the CBC wants more young people to watch and listen to their programming. Young people are not always necessarily interested in all the news coming from Quebec. We have no control on the person who is reading the news bulletin.
Mr. Watson: Fortunately.
Senator Losier-Cool: We know that there will be some changes to the 9 o'clock news on Radio-Canada. In your view, is the CBC really fulfilling this primary mission, according to which the Corporation is supposed to present a Canadian vision, that of the two founding people?
Mr. Watson: Yes, in principle. Indeed, Radio-Canada and the CBC have serious constraints for budgetary reasons and for other reasons. According to me, the main reason for this would be the culture change at the CBC, the people in the corporation no longer seeing their mandate as their main reason for being, but rather the acquisition of a larger and younger audience.
That being said, it will not be impossible to review the programming of the CBC, but it will be very difficult, unless the management of the CBC decides that quite draconian changes must be made. The CBC is trying to offer the whole gamut of programming to serve a huge audience, instead of specializing in what I would call ``programming for the citizens.'' I believe that is the crux of the matter. Obviously, there is the huge financial issue.
I believe that what is lacking at the CBC is the support of the people and the support of Parliament. The CBC is confused about its own image, because of this mix of commercial programming and programming for citizens, so that it is no longer possible to say that we constitute an absolutely distinct service.
[English]
Over and over again, I have people come up to me and say, ``Oh, I saw one of your programs last night, a fabulous program.'' When I ask where they say it, they say, ``Oh, it was on the CBC — hold on a second, maybe it was Global, no, History Television. Oh, I'm not sure.'' That represents to me an important example of a failure of the CBC.
During my second year as chairman of the board of directors, I wrote a paper entitled, ``Distinction or Extinction'' and brought it to the senior management. It was a blueprint for returning the corporation to its absolute distinct image as a broadcaster of public service. It entailed the elimination of advertising, among other things, and a tactic for doing that. That is not as difficult as you would think, and the response of the senior management was that it was great:
[Translation]
That is superb. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It will take a year or two to put the fundamentals in place, but we will do it.
[English]
They were lying. It took me almost two years to realize they were lying and that I was being trifled with. At the end of that period, there were some crises that had to be attended to and that particular motif got shoved into the wastebasket. However, it is not too late to do it.
In his testimony, Mr. Starowicz came very close to one of the tactics that the CBC could use in restructuring its programs to achieve distinction. He talked about the Arts and Entertainment Network running the television version of Longitude — that brilliant British novel — from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. then again from 10:00 p.m. to midnight for 14 consecutive days. That was very interesting. He put that up as an example of how to deal with distinctive programming.
Whenever that has been put to the management of the CBC they say, ``Think of the commercial revenue we would lose.'' That is the kind of prison the CBC has got itself into: Confusion between the idea of public service and survival through advertising revenue. Because of that confusion, the CBC has lost its distinctiveness, has lost its large constituency and has lost a lot of parliamentary support. I do not think there would be a huge outcry in the country if CBC Television were to disappear. There would be a huge outcry if CBC Radio were to disappear, but if it continues with Radio 1 in its present form, perhaps that outcry would diminish too. Maybe there are interests who would like to see that happen.
[Translation]
I do not have any specific answer to the question about New Brunswick. It is inextricably linked to all these larger issues, including the whole issue of why this service exists in the first place.
Senator Losier-Cool: That is exactly it. In your comments, you talked about the CBC being distinct and how we can manage to bring about this distinction when it is in competition with the private broadcasters. To bring about this competition, will we have to emulate the private broadcasters? We will have more programs to draw a younger audience, but by doing so, we will loose sight of the essential part of the CBC's mandate.
I appreciate your comments. I also believe that the CBC is faced with quite a challenge in keeping to its mission and being different, but without going too far in the other direction. We do not wish to have too many private broadcasters.
[English]
Senator Day: I have two questions. One flows from the other in terms of public broadcasting and the public's participation in ensuring diversity of opinion through various media.
How did the CBC evolve from its earlier mandate as a public broadcaster to the hybrid you have described? You have expressed concern that it is no longer fulfilling its basic public broadcasting mandate? Is that a senior management decision to move it? Is it a board of directors' decision to move it? Is there some direct or indirect government influence that causes it to evolve?
Mr. Watson: It would be a mistake to assign a single cause. It is a cultural exchange that takes place over a fairly long period of time. I remind you that in the early days of CBC, both radio and television carried advertising. It was a radical change for CBC Radio in 1964 when the decision was made to abandon advertising and to confine radio solely to its public service mode.
CBC Television carried advertising in a limited way in the early days the change started in the years between 1982 and 1989, when senior management began to direct the programmers to sell every availability they could sell. Suddenly programs that had not carried advertising before were carrying advertising. That is when advertising invaded the news — to the great distress of a great many of us.
There is some retreat from that now under the current presidency. There has been an attempt to set aside some important packets of broadcasting time to be free of the advertising influence. However, it is very partial and it does not, in the minds of the overall public, change the general profile of the service.
As I said earlier, I am frequently asked by people to comment on a program they have seen, and it is a really fine program and they do not where it came from because the distinct image has been lost by this preponderance of advertising as part of the culture.
Senator Day: I take it that advertising alone, in moderation, is not the reason that CBC has moved away from its public broadcasting fundamental responsibility, because we have had it for some time.
Mr. Watson: The natural tendency of the public broadcaster in the mid-1960s was toward the reduction of advertising. For example, as people began to complain about advertising in children's programs, the CBC responded by saying they would withdraw it. It was the ambition of the management that came in during that early 1980s period to enlarge the establishment and to respond to the fears of — not unreal fears diminished public funding by increasing the advertising revenue.
A lot of that, by the way, went into building head office, which has now mercifully disappeared. When Mr. Gérard Veilleux and I arrived at the head office in the fall of 1989, we found one whole department of people that had been built in the previous five years consisting of 50 people who did not know what they did. When we did our walk-around and asked everyone what he or she did, they effectively said they pass paper from this person to that person. They had no function. They were an expression of the need of that particular management to aggrandize its size, not to do any particular work.
The CBC went through a very bad period in that regard. The current president is trying to move it back toward the public broadcasting modality, but I believe you cannot do that gradually. There is a real opportunity to do it suddenly and take a great chance, which would produce either defeat or survival — not only survival, but also a triumphal survival. One of the important ways of doing that is to do programming designed only to serve audiences — Serve with a capital ``S'' — not just to grab them.
There is an important distinction between getting an audience and serving an audience. As Mr. Starowicz said the other day, the real purpose of public broadcasting is to deliver bodies to advertisers. That is not his language but it is language that others have used, and he is absolutely right. The CBC is far too much into that bag right now. If it is going to be a genuine public broadcaster it has to completely abandon that motif and deal in programming that is designed only to serve audiences.
I am not talking about an earnest programming of current affairs, I am talking about programming that reflects the whole range of activity that makes this country of ours a beloved country; that causes us to say — as Canadians do and people in many other countries do not say — ``I love my country.'' I do not know if honourable senators know that. If you travel in Greece, for example, a country with a wonderful tradition and ask a guy on the street, ``Do you love your country?'' he laughs at you. ``What do you mean, love this stupid country? We live there and this is our place.'' You ask a lot of Canadians if you love your country and they say, ``Goddamn right I love my country.''
The purpose of the public broadcaster should be to go to those citizens and say, ``Here is more reason to love your country, and here is some reason to worry about it, by the way,'' but never to say, ``You know what this program is for, so you dip in your pocket and buy a Cadillac.'' Too much of our programming, because it has become the motif of television, is designed toward that end.
You can meddle with the ownership issue all you like, it will not finally transform that particular cultural motif of using broadcasting — and to a much greater extent print — to further the culture of consumerism, which is becoming the dominant culture of our time. The idea of the ``Citizen'' is vanishing. It is being replaced by the consumer.
Senator Atkins: First, Mr. Watson, thank you for coming. I missed the testimony the other day, but I do have a few questions.
First, on your suggestion about a newspaper, would you charge for it at the newsstands?
Mr. Watson: I think so. A really good example — a de minimis example — is IF Stone's Weekly, which one man produced with the assistance of his wife, out of his basement, for 22 years. It was an eight-sheet tabloid-sized journal that carried no advertising. Mr. Stone wrote it entirely himself. He did not interview politicians. He took most of his information from the congressional record. He diligently went into that record and reported what was going on to the country, which meant largely to other journalists and policy-makers. It was not a huge circulation but an important one because decision-makers, not by journalists, read it. It was weekly. He charged for it, and it was paid for entirely out of subscription, and it was a modest subscription. I used to subscribe to it. I miss it terribly. It was $16 a year, not very much. This guy was a passionate journalist with a scholarly cast of mind.
The Institute for Research on Public Policy's endowment in the 1970s was $40 million. What is that in today's money — $100 million? It is a lot of money in today's money. Take half that, $50 million, and endow a journalistic enterprise with the task of doing good daily or weekly journalism and the secondary task of being a watchdog on popular journalism — both broadcast and print. What will $50 million do if it is well-invested for a year — about $4 million a year? Could you run an interesting weekly newspaper for $4 million a year? Would it not be interesting to try?
When I said superstition, I mean there is a deep-seated and well-founded fear of state journalism. CBC on the whole and the Parliament of Canada have managed to protect that arm's length relationship, so the CBC is seldom tainted with any accusation of serving the government interest. In fact, most heads of government tend to look upon the CBC as being the enemy at one level or another because of that independence. The citizens do not think that, or they would not if they had a genuine broadcaster in the CBC. I think the citizens would look upon a public exercise in print journalism with a great deal of affection once it had established, as it must, its absolute independence.
The way to do that is to create an endowment and board composed of journalists and have a very strictly mandated arm's length relationship with Parliament.
Senator Atkins: I find myself almost agreeing with everything you are saying this morning.
Mr. Watson: That is a first.
Senator Atkins: Not really. Regarding the radio, I do not understand why the radio is trying to change its demographics.
Mr. Watson: I understand. You look at those demographics and say, ``Why are young people not listening to us?'' If you are supposed to be serving the country, there are young citizens as well as old citizens. I understand that anxiety, but it is misinterpreted. What they are saying is, ``Only 20,000 young people are listening to us.'' That is an awful lot of young people, if you cut it one way. It is not the hundreds of thousands or the millions that we would like to get, but maybe those are the citizens. Maybe some work is to be done about appealing to the younger people who are not listening — not with rock and roll and comedy with the F-word in it, but with stuff that involves them as citizens in the decision making process of this country.
Senator Atkins: The population is getting older, however. At some point, CBC will pick them up, I would think.
Mr. Watson: If the implication of your remark is that the CBC should not abandon the older population —
Senator Atkins: Absolutely.
Mr. Watson: — it is an important observation, and there is some risk of that happening now. I still find, in the midst of the clutter, some superb things taking place on CBC Radio 1.
[Translation]
As we know, the French service is absolutely superb, but it is diminishing all the time, especially at CBC Radio One.
[English]
Senator Atkins: With respect to CBC television, I supported the idea that the CBC television did not sell advertising. Would that then take them out of competition for sports events, for example, the Olympics, and leave it to the private networks?
Mr. Watson: I am not sure you have to be hygienic about those decisions. If, as the CBC policy were being remade, it was decided that because of reach of the service and the public propriety that those major sports event were effectively the property of the people of this country, I am sure that accommodations could be made. I would hesitate to try to be sort of absolutist on that particular issue.
On the other hand, for the majority of citizens in the country now, with satellite service becoming increasingly available, what is the compelling reason for the CBC to stay in the sports business? We must ask that question. Hockey Night in Canada has been with CBC for as long as radio and television have existed, and there is enormous nostalgia against the idea of that going elsewhere.
One of the propositions made, about 1990, for the formation of an independent cable hockey network was that that independent hockey network would take over a great deal of the hockey on the television, but that the CBC would keep Hockey Night in Canada. Those programs would be given to the program for rebroadcast later the same night. There were accommodations in that respect that were interesting in terms of improving the CBC's service — getting away from this thing that upsets many citizens about having the major programming stream upset by the playoffs, by hockey taking over everything and popping up at unexpected times and so on — and provide the basis for a viable, commercial service of hockey for people who want hockey all the time.
When one of the members of the board of the group putting together that hockey proposal came to me as chairman of the CBC's board of directors, I said I saw a lot of virtue in it and would take it forth to the management of the CBC. I must say that I was scolded unbelievably by the management of the CBC. ``How dare you suggest we get out of commercial hockey?'' Did they say that was the culture of Canada? No. ``Do you not know how important that revenue is to us?'' That was the answer. It was not cultural.
Senator Losier-Cool: I should like to relate and experience I had in New Brunswick when I was a schoolteacher in a francophone community. We wanted the children to listen to radio in French. We made arrangements through negotiations with the bus drivers that they put the radio at the French channel. I do not know if it is still working, but imagine if all the bus drivers across the country would put CBC Radio on for a while and see if that is a way to get the younger generation. The more they listen to it, the more interested they will become.
[Translation]
Mr. Watson: In any group, there is always the temptation to become head of programming at the CBC, and that must be avoided.
Senator Losier-Cool: It is a temptation to which we must not succumb.
[English]
Mr. Watson: We have to concentrate on principles. The principle here is this: Do we want a public broadcaster or a hybrid? By the way, many members of the board of directors of the CBC want a successful commercial operation; it is nice to have a subsidy, but there is a real problem with the governance of the CBC and the principles by which that board of directors are appointed. It is a serious problem.
Senator Adams: Mr. Watson, I used to watch you on black and white TV, which will tell you how old I am.
I live in the Arctic. Communications have changed a lot since the 1960s and the 1970s. We settled the land claims agreement in Nunavut. We are lucky to have CBC North. In some places, we receive over 60 satellite channels in the community. Bell Canada, Rogers and Star Choice all provide satellite dishes in the community.
CBC did a very good job in some of the communities. Today, there is so much for younger people. Nearly 60 per cent of our people in Nunavut are young people. They are not very much concerned with the CBC.
You have been involved with the CBC for a long time, sir. As Canadians, we like to know what is happening in the south. However, people in the community do not watch CBC very much because there is a lot more competition. We have the Internet and we will soon have high-speed access through our telephone lines.
Right now, we have an Aboriginal channel, which, to me, is somewhat difficult in that it is one channel for the whole of Canada. It shows all the different cultures. It is difficult for me to watch that channel sometimes, or even other Aboriginal shows, because I do not understand them; I have a different culture. Sometimes we only get one channel of Aboriginal programming, perhaps because CBC televised part. I heard on the news the other day about North of 60, which I used to watch. I think it is being made some place perhaps in the Calgary area. That was sort of an Aboriginal program, but I did not see enough of it.
We are the first people here and the culture system in the CBC is directed more to those in the south. What is the future for us? Will it be more like it is for the southern people of Canada?
Mr. Watson: The risk you are talking about for the Aboriginal cultures is analogous to the risk of Canadian culture at large because we are so inundated by American culture through our television. It is extremely well done and it appeals to the consumer state of mind that has been induced in our culture generally. I do not think there is an easy solution. If there is a solution — or at least a tempering of that mode — it can lie only in public intervention.
Perhaps I should shade that somewhat. We find that in some of the specialty satellite and cable channels there are some extraordinary services developing that seem to be dedicated to the public interest. To a large extent, they are still supported by advertising, although not entirely. There may be some options out there. I am thinking of ITV, for example, which is not as totally dominated by the advertising motif as some of the major broadcasters are.
You are talking about a model of what is happening to Canadian television generally. You are focusing on the television services available to our Aboriginal peoples. I do not have an easy solution for you.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Watson. I am sure we could have kept you here for another three or four hours, to all of our profit. Unfortunately, we cannot do that. We are grateful to you for having been with us here today.
[Translation]
Our next witness is Mr. Russell Mills, currently Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. There, he is developing ideas for a university-based journalism institute in Canada. He is also examining the changing nature of democratic systems of government and the role that the news media can play in creating the conditions for innovative public policy and healthy societies.
[English]
Mr. Mills has had a long and distinguished career in journalism, both from the practitioner's and manager's end. Most recently, he was for many years the publisher of The Ottawa Citizen and is very well known in this town. We thank you very much for joining us today, Mr. Mills. I understand you have an opening statement.
Mr. Russell Mills, Neiman Fellow, Harvard University, As an Individual: Honourable senators, Madam Chairman, as you said, I have gone back to school at Harvard this year, which is a wonderful experience. There, I got into the habit of writing essays. I hope you will indulge me in my opening statement.
I thank you for inviting me to appear here today.
Concern about the state of the news media has been a recurring theme in Canadian public life over the past few decades since control of the media has become concentrated in a few large corporations. The primary fear is that this concentrated ownership may reduce the quality and independence of the information Canadians need in order to govern themselves.
When I was asked to appear here, it was suggested that I might offer some advice on how you should proceed with this inquiry. I will do that with appropriate modesty since my only previous experience with inquiries has been in testifying. I have never been on your side of the table.
In a democratic society, the news media play an indispensable role. They provide the information that sovereign people require in order to form opinions on matters of public policy and to make judgments about the performance of their representatives and the leaders they have chosen. Without accurate, timely and independent sources of information, the ability of people to form these opinions and judgments will be reduced and democracy will suffer. When the news media fail in these responsibilities, the sovereignty of the people — an essential characteristic of democracy — is impaired.
It is not an exaggeration to say that a democracy can be no better than its news media. While the important inquiry you are beginning this week is about the state of the media, in a real sense it is about the even more important issue of the functioning of democracy in Canada. It is often said that the information and debate supplied by good journalism are the oxygen of democracy. This has become a cliché, but it remains an appropriate metaphor. To push it further, your inquiry is looking into the state of the lungs that provide this oxygen and, by natural extension, the impact of this on the overall health of the body politic.
Perhaps the most vital characteristic of the information that citizens of a democracy require is independence. By ``independence,'' I mean freedom from any pressures or incentives that might cause information to be distorted, either in pursuit of rewards or because of fear of consequences. There should be no pressures on the news media to offer information that is less than as complete and accurate as possible. There should also be no pressures to limit debate to only certain points of view.
Independence from government is perhaps the single most important aspect of the overall independence of the news media, since government controls so many of the rewards and punishments that might cause information to be distorted between the source and the public.
Because independence from government is so vital, some may question the wisdom, and even legitimacy, of a Senate examination of the state of the news media. They may feel the state of the industry should be left as a private matter between the news media and their customers, and that no arm of government or Parliament should interfere.
As far as the editorial content of news media is concerned, I believe they are right. Because independence from power is so vital, I would be uncomfortable with a government or parliamentary body making recommendations about the editorial content of print media, which are, and should be, unregulated. Broadcast media, which operate under an act of Parliament, are different, but even in the case of broadcasting, the vital independence of editorial content should be recognized and respected.
I believe such questioners are wrong, however, as far as the structure of the industry is concerned. All societies have rules for allocating broadcast frequencies because of scarcity. Most impose public obligations on broadcasters and it is common in democratic societies to have limits on ownership, including cross-ownership of broadcasting and other media.
The print media are also affected by structural rules. Foreign ownership is effectively banned and parts of the industry benefit from postal subsidies. These rules, and how they affect information, are a legitimate subject for examination by a committee of Parliament. The line between structure and content is obviously a fine one, but I am confident you will have the skill to differentiate them.
Previous inquiries into the media have had limited but generally positive results. One reason their success was limited was because, in some cases, they went too far in making recommendations that could interfere with editorial content. The Senate's special committee under Keith Davey more than 30 years ago led to the creation of Canada's first press councils. The royal commission under Tom Kent, which studied the newspaper industry more than 20 years ago, made many recommendations that were not enacted but resulted in the expansion of press councils across the country.
While press councils are imperfect bodies, as someone who has both served on them and testified before them and been subject to many of their judgments, I believe they generally improve newspapers by making them more accountable and responsive to the public. The public airing of issues and debate about the news media that these inquiries engendered was also positive.
Your committee's work also has the potential to have a positive and even greater impact if you are careful to avoid trying to deal with editorial content directly. You should be careful not to reach too far. Some of the provisions in the proposed newspaper act in 1981 that flowed from the work of the Kent commission would have come close to bringing government into Canada's newsrooms. One measure would have made newspaper editors accountable to a community committee operating under the aegis of a minister of government. I fought this along with all other senior people in the newspaper industry. With the help of international press freedom organizations, that proposed act was eventually shelved.
While there were some problems in the newspaper industry 20 years ago, that cure was far worse than the disease. By reaching too far, the entire proposed law collapsed. Since that time, freedom of expression has also been enshrined in our Constitution in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Intrusive proposals may not only be unwise today; they may also be unconstitutional. Recommendations that deal only with structure and avoid impinging on content may have the greatest chance of resulting in change in improving the state of the news media in Canada.
I would advise you to have some of your hearings outside Ottawa. The greatest concentrations of ownership are in cities across the country. In Vancouver, for example, CanWest owns both daily newspapers as well as television stations. You need to travel to some of these communities to hear from citizens about problems that concentration may be causing. You will be handicapped in your ability to assess this if you try to do it by inviting people to Ottawa. You will get a richer cross-section of opinion by visiting communities most affected.
Many of the complaints you will hear will undoubtedly be about content. It fine to hear those. The recommendations you make, however, should only be about structure and steer clear of proposals that would suggest there is any role for government in controlling editorial content.
You will undoubtedly hear from media owners that Canadians have access to more sources of information than ever before and that, therefore, there is no need for this inquiry and no need for structural change in the industry. This is only partly true. Anyone with an Internet connection and sufficient time has access to an incredibly rich variety of information and opinion on international affairs and, to a lesser extent, on national affairs.
The major gap is with information about municipal and, in some cases, provincial governments. Since these governments deliver most of the services that Canadians see and use, this is a serious deficiency. Most of the information and opinion about municipal and provincial governments comes from newspapers and, to a lesser extent, from television. In Canada these media now often have a common owner.
As these owners push their convergence strategies and try to achieve efficiencies in news gathering, a reporter recovering a municipal council meeting, for example, may file a story for a newspaper that will also appear on the newspaper's Web site and then go on to provide a commentary for television. The effective result of this is transfer of power from elected officials to the news media. A mayor, for example, trying to communicate with his or her constituents may have to do it through one reporter rather than the several he or she might have faced before. If this reporter decides to downplay a story or gets it wrong, all of the community may be deprived of accurate information. With more reporters, there is a greater chance that the message will get through.
The other problem with using the Internet as an excuse for inaction is that there is no evidence that Canadians or any other people will spend significantly more time reading or viewing the news simply because the richness of the Internet is available. Except in special circumstances, like the terrorist attack on the United States in September 2001, or the start of the recent invasion of Iraq, a typical educated Canadian will spend about half an hour to three quarters of an hour a day with the news. The richness of the Internet may be available but, except for specialized purposes, it is not used very much. Most Canadians still get the vast majority of their general news from television, radio, and newspapers. That will continue for the foreseeable future. Because of this, an examination of the concentration of ownership of the traditional media that dominate delivery of news in Canada is appropriate in spite of the Internet.
I am sure you will also be told that there is no need for structural change because the newspaper industry has less concentrated ownership than it had at the time of the Kent commission 20 years ago. That is true. There is also much less concentration than it was four or five years ago when Hollinger, Conrad Black's company, owned almost 60 per cent of Canada's daily newspapers. It is true that when you consider newspapers alone at the national level, concentration has been reduced, mainly because CanWest sold many smaller newspapers to two new players in the industry, Osprey Media and Transcontinental.
There are two problems with that, however. One is that because of the convergence strategies of media companies that are trying to achieve efficiency and synergy across different media, it does not make sense to consider newspapers alone. Since different media are being managed jointly, it is appropriate they be analysed jointly. The second problem is that concentration is primarily a local problem affecting communities rather than a national one. You should be looking at concentration of all media in cities such as Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton and provinces such as British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, rather than relying on national statistics.
The presence of weekly newspapers is also not an answer to the concentration issue because they usually only cover the suburbs of the large cities most affected by concentration and also many of them are owned by the same large media companies that own the dailies.
A reality is that while the news media provide a vital public service in a democracy, for the most part they are also private businesses with shareholders, debt loads and expectations of performance like all other companies. The obvious exception is the CBC. Those private companies are under the constant scrutiny of investment analysts. A news medium is often described as a ``public trust in private hands,'' and that is not a bad way to sum up the situation. Managers of media companies must balance the quality of information they provide to the public against the demands for improved earnings per share and other business imperatives. In the short run, these are often in conflict.
In the past, Canada has often relied on public-spirited owners who were willing to put their public trust responsibilities ahead of business imperatives. For several decades, the two major companies in Canada were Southam and Thomson. I worked for both and they exemplified very different approaches to balancing public trust and business demands of newspapers. Southam was controlled by a public-spirited family that was willing to sacrifice profits in order to serve the information needs of communities. Thomson, however, did not spend a nickel more than necessary on content. The exception was The Globe and Mail, which was run separately and with more generous editorial budgets in the years that Thomson owned it.
The Southam newspapers generally supplied good journalism while, because of inadequate resources, the small Thomson newspapers generally did not. Ironically, the relatively lowly profitability of the Southam papers made the company vulnerable to a takeover once the Southam family lost control of the majority of the shares.
Another reality is that in our system, the freedom of expression that is protected in our Constitution ultimately belongs to the owners of the news media, not to editors or other journalists. Owners have the right to control the news and editorial content of their media outlets, if they choose. In the early days of journalism, this was the rule, since there were often several newspapers in a community and each was used to promote the interests, political views and often the career of the owner. Readers often had to read more than one paper to get both sides of an issue. As newspapers evolved and many went out business, the remaining papers generally became more professional and objective. They tried to present balanced coverage of the news, and opinion was restricted to the editorial page. Control of content was likely to be delegated to publishers, editors and their journalists.
In recent years, the use of media to promote the views of the owners has made a come back, notably since CanWest became a newspaper proprietor. The principals of the company have been quite open about their desire to use their newspapers to promote their interests and views. Staffs of the newspapers have learned which issues are sensitive and when to censor themselves. For example, you are unlikely to find much that is favourable about the CBC or about Palestinians in CanWest newspapers. Managers of the papers have learned that Canadian broadcasting and the conflict in the Middle East are highly sensitive matters with the proprietors. Some readers of CanWest newspapers have complained that they do not get balanced coverage of these and a few other issues. In spite of this, owners undoubtedly have the constitutional right to control content if they so choose.
What can be done? As I have said, I believe that any attempt to control editorial content directly would be unwise and probably illegal under our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As frustrating as this may be for some who would like to improve the media, content issues must be worked out between proprietors and their customers. Readers and viewers must be more demanding of the news media and make their views known when they believe they are not receiving quality journalism or balanced coverage. Over the long haul, cancelled subscriptions and changed channels can be powerful tools in promoting better journalism.
There are structural changes, however, that could promote greater diversity in news and opinion. This would involve limiting the number of media outlets that any one proprietor could own. This can best be done by banning the cross-ownership of broadcasting and newspapers that has impeded the flow of information in several Canadian cities and provinces.
For several decades, ownership of broadcasting and print in the same city was discouraged. In 1982, this became formal government policy, and a directive was sent to the CRTC. In 1985, however, this policy was reversed shortly after an election and a new government took power. The reasons for the reversal have not been made clear.
The most important public policy change that could be made to improve the state of Canada's news media would be to recognize that the 1982 policy was the correct one. Ownership of both broadcasting and newspapers in the same city gives an owner too much control over the flow of news and opinion. Banning of cross-ownership would create greater diversity in sources of news and opinion in many Canadian cities. Tom Kent suggested a ban on cross-ownership in a thoughtful article on policy options last fall, and I support his conclusions. I believe he made the same suggestion here this week.
Media owners may tell you that they must own different media in order to meet the needs of advertisers and to compete against much larger foreign media companies. Both of these rationales are highly questionable. Media buyers and advertising agencies are already very skilled at arranging multimedia advertising packages involving different companies. Common ownership adds little value to this. There is little direct competition between Canadian media companies and their foreign counterparts. Few foreign newspapers are sold in Canada and while Canadians watch a lot of foreign — particularly U.S. — television, Canadian media companies control virtually all of the advertising revenue directed at the Canadian market. Canadian magazines, of course, do compete intensively with foreign magazines, but ownership of broadcasting outlets by a magazine company would be of little or no help.
In fact, the entire business rationale for cross-ownership and convergence of media is shaky. Companies that have invested heavily in convergence by buying other media have generally seen significant declines in their share prices. Investors appear to be questioning the value of the purchases and the debts that have been taken on to finance them. You should question claims that under convergence news media are stronger because they can support each other. The truth is that, in many cases, the debts of parent companies have resulted in severe cost cutting and made Canada's news media weaker, not stronger.
A ban on cross-ownership would also enforce the vital independence of print media from government. Broadcasters require licences from government in order to operate their businesses. A broadcast licence is an extremely valuable asset for a company and this may give the company a powerful interest in remaining on good terms with the government. This has the potential to affect the objectivity of journalism. Broadcast journalists, of course, have no choice but to operate in this environment but there is a public interest in not having print journalists compromised by the ties of their owners to government.
In this sense, a ban on cross-ownership would extend the ethical standards that good governments impose on their employees to the level of ownership. The Globe and Mail, for example, would not permit one of its reporters to accept a free airline ticket from government in order to cover a story because of concern that this might influence content. However, BCE, the owner of The Globe and Mail, receives a broadcast licence from the government to operate the CTV network, which enables the company to make millions of dollars in profits each year. Owners should be subject to the same ethical standards as they impose on their employees; they should accept no benefits. Removing broadcast licences from newspaper owners with a ban on cross-ownership would achieve this, and several thousand Canadian journalists would become free of their owner's ties to government through broadcasting licences.
Because media companies have made substantial investments in cross-ownership and convergence strategies however, they should be given reasonable time to adapt to the change. Legislation should be passed that would give media owners until the end of their current broadcasting licences to be in compliance with a ban on cross-ownership. In most cases, this would be about five years. BCE, CanWest and Québécor would have to decide whether they wanted to be in the newspaper business or the broadcasting business and sell assets to bring themselves into compliance. In the meantime, awareness that cross-ownership is coming to an end would halt the convergence activities that are now limiting diversity of coverage. Mediums that will be sold must be operationally separate.
Your committee may also look at the issue of an effective ban on foreign ownership of Canadian media. While it might be tempting to permit foreign ownership of Canada's media to promote diversity of proprietors, I think this would be a mistake. Foreign ownership would almost certainly mean ownership by large U.S. media companies. I know from experience in working with them that there is often little recognition that Canadian information needs and viewpoints may be different. When Canadian and U.S. opinions on policies diverge, as they did recently over the invasion of Iraq, it could be unwise to have control of Canadian news outlets in U.S. hands. Canadian-owned news media remain an important tool to promote our national identity.
I am sure you know that some have questioned the value of your hearings. Skeptics doubt that government would have the courage to take issues with the big media companies, regardless of what you recommend. In spite of this, I urge you to press forward. I believe your work may be vital not only to the state of the news media in Canada but also to the health of our democratic system.
Abraham Lincoln once said, ``Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe.'' I hope you will be able to make sure that nothing, including media ownership, gets in the way of Canadians knowing the facts so that our country can continue to be safe.
The Chairman: Mr. Mills, you mentioned the effect of convergence on coverage of local government — in effect, one reporter instead of previously a number of reporters — and how this could have serious effects on the flow of accurate information.
Was that hypothetical, or is that already happening?
Mr. Mills: It is starting to happen now. The companies that own both print and broadcasting are looking at ways to rationalize their coverage. CanWest has established a Canadian news desk in Winnipeg through which a lot of information flows now, so that is centralizing of control. As in any business, they are looking to operate as efficiently as they can. If you can get away with one reporter covering a story rather than two or three representing different media, you will do it. I would say at this point I do not know of specific examples where that is happening now, but it is certainly in the planning of the companies.
Senator Phalen: Mr. Mills, at the ``Who Controls Canada's Media'' conference, you said the primary allegiance of good media companies must be to the citizens of their communities and not to shareholders, advertisers or employees. In his testimony before this committee on the subject of newspapers maximizing their profits, Mr. Tom Kent said that we need the Bank Act to ensure that, in some respects, banks do not maximize their profits. Newspapers, because of their role in information that is vital to democracy, are not only businesses.
My question is: What mechanism, if any, would you see being effective in ensuring that newspapers do not waver from their duty to the community in favour of corporate profits?
Mr. Mills: That is a very tough question. I would not want government to try to impose that, because that would impose the other conflict that I outlined in my presentation. As frustrating as it may seem, it ultimately has to come between the customers — the readers — and the owners. The only role you can have is to ensure that there is as diverse a range of sources of news and information and opinion as possible. If an owner decides not to own up to the public responsibilities — that I believe media owners have — then he becomes a smaller part than if he controls a lot of it. I would be very uncomfortable about something like a bank act imposing obligations on newspapers. Go back to the defunct newspaper act of 1981; the cure would be worse than the disease.
I do not have a good answer for you.
Senator Eyton: We live next to the great elephant to our south. Relative to the U.S., we have far fewer media outlets and a smaller population that is thinly distributed along the border. We have just a few cities around which the media is centred. At the same time, I make the observation as a proud Canadian that much of our media, including newspapers, are significantly better than the comparable product in the United States.
I spend a lot of time in the United States. I find it very hard to find newspapers that provide the reach, information and opinion that I can get from the Toronto Star, the National Post or The Globe and Mail or even some of the other papers in Toronto.
I give much credit to Conrad Black when he intervened dramatically in the newspaper business in Canada. Being Lord Black, he exercised a fair amount of control over his newspapers and over their editorial content. The direct effect of that is not only did the National Post provide an alternative that was welcomed by Canadians, but also the other papers got significantly better. We were enriched by that.
I recognize that I am not speaking to convergence, but I am speaking to the point of ownership and your concern about the entire separation of editorial content from ownership. In my view, that experience, which was very important to Canada and our media, proves the opposite case. Responsible owners can make a good and positive difference in what we see and read.
Mr. Mills: I think that all of your observations are correct. It is true that Canadian newspapers of similar circulation size are invariably better than their American counterparts. The very best newspapers in the United States — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post — do not have counterparts in Canada. However, if you compare a circulation of 200,000 in Canada with its counterpart in the U.S, the Canadian version is invariably better.
Conrad Black and the competition that he brought into the industry was very good for newspapers. I worked for Conrad Black. When he bought The Ottawa Citizen, I spent half a day with him in New York getting things sorted out. He is an owner; he has a right to control the content. I took down a plan, and he agreed to invest substantially more in the newspaper. Part of his condition was to get rid of two of our senior editors because he did not believe that the newspaper would be able to perform the way in which he wanted it to with them in place. That was a choice I had to a make at that time.
You have to respect the constitutional right of ownership. He was extremely good for newspapers in Canada. The competition from the National Post and what he did for the daily newspapers did improve journalism right across the country.
Setting up ownership rules for newspapers is similar to setting up governments. You must set them up for the worst case. You cannot always rely on having good people around. If you could be sure that saints were running the government, we would not need the checks and balances that we consider vital.
The ownership rules should be set up to take account of the fact that some owners may not be so good. Some owners may not respect journalism and might abuse their positions. When Conrad Black owned 60 per cent of Canada's newspapers, in theory, that was terrible. In practice, it was not so bad because he did love newspapers and was willing to invest in them. Someone else owning 60 per cent of the newspapers in Canada could be serious for Canada and the information that we receive.
Senator Eyton: Would the restriction or regulation that you are considering discourage other Conrad Blacks? There are probably not very many like him, but it is important to encourage those who have an aspiration that way.
Mr. Mills: I am proposing only one restriction — banning people from owning broadcasting and newspapers. Conrad Black did not own broadcasting. He loved newspapers; newspapers were his game. He would have done what he did with the Canadian newspaper industry regardless of cross-ownership. He might have had more difficulty selling newspapers at the end, because there would have been fewer buyers. However, it would not have deterred him from coming into the newspaper industry in Canada.
Senator Eyton: I reject your analysis that convergence is bad from a financial point of view. It is fair enough to observe that some may have paid excessive prices and that the excessive debt imposes an operating difficulty for the companies. However, convergence itself can be demonstrated to be good and properly used efficient thing.
We are a little bit late with that recommendation. In fact the convergence against which you are speaking has already occurred. A transition period of five years simply would not do the job. It may be counterproductive opposite convergence, which can be argued to have some merit. Second, the kind of transition about which you are talking is after the fact and unfair. There would be great difficulty making it work in practical terms. Certainly, the market might feel that way. I know that some of the media owners are going through difficult and challenging times. CanWest is challenged. Québécor is challenged.
However, it would be unfair now to come along with anything as stringent as a five-year transition period where they would be obliged to separate broadcast and newspaper outlets.
Mr. Mills: First, I would not dispute that convergence can promote efficiency. If one person bought the media and all the people sitting you, there would be only one person back there. Some big salaries would be saved, and that would be more efficient for the owner. No question.
Whether it is in the public interest is another question. I do not think it is, because it would reduce the range of diversity of coverage and the range of voices that we hear. I do not challenge that it might be operationally efficient.
You say that the media companies are doing poorly. They are doing poorly partly because of debt loads and partly because of the prices they pay to acquire media.
If you look at the underlying operations of media, they are still very profitable. Newspapers are profitable businesses, as are well-run television stations. If they were independently owned, they would be extremely profitable for the owner. The fact that they have been pulled together and the owners have paid excessive prices is the reason that they are struggling to deal with through convergence and cost-cutting activity. That is a separate problem.
I agree there is an element of unfairness in saying that you put all this together and now you have to take it apart. Sometimes, I think the public interest has to come to the fore. In this case it does. Giving people to the end of their broadcast licences to make the adjustments necessary to come into compliance is not a bad compromise.
Senator Eyton: It would be an expensive one.
Senator Day: I am trying to balance your comments regarding freedom of expression, which you give to the owner of the medium, with the responsibility of the public trust. Freedom of the press is, presumably, part of that public trust. The press has a freedom that it holds in trust and it is a public right. I have seen that written a number of times and people have suggested that to us.
When you talk about independence, are you talking about independence of the press or of the journalist? When you talk about independence, you say that of all of the different vital characteristics, independence is most important. Is that independence of the owner of the medium or is that independence of the journalist who works for the owner?
Mr. Mills: It is both. Initially, I am talking about the independence of the medium from government and that is the owner because the owner is the ultimate holder of the freedom of expression. The owner delegates any freedom of expression that journalists and reporters have. If someone owned one newspaper then it would be very hard to criticize the owner for coming down and sitting on the newsroom floor to take part in editorial meetings because it is his newspaper. However, if he owned a dozen newspapers or more, then it would become questionable just how much the owner should get involved with all of them because one person's right to communicate should not predominate over the thousands of people who may work for him.
When I was a publisher and an editor for Southam, I never worried what the owners thought because they did not tell us. It was up to the individual newspapers to develop their own editorial policies in their coverage. That was delegated authority by owners who were aware of their public trust responsibilities.
It is important that owners are independent of government and that is why print media owners should not be tied to government through licences. Good, responsible owners — particularly those owning multiple outlets — should be aware that they can best serve the public interest by delegating much of their authority and by giving independence to the individual media and journalist.
Senator Day: If a journalist finds him or herself working for an owner that places restrictions on the ability to do the job as he or she sees fit, then the commercial reality is that you leave and move on to another place.
Mr. Mills: Yes. The reality now is that there are not many places to move to because there are so few owners in Canada.
Senator Day: There is the issue of the embedded reporters, CNN's role in Iraq and management deciding what to cover in order to maintain their commercial position and an operation in Baghdad. Is that a reasonable balance of the public trust, such that in order to quickly obtain and communicate on-site information, they sacrificed some of the independence that we talked about?
Mr. Mills: I am not an expert on broadcasting. However, I would think that it is okay as long as it is only part of your coverage. Embedded journalists are receiving only a narrow slice of the action because they see only what is in front of them on any given day. If you have only a few, some of whom are back at headquarters and some of whom are roaming free, and if you have good editors pulling this together either for television or for print, then that may be perfectly acceptable. You may be referring to the piece that the manager of CNN wrote in the New York Times a few weeks ago about the confession to the covered up story.
Senator Day: Yes.
Mr. Mills: That is pretty hard to defend. In that case, the commitment to tell the story and to tell the truth should have come ahead of whatever practical difficulties it may have caused for CNN. The reputation of the network has been damaged through that.
Senator Day: I am trying to get at the responsibility of owners and journalists to obtain part of the story. Is that okay? Is embedded journalism acceptable as long as they make it clear that they are reporting only what is before them at the moment?
Mr. Mills: You would not want those items on the air without context but if you have editors pulling everything together and making the viewers aware of the limitations of embedded journalists, then that is fine.
Senator Ringuette: I have no doubt that over the last decade we have seen a drastic evolution in respect of the distribution channels of news. These distribution channels have been put in place and are offering the consumer — the reader, the viewer, and the listener — a greater option of media sources and channels in accordance with the consumer time allocation to receive that news.
Therefore, I have a hard time understanding that a ban on cross-ownership would benefit the news consumer. You cannot stop the evolution of the distribution channels of the news. It is a mission impossible where there may be consideration of the economic state of affairs.
In my opinion, banning cross-ownership would be a step backwards for the consumer who wishes to be well- informed and to have options for the source of that information.
I read different newspapers from different owners because I want to have all the facts. Sometimes I will read two daily papers in print and read one more on the Internet to receive the facts from a different distribution channel. I listen to CNN and to Global. I find that the Canadian consumer of news is better served now because of the greater choice and access to news than ever before.
Why should we change this very good evolution of news communication to Canadians?
Mr. Mills: I think you are talking about two things. Technical evolution is absolutely unstoppable and you are absolutely right — those of us who have the time to surf the Internet have more information available than we had before. You said that you like reading newspapers from different owners. What if you lived in Vancouver and both newspapers had the same owner? What would happen if Power Corporation bought Québecor and they did not have different owners? What if one media company bought all of the television stations and all of the newspapers in Canada? Nothing could stop that but would it be good just because technological evolution has continued?
There is a role for public policy in limiting ownership in the public interest. It should not be drastic and it should not interfere with editorial content. I am not suggesting anything about newspapers, per se. However, limiting cross- ownership is a reasonable suggestion to me.
Senator Ringuette: I have a hard time reconciling your current comments with the comments that you made earlier. You said that if someone other than Conrad Black were to own 60 per cent of media, you would see that as a danger zone.
Mr. Mills: It could be. It could be another Conrad Black who would be good for the industry but it also could be someone who is not.
The Chairman: I know that most local newspapers now are quite profitable and, indeed, have been pressured to be profitable. However, it is also true that newspaper readership, in general, is declining as a proportion of the population. Given that, over the long term, is there not an argument to be made that those newspapers will, in the foreseeable future, need business alliances with broadcasters in order to keep them going as viable news gathering and providing entities?
Mr. Mills: That is a long way off. It is true that newspaper readership is down, but fragmentation of the broadcasting audience has increased even faster. As a result, even though a newspaper like the Ottawa Citizen serves a smaller proportion of the public than it did 10 or 20 years ago, its relative strength within the media mix in Ottawa has increased dramatically. That is why it is much more profitable than it was 10 or 20 years ago. People have access to so many television stations, broadcasting outlets and other ways to receive advertising. Newspapers are healthy nowadays.
As a result of some of the current trends, with continuing fragmentation of broadcasting markets, the ability of new machines to have people bypass commercials entirely, it is more likely that, for the foreseeable future, newspapers will be holding up broadcasters, rather than the other way around.
Senator Eyton: Where does radio fit into all this? I spend considerably more time listening to and getting my news from CBC Radio than from television. I spend more than the average on newspapers, but I listen to radio a great deal. Where does radio fit into this matrix?
Mr. Mills: We are fortunate in Canada that we have the CBC, which is an excellent radio service that I listen to when I am here. There is a great example of what could happen in the United States. Media critics in the United States are most concerned about radio.
There is a company called Clear Channel that has bought up about 1,300 stations. They are by far the largest radio operator in the United States. The television show 60 Minutes aired an item about Clear Channel two or three weeks ago. They reported on a case in Minnesota where a rail car had gone off the tracks and some noxious gas was coming out. The authorities wanted to phone the radio stations to alert people not to go to this part of town because of the perceived danger. Clear Channel owned all the radio stations in that town — about four or five. There was not one employee at any of those radio changes, not one. No person answered the phone. All the content was coming out of Los Angeles, or some place like that. The music and news is cleverly done to make it seem local, but it is not local at all. They are sitting there as transmission towers and all the content is coming from thousands of miles away.
The radio station could not even serve its function of alerting people to the fact that there was a danger to the community. Commercial radio is in real trouble in the United States. We are fortunate in Canada that we do have the CBC.
Senator Eyton: How would you feel about the convergence of radio and newspapers? Where does radio fit into that mix? They are quite different companies in Canada.
Mr. Mills: Yes, they are. I would still be concerned about the broadcasting licence issue. Commercial radio now provides so little news that we hardly think of them as being a factor.
If you have rules, they should be drawn at the level of broadcasting, rather than putting television on one side and radio on the other.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. This is a fascinating topic. Maybe we will have to have everyone back. In the meantime, we are grateful to you for being with us today, Mr. Mills.
With that, we turn to our next witnesses.
[Translation]
Mr. Caplan was cochairman of the Task Force on Canadian Broadcasting Policy, which reported in 1986. Mr. Sauvageau, a journalist with a lengthy experience in the written and spoken word, is currently director of Laval University's Centre for Media Studies.
[English]
Mr. Caplan has been and continues to be active in human rights education and human development issues both in Canada and abroad. Indeed, we were lucky to catch him on the fly between one continent and another.
We are grateful to both of you for being with us today. Since you are here as a panel, having been co-chairs of the same task force, we have left it up to you to decide how you wish to handle opening remarks prior to our questions. Either way, we are grateful to both of you for being here.
[Translation]
Mr. Florian Sauvageau, Director, Centre for Media Studies, Laval University, and former co-chair, Task Force on Broadcasting Policy: Madam Chair, two trends have developed during the 1990s. I am pleased to see that these two trends are at the heart of your discussions. They go together and cannot be taken separately. They must be viewed within a context.
One of these trends, which was already noticeable in the mid 1980s, is the decline of public service. I can say that the central objective of our 1986 report was to stop that decline. We only managed to slow it down. I like to say that we have prolonged the agony of public service.
The other trend is consolidation, concentration, the rise of large groups. That was already emerging in 1986. We had mentioned these conglomerates that were emerging in Canada and suggested — and I believe that these two trends must be considered within that context — that the rise of these conglomerates and the other trend as well had to be viewed within a global context.
Mr. Mills mentioned earlier the argument that was put forward all along the 1990s, before the various public authorities and in particular the CRTC, by the CEOs of these large conglomerates to persuade the CRTC, among others, of the necessity of allowing consolidation. For example, in 1994, when Rogers took over MacLean-Hunter, the main argument was that we needed larger groups in order to eventually fight larger groups that were emerging internationally and would some day be our competitors.
That was the argument that was accepted by the CRTC and by the public authorities generally. At the beginning of the 1980s, in a document that was published by what was then the Department of Communications, they said that in the future, the soundness of Canadian culture will depend on strong private sector entities. What was different compared to the previous discourse and that which is still commonly heard today is that the heart of the broadcasting system was the CBC. One could not write today what was written in 1986, namely that Radio-Canada and the CBC are the flagship of the Canadian culture. The CBC is one actor amongst many others, within a universe that is dominated by the private sector. That is what is important. Namely that in the media universe, there has always been and there will always be two dynamics at works, two conflicting logics.
An economic, industrial logic on the one hand, and a cultural and democratic logic on the other hand. For a long time, in Canada, we have managed to balance these two logics within the whole system put in place by the CRTC, having come to a tacit agreement with private broadcasters.
They are guaranteed profits within the annuity system, and in return, they must meet some requirements. And then there was the CBC.
The assumption that, in my view, can be easily verified, is that in 1990, that balance collapsed. When I say that it is a global problem in the context of globalization, it is because all over the world, market forces are dominant.
The public sector is declining and the private sector is on the rise in the media industry. In the universe of media, there was at one end the commercial system, that of the United States, and at the other end, the public system, that of continental Europe. Then there is a hybrid system, namely the Canadian system, the British system and the Australian system, with public media and private media with some balance between the two. The whole world is now going over to the American system of commercial media. That is the heart of the problem. I believe that you cannot escape from this analysis. At the same time, within news organizations, the equilibrium that tacitly existed between commercial and information objectives has toppled over.
There was this metaphor being used in the United States: ``The Church and the State.'' At the Chicago Tribune, journalists were using a different elevator from the publicity and circulation people in order to avoid being ``contaminated'' by the commercial goals of the company. That does not exist anymore. In most media companies, the information objectives are subjected to marketing imperatives and we would be wrong to think that it is caused by convergence.
That did not start in January 2002, when AOL took over another company. It had all started well before that. The important date to remember is 1989, when there was the merger between Time and Warner: the merger of a company that had up until then been dedicated to information with another company that was dedicated to entertainment. We are now living in a global culture of entertainment.
In the whole issue of concentration, cross-ownership is the most significant problem. Mr. Mills mentioned Vancouver, but in Montreal it is somewhat the same thing. The domination of Québécor, in television viewing with its TVA network and in newspaper readership with the Journal de Montréal and the Journal de Québec also gave rise, as we have seen, to the phenomenon of Star Académie in Quebec. One can see how cross-ownership can allow these groups to realize not convergence but rather what was being called synergy in the 1980s. It is the same thing, these are all slogans. The fundamental trend is that concentration is giving rise to cross-promotion, all the firms within a group obviously doing their best to achieve success of the group as a whole. In the case of Québécor, it gave rise to news items about Star Académie that were almost more important than the war in Iraq or elections in Quebec. That was a rather extraordinary phenomenon.
I believe we must find modulated solutions, according to the various markets. The issues are not the same in French and in English and they are not the same in markets of various sizes and depending on transactions that are being made in these markets.
These issues are being examined elsewhere as well. Some are exploring a system of indicators that would enable to assess the power of a group within a given market. Clearly, radio does not have the same weight as daily newspapers and television at the level of information. Dailys have less weight, as you said in your article, than they had 20 or 25 years ago, but they still have some weight because of the number of journalists they employ. Daily newspapers are the most significant places for information gathering because they have a much stronger complement of journalists. Dailys are important at the level of offer, and television at the level of demand, between 65 per cent and 70 per cent of people turning to them for their first source of information. Radio has very little significance regarding the quality and quantity of information, except for the CBC.
According to a study that was made in the 1990s, there are in average, including at the CBC, five journalists for every radio station in Canada. Only five journalists, as opposed to daily newspapers which have an average of some 40 journalists. That is an average, but the strength of daily newspapers is much more significant at the level of information gathering.
I will conclude by recalling what was reported in the papers, when Mr. Stakhovitch said that there was some cacophony in the system. It is an incredible problem. I will use yet another phrase that is in fashion these days: there is no governance in the system. The CRTC and the Competition Bureau are making contradictory decisions.
They have done so recently in the matter of radio stations in Quebec. A report on foreign investments that was published last year by the Parliamentary Committee on Industry will quite certainly be contradicted in two weeks by the Parliamentary Committee on Heritage, the latter telling the former that we must maintain the rules on foreign investments. I could give many other examples of crazy going ons in the system that reveal the lack of governance.
There are many reports in Quebec City. Several reports were published in the past few months by a committee of the National Assembly. There are reports in Ottawa and the Heritage Committee will publish another one next week.
Mr. Watson talked about citizens and consumers. I must have said I do not know how many hundred times that we must address citizens and not consumers. We talked about information quality and we talked about information diversity. I believe that it is important to better define these terms and, more important still, to link these principles with journalism practices.
What does a democracy need in terms of information? What is the required diversity in a democracy? What role is expected from the media in order to fulfill that diversity? Is it expected from each media or from the media as a whole? We are living in democracies that are getting more and more complex. I believe that it is not with a complex system of media that we will meet the needs of citizens, of these democracies: a system where there is a mix of private and public sector players, plus community media, and alternative media.
There is room for public policy not only to counter concentration, but also to allow the public sector to play its role and to allow other sectors of the civil society such as community and alternative media to play their role as well.
[English]
Mr. Gerald Caplan, former Co-Chair, Task Force on Broadcasting Policy, as an individual: Like Mr. Sauvageau, I am delighted to be here. You are hearing the ghosts of commissions past.
I want to try to complement what Mr. Sauvageau said by focusing mostly on the role of the CBC today, which played a major part in our report. Our work began in 1985 and was concluded in 1986. Ours was one of a long series of reports on Canadian broadcasting and it soon became apparent to me — and I believe to Mr. Sauvageau — that we would be the last in an era that now can be seen as having been characterized by considerable simplicity and innocence.
It seemed complex at the time, but looking back, it is evident how much easier it was then. First, it was possible to talk about much more money being available for public broadcasting. Second, much of the high-tech stuff did not exist at all. Computers were word processing; we had never heard of the Internet; Web sites were non-existent and all-news channels were almost futuristic. The notion of the 500-channel universe seemed more science fiction even 17 years ago than it does now. The biggest single technological innovation in our day was high definition television, which remains the same today. I am sure one day we will get it.
The Mulroney government appointed us. That is important because it shows who the members were. There were seven of us. None of us knew each other in advance. We discovered quickly that we were a diverse lot. We represented all political parties and no political parties.
After a year and change of work, we agreed —as Mr. Sauvageau implied — on the following key recommendation that set the tone of our entire report. The words are: ``We recommended a substantially expanded public sector in broadcasting with the CBC as its major component'' — not a major component, but its major component. Within a year of our concluding, it became clear to me that this was a completely unrealistic dream. It would never happen. The Mulroney government quickly started cutting budgets, a trend that was continued eight years later by the Chrétien government. This is not a partisan comment; it simply became clear that money for the CBC would not become available.
Second, the proliferation of channels dramatically increased about the same time. Strangely enough, convergence was an early problem for the CBC, but convergence for them meant two things: It meant less money than we thought they needed — and of course than they thought they needed — and more competition and more difficulty understanding exactly what niche and role in the larger broadcasting system the CBC would play. It quickly became clear that the idea that we avowed — a bigger, better all-things-to-all-people CBC — was not in the cards and would never happen.
What kind of CBC would we have? That is why I am glad that you have restricted the mandate of this committee, honourable senators, mainly to news and information gathering. It makes my job, at least today, much easier. I wish to skip to 2003 from 1987.
It is clear, as Mr. Sauvageau has said, everything is much more complicated. Your task is more complicated. To come out with public policies that will deal with the issues you have already heard this morning and this week will be enormously difficult.
What is less difficult is to understand the role of the CBC. This is a very propitious moment to talk about it since the last few months have done wonders to clarify and focus on what that role should be, at least in news, public affairs and documentaries.
Honourable senators, anyone who has ever questioned in recent years — and there is an entire part of the ideological spectrum that questions it every day in good faith —the raison d'être of the CBC and wondered about what role it has, must now stop questioning and wondering.
I am here to make the following assertion: I thank heaven for CBC news and current affairs. I cannot imagine how this country would have gone through the last four months, the build up to the invasion and the war in Iraq without having the CBC to depend upon. I talk about CBC television, Newsworld, Mr. Sauvageau tells me I am allowed to talk about Radio-Canada and I also talk about CBC Radio 1, which, for all the criticism it is getting now, remains in my view the single greatest teaching resource in this country. This was true when we had our commission and it is true today.
If you were to listen to CBC radio from the time you got up until the time you went to bed, you would get a Ph.D. every week of the year. You would be knowledgeable, informed and you would even possibly have wisdom.
The prospect of us having gone through this last war and the build up to it, without what CBC brought to it, is too appalling to contemplate. As the chairman pointed out, I have been travelling. I happened to be in Ethiopia during a good part of the war and that gave me exposure to BBC and CNN, which is indeed ubiquitous. I watched some of it here, which is why I can talk about this with some confidence. Let me rush to say that the issue is not whether or not you supported the invasion; the issue is whether you were in a position to have enough thoughtful knowledge to make an informed decision about the war.
The issue is the quality of information, the balance of the information, and the provision of context. The issue is having sources that are skeptical in their reporting of all official sources. It is not that you take on the Americans; it is not that you are anti-American. It is just that you say that all governments and all interested parties have their spin. It is the job of a serious journalist and of a serious journalistic enterprise to question all those sources and to give us not an anti-American view, but an un-American view and to put it the best way, a pro-Canadian view, a view that reflects the diversity of Canada.
Two ironies emerged out of the coverage of the war. One is that CNN, the three nets and MSNBC, despite all of them being great free enterprise institutions, all became state broadcasters for the period of the war. Even more ironically, the most rabidly free market of them all, the new Fox news station became virtually a government spokesperson.
Ironically, in Canada, where we have a broadcaster that is sponsored by the state, it functioned as a public broadcaster. It did not peddle any line. It gave perspectives from all sides. It was free of the government, which is what a government-funded public broadcaster should be. It represented, in that sense, the diversity, messiness and the contradiction that any view of the war would have.
The second irony is that competition has done things to the CBC that many of us do not admire. It has made it glitzy; it is filled with graphics. It now has four-word clips. They used to be eight-second clips. Now people have only four words. It has become entertainment. It is the kind of show business that Mr. Sauvageau spoke about. That is the downside of competing with the entertainment news that we now get.
The upside is that I believe absolutely that thanks to the standards and quality set by the CBC, Global and CTV are better than they would be otherwise. The tragedy for the United States is that they do not have a CBC. PBS is marginal as opposed to CBC's mainstream function in our system. They do not have a CBC that would have pushed the private networks to do a better, more balanced job of covering that war.
As a result, we know that large numbers of Americans who were not ready to take their government's words as reflected in the private media, who did not love the war and who wanted to know more about it, turned every night to C-Span, which picked up the CBC news every night. That is where those people got their news. Many of them wrote to media commentators in Canada to tell them how thrilled and delighted they were that they could get real information about the war thanks to The National being covered in C-Span in the States, that they had absolutely no access to otherwise on the mainstream TV nets in the United States.
That is why we get the following statistic provided by a poll that EKOS Research did two or three weeks ago that showed that the more Canadian TV that Canadians watched, the more they were likely to support the government's policy of non-intervention in the war. The more American TV news Canadians watched, the more they supported the George Bush position. The figures, by the way, are that 75 per cent of Canadians who watched only Canadian news — and we know from the stats that this must include Global and CTV, not just CBC — approved of Canada's non- participation in the war and 58 per cent who watched American sources exclusively thought Canada should join the British-American version.
I am not here as a CBC flack. I do not work for the CBC. I am a friend of Izzy Asper, as long as we do not have to talk about anything. I am a friend of Lloyd Robertson, Tom Clark and Bob Hurst. I have no interest and I gain nothing from saying these things. In fact, I have many objections to the CBC and to its coverage. I hated the fact that it made the corporate decision to refer to the invading forces as ``the coalition,'' I thought it was a political copout.
However, imagine Canada without the CBC. Imagine going through the war without the CBC. Imagine the next Iraq. There are going to be crises like this. Imagine the CBC not having the resources. It took all their resources to cover the war. Imagine them not having the resources to cover the next war, as they did this. How will we know how to think? How will we know how to figure out what to think?
The public policy implications of all this are difficult. I am not here asking for $1 billion or $2 billion. That is not on and it is not real. Some things — as the ad says — are priceless. Having a CBC that gives us this kind of informed coverage is among those priceless assets.
What I am advocating to you is what Peter Herrndorf advocates about all things that are important. I am sure you will have Peter here; he is one of the Canada's great cultural advocates. You have a ``bully pulpit,'' as he calls it. Teddy Roosevelt used to call it that. You have your position, you have your status, and you have the capacity to champion the fact of the CBC.
Honourable senators, you have your independence — which you talked about, Madam Chair, in one of your articles — to say whatever you want and to have it be legitimate, because no one thinks the people in this room can be pushed around or bullied. You can say whatever you want.
The CBC badly needs a champion, it badly needs a cheerleader, it badly needs someone who says, ``This corporation must be protected so in its news and its current affairs it can continue to give us the kind of coverage we had last time and that we need badly next time.''
I urge you to use your status and your position in that pro-Canadian way.
Senator Atkins: Mr. Caplan, I have to say you give us listeners of Radio 1 a lot of credit if we can get a Ph.D. in a week.
There have been a lot of changes — technological and others — since your task force. How does cable fit into the overall scenario now? Does it have any value?
Mr. Caplan: There are three achievements of our task force. One is that it introduced Mr. Sauvageau and me and we have become life-long friends. Another is that we played an important role in the creation of Newsworld; it was one of our key recommendations. The third is we saw Ted Rogers turn apoplectic in front of us when he read our recommendations and announced that this was among the ``black days'' in the history of — I cannot remember — either the world or cable history or the universe or something. It was quite a wonderful moment.
Cable does not even have a separate existence in my view. It is simply one of the many components that Mr. Sauvageau talked about and that you are studying. It has become more complicated because in our day it was just a transmitter and distributor. Then they got ambitious and they started buying their own channels, and issues of conflict of interest arose. Here is where convergence is real: My e-mail account is @rogers.com. Unfortunately, I am at the mercy of the cable industry with my Internet access — since it fails a good part of the time it makes me very aggravated.
Cable is just another factor for you to work in. I do not think it does more or less harm. It is in the nature of these enterprises that whatever their position is they will tell you they need more. Whatever liberties you grant them they will need even greater ones; whatever constraints are put in public policy, they will find reasons to tell you they are unacceptable. I do not believe it. Cable will live and thrive as long as it keeps modernizing itself, and bringing in new broad-band cables to give us the right kind of reception.
Senator Atkins: Is that because of the vertical interests that it produces? I refer to sports, A & E, history, et cetera.
Mr. Caplan: It is just a central player. In terms of understanding how the system works it is simply another player.
Senator Atkins: I could not agree more with the concentration of U.S. media in Canada. Your point about the CBC is absolutely critical; there is a counterbalance to the Canadian audience that makes the kinds of arguments that are essential to our own citizenry. I think you are very wise in your comments.
Mr. Sauvageau: In our report, recommended a general overview of the question of concentration. We did not like the way the CRTC looks at it on a case-by-case basis.
Before coming here, I re-read the section of our report pertaining to concentration of ownership. We wrote that this way of doing things by the CRTC was leading to controversy and confusion. Those are the words of the report. I think those words are still valid.
[Translation]
We recommended, among other things, that the CRTC hold hearings on the issue of concentration generally, instead of reviewing the situation on a case by case basis. I believe that this is just as important today as it was yesterday. If you are examining these issues today, it is because of lack of action by governments.
On the issue of concentration, there was, among others, the Kent report. Even though it was not our main topic, we did say that is was a problem and that the CRTC did not have the right approach to this problem. Concentration has been a problem in Canada for over 30 years and no one has dealt with the problem.
Someone said earlier that it was a bit late to deal with this problem. I also think that it is a little bit late to deal with it, because we cannot say that we will undo what we have done, retroactively. We have allowed the situation to develop. We took no action where we should have had, that is at the structural level.
In Quebec, for example, in the latest reports that have been proposed, some of the measures being suggested were sometimes worrisome, in my view, because they were suggesting measures at the level of content. We are now proposing measures at the level of content because we did not act at the level of structures and concentration.
I believe that we must look at the issue together, see what our needs are in terms of diversity, find out that there are some things that we will never get from concentrated media and find other ways to create the diversity that is a fundamental ingredient of democratic life. One of our problems is the lack of action on the part of governments.
I would like to add a few words on the war. I do not have any statistics to provide, but one of the hypothesis that we can make is that if francophones were not as favourable to the war, it is because their information is extremely diversified. During the war, I have seen two different wars on television: the war that was shown on American television and the war shown on the CBC, but also, thanks to the means of distribution, the war as shown by the French TV networks. Every evening, I saw on French TV the victims of the war that were not being shown in such a stark manner on American television. The victims of war were not being shown in the same light. There was a king of self-censorship. When you see the victims night after night, when you follow the war not from the point of view of the American troops, but rather with the victims on the field, you do not react in the same fashion to the reality of the war. That is an example of information diversity.
Senator Ringuette was saying earlier that we have many sources of information coming from everywhere. That is true and I believe that we have never been as well informed. In my area, in any case, because we have information both in English and in French.
At the level of international information, if I want to know what is going on in my hometown, if I happen to live in Rimouski, I may try to read Le Monde from Paris, the Washington Post or the New York Times on the Internet, but this will not be very useful to me. Local information is also a serious problem that we must think about. The concentration of weekly newspapers, for example in French, is a crucial problem that is never talked about.
[English]
Senator Ringuette: I am enjoying your comments. I certainly agree with your comment about Radio Canada-CBC setting the standards in reporting and the high quality of journalism that Canadian citizens get through that media.
It makes me realize that Radio Canada-CBC is a public cross-owner of radio, TV and Internet. The government truly supports that and the citizens of this country truly support that.
What is the difference between the cross-ownership of the public media and the cross-ownership of the private media?
Mr. Caplan: That is a heck of a question. I would like to invite my colleague to talk about a survey that his media institute did of journalists in the public and private sector. I think it speaks directly to that.
[Translation]
Mr. Sauvageau: In the middle of the 1990s, together with one of my colleagues, we did a survey of Canadian journalists in order to determine what were the values of Canadian journalists. That survey was the basis for a book entitled Les journalistes canadiens.
I believe that the very existence of the CBC within the system creates an enormous amount of diversity, for the following reason: clearly, there are two kinds of journalist in Canada. This is because the most important factor having an impact on journalistic practices is the type of news organization. We have tried to determine within that study whether the practice of journalism was defined along the lines of generations, genders or culture.
It is true that a young journalist does not necessarily think like an older journalist and that a francophone journalist from Quebec will not react in the same way as an anglophone from Alberta, but these are not the most significant criteria.
The criteria that defines the practice of journalism is the kind of organization you work for. After having done that survey, including long interviews of 550 journalists, we found out that there were two types of journalism.
The journalist working for the CBC, we called him the public service journalist. The journalistic tasks that they find important are investigation, enabling public discussion of public policies while they are being made, analysis, and so on.
At the other end of the spectrum, the other kind of journalists are those who work for private radio and television and who give much greater importance to more commercial functions, such as increasing the ratings — I have nothing against that and I am not saying that there is some sort of conspiracy — entertaining the reader, giving the reader what he expects.
I come back to what I was saying a moment ago, namely that there is some diversity in the system if we allow various modes of ownership to coexist. That is why I was talking about the public, private, community and alternative media that will give rise to different ways of practicing journalism, and hence different contents.
It is true that the mode of ownership is important with regard to the content, but there is not only ownership; the journalists themselves, as well as the structure of the organization, the ethical values of the organization also contribute to defining the content. That comes back to what you are saying; there is also synergy in the CBC, between radio, television and the Internet. That is why I am saying that we must have sophisticated policies. I do not believe that we must simply prohibit everything. We must establish thresholds beyond which concentration becomes dangerous. These thresholds can be established at the national level, but also at the local level.
For example, in Vancouver, 70 per cent of local news for the same network and 100 per cent of local news in the papers; 70 per cent of television audience for local news and 100 per cent of local newspapers for the same group, in my view, it is too much. The question is at what point it becomes too much. Mr. Kent once said that for the written press, a level of 10 per cent of the daily press circulation is the threshold. Mr. Claude Ryan talks about 30, 40 or 50 per cent. In France, it is around 30 per cent of the national circulation. What is the threshold that must not be exceeded? It must not be set in an arbitrary fashion. Most of all, we should not view the media as independent silos, we should consider the whole range of media in a given market.
[English]
Mr. Caplan: Let me add that there is an enormous body of literature on public and private broadcasting. The BBC promotes endless conferences on this. The Australians do. PBS gets into it.
One phrase that we like great deal is that ``public broadcasters make programs; private broadcasters make profits.'' It is not an insult. It seems an objectively real thing.
Patrick Watson raises the question of commercialism. Commercialism makes the CBC more interested in audiences, perhaps, than it should be. However, it still makes them interested in programs for audiences, rather than the profits they will attract. It seems a significant difference.
One of the new elements, that the war taught us, is that private broadcasters also make propaganda for the state in an unexpected way. However, for those reasons, I think a comparison — to say that since the public broadcaster is converged within itself, why should not the private broadcaster be? — That is one of the reasons why not.
Senator Eyton: These are early days and we are looking for advice. It was lovely to hear comments from Dr. Caplan — now that I know he has a Ph.D. or two. The advice is clear: We should treasure, encourage and provide resources for the CBC, particularly in its programming in the news and public service area. I am sympathetic to that view.
I am less certain, Mr. Sauvageau, as to your advice to us on how we should go. As I understand it, you are inclined not to try to undo the present concentration. The message I got from you was that you would try to discourage more concentration and, in fact, you would look for diversity.
I would be interested in your comments on how you can achieve that diversity and put it in the context that the market forces force diversity. In other words, if one organization owns all the outlets in a particular city, there is a disincentive for me as a resident of that city to hear the same thing in three different ways. In Vancouver, for example, I would be discouraged from buying two newspapers, if, in fact, they were identical. It seems to me the market must be a strong encourager for diversity, if you are trying to sell more products.
I am trying to get advice from you as to what this committee should consider.
Mr. Sauvageau: I do not think that, at least in the newspaper business, that market forces necessarily push for diversity. I read many newspapers every day. I feel that the information is more of the same, specifically — in terms of information, not in terms of opinion. The National Post is a case in Canada — even in North America — of such an ideological newspaper. That is something new in Canada.
[Translation]
In Canada, just as in the United States, we have always followed the philosophy of information journalism, as opposed to opinion journalism that comes from Europe.
[English]
In fact, the National Post is a European newspaper in North America. This is complex because I said this is a question of ownership.
[Translation]
It is also a matter of journalistic practices. Why are all daily newspapers similar? Because in the schools of journalism, students are being taught the same journalistic techniques. In the United States, there was a crisis at the Columbia University school of journalism. I have read comments about that crisis, about this sort of journalistic homogenization that is being created by the teaching of journalism. The news are all similar because all journalists have learned their trade in the same fashion.
I do not believe that, in the area of journalism, the market is giving rise to differing realities, even between the tabloids in Quebec and La Presse. Of course, the format is different, but the news are more often than not written in the same way. So there is a problem at the level of diversity of information. I have often thought that the issue of media concentration in Canada is being considered in a European perspective. Diversity of opinions is important here, but diversity of information is even more important. The fact of the matter is that all media are seeking to retain as many readers as possible, and that brings about a certain level of homogenization in journalistic practices.
[English]
My understanding is that you had the feeling I was not so negative about concentration or cross-ownership. I do think there are things that are unacceptable. The Vancouver situation for me is unacceptable. It does not make sense at all to give to one group such an influence and such a possibility to influence public debate in a city, or even in a province.
[Translation]
Certainly, some action must be taken in order to avoid exceeding a certain level of concentration.
[English]
On the CBC, we almost always agree on everything. I almost agree with Mr. Caplan on the CBC, except that I think that the network has not succeeded in defining a new role for a public broadcaster in the new television environment.
[Translation]
In my view, the CBC still has not found its right place in the multiple channels universe, in our new television universe.
[English]
The CBC of the 21st century cannot be the CBC of the 1970s. It is impossible.
[Translation]
The CBC should make an effort to redefine its role in order to better delimit its role. The CBC cannot do everything any longer as it was doing when there was two non-specialized channels. Nowadays, the private specialized channels are doing many things that the CBC was doing previously. I believe that there is a reflection gap in the CBC about the mission of public service in the 21st Century.
[English]
Mr. Caplan: You will find this true even of the BBC. Mark Starowicz told you how much more powerful and how much more expensive per capita the BBC is compared with the CBC. You will find that even the BBC — which is the world's most famous and, arguably, the best public broadcaster — is in convulsions trying to determine its role in this extraordinarily new world that no one quite yet understands or can predict. You will enjoy that. It is a fascinating conversation.
The Chairman: Thank you both so much.
[Translation]
That was stimulating and quite interesting and we really appreciate your testimony.
[English]
The committee adjourned.