Saving the CBC by Wade Rowland

Author:Wade Rowland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Linda Leith Publishing
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

If it does these jobs well, the role of ratings in judging the success of the news operation fades in importance. The public broadcaster’s responsibility is to the citizenry at large, and not to sponsors or corporate shareholders: audience numbers need to be considered in the broader context of the news available from all competing outlets within the system. If CTV, the current market leader in nighttime national newscasts, is providing excellent coverage of national and world news, then it deserves high ratings, and the nation is better off for their success. Presumably, Global will push hard to gain market share at CTV’s expense, reaping increased ad revenue in the process. However, if CTV achieves its ratings lead by resorting to the kinds of counter-journalistic methods employed on Fox News, then the role of the public broadcaster becomes even more important in providing an industry benchmark for quality.

It is not difficult to imagine a first-class news operation whose programming does not do well in the comparative ratings game – the US market provides an obvious example with excellent but obscure NPR and PBS news services up against Fox News, until the debacle of its 2013 presidential election night coverage the cable news ratings leader. By the same token, the BBC provides ample evidence that excellence need not be equated with invisibility; in fact the BBC’s leading position in its market and around the world indicates that genuine quality may well be rewarded with ratings success. The benchmark provided by such a market leader forces all of its competitors to strive for the same quality. Thus, ITN, which served Britain’s commercial networks, initially provided comparable quality to the BBC, though in recent years it has fallen victim to ill-conceived attempts to inject more competition onto the business of providing news for the nation’s commercial broadcasters.

WHAT IS NEWS?

Finally, it’s worth looking briefly into the most basic question of all, because attempting to answer it sheds light on the fundamental differences between commercial and public service news services. What is news? Events themselves are not news: events are what they are – a train crash, the passage of a bill, a war declared. “News” is the concise, reliable report that tells people about an event. In other words, news is a report of an event, and a report is quite different from an event. It is an artifact, a construct, a symbolic representation. And in the world of commercial media, news becomes something more than that, as well: as a report, it becomes a product available to be bought and sold.

But clearly not everything that happens merits the preparation of such a report; not everything that happens is considered worthy of being packaged as news. A process of selection is involved. And following that, a process of production. Each of these processes introduces a great many variables and contingencies into the making of the final product as it is seen by audiences.

Selection is guided, first of all, by two interlocking variables: first, the

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