The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente stands up for the public broadcaster she loves to complain about.
An excerpt:
... Life without the CBC is a big wasteland. At the very least, it is a sharp reminder of the wall-to-wall banality that is commercial radio. Not that I have anything against inane phone-in shows, jock talk, terrible pop music or irritating commercials that are often dressed up as editorial content. Some commercial phone-in hosts are very good. But the people who phone them are even more alarming than the ones who phone the CBC. On top of that, there is an ad for a certain old-age home that, if I hear it one more time, may cause me to euthanize myself.
CBC-bashers argue that its ratings are so low it doesn't deserve all that taxpayer support. CBC Radio gets only about 10 per cent or 12 per cent of the English-language radio audience. On TV, Canadian Idol is way more popular than Peter Mansbridge. But so what? Mass always outdraws class.
The CBC is pitched to people with a flicker of interest in the world and an IQ above room temperature, which automatically excludes a good half the population. It's supposed to be specialty programming. It specializes in Canada. No private broadcaster will ever do that. As for ratings -- well, if you want to find out where the hustle for ratings leads, just check out CNN. In between natural disasters, CNN is runaway brides from end to end.
One other interesting thing in the column was where Wente described The Voice (who introduces The Current) as a "smug, superior jerk."
Who would have thought that in Wente's world, smug and superior were words that could be used as perjoratives? :)
She claims this dispute is about people "fighting over crumbs of resources at the margins."
But part of the problem seems to be no political will to boost the Corporation's budget.
The Liberals balk at doing so, the Tories would like to privatize it, the Greens and NDP aren't likely to form a government in the next 20 years and the BQ wants out of the country.
I would suspect no one makes the CBC an issue because despite some of the excellent work the CBC does, it doesn't have a widespread enough fan base to pressure a government to boost its budget.
Ultimately, that's a bigger problem for the CBC than the contracting out issue.