One of our favourite movies from the 1930s was the British-made H.G. Wells Things to come. The movie starring Canadian Raymond Massey was considered dystopian at the time as it was the opposite of utopian in a pre-War II world. And yet it was the immediacy of the televised images in the advanced world shown that helped create the chaos at the film’s end. The body that seems to be encouraging that chaotic immediacy of television in Canada today is the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
And it is in the interest of furthering changes in how Canadians view their television. What today’s CRTC recognizes is that how people use television has changed dramatically and the industry has kept falling further behind its audiences. The most important long-term change has been the weakening of the family unit that used to watch television together. Despite the larger and higher definition screens in the home theatre, television viewing is now becoming more individual or closely shared with just one other person.
Regulation cannot buck such trends and the CRTC recognizes that it has to go with the flow. The most serious concern of the industry and the regulator is where is the cash flow to pay for the changes? There is no question but that previous CRTC rulings have put a stranglehold on program producers by the cable and satellite suppliers. And the CRTC has to figure out how to get a reasonable share of the money down to the production houses.
One area of serious concern is news collection and distribution. The biases of the distributors, the starvation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio Canada by the government and the seeming lack of interest among youth have pushed hard at real news and what passes for news today. The networks have no excuse for the five and six-day old video clips they run behind spoken updates. There is too much going on in the world of importance to Canadians.
Everyone seems to want others to pay for their weaknesses. Free money is the cry heard up and down the television food chain. Distributors are too fat, video companies live off the past and Netflix is a leech, we are told. And to make matters worse, the Directors Guild of Canada and other worthies tell the CRTC that the public should be barred from commenting at hearings because they do not know what they are talking about.
Nobody was thinking of the movie Things to Come when we argued for the creation of the CRTC back in 1966. What we were doing was stopping the former Board of Broadcast Governors from hamstringing the industry in Canada because it thought it had to protect the CBC from all comers. Maybe we were a bit precipitous.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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