The BBC's future: Don't look to Canada?

As Doctor Media noted in her post the other day ("Murdoch in context") about Robert McChesney's talks on the need to save PBS and public broadcasting in the U.S., she's not optimistic about whether the system can actually be saved in any meaningful way. Neither am I, though I agree we need to make an effort. This leads her to raise the alternative psb approach that has begun to be outlined on this blog: based on "the BBC and the potential of a global public sphere or at least some sort of transnational Anglo public service sphere." The BBC clearly is making a valiant effort to retain its broad-based relevance in a changing media world, but if we look elsewhere in transnational Anglo PSB sphere, we might be less happy with what we see.

This brings me to Canada's CBC, or Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Staff at Canada's 70-year-old public broadcaster, supposedly "the voice of the nation," have been on strike for some three weeks now, services have been severely disrupted, and audiences are down 25 percent. But, according to Peter Preston of the Observer, "the damnable thing, the awful lesson from all this, is that nobody much seems to care. Only 10 per cent of Joe Public, once polled, thinks the strike a major inconvenience; only 27 per cent would even describe it as a minor inconvenience. The rest of Canada just walks on by, untroubled, uninvolved."

Preston, making a partial comparison between the public service broadcasters in Britain and Canada, notes the BBC's much stronger position in its home country -- though that should be no reason for complacency.

Of course the BBC doesn't wallow in quite the same unpopularity hole as its Canadian cousin, at least for the moment. CBC prime time TV audiences have dropped to 5 per cent in the past six years (since the last strike). The usual American marauders and digital destroyers have done it terrible damage. But don't pretend that the same forces of future gloom pass Wood Lane by. BBC audience share in August - 21.5 per cent - was its worst monthly figure ever, and the last Sunday of the month - 16.8 per cent - the worst day since records began. Shrinking, shrinking ...

What happens - the Canadian question, already put - when Joe Taxpayer declines to stand up and be counted again? There are differences, to be sure. We have the licence fee, Ottawa has direct government subsidy (nearing a billion dollars a year) to go with CBC's revenue from advertising, a mix-and-match that might come to Britain if fee-payers got too restive. The BBC tries to chase big numbers for its biggest shows; CBC has largely given up the ghost. Yet still, it's the similarities that bring a chill.

Yes, there are similarities, just as there are significant differences. The CBC has also attempted to get on the new media bandwagon, with an extensive CBC.ca web site, RSS feeds, podcasting, a free archives service, and so on (see wikipedia's "Internet" section); still it doesn't appear to be as innovative as the BBC's efforts (see, e.g., "MyBBC" on this blog). But this apparently hasn't stopped CBC's slide. For whatever historical, cultural or economic reasons, there is no doubt that the CBC is now in a much weaker position than the BBC. Yet both corporations were and are supposed to be "voices of the nation." It's one thing to ask whether the BBC can avoid the marginalization that bedevils U.S. public broadcasting, which after all was never really part of the national mainstream. The CBC example raises the question of how the BBC can avoid being relegated from national dominance to marginalization.

Yet the threat of national marginalization might (I stress might, as I'm still thinking this through) be a force driving these old-school public servive broadcasters away from a national psb orientation toward a transnational psb role. Of course, psbs would have to tread a fine line between maintaining public (taxpayer) support at home and spreading out to new audiences abroad. Obviously it makes sense for psbs--especially English-speaking psbs--to work together, although there is nothing wrong with working with for-profit entities, as long as the collaboration produces psb-friendly results. The BBC has clearly grasped this new reality. The CBC, I fear, hasn't.