PING!
Posted on 07/24/2006 10:27:39 AM PDT by GMMAC
The One that wasn't for Mother Corp
The Edmonton Journal
Sun 23 Jul 2006
Page: A14
Section: Opinion
Byline: Lorne Gunter
It was a bad week for numbers over at the CBC.
First there was the public broadcaster's experiment with hipness.
In an attempt to capture a younger viewership, Mother Corp decided, quite bizarrely, to bump The National newscast Tuesday nights throughout the summer in favour of an American Idol knockoff known as The One. The alleged "reality" talent show would appear in The National's 10 p.m. slot, while Peter Mansbridge et al. would be forced to slink over to 11 p.m.
Well, The One aired for the first time this week, and it would be fair to say it met with as much enthusiasm as an electric blanket on a sweltering summer night.
Just 236,000 viewers from coast-to-coast tuned in. A good local newscast in any of Canada's six or eight cities will attract that kind of audience -- in a single market.
In January, when rival CTV aired the premier of Season 5 of American Idol, more than three million Canadians tuned in -- nearly 14 times the audience for the first episode of The One.
Perhaps subsequent weeks will be better watched, otherwise The One has to be counted as a colossal flop. The National, despite flagging ratings in recent years, still manages to pull in 585,000 Canadians at 10 p.m. The One received just 40 per cent of that number.
Rebroadcasts of question period attract larger audiences.
Far from gathering the public network a whole new young, fashionable demographic, the vocal popularity contest seems to have lost the CBC nearly two-thirds of its audience in that time slot (as nearly every commentator and media expert outside the CBC's executive offices predicted it would).
At a private network, such a boneheaded gamble would lead the executive who made it into a new career -- one that involved frequent repetition of the phrase "Would you like fries with that?" -- almost overnight. But don't expect the CBC even to admit who specifically made the head-shaking programming choice to move the network's signature show in favour of the kind of mindless commercial prattle so many loyal CBC viewers detest.
When you are spending other people's money and making decisions by committee, you never have to own up to your mistakes, no matter how disastrous.
But as bad as the flirtation with The One is, in a way, numbers on radio listenership produced by Statistics Canada were even worse for CBC.
For a number of years, even many fanatic CBC loyalists have been forced to admit that public television may be going the way of the dodo.
Ratings have been in a constant nosedive. What is known as "cable fragmentation" -- the dispersal of network television viewers to cable channels -- has hit public broadcasters particularly hard. Speciality channels for things such as independent films, fine arts performances and public affairs simply do more of what public televisions used to offer exclusively. And they often do it better.
There are still those who insist public broadcasters serve all tastes better than speciality cable services, but what they typically mean is that the CBC and its counterparts in other countries serve their viewing tastes better because otherwise they have to pay for cable. With public broadcasters they can make someone else -- taxpayers -- pay for the shows they like to watch.
Still, CBC Radio has been considered sacrosanct.
Perhaps, CBC devotees would concede, perhaps the television service could be done away with. But not radio. Radio still has a strong, cross-cultural following. CBC Radio still fulfils Mother Corp's mandate to be the medium through which Canadians tell their stories to one another.
Well, it turns out that's not true, either.
According to a Statistics Canada study of 90,000 radio listeners released Thursday, the CBC has gone from a total audience of 11 per cent of Canadian listeners in early 2005 to just 8.8 per cent now.
The precipitous fall is due mostly to the 2004 labour dispute. During the lockout of on-air talent and others, tens of thousands of CBC listeners tuned to other stations and never tuned back. They found they didn't need a public broadcaster after all.
Where a year ago CBC was third nationally among formats on radio, today it is sixth, ranking behind adult contemporary, oldies/rock, talk, country and Top 40, and just ahead of "other."
In Alberta the numbers are even more disheartening for lovers of CBC. Here it is eighth, with just 6.5 per cent of listeners. Country is king (25.4 per cent), followed by oldies (20.5), adult contemporary (10.0), talk (9.4), album-oriented rock (8.7), other (7.4) and Top 40 (7.2).
And as Statistics Canada points out, the CBC's audience is typically middle-aged or older, well-educated and well-heeled. And as we know from other sources, it is also disproportionately non-immigrant.
In other words, CBC listeners tend to be well-off, university-educated, white people.
There is no reason not to have a radio service for that market.
It is just that the rest of us shouldn't have to subsidize it.
There are no government subsidies for the radio formats most Canadians are listening to, so why should the listeners best able to afford them expect their radio choices to be paid for by the rest of us?
C B C = Constant Bolshvik Crap !!!
PING!
In other words, CBC listeners tend to be well-off, university-educated, white people.
AKA
Socialist Fools
Witness the knucklehead at Maryland Public Broadcasting who made the decision to remove Louis Rukeyser from Wall Street Week. The new show tanked, Rukeyser moved to CNBC and promptly started a new show that ran in the same time slot, contributions to MPT plummeted and a third of the staff was laid-off. That same bone-head remains today at MPT; simply unbelievable.
"MPT plummeted and a third of the staff was laid-off. That same bone-head remains today at MPT"
Bone-head, hell. Put him in charge of PBS. Maybe he could work the same magic there.
"EXHIBIT: A"
Long-time prominent CBC Radio broadcaster
the ever-vile Andy Barrie:
self-important, crypto-Marxist,
Carter-pardoned US Army deserter
& all round American traitor!
No need to hold back...tell us how you TRULY feel! ;o)
Looks to me like America ran him out on a rail...that about it?
LOL! Just for fun, I had to dive around the Moap & Wail. Been a long time since I've gotten any news straight from the tap, pretty fun stuff. I'll ping what I posted.
I think the days of the need for CBC television are largely passed. It had a mandate to make TV available to (almost) all Canadians, and was sometimes the only channel available. These days every place has access to cable and/or digital sattelite. And because of the budget cuts, among other things, CBC doesn't even produce as many of the good programs that it did do. For example, a good CBC shows focussing on the farming, fishing and forestry industries, "Land and Sea" had disappeared for a number of years. A bunch of local news programs also disappeared. Anyway, I can't remember I watched anything on CBC TV, and hardly ever anything on network TV at all - most of what I watch is on cable channels.
CBC radio, OTOH, is a different story. It provides unique and distinctive programming not reproduced in the private sector. It's about the only source of intelligent news and commentary on the radio. Yes, they tend towards the left, but I generally find their reporters and interviewers to be unbiased. Last Friday I listened as they played a number of recorded comments from listeners on the gov'ts handling of the current troubles in the middle east. To my surprise every one of them was supportive of PM Harper's position (supporting Israel's right to defend itself) and handling of the "refugee" problem. CBC radio is a good alternative to inane DJs, drive-home guys, morning guys (they're the worst), overly brief news reports, lously AM sound on news stations, repetitive play lists, and so on. Of course, I also fit the demographic mentioned in the article, to a T.
Honestly, CBC radio leans leftward little if any more than your average MSM outlet, and is considerably more intelligent and honest. Another example - I remember hearing a CBC radio interviewer talking with a supporter of Canada's gun registry, and asking very pointed questions about how it was supposed achieve any reductino in gun violence. The registry supported had no good answers, other than that it was a feel-good thing.
When I lived in eastern Michigan I used to tune in the Windson, Ontario channel to watch Canadian news just for laughs.
What is there about CBC, BBC, PBS, and NPR that make them so anti-capitalist? Is it because these folks can't get jobs in real tv and radio markets?
The only thing I missed was the Royal Canadian Air Farce.
> Carter-pardoned US Army deserter
My God, they even put that on his Bio, like a badge of honor.
Amen! The only show worth watching is Antiques Roadshow (purchased from the BBC - their only good show), but then you have to ingore the smarmy crawler with all the anti-US/anti-Israel propaganda. And somebody has to give Comrade Mansbridge the heave-ho.
I just had a vision - CBC in an effort to be hip with collaborate with Al Franken to bring Air American to CBC-One...
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