from the frontiers of broadcasting policy...

Warning -- long post about something a little old ahead.

Is there something in the air or has there just been a bizarre flurry (no pun intended) of weird stuff emerging from the frontiers of broadcasting regulation? What a country!

So fasten your seat belt -- it's going to be a bumpy ride.

A couple of weeks ago there was a wee controversy around Canada's annual award show for the music industry, known as the Junos (named after the bureaucrat that brought Canadian content regulations to Canada's airwaves, Pierre Juneau). It was slated to air on CTV. It had Nelly Furtado as the host. But then there was this little problem with "The Amazing Race". It airs on CBS, but in Canada it is simulcast on CTV to allow the network to sell Canadian ads. The Amazing Race was planning a 2-hour edition of the show. That would interfere with the airing of the Junos in Ontario and Quebec. CTV originally decided that it tape delay the Junos in the east, air the Amazing Race and give viewers the chance to watch the awards show at the convenient Sunday night hour of 10:00. That decision appeared in the paper, with CTV offering the opinion that "weighed against the risk of losing two million viewers to CBS for a show those viewers are already engaged in, this was the best solution." Well, that didn't go over too well, and by the middle of the day, CTV had reversed that decision and air the Junos in the east, as originally planned.

Now Dead Things on Sticks, one of the finer blogs on Canadian television culture, does a nice job of explaining that this situation was more complex that it may appear, so I won't repeat that here. So what does this situation show?

1. It shows us that one of the key levers in the country's regulatory apparatus -- simultaneous substitution -- is intended to allow broadcasters to sell Canadian advertising. One might also say that this rule is, in effect, a kind of "Canadian content" system for Canada's advertising industry, including production houses, technical staff, writers, and agencies.

2. It shows us that under the "Canadian content" scheme, Canadian programming is almost always the compensatory choice for conventional broadcasters. In other words, broadcasters lack the motivation to support Canadian programming unless it is in return for something, either the continued right to rebroadcast programming readily available to most Canadians on other channels, or to have ownership regulations that shut out foreign ownership of broadcasting undertakings. What happened with the Junos is representative of a longstanding practice whereby broadcasters find ways to do as little as possible to support such programs, either by messing around with schedules so that audiences can't find the programming (this is not exclusively a Canadian phenomenon, by the way); or by slotting programming in times where either a) a popular program is being run on another network b) on Saturday nights. To a degree, this is understandable, because Canadian content regulations ask broadcasters to subscribe to rules which are counter to those which exist among private broadcasters in (some) other countries. For them, audience numbers are obviously very important factors; in Canada, audiences are an important factor, but fulfilling a broadcaster's quota of Canadian programming is another.

3. It also shows us that sometimes people do really dumb things. Remember: CTV is going before the CRTC to approve its merger with CHUM soon. It doesn't want to ruffle any feathers in advance of that happening. I think someone realized this very quickly and sought to rectify the situation, even if it came at the expense of "The Amazing Race." To make it worse: the Junos is actually a successful show, attracting a decent sized audience, and is watched by prized youth demographics. For CTV to even open this can of worms (especially for a show that is successful) was a really dumb call.

4. Finally, it shows us that a major tension in Canadian cultural life is not that between "culture" and "commerce" but that between economic nationalism and cultural nationalism.

Well, that will do for that one. What's next? Oh yes, the case of a history network, a writer's union, and one of the CSI shows. It seems that someone at the Writer's Union of Canada began to notice that History Television was showing an awful lot of episodes of "CSI: NY." They didn't like this. They complained to the CRTC saying this didn't qualify as "history". The network, owned by Alliance Atlantis (who co-produces CSI) offered the justification that it was airing the show because, um, the show is “set in a city that became synonymous with one of history’s most significant and notorious events, 9/11.” The CRTC said it didn't think so, and it looks like the two sides are now embroiled in working out some kind of solution but that the CRTC has asked them to stop airing the show so often. Since it's about New York -- the city where 9/11 took place -- the story attracted attention (and maybe a few laughs) in the New York Times.

What's our take-away here?

1. It dispels the myth that the CRTC only regulates the broadcasting system and not the content itself. As in the case of history television shows, it does. You can see this by following this link to the CRTC's site and checking out the "Conditions of license." It tells you exactly what kind of programming will be aired on this station. This kind of situation came up a while ago with two news services, CBC Newsworld and CTV Newsnet. The conditions of Newsnet's license was that it was a "headline" news broadcaster only. This meant that its programming had to operate on a 15-minute "wheel" and that Newsnet always had to return to headlines, even if they were covering breaking news, press conferences, and so on. This went on for years, until they finally relaxed the rules and Newsnet now runs a regular all- news station. Similar fights over formats took place between MuchMusic and MTV Canada a while back too, because I believe MTV wasn't allowed to show music videos. So in Canada audiences endure programming quotas imposed on broadcasters and rigid rules on actual program content.

2. These rules are meant to encourage diversity, but do they? I don't think so. They do allow for networks to have control over certain formats (Newsnet's complaint was always that the rules were in place to shield CBC Newsworld from competition, ditto for Much and MTV) and have little to do with audiences.

3. These rules also show that the CRTC's decisions on which television services to air (and how to define genres) is tied to broader political objectives about how Canadians should watch television. As one of my colleagues suggested, the fact that it is in the business of deciding the Canadians need a history channel -- over a channel devoted to bossa nova -- is something else. This system actually encourages the kind of behaviour on display in this case -- namely the politicization of genres. Look at the all of the hand-wringing linking the state of the "Canadian drama" to Canadian national identity and you can see what I mean.

4 Of all people, the writers' union should realize the serious ethical consequences of getting into the business of effectively regulating the works of others.

Last for today -- did anyone else catch Michael Geist's column about the pressures being placed on the CRTC to get in the business of regulating the Internet? Geist talks about the fact that this is a push by industry for the regulator to find ways to reproduce the current industrial arrangements for broadcasters onto new media systems because of copyright pressures and concerns that the prospects for Canadians to get American programs direct would actually force them to have to change their practices and give Canadians something different in addition to what we can get from American stations.

What can we take away from this?

1. We must always read the fine print: The CRTC always maintained it had the right to reopen the issue of regulating the Internet at a later date.

2. This may be a bit of a stretch (and it's not as conspiratorial as it sounds) but it may also be the case that since places like China or Thailand have put pressures on search engines or web sites to block access to certain sites from their citizens, and since those pressures haven't resulted in full-scale revolution, that the CRTC (and others) are just waiting for the right time to get in the game. In other words, its interesting to see the ways in which democratic countries borrow techniques used in the undemocratic ones.

3. There was a scholar -- whose name absolutely escapes me at the moment --who once said that relations between regulators and those that they regulate are such that the regulator actually benefits the regulated because the two effectively need each other for their own survival. Did you notice the way the CRTC took the issue about media ownership off the table until after it makes its decisions on the big media mergers coming down the 'pike? Case in point. Can you see how more regulation of the Internet might serve mutual interests?

My brain is slowly breaking, so I'll stop there. Maybe the old line that the most interesting things about Canadian broadcasting take place not on television, but in policy documents has some sad truth to it after all.