Canadian public service broadcasting in the information age
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Date
2013
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Publisher
University of New Brunswick
Abstract
As governments have adopted an activist role to encourage the growth of the
information society based on a technologically progressive agenda framed within a
larger neoliberal political and economic discourse, the scope and influence of public
service broadcasters like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) have
diminished internationally and nationally. This research study uses the CBC as a single
case study to identify, explain and critique changes to the intrinsic meaning of public
service broadcasting in the Canadian information society, and whether or not those
changes have benefited the public.
This research uses a critical neopluralist analysis to improve understanding of
the processes and relationships that have an impact on the social, cultural, economic and
political role of their public service broadcaster. It addresses a gap in the scholarship
through the analysis of the form, function, processes and directions of influence in late
capitalism (Macpherson, 1977) on the Canadian public service broadcasting ethos.
The concept of public service broadcasting in Canada has traditionally been
simultaneously nationalistic and divisive, as a managerial approach by the federal
government excluded provincial, regional and local influence over both the broadcasting
system as a whole, and the CBC in particular. Original research provides evidence that
over the last forty years, Canadian communications policy has increasingly favoured economic objectives over social and cultural goals, and that the CBC has reinvented
itself as a cross-platform 'content company.'
The CBC, as a national institution in the hybrid Canadian public service
broadcasting system, has faced numerous challenges in its attempts to be universal,
independent, diverse and distinctive. Some long-standing issues are the challenges of
covering a large land mass, reconciling conflicting expectations for local, regional and
national levels of service, as well as serving the needs of a neopluralist population with
diverse cultural and linguistic requirements. The political climate and societal changes
associated with the expansion of the information society have both exacerbated old
challenges and presented new ones. The process has undermined not only the ethos of
public service in media, but also the credibility and the integrity of the CBC. However,
these changes have also presented opportunities to re-think technologically-constrained
expectations of the media, and to reconfigure the traditionally limited perception of the
very "public" that the CBC is mandated to serve.