The future of the CBC has been talked about regularly and Open Media has said that Creative Commons licensing for the broadcaster should be in its future.
One of the off again on again debates revolves around what to do with the future of the CBC. Indeed, there is a wide ranging different opinions on what the future of the Canadian broadcaster should look like. This, of course, also ranges from the completely boneheaded to the very forward and excellent.
An example of the many ideas floating around is something that is actually being floated by the Liberal party. That is to greatly increase the public funding of the CBC and, in turn, get the CBC out of the advertising business and make the broadcaster and news organization advertisement free just like the UK’s BBC. As far as I can tell, that’s really not that bad of an idea.
One of the long running complaints for the CBC is that they eat into advertising revenues. This is because they not only receive subsidies from the federal government, but also pull in billions from advertising. The problem, for many, is that this basically takes away money from private sector news organizations. Why advertise for a small newspaper of 8,000 people when you can advertise on the CBC and reach a much wider audience? This especially if the services you offer is offered across the country. It does technically distort the market because everyone else is competing against a heavily subsidized public broadcaster for ad dollars.
On the flipside, there is the Conservative party (famous for their bumper sticker policies and slogan based policy making) that is pushing the “defund the CBC” slogan. More broadly (and less talked about) is that the Conservative party views organizations like the CBC as a political threat. They’re constantly angry that the broadcaster is not always reporting on stories in ways that benefit the Conservative party. So, for them, the idea is to take away all the money for the CBC entirely because the are proving to be too politically inconvenient.
This was recently expanded upon by one right wing commentator who argued that the CBC should also be completely paywalled off and away from the public. This, of course, comes from someone who thinks all news organizations should be paywalled so that only the wealthy can be informed as opposed to anyone who wants to be informed and is putting in some effort to do so. As I pointed out in my article, it’s a really bad idea that makes society worse off.
Well, recently, I took a look at Open Media and found something rather interesting. One of their letter writing campaigns is pushing to fix the media ecosystem. On the surface, this sounds like a campaign that is targeting bias in journalism (which is a complex problem to be fair). After all, the paragraphs describing the campaign says this:
Do you ever feel like the news is just exhausting—endless shouting matches or, worse, something you can’t trust at all?1 That’s a sign that Canada’s news landscape is broken—and it’s time we fix it!
We need news that informs, not divides. But local news outlets are vanishing,2 while algorithm-driven platforms control the narratives we see to maximize their profits and clicks.3,4
Our media system is failing the people it’s meant to serve. It’s time to rebuild a diverse, strong, and local media ecosystem—one that delivers independent and trustworthy reporting from a range of perspectives.5,6 Tell Canada’s leaders to take action and fix Canadian media NOW!
So, news is divisive, this needs to be fixed. Local news is being increasingly scarce, this needs to be fixed. Yet, when you scroll through the actual letter, you might notice something that is far more interesting buried in the text. That is this:
We also need a strong public broadcaster that puts journalism first and helps the private sector to fill in the gaps. CBC journalism should stop competing with private media for ad dollars, and instead be funded at the same per capita level as our Commonwealth peers. All CBC news content should be Creative Commons licensed, free for Canadians to access, share, and rebroadcast. And the CBC should commit to filling every major news desert, ensuring no Canadian town is left without coverage.
I don’t know about you, but I find it rather unusual that Open Media is burying the lead like this. Putting content from the CBC in a Creative Commons open license is a fantastic idea. I mean, the calls to increase subsidies is certainly there, but putting the CBC content under a Creative Commons license would be an excellent idea.
I think if you combine the idea of making the CBC a fully public broadcaster and the idea of granting open licenses for the CBC content would ultimately prove to be the complete package for fixing a lot of problems with the CBC. If taxpayers are paying for the production of content produced by the CBC, then they should have full access to that material. It’s a fantastic idea all around that I think works for a lot of people in the news sector. What’s more, it means that the CBC isn’t beholden to so many financial interests that advertise with them in the first place.
All in all, it’s an excellent idea and I’m surprised that this wasn’t really mentioned in the text above. I don’t know if it was because they thought it was too complicated for the broad public to understand or what, but it’s an excellent idea that might get glossed over by many people signing these open letter campaigns.
One thing is for sure, it’s not every day that you see great news buried in fine print like this, but there it is.
