Canblog

Piece from today's Globe and Mail says that a new Senate report encourages more scrutiny of future mergers in Canada's media industry.  Canada's media titans like Leonard Asper have already made their desire for the government to get the hell out of the way fairly plain.  I'm pretty ambivalent about media regulation, though I'm no fan of Lenny being such a suck about it. 

The report also has some tough words for the CBC television arm (ummm... stop being so... ummm... shitty?) and looks at CBC radio's model of offering alternative, non-commercial content which is just unavailable elsewhere as something for the television arm to emulate.

More bullshit from CBC in a separate piece in the Globe though, summed up by Andrew Potter:

First, From a speech given in April by Robert Rabinovitch, President and Chief Executive Officer, CBC/Radio-Canada:

If we want Canadian drama to succeed, we need to build a critical mass of homegrown programs. It is not enough to make just one or two good shows; we need to rehabilitate the entire genre. If we want to attract larger audiences, we need to make Canadian drama more accessible by providing it in sufficient quantity; it must be of high enough quality, and we must show it in prime time when people are actually watching television.

And only the public broadcaster has space in its schedule to do that. The economics of Canadian television virtually guarantee that private broadcasters will - and must - continue to simulcast those American programs that attract large audiences.

While we are mandated to provide Canadian programming that informs, enlightens and entertains, we are not precluded from doing it in a way that large numbers of Canadians want to watch or listen to it.

Then, from today’s Globe and Mail:

Veteran news anchor Peter Mansbridge and The National will be bumped from their 10 p.m. time slot this summer to make way for an American Idol knockoff reality series, The One: Making a Music Star

....

In October, 2005, CBC president Robert Rabinovitch told the House of Commons Heritage Committee that "there are certain types of programming that we don't have to do or should do. For example, we don't do reality television.

"We think we're enough of a reality on our own, in terms of surviving. But we do not do reality programming. If we only were chasing rating points, we could do reality programming," he said, in response to a question from Bev Oda, then Conservative Party heritage critic. "Quite frankly, some public broadcasters in the world do reality programming. But we don't do that."

Apparently, Mr. Rabinovitch is unaware of recording devices invented in the past several hundred years, such as cameras, audio tapes and even something known as "pen and paper", which are quite adept at catching people spouting double talk and bullshit.