No News is Just No News

WE LIVE IN a bit of a fraught media moment.   There are new rules on copyright coming -- rules that might unnecessarily shackle consumers and content creators at the behest of large corporate conglomerates.  After crying poor because of the recession & stating that there wouldn't be a huge spending spree for U.S. shows this year, it looks like the Canadian nets went down and did exactly that.  Meanwhile, the pushoff of license renewals means that Canadian creatives won't have any sense of what we're making for about another year, as lawyers everywhere tread water and try to find loopholes in the new Canadian television policy.

In the meantime, homegrown gossip mavens send out breathless press releases about dubious scoops.  The number two private network in the country has just been taken over by a large cabler. The same large cabler has successfully reconfigured the CMF so that the board members are all cable cronies.  Creatives need not worry, they say, you will be heard -- in the same fabulous, paternalistic way as always, I suppose.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives are on the warpath about...everything, really, but let's just call it the CBC for now.

There are questions, and lots of them, about media concentration, the future of homegrown broadcasting, how consumer choice should shape the industry going forward ...

... not to mention things like, well, the fact that they're talking about a National Digital Strategy five years too late; the people who seem to have the ear on the government on that file are the same snake oil salesmen I've been hearing bleat since my days pre-dot.com crash covering the street for Media Television... oh, and nobody but my friend Howard Bernstein seems to be able to lay out a cogent explanation of the ongoing troubles with Canadian Local TV.

And nobody knows who, or how, Canadian networks are going to make the transition to full digital broadcasting.  (The U.S. stations by the way, are mostly done.)

Canada is the second largest country in the world by land mass, yet it's small in population. Spread out. We are wracked by regionalism, resentments rooted in geography that go back to our founding as a nation.  Not fighting at your birth means, maybe, that you push the big fights further down the road. But at a time when we need local voices & local coverage, we have less than ever. We have some of the most concentrated media in the world.

One story can show you what happens when you have a concentrated media and no valve.  Jim Henshaw wrote about this the other day, but if you'll indulge me a moment, I will recap it in short for those who may not be from my corner of the country.  The Province of Ontario's Attorney General was involved in a vehicular accident a year ago in which a bicycle courier was killed. There is surveillance footage showing the car speeding away.  There were also unsavory details that came out about the courier -- his alcohol level, previous altercations with motorists, etc.  Point is, the courier's dead. And now, because an outside prosecutor brought in to hear the case decided there was not enough evidence, there will be no trial for Michael Bryant.

This may have been the right call, for all I know.  I know that the details about the courier gave me pause. I've ridden a bike downtown, and been scared by crazy drivers -- but I've also been a driver desperately looking for bicycles and incensed when a rider flouted the rules of the road; riding unsafely, running lights, going the wrong way up a one way street and a hundred other moves.

But what's happened now is that there is no satisfaction on either side. Evidence will never be heard. We will never settle this as a society. It will always remain there, hanging, the two factions convinced they're right, a vague queasy sense of a backroom deal, and many people feeling like that deal robbed us of a public airing; of justice.

There's a lot of that in Canadian society.  I remember learning about the Family Compact in my Canadian History.  Like Tammany Hall in NYC, the Family Compact was the group of families who ran everything for their own benefit here in the early days of Upper Canada.

It was a set of controls made all the easier by the docile nature of the Canadian.  Slow to provoke, slow to object -- given to grumbling mightily but never organizing or really doing much of anything.  (Save the occasional rebellion or General Strike, I mean.)

Well, here we sit now in an age of communications uncertainty. Foreign ownership, editorial independence, Canadian voices -- all of this is up for grabs right now.  And it's not really being written about.

A strong rumor from many sources indicated that in the runup to the "Save Local TV" "TV Tax" last time,  a certain Canadian paper with broadcast interests had a standing policy that the discussion of the issues of Fee For Carriage be restricted to the Business Pages.  The Arts pages were not to be used to discuss the issues arising from the debate -- lest they rile up those excitable creatives & people who care about culture.  And lo, they were not used for that purpose. And that part of the debate was never joined.  It stayed a nice, hermetically sealed business story.

Even papers like The Toronto Star, with no major broadcast interests, gave the issue short shrift. Who is reporting on media issues, whether from a creative industry or consumer side?  A few blogs. A few paid industry newsletters that never trickle down to the public. Nobody else.

Then, last week, a wonderful piece of doublespeak flew into people's inboxes.  It seems in order to serve us better, Playback, the publication that served as the putative "industry paper," for the Canadian TV industry, had folded its print version, and would henceforth publish only electronically.  This would allow for more immediacy, or something.

Playback has gone through a rocky road through the years, from being a rag that published stuff you mostly already knew to having occasional flashes of insight or good writing & reportage.  Mostly, though, it's always been a reliable repository for the fawning "tribute to" this or that issue -- somebody in the club who's retiring, meeting a career milestone, grabbing a gold watch or something.  It's not rare to see a single-sourced story in Playback -- nor is it particularly odd to see a rewritten press release served up as news.

What was interesting in the runup to their announcement, though, was Playback didn't cover what I would say was the real story: the fact that when they folded the paper, they laid off a significant portion of their staff.  About 20 people, including the editor.

Now you can play any game you want talking about how they're going to do more with less -- but we both know that's not how it works.

And though I looked, I didn't really see any coverage of Playback laying off their staff in any of the nation's newspapers.

So there are all these questions, all these issues going forward in Canadian broadcasting.  It's a strange time.

And I guess you better hope that all us free bloggers keep writing about them, because aside from some expensive subscription-only newsletters with narrower focuses, you're not going to read any day to day journalism covering the beat.

Don't you feel well served?