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Poor CBC Pan Am Games coverage should bring out defenders — not detractors
Juxtapose: the federal minister of sport saying he was "surprised" by CBC's universally panned Pan Am Games coverage during the same week that a Senate committee recommended more changes to the public broadcaster. Forgive Bal Gosal, for he knows only what's in the talking points furnished for him.
Earlier this week, there was a great hue and cry about CBC not devoting live television coverage to the Pan Am gold-medal games in men's baseball and women's basketball. Both games, which involved Canada defeating the United States, were live-streamed, although baseball in particular draws an older audience that is more conditioned to watching live sports on TV whilst carressing the remote, rather than scrolling through browser tabs. That led to Gosal telling the Toronto Sun that he was taken aback by the coverage.
"I was surprised," Gosal said outside the beach volleyball venue when asked about the fact there was no live TV of marquee events, such as the men's baseball final on Sunday (which was also streamed online) and the women's basketball final on Monday.
"I would have liked to see more coverage. I thought there would be more coverage ... When I went to the Paralympics in London (in 2012), they were slated for very small coverage. Once they saw the ticket sales, once they saw the people, right away they increased coverage. That's what I'd love to see in Canada, every amateur sport covered much more than it is right now." (Toronto Sun, July 21)
Cognitive dissonance, much?
It is more than a bit rich for a Conservative Party of Canada minister to take umbrage with the CBC's coverage after successive cuts in the public broadcaster's annual appropriation from Parliament. To be fair, the constant cleaving away at the CBC began in the mid-1990s under a Liberal government before escalating. Since 2012, one year after Prime Minister Stephen Harper gained a majority government, the CBC's budget has been further cut by more than 10 per cent.
(That Senate report, curiously, also only calls for disclosure of "non-executive salaries." Directors that are appointed by aprime minister who potentially might have an ax to grind against public broadcasting are safe, then?)
The example that the BBC adapted during the 2012 Paralympics and beefed up live coverage once demanded showed a need for is also self-serving. The BBC receives about three times as much funding than CBC on a per-capita basis. It's so obvious that it shouldn't even have to be pointed out.
Moreover, broadcast feeds for the Pan Ams, like the Olympics through the Olympic Broadcasting Service, are made available by the organizers. That does not mean CBC Sports gets a pass. A rights holder in a host country should be working hard to make sure the events that Canadians would want to watch on a July night are available. That's where exclusivity is a problem. A well-funded public broadcaster could also help the Pan Ams offset costs.
The CBC could have anticipated a sudden surge in demand. There is usually some consumer apathy before the Olympics, too, but people tend to get drawn in very quickly. The spike is in interest in a multisport games is especially high when it's held in a North American time zone. Canadians also like to watch Canadians winning, and the fact the Pan Ams doesn't possess a deep field in many disciplines is of little consequence. After all, the world junior hockey championship exploded in popularity in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union left Canada, for a time, as the world's only hockey superpower.
The funny thing is that, since live sports are the only entity keeping traditional television alive, the post-Hockey Night In Canada revenue CBC's enfeebled state has become all the more obvious in the last two weeks. It's less obvious during daily news coverage, when there are multiple outlets covering the same stories, than it is with sports where media rights are exclusive.
There is little defending CBC's television side as is, as it adapts to life without that hockey revenue. Its French-language brethren at Radio-Canada had to go through about a decade earlier, not that it helped preserve its funding. The public broadcaster desperately needs a reboot that will allow it to "air more amateur sports." Not incidentally, that is a recommendations from that Senate committee. Naturally, as Kate Taylor pointed out, there's no helpful suggestion on how that would be funded.
The committee thinks that the CBC should air more amateur sports. Great idea. Why not? The private broadcasters won’t and amateur associations are often willing to offer their broadcast rights in exchange for a bit of marketing. Still, production crews and sportscasters cost money and the CBC won’t make much ad revenue with specialized offerings like these. So where is the money going to come from to get more amateur sports on air? On that subject, the report is silent. (Globe & Mail)
Generally, adults try to come up with solutions and not wishful thinking. What people have seen, or haven't seen, on CBC's TV side across the past two weeks, is the residue of two decades of race-to-the-bottom cuts. There aren't a lot of firm answers about how to adapt to the change in how media is consumed, especially on a sports blog.
There is an audience that wants to watch live sports and emotionally invest in amateur athletes. A public broadcaster is the best one to air amateur sports that have limited mainstream appeal in non-Olympic years. The media universe is too fragmented to have another national voice on the scale of a vintage Don Wittman, but there is a happy medium somewhere.
Ultimately, Gosal and anyone who faults the CBC for its coverage is just buck-passing. There is a lot of shade to be thrown — at the government, at the CBC highers-up, at the Pan-Am Games organizing committee. Very little should be directed at CBC Sports' frontline producers and on-air talent.
Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @naitSAYger.
