Speeches and Interviews

November 12, 2002

The Role of Public Broadcasting in Fostering Civil Society

Remarks by Harold Redekopp, Executive Vice-President, English Television, at the Public Broadcasters International, Hong Kong, November 11-12, 2002, from "Session 5: The Role of Public Broadcasting in Fostering Civil Society"

Thank you, Mister Chairman, and good morning, everyone.

You know, in contrast to our Chair, and to my fellow panelist, and to several others in this room, I'm a relative newcomer to the topic of public broadcasting and its role in contributing to the development of civil society.

But like so many of you, I've been brought to it by both the demands of my work as a broadcaster, and my personal experience. I've devoted my career to Canada's national public broadcaster, and I've had my eyes and heart opened as I traveled through emerging democracies. I feel privileged to contribute to today's discussion. I also feel a real sense of urgency about it.

Like many of you, we at CBC want to make a difference. We are currently re-evaluating our international strategy and role. We want to identify where in the world it is important for us to be, and to join forces with other organizations that can help make our presence useful and effective, with the resources available.

As public service broadcasters, most of us have helped build civil society and democratic institutions in our home countries. Many of us have also contributed to social development outside our own borders and around the world. I have tremendous admiration for the work that many of you in this room have done and are doing in this regard.

There's a widely held view - one which I happen to share - that in this post nine-one-one world, there is a profound global need for what we do and for more of us to do more of it, and do it in a more concerted way.

I also believe that changing technologies and markets are opening opportunities for us to fill that need around the world.

There's been lots of talk about how to do it - and good talk, too. And I am sure there will be more of that here today. But right now, I want to challenge us - and by "us" I mean all of us as individual public service broadcasters, rather than PBI as an organization - to move beyond talk, and take action.

• Is this the time for us to create an international public service satellite channel?
• Is this the time for us to tie together all of our various international training and development efforts into one more effective agency?
• What other ideas should we put on the table and explore?

I hope we can discuss these questions this morning.

Let me start with some first principles.

I begin with the assumption that public service broadcasters empower individuals by giving them access to reliable information and a range of opinion on issues that affect them.

Informed citizens are equipped to participate in the open public discourse that is the lifeblood of democratic society.

They demand more of their institutions and they are able to contribute more to them.

Empowered citizens work together to build a vital civil society. By civil society, I mean all those collective activities people participate in beyond their formal interactions with government and business - everything from neighbourly cooperation to community decision-making to church groups and volunteer associations to NGO's of all kinds - and beyond this, even more broadly, what has been called "the culture of citizenship."

Public service broadcasters help build civil society in many ways - and not just through news broadcasting. I imagine some of you are familiar with the long-running BBC Radio serial called "The Archers": a soap opera about a fictional rural family in a village in the Midlands.

Well, in Canada, we at the CBC created something similar with our daily Farm Radio Dramas. Like "The Archers," they used the continuing story of a farm family to discuss, in an easy-to-absorb way, rural issues in different parts of the country. Given the nature of our country, it's perhaps not surprising that there were several different families, each facing different circumstances: the Carsons in BC, the Jacksons on the Prairies, the Craigs in Ontario and the Gillans in the Maritimes. Broadcast live at noon each day from the 1940's through the 1960's, the series made an important contribution to the war effort, especially in food production, while post-war, they helped disseminate new methods of farming and household economy.

P-S-B's also bring the political process into public view, and open the airwaves to debate. When Canada has faced crucial moments - turning points in our nation's history - CBC has staged electronic town halls that have been vital forums for a national public dialogue.

When the country was split by a deeply divisive constitutional debate, we brought a group of ordinary Canadians together, and challenged them to do the politicians' job by writing a new constitution for Canada - while the cameras were rolling. The result was dramatic, absorbing television that made headlines, and brought to life the dynamics of the political process.

I believe that citizens everywhere, even in the most media-saturated countries like the United States, are hungry for stories like these, that illuminate public issues and processes. That's why I don't think it was an accident that, in the hours and days following September 11th, millions of thoughtful American viewers sought out CBC reporting.

We offer an international satellite television news service called Newsworld International. At the time of the attack on New York, N-W-I was carried in the United States by U-S-A Networks. As the magnitude of the attack became clear, they placed our signal on some of their other popular specialty channels, like The Home Shopping Network.

An unprecedented number of Americans was able to see CBC's public-interest journalism. And they told us that they liked what they saw, because of its independence, objectivity and thoughtfulness.

To me, the message is clear: what public service broadcasters do at home is valued far beyond their own borders.

As I mentioned at the outset, there's already a lot of excellent work going on, and a number of intriguing ideas being floated. My colleague here, Reinhard Keune, described several of them in a recent paper, including those brought forward by Canada's David Nostbakken and Hendrik Bussiek in South Africa. Let me just mention a few others briefly.

• Of course, some broadcasters, such as BBC World, TV5, and ABC's Asia-Pacific service, already deliver their signals to developing regions.
• Some N-G-O's produce programming meant to develop civil society in unstable societies. For example, an organization called Search For Common Ground, based in Washington, DC, operates in the Balkans and elsewhere. Its employees and volunteers use a broad portfolio of tools to help communities develop the capacity to resolve their own conflicts peacefully. That portfolio includes TV production and training, tightly interwoven with development efforts.
• Under Guillaume Chenevière's leadership, the World Radio and Television Council is proposing the creation of "social performance" ratings for broadcasters.
• The Institute for Media, Peace and Security in Paris, under the direction of prominent Canadian Keith Spicer, is a high-level research and training center to help journalists better understand the conflicts they cover.
• There is funding meant to encourage an independent press, that flows from UNESCO and funders associated with The Soros Foundation.
• And there's the training offered by many organizations, such as the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, the Baltic Media Centre and the Thomson Foundation. We at CBC have been associated with international training initiatives in the Caribbean and in Southern Africa. At the dawn of South Africa's new democracy, our trainers were privileged to work alongside S-A-B-C broadcasters to help them practice free journalism as the country moved towards its first multi-racial elections. Following Prime Minister Chrétien's recent trip to Africa, Radio-Canada has been approached by Senegalese Broadcasting to help it set up a regional training institute for West African broadcasters. And we are currently working on a flexible overall training strategy to help us better meet our partners' requests.

These are just a few examples; there are many more. I expect that many of you in this room have participated in similar efforts.

So if all this work is already going on, why am I calling for action? Because I believe that there is a real need, and a real opportunity. And that there is real urgency to act collectively, and to act now. Why urgency? I'm going to turn to the observations of a Canadian scholar to help me with this point.

Professor Frank Chalk of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies focuses his work on those moments when the conventions of civil society rupture when democratic institutions vanish and the conditions for genocide emerge.

He collected accounts of anti-Tutsi programs broadcast by government-controlled radio stations during the Rwandan massacres in 1994. And he observed how those broadcasts incited tribal hatred and helped fan the flames of genocide.

He witnessed a very different experience in 1993 in Cambodia, where terrible conflict seemed possible. Chalk believes that, in that specific situation, public service broadcasting helped create the conditions for an orderly election - through U-N sponsored Khmer language programs.

The U-N was able to counter threatening Khmer Rouge propaganda, and show Cambodians how an open election works. Ninety percent of those eligible braved intimidation and voted: a conspicuous success, by any standards.

In a world where there is so much conflict brewing -- and so much social development required -- I believe there's a persuasive lesson here for us.

In the right circumstances, public service broadcasting can help communities develop and democracies take flight - and do so on a society's own terms.

I believe we can cooperate to better deliver the benefits of public service broadcasting to emerging democracies, in ways that the commercial media cannot.

We can grasp the opportunities from new markets for television sets and programs, the promise of the world-wide-web and the new potential for international cooperation opened by more effective and cheaper communication technology.

How can we act? What we can offer that is not provided by all those other P-S-B and N-G-O efforts? What positioning can we build that will differentiate us significantly in a crowded global media environment? In a word, as I said at the outset, how can we be most effective?

In considering these questions, we at the CBC are just at the early stages of our thinking. We don't yet have solid, detailed proposals . . .
certainly no business plans.

What we're doing is gathering ideas, testing appetites, trying to imagine how the CBC, working together with like-minded P-S-B's around the world, can make a difference with the quite limited resources we have available to us.

To kick-start our discussion, I'd like to share some of our ideas with you, and get your reaction to them.

Some of them are fairly traditional, "top-down" models. For instance, we've talked about consortium networks that would repackage programming from public service broadcasters for distribution in different ways.

• I'll begin with the simplest: an English-language consortium. Focusing on information programming already produced by P-S-B's for domestic consumption, gathered together at one or more central packaging points, and fed to carriers around the world, this service would offer a thoughtful, objective, multiple perspective on events and issues unfolding in all parts of the world: a useful antidote to both commercialism and chauvinism.
  
• Another possibility would be a bilingual consortium network in English and French, drawing on the rich program resources in those two languages that we and several other networks have. Radio-Canada already participates in two French-language consortia - TV5 and ARTV - so this would be a natural extension of that work. We in Canada have a special passion for bilingual enterprises, so we can easily imagine a global signal carrying programming in both languages. ARTE in Europe and other examples suggest it's not impossible.
  
• A third alternative would see us cooperating to create International Specialty Channels. Potentially broadcasting in several languages, these channels could unite existing P-S-B material into thematic streams, such as children's programming or educational broadcasts. They would quickly stand out among other offerings because of their tight focus and the high quality of their material. I don't know about you, but the idea of a global children's network offering a safe haven for kids and their parents to learn and grow together, and an alternative to commercial exploitation, is one that excites me a lot.

Any of these three models - and others we could think of - could be funded from a variety of sources.
Governments, N-G-O's and foundations might all see the benefits of contributing to such an enterprise.

I think these ideas are intriguing, and deserve further consideration. I hope you do, too, and I look forward to the opportunity of discussing them with you.

They are also full of unresolved issues and unanswered questions - from program rights to distribution technology. I also realize that there are already plenty of competitors in these fields, and it could be a challenge to make a distinctive offering. As well, we've learned over the years that where development is concerned, "top down" often isn't the way to go. Or at least "top down" by itself may not be enough.

So some of our other suggestions are more "bottom-up" in nature, as befits our focus on nurturing civil society. Experience shows that grassroots efforts can often be particularly effective - especially when they are backed by substantial resources and expertise.

In other words, it may not be an "either/or" proposition. It may be possible to combine the best of both worlds. That's what's behind the conspicuous success of the BBC World Service Trust, with its blend of BBC World Service expertise and resources, alongside local language broadcasting, local issue programs and micro-level training. What if we found a way to expand that model to other P-S-B's, and perhaps linked it to the notion of the consortium network?

Think of the role that we could play in helping create "micro" public service broadcasters in emerging democracies. Off-the-shelf production equipment is now inexpensive and easily linked to create powerful micro-networks.

My colleague Alex Frame - who is about to retire as Vice-President of CBC English Radio - already volunteers in South and Central America on such a project.
He and his Bahai colleagues are renovating a loose group of community radio stations into a digital micro-network. Using cheap, simple, basic technology - like solar power and store-bought computers - they're building stations for local indigenous people to tell their own stories to one another . . .
and to organize their communities for a better life.

These tiny P-S-B's are inexpensive, and powerful. With consumer software available for desk-top editing and web design, similar possibilities now exist for TV and new media.

Could we consolidate our expertise to show communities how to create "micro-P-S-B's"?
Could we contribute resources like people and equipment?
Could we work collectively to attract third-party funders?

There are other possibilities, too.

Can we forge a global "virtual" public service broadcaster?

Could we use servers and the web to collect, repackage and distribute our material for rebroadcast around the world? Either direct to end-users, or through those "micro-networks" I was just talking about?

Could we create a cooperative web-based clearing house to organize and deliver P-S-B training programs?
An on-line component at the center of a new, aggregated training initiative among public broadcasters, using all the latest techniques of distance education?

As public service broadcasters, we are uniquely placed to put any one of these ideas - or any number of others - into practice.

So, let's keep talking. But let's also start acting.
Let's use our resources, our relationships, and our common goals and values, to translate our good intentions into reality.

I look forward to discussing with you how, together, we might start doing that.

Thank you very much.