Speeches and Interviews
April 28, 2003
Notes for Remarks by Mark Starowicz Before the Senate Transport and Communications Committee
Notes for remarks by Mark Starowicz, Executive Producer, before the Senate Transport and Communications Committee, Ottawa
The Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communications has launched its study of the national media landscape. The Committee is looking at the current state of Canadian media industries; emerging trends and developments in these industries; the media's role, rights and responsibilities in Canadian society; and current and appropriate policies relating thereto. The Committee is expected to take up to 18 months to complete its study and make recommendations.
On April 28, 2003, Mark Starowicz, head of documentary production for CBC Television, appeared before the Committee. Following are his remarks to the Committee.
Honourable Senators,
Most citizens don't understand how North American commercial television works. They think it's a little like a movie theatre. The owner of the theatre tries to get the best movies he can, to attract the most customers, and make his profit from selling tickets. The assumption is made that television is the same, with the only real difference being that we don't have to pay an admission price because that's been covered by the commercials. Like the film is the product of the movie system, so the product of television, it's universally assumed, is the program.
But that's not the economic model of commercial television at all. The product of commercial television is not the program. The product —that which is being bought and sold-- is you. To quote Les Brown, the former New York Times writer who became one of the world's leading historians of the industry: "The product of commercial television is the viewer. The program is merely the bait." Follow the money, which is usually a good idea. The exchange of money is not between the viewer and the network, it is between the network and the advertiser. The advertiser is buying "eyeballs" by the hundreds of thousands, from a network.
This is not a democracy. This is not one-person one vote. Certain demographics are far more valuable to the advertiser than others. A woman, 18 to 35, for example, is worth at least ten people over 50. That's because the people in the 18-35 demographic still have their major purchasing decisions to make —fridge, home, car. In the Toronto market, depending on the network, and the time slot, they may be sold at $150 a thousand to an advertiser. But old goat like me, who's unlikely to make the same purchases, will be worth $ 7.50 a thousand. We are not all equal citizens in this universe. We are classified into complex grids and income categories with names like "Asian Heights" (meaning Vancouver Chinese gentry) or "Urban Nesters", meaning childless downtown professionals. Some of us don't even count as citizens. A program can attract a million older citizens and never see the light of prime time. And all children have not gone to bed by 7 p.m. They're just not worth programming to in commercially valuable time. Have you also wondered why commercial television news is scheduled at six and at 11 ? To quote Les Brown again: "TV news is scheduled at the peripheries of prime time, where it will do the least possible damage to commercial revenue."
Now if you want men and women in the 18 to 35 demographic you design Friends or Sex in the City, or Survivor. If you want to attract the 14 to 18 niche, you design Dawson's Creek or Gilmore Girls. And, incidentally, that's how almost everyone on television turns out to be white and suburban with disposable income. The reason there's so few African Americans or Hispanics on prime time US television, despite their proportion of the American population, is because they are not as desirable an economic demographic for the advertiser, as measured by disposable income.
Commercial television is part of the marketing and distribution system of the manufacturing economy, not part of the cultural production system. It's arguably the very engine of consumer distributing. We are bought and sold, in our hundreds of thousands, by companies that assemble viewers —networks, in other words—and sold to agencies representing auto and computer manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and toy manufacturers. None of this inherently pernicious. Business is business. Only that will get produced which returns the highest yield on investment to the various players in the system. In this model, the viewer is a consumer.
But what has happened is that the commercial television industry has successfully hijacked the rhetoric of democracy, liberty and choice. In the cornucopia to choices, you have pure democracy at work, and the viewer ultimately decides what will be aired or not aired. You've heard the arguments. People are voting with their eyeballs. If they wanted more Canadian programs, why are they watching Frasier ? The question of freedom of choice has been defined, by the commercial industry, as the freedom to pick between two hundred channels' worth of such programs.
Freedom of choice —in radio, television or cinema—should be defined as the freedom to produce television, not just to consume. This is best illustrated in the Canadian North, from where I've just returned from doing a documentary in the Inuit community of Inukjuak. They have almost as many channels as I do it Toronto. They can choose Frasier or Entertainment Tonight or watch the fall of Baghdad, as we did. But they have virtually nothing in their own language, nothing produced by them, nothing that speaks to them and their society. Do they have freedom of choice in television? Like any Canadian, I want my American programs. I like American television; my daughters like it. I don't want anyone restricting our access to it and I don't believe in electronic Berlin walls. But how did we come to delude ourselves that everything that appears on our screens must by arbitrated totally by what is essentially a massive consumer distributing industry ?
The experience of Canada: A People's History is painfully pertinent. For two years, not a single Canadian corporation would become a sponsor of the series. Not the airlines. Not the oil companies. Not most of the financial sector. Not the manufacturing companies, the big retail chains, the communications giants. Not until the last minute when one, Sun Life, came on board. For the first year, we had four of the five commercial underwriting spots blank. The next year, Bell Canada stepped up to the plate. So to those who say, as the National Post does every day, and the Globe and Mail every other day, let the market decide, let the people vote with their eyeballs — I say: If you can't finance the history of your own country, what can you finance?
The truth is the marketers in those companies felt there were more efficient ways to sell cell phones, Toyotas and Tylenol than in a Canadian history series. And it may surprise you to hear me say this, but they're probably right. We probably weren't the most cost efficient delivery vehicle of 18 to 25 year olds, or the best platform for selling cosmetics. But the people wanted this programming. They set national viewing records. That series would never have seen the light of day if it had to meet the market consumer delivery test. Even if it did reach millions, after all there are cheaper ways of reaching millions of people. You can get 3 million viewers by buying CSI at a miniscule fraction of the price.
This is how Canadian programming is strangled daily. Not because Canadians don't want it. Not because we can't compete with the world. But because it's not the most efficient return on investment, or not the most efficient demographic targeting device to sell consumer products. Why does it have to be? How did the marketing heads of Coca Cola and Canadian Tire become the people who decide what appears on Canadian television? I understand and accept that if a Canadian program isn't popular, has not found a significant audience, it should probably die. But I resent that a Canadian program will not even be born, even if it reaches a large audience, if I can't prove it will sell shampoo. Yet I have described, quite precisely I believe how Canadian television programming is decided. Let's not confuse marketing with democracy.
Because we live next to the most powerful commercial market in human history, we've been conditioned to accept this is the norm. In fact, at the dawn of television, that system was the aberration. Public broadcasting owes its genesis to the British, who set up a completely public system, and only allowed commercial competition decades later. Radio and television was not in the same column of the economic register as department stores, but in the same column as schools, highways, railways and the post. And that's the way it initially developed in Japan, in Italy, in Germany and in France —in fact, in most countries of the world.
In public television, the economic model is different. Large audiences matter, don't let anyone fool you. But the unit of measure really is one-person/one-vote. In commercial television, the unit of measure is the number of consumer. In public television, the unit of measure is the number of citizens, one person, one vote.
The health of a mixed private and public system has to be measured in its balance. Both public and private networks will produce children's programs, both will produce comedies. But one, the public half, will produce children's programs regardless of the particular needs of the toy manufacturers, and comedies which appeal to more than the highest consumer demographic. Britain, for example, has a healthy, balanced system. Private networks make strong profits and the BBC is widely cherished by the audience too.
It is not necessary any more, in 2003, to have to persuade anyone that information industries are the central battlefield of the 21st century. All of us now call it the Information Age. Yet Canada enters that age with a dangerously weak media sector. The newspaper industry is gripped by monopoly. The national magazine sector is moribund. The book publishing industry, despite the wealth of Canadian authors, is financially precarious and being taken over by multinationals. The broadcasting industry has been fragmented into a dizzying array of channels, and most of the private production industry is heavily dependent on decisions in New York and Los Angeles --our ambitions often reduced to who can produce the most exportable cooking show. The largest unit—the public broadcaster—is still in the recovery ward after a decade of divesting itself of a generation of talent and entire production departments. The provincial educational networks are on life support. And finally, as we saw this month, the structural funding system at least has the virtue of consensus —absolutely no one believes it works anymore. If we set out to design a system by which Canada would lose in the global information economy, then we found it.
There is no Canadian national industrial strategy for the Information Age. There may be document somewhere; probably a dozen. But our strategic planning is, in practice, diffused between the Ministry of Heritage, the Ministry of Finance, the regulatory agency, and cacophony of federal and provincial funds and tax credits best understood by lawyers and riverboat gamblers. I'll concentrate on the industry I know best, television and radio.
The system is broken and dysfunctional not because there aren't sound ideas or dedicated industry leaders or ministers. Not because we don't have superb producers in the private and public production industry. This chaotic drift derives from the fact that for almost two decades, successive governments have made it clear national broadcasting and cultural industries are not a significant priority of national policy. It is a mystery to me how Canada failed to identify this as one of the top two or three absolute key strategic economic areas in the new global order. We were focussed on reducing the national deficit. But now, a blueprint for a concerted national broadcasting strategy, and a strategy for becoming a global player, is economically paramount.
The explosion of channels is global. There are 19 Discover channels in Europe, almost 20 history channels; National Geographic channels are an international force. This infinite channel universe is so hungry for product that it has given birth to a global boom in televisual and cinematic material. It's essential that we position ourselves to become major producers, on a global scale. To do that, we have to bring our house in order.
There is no way we are going to become world-scale competitors in production without restoring the public-private balance in Canadian television. The public networks have traditionally been the engines of production and development. The public sector in television has shrunk to a miniscule proportion of the channel spectrum. Out of about seventy English channels most cable systems bring to a Toronto home, for example, only three are public sector: CBC, Newsworld and TVO. That's around 1 twenty-fifth of the shelf space. [On the infant digital tier CBC has one channel, Country Canada, and shares in the Documentary Channel]
Element number one in creating a national strategy is, therefore,: An urgent program to renew and expand the public sector in television, as a driver for the industry. While this also means trying to resuscitate the educational networks and re-investing in the National Film Board, the key is the CBC. Unless the CBC is able to rebuild the drama, documentary and entertainment infrastructure it lost in the past 15 years, Canadian television will have no strategic momentum. In case we think we're being competitive with what we do invest in this sector, compare the British investment in public radio and television to Canada's. The CBC's appropriation for everything is around $800 million. The BBC's budget is seven billion dollars. Britain is trice as large as Canada — but it's not seven times as large as Canada. Britain understands the emerging global market in information. The British television industry, public and private, dominate world production as much as the US because of the national investment in the BBC as a driver.
But not every investment is financial. One historic mistake that should be undone when the CRTC turned down a second channel for the CBC over 20 years ago. The BBC now has eight TV channels and 11 radio channels. You can't compete in this fragmented spectrum without giving the viewer multiple viewing opportunities across several platforms. There has to be a CBC 2. And it should be adjacent, on the spectrum, to CBC 1. English CBC, right now, is channel 6, then Newsworld on channel 26, then Country Canada on digital channel number 166. The channel allocation grid, which grew haphazardly, makes no coherent sense today. Channels will matter for several years to come and should be clustered so that broadcaster can multiplex across them.
The second element in a national strategy of renewal is restoring stability in the private and independent sector. And by the private sector I don't mean those channels and networks that are basically import warehouses for American programming, because they're doing very well. We have to stimulate and support the growth of significant scale production companies that can compete internationally, just as we have to on the public side.
To do that the sector not only needs investment, but stability and predictable funding. I've worked a great deal with independent companies in the past decade, and it's like trying to build a business by buying a lot of lottery tickets. The chaos of the past month, which may create a domino effect of bankruptcies, is evidence of the shaky foundations of that funding formula.
Canada can become one of the biggest winners in the new information order that's emerging. Communications is second nature to us because of the scale of the country. We have a disproportionately strong talent base because of our forefathers' investments in the CBC and the National Film Board. We have a strong craft base in cinematic production. We produce some of the best animators in the world. We can produce in two of the world's principal languages. We have a sophisticated communications infrastructure. We are not a superpower nor a colonial power so our programs are not mistrusted for their political and cultural baggage. The decision to compete globally in televisual and cinematic industries is as critical a strategic economic decision today as the decision to invest in nuclear energy or aviation technology was in the last century.
