Speeches and Interviews

September 2, 2003

Notes for Remarks by Harold Redekopp at the CCTV Forum on Chinese Television and Media Development

Notes for remarks by Harold Redekopp, Executive Vice-President, CBC Television Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, at the CCTV Forum on Chinese Television and Media Development to Mark the 45TH Anniversary of the Establishment of China Central Television, Golden Hall of the People's Congress Hall, Beijing, China

Thank you. Mr. Vice Minister of SARFT, Mr. President and Vice Presidents of CCTA, ladies and gentlemen.

I'm very pleased to participate in the 45th anniversary celebration of CCTV, and to have this opportunity to share with you a little bit about my broadcasting organization, and some of our current thinking on the topic of media cooperation.

To understand the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, you first have to understand a little about Canada. Because in many ways, the CBC is a mirror of the country it serves. It is a country that was born in 1867 (136 years ago). And unlike so many countries, it was not formed by war or revolution. It was formed by compromise and patience. The two founding peoples, English and French, shared little and liked each other less, but to survive they had to work together. And so the history of Canada became a story of negotiation and co-operation.

Today, Canada is the second largest country on the planet. It covers almost ten million square kilometers. And it touches three oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic. And yet, our population barely reaches 31 million. 85% of the people of Canada live within 300 kilometers of our border with the United States.

Perhaps that's why communication has always been so important in Canada.

It was a Canadian engineer, by the way, named Reginald Fessenden, who was the first to broadcast his voice through the air — a year before Marconi famously sent a Morse signal across the Atlantic. What were those first ever broadcast words? They were quintessentially Canadian. Fessenden asked, "Is it snowing where you are?"

While CBC Radio went on the air in 1936, CBC Television was created in 1952. Just getting to air was a considerable technological achievement. Engineers laid down 24 thousand kilometers of lines to reach across Canada. To give you a point of comparison, that is 16 times more than the BBC had to lay to reach its viewers across Great Britain. CBC became the most extended television network in the world.

And still, we didn't reach all Canadians.

Fewer than one hundred thousand people live in our far north. But CBC did not want to leave them out, and our television signal finally reached them in 1967. We constantly work not only to reach all Canadians, but also to support production and to broadcast from all parts of the country, including our remotest areas.

The News service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has achieved a considerable international reputation, and has won many awards for the quality of its work. Year after year, our News programs are judged the best in the country: best newscast, best news anchor, best reportage, best special events coverage.

In the past two years, we have all lived through many critical international events. During a period when many Americans felt that there wasn't a sufficient international perspective in the programming they were receiving from the American television networks, CBC's programming was cited by many as refreshing and balanced.

I think there's a good reason for this. Like the CBC as a whole, CBC News reflects the nature of Canada itself. In a global political sense, we are not a "big power." Historically, our governments have directed Canadian efforts abroad more towards international co-operation, peacekeeping and humanitarian initiatives, than towards involvement in political disputes. This has meant that Canadians feel more objective about many international developments. Our news service — through its balanced and global perspective — has always reflected this reality.

From the very beginning, we have dedicated ourselves to explaining the world to Canadians. But a funny thing happened. In explaining the world to Canadians, we also became very good at explaining the world — to the rest of the world.

First we did it on radio. Radio Canada International is a short wave service that is heard around the world in English, French, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Ukrainian. Now, we also do it on television. Newsworld International is a 24-hour news channel available in more than 17 million homes in the United States and parts of Mexico, the Caribbean and South America.

We speak to the world through the World-Wide Web. CBC.CA gets about 13 million visits in a typical month. A quarter of those visits are from outside Canada, including China. In June, people from 212 countries visited our Internet site.

In terms of the general topic we've been asked to address this afternoon, we are always seeking new partnerships to extend the reach of our News coverage. For example, we provide News to Internet and wireless providers, to multilingual television channels, and to in-flight newscasts on Air Canada. By the end of the year, we'll also offer interactive News. We have formed partnerships to offer video on demand, and to merchandize our program content through DVD's, CD's and books. And we have joint marketing agreements with other broadcasters for pay-per-view and pay audio services.

Now, let me give you another reason why I think we're particularly good at telling the rest of the world about the issues and events of the day. It's because the people of Canada have become a reflection of the world. Canada was settled by immigrants — most from Europe in the first half of the 20th century, followed by a great surge from all around the world after the Second World War, which has never stopped.

In fact, more people immigrated to Canada in the 1990s than in any previous decade of the 20th century. And most of those immigrants came from Asia — almost 60 per cent, another affirmation of Canada as a partner in the Pacific Rim. The last Canadian census reported that the people of Canada speak more than one hundred languages. English and French, of course. But Chinese is now in third place. Italian and German are next. Then Punjabi and Spanish.

And that is what sets Canada apart. The seeds of negotiation and compromise sown generations ago have produced a country proud of its history and proud of its unique identity.

When he was retiring as Secretary General of the United Nations a few years ago, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar was honoured at a dinner in Ottawa. Now, you may know that a Secretary General receives a lot of precious artifacts and gifts from heads of state during his tenure and Pérez de Cuéllar was donating all of his to Canada. When he was asked why he was giving them to Canada and not Peru, since he was Peruvian, he replied, "Because of all the countries I came to know in my tenure, Canada most approximated the world as I thought it had to become. All races, all nationalities, in a peaceful coexistence."

And that's what I mean when I say that when CBC News speaks to Canadians, we are really speaking to the world. With our population mix, we are forced not only to cover many foreign countries, but also to cover them in quite a sophisticated way. Because our audience has more than a superficial knowledge of the rest of the world.

We have CBC News foreign correspondents in about a dozen cities. Among them: Beijing, Moscow, Jerusalem, Cairo, Amman, Bangkok, London, Paris, Washington, and Mexico City. Twenty years ago, U.S. networks could say they had ten times as many foreign bureaus as the CBC. But since then, we've expanded, and many of them have contracted. Today, we actually have more foreign bureaus than some American networks.

And of course, on major stories, we often send reporters based in Canada to supplement our coverage. The war in Iraq was a good example of that. We made a commitment to cover that conflict as fully as we possibly could. And I believe our coverage was as comprehensive as anyone's. And it was fair and even-handed as well.

Now, I should say that no one at the CBC pretends that we have the resources to challenge the sheer bulk of what American networks or British networks can bring to a story. But I think we have been very clear-eyed about what we can do, and then we go about doing it very well.

Don Murray is one of our senior foreign correspondents. And he is surely a model of what any network would want in a foreign correspondent. He speaks English and French so fluently he reports for both our English and French networks. He speaks Czech as well. He was the correspondent we sent when we opened our news bureau here in Beijing in the 1970s. And he learned to speak Mandarin. (I should point out here that Patrick Brown, who will be taking over the Beijing bureau at the beginning of October — for his second tour — also speaks Mandarin.)

Well, after Beijing, we sent Don Murray to our bureau in Moscow. So he learned to speak Russian. When Mikhail Gorbachev was granting interviews to western news agencies, our Don Murray did his interview in Russian. I think that said something important about CBC News.

Please understand, we greatly respect our bigger colleagues. We have co-operative arrangements with CBS, NBC, CNN, and the BBC, among others. On Newsworld International every day you can see newscasts from NHK in Japan, from ITV in Great Britain, and from Deutsche Welle in Germany. The French-language service of the CBC — called Radio-Canada — is part of the international consortium that produces TV5 — a French-language international channel seen worldwide. Many of our CBC programs are broadcast in French on this channel.

CBC was host broadcaster last year when the Pope came to Toronto for World Youth Day. Our coverage of that event was seen by millions of people around the globe —probably on every network in the world.

We have become the Canadian network most strongly identified with the Olympic games. We have had Canadian rights for every Olympics since 1996, and we will carry the games at least through the 2008 summer Olympics here in Beijing. In addition to our domestic coverage, CBC also provides host broadcaster services.

So we are always looking for ways to co-operate with other networks. We were the Canadian partner in one of the most remarkable television events in history: the around-the-world broadcast of the start of the new millennium. Just a few months ago, we teamed up with ten networks around the world in an initiative coordinated by the BBC to examine What The World Thinks Of America. And we are co-producing a new weekly international affairs program, called Hemispheres, with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. That program will have its debut in a couple of weeks.

These ventures allow us to stretch our resources even further. And to bring perspectives to Canadians that might otherwise not be possible.

Of course, at a time when we're looking to make arrangements with foreign broadcasters, it makes sense that we also look inside the CBC to meet the challenges of a world that moves faster and faster. So in the past two years, we have integrated all of our Radio, Television and Internet news services into one, streamlined, strong CBC News division.

The CBC strongly believes that television should be public service in the public interest. That access to the most innovative, courageous and challenging broadcasting is something everyone deserves.

We have a book of journalistic standards and practices that guides us every day on every story. Each of our journalists is required to know and understand its contents. It is freely available to the public, and we have it posted on our web site. We are proud to declare our journalistic values. And we are anxious to know if we have failed to live up to those values.

CBC is the only North American television network with an Ombudsman. Anyone who believes they see a breach of our standards on any of our networks is free to bring the matter to the attention of the Ombudsman. His report for the 2002-2003 season says that he received 12 hundred complaints, of which only 5% were found to have merit. And while that's pretty good, our goal is to do even better.

We are proud of our journalistic record. We believe our accomplishments are impressive by any standard. But they are truly extraordinary when you consider the size of our population (small), the size of our country (immense), and the unique challenge of broadcasting in the shadow of the United States.

We have a rich history, but we are determined that our best days are not behind us — they are still ahead of us. We have built a journalistic enterprise on the solid foundations of fairness, balance, and integrity. And we will never waver from those principles. But we've come to the conclusion that it is simply not realistic to think we can continue our success if we fail to explore better ways to do things. And working with other broadcasters is one of those better ways.

We see this as an opportunity for Canadians to experience the best journalism from around the world. And we believe our partners will appreciate the opportunity to share the work of CBC News with their viewers.

So, I look forward to much more collaboration among us in the future. And I thank you most sincerely for the opportunity to speak with you today.