CBC Radio is "a national treasure" and audiences across the country will be listening carefully for any changes following the announcement of CBC's integration plans, a Canadian broadcasting watchdog said on Friday.
The public broadcaster announced on Thursday the amalgamation of its English-language platforms — including CBC.ca, CBC-TV and CBC Radio — under Richard Stursberg, promoted from his previous post as TV chief. The move comes two years after CBC's French-language services were integrated under Radio-Canada executive Sylvain Lafrance.
"We do have some concerns about [the decision], notwithstanding fact that it happened on the French-language side," Ian Morrison, spokesman for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, told CBCNews.ca Arts on Friday.
According to the watchdog group, CBC Radio holds the attention of about 13 per cent of the total radio listening audience across the country. This audience includes elite groups such as executives and supreme court judges, Morrison said.
"CBC Radio is what it is because it is so distinct," Morrison said. "Subsuming it underneath and part of the much larger English television network raises a number of troubling questions."
Media-watchers, Morrison included, criticized Stursberg for a recent Globe and Mail interview in which he discussed the CBC-TV winter schedule and suggested that the network needed to be more like the populist coffee chain Tim Hortons and less like its more upscale competitor, Starbucks.
"Do Canadians want CBC Radio to be a Tim Hortons rather than a Starbucks?" Morrison asked.
"If I understand the intent of this silly metaphor, it is to downscale — the French use the word vulgariser for popularize — to take down to the lowest common denominator the programming. That type of programming is very well supplied today by the other 87 per cent of radio listening in Canada, the 600 private radio stations. CBC Radio is a national treasure because it's an alternative to that."
Morrison acknowledged that he doesn't consider the integration plans "the end of the world," but noted that both fans and critics of CBC will have their ears perked up for any sort of change.
"A lot of those people will be listening with a very sharp ear for anything that suggests that [radio] will be moving towards the silly metaphor," Morrison said.
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