GATINEAU – As the seventh and final day of the 2006 CRTC TV Policy Review hearing wound down yesterday, a frustrated group got very wound up, and a broadcasting legend weighed in.
In a process that has sometimes gone into excruciating detail about how much more we may pay for our TV universe, how we’ll receive programs, how big a role advertising will play and what we’ll see between the ads – a big problem should have been hard to overlook. But on this day, James Roots, executive director of the Canadian Association of the Deaf, made a passionate presentation making it clear he and 310,000 deaf Canadians feel ignored by the industry.
Although Canada began captioning TV programming in 1981 and a human rights decision in 2002 required 100% captioning, Roots says deaf people are frustrated with the gaps in the system, the litany of errors in some programming and lax monitoring. He says he thinks “nobody on the Commission or licensees is a caption consumer!”
Over the hearing’s first three days, Roots says, broadcaster after broadcaster answered questions about their record on providing closed captioning. (On Day 6, commissioner Ron Williams remarked to Beverley Milligan of Media Access Canada that U.S. programming arrives fully captioned and Canadian broadcasters aim to ensure captions appear on Canadian pre-recorded programming, live programming, ads and promotional spots.)
But Roots says the Commission didn’t do enough follow-up when broadcasters or specialties could not guarantee 100% captioning on their services. He says the Commission allows those who fall short to build to total coverage in increments. “No licensee should be exempt from a requirement to bring in 100% captioning within one year.”
CBC’s Sylvain Lafrance says Radio-Canada captions about 90% of its content. His colleague, Ray Carnovale, told the commission it’s sometimes hard to cope with live programming. CBC requires specially-trained captioners to work on its stenographic keyboard and trained people are scarce in the French-Canadian market. Combine that reality with an 11 p.m. sports program and Carnovale notes: “It is a talk show and the availability of closed captioners at that time of the day is difficult.”
Roots says when captioners are working on live programming, errors can be common. He recalls a hockey broadcast where two players’ names were misspelled throughout. He says he was assured the commentators pronounced the names correctly – “even Don Cherry!” Accuracy is a non-issue entirely if crawl text obliterates the captions.
Broadcasters said advertisers should be responsible for captioning ads. Some noted the advertiser’s meaning needs to be imparted precisely and stressed that legal or other technical text can’t be covered by captions.
Ron Lund, president and CEO of the Association of Canadian Advertisers, said he was surprised to hear ad captioning is a problem. He agreed that “once in awhile” ads are finished too close to airtime to allow time for captioning. But he said the ACA will notify its members and ask the production community “to address this… People should be (doing) closed captioning.”
Although Roots says broadcasters have been “doing a better job,” he wondered “how many of them watch every time without an audio track?” Like Milligan, he wants monitoring handled by third parties – perhaps a body linked to the CRTC – and common standards established. When he challenged the commissioners to mute their TVs for a month, commissioner Rita Cugini said she will do “that quality control test.”
Commissioner Cugini and her colleagues will also have to consider requests by commercial broadcasters for flexibility, or not, on ad minutes per hour: CTV asked “to eliminate the time restrictions on advertising” while promising to devote, on average, two minutes per hour to promoting Canadian programs; CanWest asked that the current 12-minute cap be redefined to exclude U.S. program promos; Quebecor asked that the cap be removed for private OTAs only, which includes TVA and Sun TV; and TQS wants status quo because it says adding inventory will lower prices.
On day seven, the ACA stood firmly opposed to extra ad minutes, not because “extra” would translate to excess inventory but because it would add more annoying interruptions and create too much ad clutter. That, in turn, would send consumers out in search of ad bypass technology, a.k.a. Commercial Avoidance Machines: PVRs.
“The net effect of all this is that advertisers can no longer be sure that their TV messages are even getting through,” said Judy Davey, a marketing VP for Molson Canada and chair of ACA’s broadcast committee. She adds since advertisers pay “substantial fees” for TV time, “we don’t think it is unfair to suggest that before we ask consumers to shell out for the broadcasters’ new ‘fee for carriage,’ that broadcasters try a little harder to guarantee ‘carriage for fee.’”
The national English producers association, CFTPA, went the other way. “To help conventional broadcasters achieve the higher level of financial support that we seek,” said Montreal producer Arnie Gelbart, “the CFTPA recommends that the CRTC… permit conventional broadcasters to increase commercial messages to 14 minutes per hour.” Gelbart ended the sentence with the phrase “in simulcast programs” during the presentation, but in questioning after, CFTPA president Guy Mayson said “we’d extend the 14 minutes across the board.”
The key element of the “higher level of financial support” sought by producers is money for drama production. As Breakthrough Entertainment’s Ira Levy explained, producers think broadcasters have the means to buy more Canadian. “Just one dollar of every five that conventional TV broadcasters spend on drama is allocated to domestic content. This simply isn’t good enough.”
CFTPA is asking that “the largest” OTA licensees “allocate 12% of broadcast revenues to priority programming, increasing over the course of the next license term to 15%. We specify that the largest portion of this should be dedicated to the creation of original Canadian drama.”
Beyond drama, there are requests that broadcasters be required to sign terms of trade deals – minimum standards for the creation of contracts fair to both sides – and that the CRTC institute a dispute resolution mechanism. CFTPA also hopes the Commission will ensure that the benefits packages payable when ownership of broadcasters changes hands are paid out to beneficiaries in a “transparent” manner.
The English producers opposes fee-for-carriage because, as Toronto producer Stephen Ellis said, “The broadcasters’ proposals are unconvincing in our view.” The association also declared itself “alarmed by proposals that any additional financial contributions… BDUs might be required to make should be taken from their existing mandatory contribution of 5% of revenues derived from broadcasting activities… It is time for the CRTC to restore the full 5% contribution” to funds intended for independent production.
Alberta producers are also looking for restoration, but in their case, it’s about reviving incentives for regional production. According to Alan Brooks, executive director of the Alberta Motion Picture Industry Association, all but news programming has disappeared from the westernmost prairie province since the CRTC’s 1999 TV policy arrived. “Non-news in-house program producers are gone and, in most cases, so is the person with the knowledge to work with the independent producers.”
Brooks, and Alberta producer Connie Edwards, said prairie production has been successful and still is, as the Saskatchewan-based production Corner Gas demonstrates. But they say the combination of a lack of minimum spending requirements for broadcasters and the withering of regional production incentives make it very difficult to convince broadcasters to investigate the possibilities. So they want a return to minimum spending and the creation of “a system for regional incentives.”
As with others on the last day, they remarked on the fact that broadcasters want producers to deliver HD programs, but pay no more for them. Incentives to produce in high definition would also be welcome.
Our Public Airwaves, a “public interest advocacy group” which works to support the aims of public broadcasting, pitched a $2 subscription fee for CBC/Radio-Canada that OPA executive director Arthur Lewis said would bring $240 million to CBC’s coffers. He did not say CBC should be the only FFC recipient, but he quoted Rogers CEO Ted Rogers, who said last week that the CBC is the only logical recipient if FFC is granted.
Lewis said with FFC, CBC could cut its reliance on advertising by one third. “I’d be distressed” if the CRTC said CBC should cut 100% of ads “because that would mean no new programming.”
Lewis and commissioner Richard French had a long discussion on whether FFC for CBC would amount to Canadians paying a second tax for CBC and French’s point of view on whether or not the Commission would have the authority to overrule the elected federal government and its decision on the funding levels for the CBC.
And a final word of wisdom from industry legend and former CRTC chair Pierre Juneau, back at the CRTC as a presenter for only the third time since he left in the mid-’70s. The man credited with jump-starting the Canadian content mindset in 1970 arrived with colleagues Florian Sauvageau (of the Caplan-Sauvageau report, a.k.a. 1986 Task Force on Broadcasting Policy) and York University political science professor Fred Fletcher to pitch the need to support media research.
After the presentation by three of the principals of Canadian Media Research Consortium, the commissioners took the opportunity to ask their thoughts on the issues under discussion at this hearing. “The basic problem,” Juneau said, “is the funding model of Radio-Canada” which is causing “a deterioration of the service Radio-Canada is supposed to offer.” He cited a study which compared the program quality of various services, their “distinctive” characters and their funding models. “Of all the organizations they studied the one least dependent on advertising was the BBC and its programming was the most distinctive.”
Sauvageau added that the less advertising a public broadcaster receives, the better it serves the public interest.
Juneau said that in a Globe and Mail article, former CBC executive Bill Neville had said CBC’s ad revenues put it in competition with the private sector. And he quoted Quebecor’s Pierre Karl Péladeau who said “this is not right. It’s a very strong argument that he put forward.”
Susan Tolusso is a freelance writer who covers the industry and is based in Ottawa.
