Save local TV, not CTV's profit margins

Major Canadian broadcast television networks such as CTV and Global have of late been running a 'Save Local Television' campaign.

The networks allege that they are losing money because cable companies won't pay them extra money to carry their digital signals, the way they do for specialty channels. If this doesn't change, CTV argues, they will be forced to cut back on local content to the point where local television in this country (save for a bit of CBC programming and Rogers-type community access channels) will become extinct.

Before I start explaining all the ways in which this is a horrible argument and CTV is far more at fault for any death of local television than Rogers or the CRTC or anyone else, I should include a disclaimer. So here it is:

I like local media. A lot. I'm convinced that the best way for newspapers to remain relevant in the Internet age is to put a greater focus on local content. I listen to local radio because they'll tell me if something important is going on while Internet/satellite radio often won't. I think brantford.com is an excellent concept and am frustrated at the essential monopoly status held by three media companies in Kitchener-Waterloo. So this is not some sort of free-marketist "if local television fails it's because local television was meant to fail and that's too bad" point of view.

So let's get into this. Basically, CTV saying "give us more money or we might not be able to afford local television" is like the fifth-grade bully beating you up for the first half of recess and then telling you he'll stop if you give him money.

There used to be such a thing as local television. In Kitchener, CKCO. In Montreal, CFCF. In other cities, other call letters. But these stations have all been rebranded and gutted to the point where they have no local identity anymore.

Take CKCO, for example. Now known as "CTV Southwestern Ontario", and the last time I heard anyone call it CKCO on-air was veteran reporter Art Baumunk, by mistake, over two years ago. Their entire schedule of local programming consists of the hour-long newscasts at 12 and 6 during the work week, 30-minute newscasts at 6 on weekends and 11:30 all week long, pseudo-news shows What's Your Point? and Provincewide, and a Sunday morning church service. Combined, that's 16.5 hours of local programming each week. There are 168 hours in a week, so we're looking at just under 10% of CTVSWO's programming as local.

Every few years, the station will celebrate some sort of anniversary and trot out clips from the past. Even from these brief clips, it's obvious that the then-CKCO was producing far more local content - possibly even the majority of its programming was local.

Now, there's no local content, and people of a certain age don't even recognize the CKCO initials (I hesitate to use them around anybody my age). This is entirely because of decisions made by CTV in the past to slash local content - and now they're the ones supposedly looking to *save* it? "Give us money and we'll stop destroying local television". How is that not extortion?

But let's look at this from a different angle. CTV claims they are being put out of business because specialty channels are taking away too much of their audience. Specialty channels like TSN, MuchMusic, the Comedy Network, the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, Bravo, Space, and Fashion Television - all of which (and many more) are owned by CTV. This stage of their argument is "we started new channels and it never occurred to us that people might actually watch them rather than our existing channels at times".

How about the amount of money (often millions of dollars) CTV pays out to acquire American programming? For the cost of the CSI series alone, I bet they could afford a whole lot more local content.

Best of all, the people who most rely on local television - those in remote, rural communities - are inching closer and closer to being completely without it, as a result of the CRTC's mandate for all stations to be broadcasting digitally by September 2011. Once the switchover happens, it is expected that analog signals could be removed in a few years.

The ironic part of all this? I'm in favour of fee-for-carriage. I think all stations/networks should be competing on an even field, at least when it comes to what they're getting from cable companies. I'm just not in favour of conglomerates cutting local television content for decades and then claiming to be the only ones fighting in its interest.

Oh, and Toronto Sun TV critic Bill Brioux has a list of 25 causes more worthy than Save Local TV. So there's that.

--Ryan