CBC VP Kirstine Stewart resigns: Debriefing, please. © 2013 by Wade Rowland What does Kirstine Stewart know about the future of the CBC that the…
Anyone watching the new Conservative party attack ad aimed at the new Liberal leader, Justin Trudeau, might well wonder why we should permit such deliberately…
We all agreed that the Life of Pi 3-D special effects were spectacular, and that the acting was on the whole pretty good. But something seemed to be missing, and the film seemed somehow deeply unsatisfying. Twelve hours later, after a night’s sleep, I had an answer that seems to me to make sense.
News on public service broadcasters like Canada’s CBC that feature advertising cannot avoid sacrificiing journalistic integrity ito ratings and audience share.
The modern Olympics, a commercial juggernaut par excellence, has now become the CBC’s tar baby.
There are two obvious responses to the crisis facing our public broadcaster, and both involve eliminating advertising on CBC television. Both the theory and practice of public service media demand this.
Market forces that are alleged to maximize quality and minimize price in consumer products systematically produce mediocrity in commercial mass media output. Consumers of commercial broadcast media do not get “what they want” from the broadcasters. Although the dynamic is widely recognized, its sources and mechanics are seldom analyzed. Identifying the product of commercial mass media as audiences rather than programming is the key to delineating the issues through an analysis of the market for this product. This entails an analysis of the determinants of quality in media. There are signs that web-based media are increasingly falling under quality constraints similar to those experienced in traditional advertising-supported media.