The CRTC’s bureaucratic war to keep community media out of community hands

 

The Canadian airwaves are often perceived as a banal thing, driven by rather bland citizens accepting of a socially progressive, economically neo-liberal society. Yet, rather than being a product of people residing in Canada, it is instead the product of the Canadian state’s legislative and bureaucratic suppression of ethnic communities, Indigenous communities and dissenting voices. That suppression, beginning after the CRTC was founded via the Broadcasting Act in 1968, ensures that ethnic and community media are structurally prevented from substantively criticizing Canadian foreign policy. 

Community media was initially given some support by the CRTC, an arm of the Canadian state. In 1975, according to an unreleased journal report by Gretchen King, a Community Media Advocacy Centre (CMAC) Research Consultant and Assistant Professor of Multimedia Journalism and Communication at Lebanese American University, the CRTC mandated “cable companies to provide a community channel and financial support (based on a percent of revenues)”. In 1990, King explained that the CRTC put supporting a community channel as a mandatory element required “in return for the privilege of profiting from the use of public airwaves and cable infrastructure created through public policy”. Yet from 1997 onwards, the CRTC limited required expenses for large telecommunications companies and pushed support for independent media efforts (both community and ethnic) which relied on government funding, into the hands of telecoms who could keep more money in-house, effectively having “deregulated community television”.

By the 2010s, new methods of suppression were being conducted via the CRTC. They protected large television companies from community media organizations who repeatedly caught them in violation of licensing conditions and punished these organizations by blocking off critical opportunities for growth, even when forced to punish television companies. The experiences of Independent Community Television Montreal and its national project Tele1, in exposing misdeeds of large telecommunications companies and the CRTC’s efforts to protect these companies, is just the latest example.

This is only the top layer of the suppression cake the Canadian state maintains to control the airwaves.  (more...)

The CRTC’s bureaucratic war to keep community media out of community hands