Commercial radio thinks their broadcasting is more important than ours: community radio

Private radio proposed government subsidies, community funding, and charitable status as its prescriptions for the ailing campus and community radio sector Tuesday—solutions the community radio sector called “patronizing.” “Many of their points were patronizing. They were suggesting that what we do is much less important than what they do,” Freya Zaltz, regulatory affairs director of the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA), told The Wire Report following hearings at the CRTC. The Canadian Association of Broadcasters, representing commercial radio at the hearings, said that was not its intention, and citing its own financial difficulties, rejected a community radio proposal to receive commercial funding. “I’m sorry to see that she felt we were patronizing,” Pierre-Louis Smith, the CAB’s chief regulatory officer told The Wire Report. “We believe that the community radio sector has a role to play, but we don’t believe that it is up to the private radio sector to be mandated to financially support the community radio sector.” Paul Ski, CEO of Rogers Media’s radio division, told the commission Tuesday that mandating private radio broadcasters to fund the campus and community radio sector would “not foster collaborative partnerships between the two.” Sylvie Courtemanche, vice-president of government relations at Corus Entertainment, added that it is difficult for private radio to provide more financial support to the community radio sector in light of the industry’s decline in revenue over the past 14 months. The CAB’s submission to the commission stated that one third of private radio stations were not profitable in 2008. Courtemanche said that the private industry’s contributions to Canadian content development (CCD) under the Broadcasting Act grew from $3.9 million in 1998 to $28.6 million in 2008. At the CRTC’s review of campus and community radio Monday, the sector said it needs an extra $20 million in yearly funding to survive. The CAB proposed Tuesday that it continue its voluntary contributions to the Community Radio Fund of Canada (CRFC). The fund started in 2008 with a donation of $1.4 million by Astral Media Radio to be spent on development programs within the sector over seven years. Earlier this year Astral Media donated another $300,000 to the fund. Smith said that it was still too early to judge the effectiveness of the private radio industry’s voluntary contributions to the CRFC. The CRFC has proposed that it become a recipient of additional Canadian content development dollars that the private radio industry must now contribute to organizations like the Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Recordings (FACTOR). “With a group of 66 other that are eligible for this type of funding, these would be dangerous precedents,” said Paul Larche, president of Larche Communications and president of the CAB’s independent radio caucus. The CAB urged that the federal government more actively support community and campus radio. “We believe the engagement of the Canadian government is essential,” said Raj Shoan, director of regulatory affairs at Astral Media. “The CRFC was originally envisioned as an organization that would be funded by the government.” Commissioner Peter Menzies questioned the value of using government funding to create community radio stations with a role similar to the CBC. But Courtemanche responded that community radio has a different social and cultural mandate than the CBC. “I think we can agree that the type of service that the community and campus radio stations would provide would be different from CBC radio or television,” she said. The CAB also argued that community radio stations should improve their efforts to apply for charitable status. As a registered charity, a radio station could hand out tax receipts to donors and have access to grants for charitable foundations. However, Courtemanche said the community radio sector may lack the legal counsel necessary to navigate the complicated process of attaining charitable status through the Canadian Revenue Agency. She suggested community and campus radio could benefit from the assistance good lawyers, and that the CAB would consider providing the necessary expertise. But Kevin Matthews, executive director of the NCRA, disagreed. “It’s not as if there aren’t people in our sector with expertise in pursuing charitable status,” Matthews told The Wire Report at the hearing. Radio stations no longer meet the Canadian Revenue Agency’s criteria to be charitable foundations, he said. The few community radio stations that have charitable status, Matthews said, received it before the Canadian Revenue Agency changed its regulatory policy for radio stations. “They think it’s simply difficult, but it’s impossible,” Matthews said. The CAB also recommended that community radio stations air a required minimum of 30 per cent spoken word content each week. This ran counter to the NCRA’s suggestion to lower the weekly minimum spoken word quota from 25 per cent to 15 per cent. Zaltz, of the NCRA, said that spoken word content takes more resources to produce than musical content. Stations in smaller markets would have trouble producing 30 per cent spoken word content each week, she said. But Ski, of the CAB, said community radio stations could repeat content throughout the day to meet the quota. “Repeating programs is not a bad thing,” he said. Spectrum scarcity has been another issue figuring prominently in the hearings. Wayne Stacey, the CAB’s technical counsel, said community radio stations should consider a greater presence on the Internet or the AM band in markets where FM frequencies are not available. Chris Gordon, president of CHUM Radio, suggested that it would not be “in the public interest” for the commission to recommend to the government that it set aside radio spectrum “for the expansion of campus and community radio stations.” He added: “When specific frequencies are set aside for only one category of license, everyone loses.”

Commercial radio thinks their broadcasting is more important than ours: community radio

Broadcast | January 19, 2010

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