What's local about local TV news?

There are hearings in Ottawa right now about the future of the Canadian television industry. On the one hand, you have the giants at CTVglobemedia and Canwest Global (which, together, own over 60% of the country's English television channels and hold 80% of the viewership) whining to keep their oligopoly (and have cable and satellite companies pay for it), on the other hand, cable companies like Shaw who want an open marketplace to bring more US channels into the market.

CTV is taking an interesting angle on this. Last week, they brought the lead news anchors of their 13 major owned-and-operated stations across the country together for a meeting in Ottawa to show the "importance" of local TV news to Canadians. They even put up a website about it, and each of their stations ran retrospectives on station histories and such during their newscasts.

Note the letter by CTV's executive vice-president of corporate affairs, Paul Sparkes. I'm not sure if he's seen his own newscasts, but what he talks about is pretty far removed from what I've been seeing. He talks about your "local TV station". Well, years ago they may have been locally owned, but virtually all of them have been bought by the national media conglomerates, and had the soul sucked out of them.

For starters, the news on my local CTV station comes from Halifax, Nova Scotia; a city over 4 hours' drive away in another province. We used to have a local newscast, but it was scrapped in the early 1980s. I sure as hell have never seen Steve Murphy at standard cookouts around here....he may do it all the time in Halifax, but why are we in Fredericton supposed to care about that? Just the other night, when Fredericton was flooding, rumours about the Halifax school board led the evening news. Not exactly local.

They're at "the local rink covering minor hockey"? Uhhh...90% of the time, their coverage of local hockey is putting up a score on a screen for 5 seconds. Forget about university or high school sports.

During the last New Brunswick provincial election, they pushed coverage off to ASN, a cable channel. Why? It was season premiere night on CTV! Nice to see where their priorties lie.

And don't think it's just CTV. Global has no local news presence at all in Ottawa, Canada's 4th largest city. CBC, the Crown corporation who is mandated to serve all Canadians, has a minimal at best presence in many cities in Ontario and smaller markets in the west. The 14th largest city in Canada, St. Catharines Ont., has no local TV stations at all.

It's interesting that neither CTV or Global want any strings attached as to what they do with the money that they may receive from cable operators once all is said and done. In other words...just buy more US programming and suck the life out of local news some more. This plea by CTV is painfully-obvious window dressing and many viewers see right through it.

There's no doubt that the erosion will continue further. The French Quebec network TQS is completely abandoning news later this year - despite a CRTC requirement they produce a minimum amount per week.

The licenses for most Canadian television stations are expiring in 2009, at which point public input will be asked before their renewal. I'll be sending something in that the bigwigs in Toronto probably won't like.

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