One of the Problems with the CBC
A public broadcaster presupposes a consensus about the nature of the good, a consensus that the left has destroyed.
A very long time ago I attended an academic seminar on the history of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the Second World War, at which the presenter quoted the founding chairman of the BBC, John Reith, Lord Reith as he became in 1940, on his intention “to make the BBC as good as the British people will tolerate.”
I have no reference for that quotation, but it captures important points so well that it would be unfortunate should it turn out to be apocryphal. The witticism looks a long way down its nose at the British people, and some of the seminar room titters that greeted it did so too, though others also snickered back at the arrogance of Lord Reith. But no one questioned that the idea of the good was then considered unproblematic, as unproblematic as the idea that someone in authority knew what was good. Times have changed.
The BBC was founded in 1922, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, imitative as ever, in 1936. At that time, technical limitations, above all of cost, made of broadcasting what economists call a natural monopoly. It made no more sense to have multiple broadcasters than it did to have multiple electric systems or multiple telephone systems. As with telephones, technological change has removed the technical argument for monopoly, and hence for a nationally administered utility. My point here concerns Reith’s aspiration to provide the people with quality, whether they wanted it or not.
The internet has removed the technological case for the CBC, as it has for the Beeb and for other public broadcasters, and without a standard of cultural quality, there is no remaining coherent argument for the public subsidy of any cultural enterprise. Without an idea of quality — of the good — the defenders (and beneficiaries) of subsidies are reduced to arguing from representation or other political objectives.
One hears in Lord Reith’s words an allusion to Matthew Arnold’s famous reference to “the best that has been thought and said in the world” (Reith would certainly have known it), and Reith’s remark posits an unproblematic acceptance of the idea that some thoughts, like some art and some discourse, really are better than others, and also that there is value, social, moral or personal, in knowing those ideas or that art. What precise qualities or characteristics made some ideas better than others was of course always debatable, and the BBC (especially its famous Third Programme) did an excellent job of carrying debate on that and many other topics. But the intelligibility of the idea that some things are “better” than others, rooted in an idea of the good, was accepted, and if occasionally questioned, that was only for the purposes of common-room argument.
Also present and entirely self-conscious in Reith’s witticism was the equally Arnoldian belief that the people needed to be elevated, and would left to their own devices descend to level of The News of the World. The CBC also believes that its aim is to educate the people, who are by hypothesis ignorant and subject to the temptations of Hollywood’s specious glamour. But the CBC, and the class that runs it, lacks the honesty and self-confidence that Lord Reith brought to his ambitious project.
Without the belief that it is better in some ineffable way than its commercial competitors, the CBC’s raison d’être evaporates. The CBC today relies consciously on appeals to “telling Canadian stories” and “reflecting our diverse communities”, which is to say to authenticity, rather than on any explicit appeal to intellectual quality. But the idea that it is intellectually serious, and not merely grifting for page hits, lurks behind the CBC’s self-image and its self-justificatory rhetoric alike, however furtively and however inconveniently.
The CBC also has a nationalist purpose, appeals to “a shared national consciousness” being found in its corporate mission statement.1 One of the problems behind this is common to all nationalist projects: were the national culture as authentically present as the nationalists would like, they wouldn’t need 1.4 billion taxpayer dollars per annum to construct it. A national identity that claims popular authenticity while requiring taxpayer support is not as spontaneously authentic as it claims.
And the problem goes deeper: a cultural bureaucracy that wants to tell the people who they really are cannot logically claim to respect and value the very people who on their own premises need to be told what to think, what to value and even who to be. Elitism is inherent in the project. Lord Reith believed with some justification that he was more intelligent and a better judge than most of intellectual and journalistic quality, and made no bones about that confidence. The CBC’s CEO Catherine Tait, and indeed the journalists who write for the CBC, also believe that they are smarter and more perceptive than the rest of us. But they live in a more demotic era, and cannot directly avow their class arrogance, even to themselves.
What is missing today is a standard of intellectual or cultural value rooted not in an identity, let alone a nationalist project or an irrefragable authenticity, but in something less personal and less inherently political. What is missing is a standard of knowledge or judgement or intellectual and artistic quality on which there is a some general consensus. While many will join me in insisting that Reith, like Arnold and like most of our ancestors, was right to believe that there was such a standard, however difficult it might be to define programmatically, that consensus has disappeared. A standard of intellectual or cultural quality no longer exists as a politically tenable proposition.
It is the left, and particularly the CBC-listening academic and intellectual left — including all those pronoun people who use the CBC’s splattered pizza as their Twitter icon — with their critical theories and their post-modernistic disdain for everything once established, that has destroyed the possibility of any standard of intellectual or artistic quality. With that, the left destroyed among many other things the branch upon which its state broadcaster was sitting.