The New Tvontario: Salvation Or Suicide for Public Educational Broadcasting

The New TVOntario: Salvation or Suicide for Public Educational Broadcasting Kirsten Kozolanka Carleton University Abstract: When faced with privatization by the Ontario government, the public educational broadcaster TVOntario took a pro-active stance in the face of the neo-liberal ideology of reduced public expenditure and institutional restructuring. TVO won short-term salvation by embracing market model methods, but in so doing it may have lost its niche as a public educational broadcaster. It now faces two major policy challenges. It must balance its general-audience broadcast arm with its newly refocused educational arm and it must negotiate possible political interference from the imperative to connect the government’s newly revised school curricula to its new technology-in-education arm. This paper also situates the TVO example as a rejection of the privatization agenda of the Gov- ernment of Ontario. Finally, this paper uses the TVO example to raise questions about hybrid models of broadcasting. Résumé: Pour éviter que le gouvernement de l’Ontario ne la privatise, la station éducative publique TVOntario a adopté une position qui prend les devants face à la volonté néolibérale de réduire les dépenses publiques et restructurer les institutions. À court terme, TVO s’est protégé en adoptant des méthodes axées sur le marché, mais celles-ci lui ont peut-être coûté son créneau particulier à titre de diffuseur éducatif public. En effet, TVO doit maintenant relever deux défis politiques imposants. La station doit équilibrer le besoin de s’adresser à un auditoire général avec celui remis au point d’offrir des émissions éducatives. En outre, elle doit parer à des interventions politiques possibles émanant de son obligation de relier le nouveau curriculum scolaire à sa nouvelle branche consacrée à la tech- nologie dans l’éducation. Cet article discute de TVO comme manifestant un rejet des projets de privatisation du gouvernement ontarien. Finalement, l’article utilise l’exemple de TVO pour soulever des questions sur des modèles de radio- diffusion hybrides. In the complex political and communications environment of the 1990s, strategies to preserve public service broadcasting that have drawn on market-driven broadcasting models have been looked at variously as salvation or suicide. The struggle against privatization1 and the subsequent restructuring of the Ontario Educational Communications Authority (TVOntario) stand as an example of a rare dynamic Kirsten Kozolanka is a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Communication at Car- leton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6. E-mail: [email protected] leton.ca Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 26 (2001) 53-68 ©2001 Canadian Journal of Communication Corporation 53 54 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 26 (1) and pro-active response by a public broadcaster when faced with the now familiar neo-liberal ideology of reduced public expenditure and institutional restructuring. The educational public broadcaster TVOntario has been a cultural agency of the Government of Ontario since its inception in 1970 (Government of Ontario, 1992). It operates two educational, non-commercial television services, TVO (English-language) and TFO (French-language),2 and provides a wide range of curriculum-based programs directly to Ontario schools. TVO is available to 98.5% of Ontarians and TFO to 76%. If its ratings are the test of success, TVO’s success throughout the 1990s has been phenomenal. One of its most popular programs, Saturday Night at the Movies, draws 400,000 viewers. Studio 2, its English-language current affairs show launched in 1994, has 100,000 per viewing minute, ahead of NewsWorld and specialty channels (“Peter and the Wolves,” 1996). The TVO Kids weekday programming accounts for almost 24% of the network’s overall viewing hours and 30% of afternoon viewers. Overall, 2.4 million people, or one in five Ontarians, watch TVO and TFO every week. TVO accomplished this while absorbing massive reductions in its government allocation, from $91 million in 1992 to $48 million in 1999. The Ontario government announced in June 1998 that it was not privatizing but “refocusing” TVO. TVO remained a government agency and was reprieved from the threat of privatization, but the government rejected the renewal option proposed by TVO and instead refocused TVO on a narrow educational role. Although the achievement by TVO in becoming more entrepreneurial and less dependent on government funding is considerable, the expensive current affairs shows and imports it used to attract viewers now seem superfluous to the government’s objectives. In other words, TVO has won the proverbial battle, but could still lose the war. The new TVO faces two major policy challenges. First, it must create a balance between its broadcast arm, with its popular, general-audience programming, and its educational arm, now to include technology, computer literacy, and skills development and training. Last year, the government launched a $5 million TVO fund to develop skills training programs for the Internet, yet it continues to reduce TVO’s general operating grant. How will TVO manage the competing financial demands? Second, the imperative to connect the government’s newly revised school curricula closely to the technology-in-education arm may create problems of political interference. How will TVO, as a public educational broadcaster, manage potential conflicts between pedagogical objectives and political objectives which may be inappropriate? The TVO story is a key defeat for the neo-liberal privatization agenda of the Ontario government. Before coming to power in June 1995, the Conservative Party’s election platform included a promise “to actively explore the sale” of assets, including TVO. Now well into its second electoral mandate, the government has accomplished little in this regard. Related to this is the hard-fought battle by TVO and its supporters against privatization. The TVO campaign follows a Kozolanka / The New TVOntario 55 pattern found in other examples of campaigns that counter neo-liberal legislation and policy initiatives, notably in Great Britain (Deacon & Golding, 1994) and New Zealand (Scott, 1995). The engagement of the public in the campaign struggle and the ideological coherence of the government are critical to the success of such campaigns. TVO, with its strong membership base and commu- nity presence, was well positioned to maximize these assets, while the government’s coherence in the end was lacking. But has the privatization battle left the new TVO in an impossible financial and policy situation? How much more growth potential does TVO have before a renewed restructuring process is neces- sary? If needed, can the public be mobilized again? The TVO example also raises significant questions about the viability of hybrid models of broadcasting. Can the two be balanced or is it impossible for a public educational broadcaster to serve two masters, the market and the public? Political and policy environment The crisis facing TVO in the early 1990s was not unique. Other public and educational broadcasters in the Western world were coping with the same reconsidera- tion of the role of public institutions, linked to a neo-liberal project that had its roots in British Thatcherism in the late 1970s. Thatcherism was symptomatic of and a major contributor to a wider political and social crisis which saw “a pro- found shift in people’s attitudes to the State and to the State’s proper role in social life” (Garnham, 1983, p. 20). Thatcherism and market model ideology were sup- ported by other complex environmental trends (internationalization, deregulatory ideology, technological change, and social changes) that put pressure on public institutions to adopt market models (Dyson & Humphreys, 1988). By 1985, major public broadcasting institutions in the Western world were suffering what Raboy (1989) calls an identity crisis, “as they became less and less able to satisfy their publics, increasingly fragmented and self-identifying by interest group rather than national collectivity” (p. 70). Under attack ideologically, economically, and socially, public broadcasters seemed unable to mount a defence in support of their values or vision. Their strength of purpose was being eroded from within, as the traditional proponents of public broadcasting were “replaced by managers, accountants and technical experts with different commitments and priorities” (Rowland & Tracey, 1990, p. 19). Few options were open to public broadcasters. They could resist and maintain the status quo, which earned little support, or they could resort to what Rowland & Tracey call the “temporary barbarism” of the market model—abandoning their purity in order to survive. The economic or market model viewed the audience as consumers and the cultural or public model saw the audience as citizens, but the distinctions between the two models and the assumptions underpinning them were becoming increasingly blurred (Jeffrey, 1996). In Canada, broadcasting is already a hybrid system with cross-development. It is shifting towards the private sector at the same time as the private sector is becoming more reliant on public money and public policy measures (Raboy, 1996). 56 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 26 (1) Educational broadcasting faces as inhospitable a political and economic environment as that facing public broadcasting. In the U.S., the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has long been under attack, facing cutbacks and the threat of privatization. To Rowland & Tracey (1990), the first wrong steps were taken by PBS in the 1960s, when it emphasized general audience programming over its traditional, instructional programming in order to attract corporate sponsors. In so doing, its education function and focus became lost. In Canada, Access: Learning and Skills Television was once owned and oper- ated as an educational service by the Alberta government. It was sold to the private sector for $1 in 1994. The strategy of the owners was to narrowcast, keeping a tight focus on learning and returning the network to its educational roots (Livesey, 1997).

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