OTTAWA – Canada’s broadcasting regulator says it will allow questions on CBC’s new branded content division during regulatory hearings scheduled for next month, but stopped short of saying it would investigate the issue specifically.
“This is excellent news. We’re delighted that the issue has now reached the level where the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has to acknowledge it,” commented Jeffrey Dvorkin, former managing editor of CBC Radio.
Dvorkin is one of many current and former CBC and Société Radio-Canada (SRC) employees, as well as public broadcasting advocates, pushing to get the CRTC to “investigate” the public broadcaster’s new controversial branded content division, Tandem.
They wanted the study to be done as part of hearings for the renewal of CBC/Radio-Canada’s broadcasting license that are slated to begin next month. Critics complain that Tandem, which was initially announced last September, was not part of the broadcaster’s original licence renewal application earlier in 2019.
Branded content is an advertisement designed to appear in a style very similar to editorial content produced by a media outlet. It is generally identified as “paid content” or “sponsored content” and has existed for years in private media such as National Post, the Globe and Mail and the New York Times.
On Thursday, the CRTC’s Secretary General Claude Doucet published a note partially acquiescing to advocates’ demands. In short, he said that groups that were already slated to intervene during the hearings would be allowed to make oral and written arguments about Tandem and branded content.
Of course, the Crown corporation would also be allowed to reply to comments on Tandem, and the Commission itself “may choose to question the CBC/SRC further at the oral phase of the public hearing.”
Advocacy group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting also applauded the CRTC’s decision, saying it would allow the group to better address the “aggressive pursuit to commercialize CBC’s digital platforms.”
“We will now be adding Tandem to the list of unsavoury measures that CBC management is pursuing to chase profit. We want to keep the CBC as a public good, and that means scrapping Tandem,” said executive director Daniel Bernhard.
A CBC spokesperson declined to comment the CRTC’s decision.
In response to initial backlash at Tandem’s launch in September, CBC executives suspended the project before launching it again last week with nine new “guidelines” it says will better distinguish branded content from news.
But that has not quelled critics’ concerns, and pressure has been mounting against the public broadcaster lately as hundreds of influential current and former staff have signed multiple open letters exhorting CBC and Radio-Canada management to drop its push for branded content.
A petition launched by Friends of Canadian Broadcasting calling branded content “extremely insidious” and demanding that CBC/Radio-Canada abandon the idea had also amassed 15,000 signatures by Thursday morning.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
