Evening Star

OK, I'll acknowledge that some individual employees may in fact be negatively affected by competition from Crowns. I'm just not sure that, on the whole, this is generally the case for the workforce in a given industry. As I stated earlier, it seems that the increased public funding and union protection could be beneficial. I mean, it is not generally my experience that private corporations are especially loyal to or concerned about most employees even without competition from Crowns, especially without union organization. If a private business's only social responsibility is to increase its profits within the guidelines of market competition, I have to assume that the conditions and opportunities of its workers are going to be secondary.

So you're acknowledging that it is mainly corporate owners and execs who are the 'victims' of competition from Crowns, then, not workers?

Is there anything to show that labour standards or employment levels in any industry are negatively affected by Crowns? Why do I never hear about unions demanding privatization? If anything, I would think that the presence of a stable, publicly-backed employer with an almost definitely unionized workforce would be good for potential workers.

I guess this is an answer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/policies/advertising.shtml

Well, tbf, I'd probably prefer it if CBC-TV carried as little advertising as CBC Radio does. I'm not sure how fiscally realistic that is though. (How does BBC manage it? Through the fees you mentioned earlier, Dancer? I'd be willing to move towards that.) Still, CBC is or should be doing something different from what private broadcasters are doing and is not oriented around profit so I don't see why all broadcasters should be subsidized (or not) at an equal level. That said, I'll admit that I'm not feeling that much sympathy for the corporate execs who are threatened by competition from Crown corporations.

Btw, like Shwa, I also don't agree that the government should be unable to compete with private businesses. And I thought it was free-marketeers who always argue that economics is not a zero-sum game anyway?

And what of these other examples?

2xpost Fair point, M. Dancer. But what do you think of the firing in the first place?

More examples here: http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/2002----.htm The 1992 study is Soley/Craig, I believe, and is cited elsewhere: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-165431169/advertiser-pressure-daily-newspapers.html. We have a citation for the Chrysler quote on p 125 here: http://books.google.ca/books?id=7oQms9_6ZtQC&pg=PA125&lpg=PA125&dq=chrysler+letter+magazines+%27In+an+effort+to+avoid+potential+conflicts, According to this book, the New Yorker has a policy of alerting about 50 companies about articles that might offend them. We also have sources on the next page of Digital Capitalism on e.g. the influence of the tobacco industry on health reporting in even relatively recent media history. There is more on pp58-61 here (Soley/Craig are cited again): www.javnost-thepublic.org/article/pdf/2004/2/4/

" b ) substantial..."

Smallc: I'm just not that trustful that the marketplace will always provide coverage of the issues that is a) unbiased by the interests of the media's owners and advertisers and/or substantial and comprehensive when it may be more profitable to oversimplify and make things entertaining. Herman's and Chomsky's 'propaganda model' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model) may be overstated but I don't think it's useless. (A questionable, if not clear-cut, case can be seen in the Fox/Monsanto case: http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20001204.htm http://www.sptimes.com/News/081900/TampaBay/Reporter_wins_suit_ov.shtml) On the whole, I do generally think that public broadcasters such as BBC and CBC are a little better, and at the least provide a valuable counterbalance, here. I thought we agreed about this before? Maybe I'm thinking of someone else.

Development and dissemination of Canadian-made programming; news/information programming that is less driven by commercial pressures. You've watched CTV and Global, right?

Sounds more like an argument for improving CBC-TV than for privatizing it. (And no, I don't think the latter would lead to the former.)

It was widely known enough that

I did back up whatever claims I made on the other thread.

Given that some of the same people are making the same unsupported claims about the CBC's 'liberal bias', using the same 'debating' 'techniques', I think it's fair to say "yes"?

We more or less had the same CBC debate here in October (starting p 16, I believe): http://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums//index.php?showtopic=17062 The "CBC is liberal propaganda" crew kept making that assertion, refusing to back it up, and stating variants on "You wouldn't understand" or "YOU'RE defending the CBC so it must be leftist neener neener!"

Thanks, this is at least a little more convincing than just a quoted assumption by the CEO of the affected media outlet. Without knowing the details of the case, I would tend to oppose denying a licence strictly on the grounds of 'crude comments', yes. It's worth noting, though, that this is actually a case of a Canadian outlet having its licence denied. So it seems that, if anything, the CRTC, like the FCC, simply has certain content standards it enforces (not very often these days, considering this was a first), regardless of the Origin of the programming, and is not mainly focused on "banning American media content".

This is different from your first comment: Sirius suspecting or claiming that they suspect the CRTC would eventually force them to drop Stern, with no previous CRTC actions against Stern to support the claim, is not the same as the CRTC actually banning media content from crossing the border. Perhaps you're right here? I never found that Canadian TV censored more than US network TV. (On the contrary, if anything.)

If anything, the FCC has done much more to censor Stern, considering that they've levied $2.5M in fines on radio stations that broadcast his show.

Yes, read the fine print indeed. The CRTC did not ban or threaten to ban or even censor Stern, even in response to complaints, as shown by the two actual CRTC decisions I linked. Gary Slaight expressed a bullshit assumption that the CRTC "would 'eventually' [scare quotes added] force [sirius] to take Stern down." Anyone can make any assumption about eventualities. It's easy to deflect blame in this way.

As I suspected, the CRTC never banned Howard Stern. Whatever actions were taken were taken by stations themselves or by the CBSC, a non-government industry self-regulating organization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Canada#Howard_Stern http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/1999/DB99-554.htm http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/1998/DB98-213.HTM

Do you mean that in terms of absolute numbers, US programmes cover more than 34M people, since the US has 10x our population and tax base? If so, that point seems both obvious and, frankly, moot if the US programmes still leave many tax-paying citizens uninsured. This is just Wikipedia but the quoted numbers don't suggest that the cross-border health care traffic is actually that substantial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada#Cross-border_health_care At least one of the quoted studies can be found here: http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/21/3/19.full

Dwarf in what sense? Clearly not in terms of providing universal coverage. In the sense that medicare doesn't cover things like dental or eye care or drugs, you're right. (I'd be happy to start moving towards more public coverage of those things.) The system does provide universal single-payer coverage for most medical services though. I'll look into the numbers regarding the 'brain drain'.

Who said we're satisfied with it? The fact that we're having this discussion in the first place suggests that we have concerns and doubts. However, when looking to other models to try to improve, it makes sense to look to the US as a model of privatized coverage. And health coverage in the US does not seem to be working better than our socialized insurance system. Perhaps France and Japan (and some would say Scandinavian or even British models) are good models to consider. Perhaps America is a good model to consider in other areas, such as technological development or the sheer capacity you mention. Do we need privatized insurance coverage for those things? On what grounds do you judge France's system to be much better (despite the nearly identical life expectancy)? I'm not denying it. I'm just curious what criteria you're using and interested in more info.