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| English Radio in Quebec |
by Melanie Fishbane and Mary Vipond
(167 K)
Post Production of a Recording, 1948
In 1952, Gui Caron, the Québec leader of the Labour
Progressive Party and a candidate for the riding of St. Louis in
Montreal, asked CFCF if he and his colleagues could buy some
air-time in order to promote the party’s platform for the
upcoming election on July 16. J.
Allan Hammond, the Manager of CFCF, refused his request. Caron complained to the federal
government’s regulatory agency for such matters, the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In
response to the initial investigation conducted by the
Supervisor of Station Relations in Québec, Maurice Foudrault,
Hammond wrote on June 17, 1952 that he had refused Caron because
“We feel that the broadcasting of communist propaganda is not in
the public’s interest” (Hammond 1952a).
The idea that CFCF was the protector of the public
interest was nothing new for the private broadcaster. A couple of years earlier S.M.
Finlayson, the president of the Marconi Company of Canada (which
owned CFCF), had suggested to the Royal Commission on the Arts,
Letters and Sciences (more commonly known as the Massey-Lévesque
Commission) that because the private broadcaster was a
“community station,” and had to know its listeners and what they
desired, it was in fact “much more a public station” than the
CBC itself (Finlayson 1949, 8). As
was and is to be expected of a commercial radio station, during
the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s CFCF was motivated by its financial
profitability. Because most of its
income came from advertisers who wished to reach large numbers
of listeners, obviously it was in CFCF’s interest to know and
understand what the listeners believed they needed. But Finlayson and Hammond pushed it
further than that. They both
implied that because they knew CFCF’s listeners’ desires, they
knew their “interests” as well. When
making
controversial programming choices, the station equated “the
audience” with “the public” (or to put it another way, the
consumer with the citizen) and defended itself by claiming that
it was acting in the public interest. Hammond
believed that he was fully justified in denying Caron’s request
because he thought he was doing what the station’s audience -
public - wanted. He knew that
airing something which could be interpreted as communist
propaganda would anger some - probably many - of CFCF’s
listeners, but he justified his action not by admitting that he
feared alienating his audience but by using abstract concepts
like the “public’s interest.”
Another interpretation of the listeners’ interests was
revealed, however, when the Marconi Company tried to sell the
station in 1963 to Radio Futura Limited, owners of the bilingual
station CKVL Verdun. In this case,
it can be argued that CFCF’s top executives were willing to
sacrifice CFCF radio’s audience to an unknown future for the
sake of the development of the potentially much more profitable
television station they also owned. The
new regulatory authority, the Board of Broadcast Governors
(BBG), did not believe that the sale was in the public interest,
and refused to allow it. In a third
case, in 1974-5, the station encouraged its listeners to sign a
petition against the introduction of Bill 22, the Liberal
government’s attempt to preserve and promote the French language
by giving it official status in civic administration and the
workplace and by reducing access to English schools for
immigrants’ children. Now, in a
changed climate of growing francophone nationalism, CFCF claimed
that actively promoting what were later called to be called
“English rights” was in their listeners’ and (according to their
perspective) the public’s interest.
By examining these three controversies, we will
demonstrate how CFCF’s status as a “community station,” when
combined with its necessary search for profits, was understood
by its management to mean that it must ascertain and act in the
interests of its listeners - in other words it must give them
what they (or the majority of them) wanted.
But the station’s listeners were transformed in
management rhetoric into “the public,”and what was in their
interest became by definition in the interest of the “public” or
the whole community. Nevertheless,
when deemed financially necessary, Marconi/CFCF management was
quite willing to sell its “public” to the highest bidder.
Advertisement for the Marconi Company
(190 K)
Canadian Wireless, June 1922
Communism is Not in the Public’s
Interest: the Gui Caron Controversy
The circumstances surrounding the case of Gui Caron
suggest that the managers of CFCF chose the defence of “the
public’s interest” as a tactic to dissuade the courts and the
federal government from pressing charges and punishing the
station for breaking the law. Supervisor
of Station Relations Foudrault
received Gui Caron’s letter of complaint on June 12, 1952. He quickly responded by writing to
Hammond: “In his letter, Mr. Caron complains of your refusal and
that of [Broadcasting Manager] Mr. Victor George to sell him
time on CFCF for the broadcast of a few political talks on
behalf of himself and three other candidates of his party”
(Foudrault 1952). Foudrault
stressed that by saying No to Caron, Hammond and George were
violating Article 8, Section 2 of the Regulations which stated:
“Each station shall allocate time for political broadcasts as
fairly as possible between the different parties or candidates
desiring to purchase or obtain time for such broadcasts” (see
Bird 162).
Hammond and George did not
believe that they had broken any regulation.
Hammond declared: “We are also aware that our license
requires us to operate in the public’s interest,” and went on,
as already quoted: “We feel that the broadcasting of communist
propaganda is not in the public’s interest” (Hammond 1952a). Caron, apparently sensing that he
would not get timely satisfaction from the CBC regulators,
approached the legal firm of Marcus and Feiner to represent him. Their letter to the CFCF management
stated that failure to comply with the CBC’s regulations within
48 hours would be “construed by us as a refusal on your part”
(Marcus 1952). But the station
remained adamant. It offered a
second line of defence at this point, communicated in a June 19
letter to Foudrault. Here Hammond
argued that because the Labour Progressive Party was not yet
registered as a political party in Quebec, its representatives
could not claim to be “candidates” in the sense of the
regulations (Hammond 1952b). On July 3, the Superior Court
issued a writ of mandamus ordering CFCF to put Caron on the air,
which the station again ignored (Montreal Herald 1952).
Although Caron was defeated on July 16, he continued to
pursue the matter. On October 17
the Superior Court ruled that although the station should have
“allocated him a fair proportion of radio broadcasting time,”
there was little it could do three months after the fact. However, the Court did say that the
“Plaintiff was entitled to the remedy sought and would
accordingly be entitled to the cost of the proceedings”
(Superior Court of Canada 1952). Here
is
where the documented story ends. Whether
or
not CFCF honoured this demand is unknown, although presumably it
had little choice; the CBC does not seem to have taken any
further action once the case moved to the courts.
It is important to mention that CFCF was not the only
Montreal station concerned about airing what could be considered
communist propaganda. A
correspondent informed Victor George on June 19 that
“Incidentally, CKAC and CJAD are also refusing time to the
commies...” (Kingan 1952). Why Caron took only CFCF to court and
not the other stations is unknown. It
may be suggested, however, that if Hammond and George had
responded positively to Caron’s demands, CFCF would have been in
the position of being the only private station to allow the
Labour Progressive Party on the air - which undoubtedly would
have caused criticism from its listeners. It
may be concluded, then, that while in this situation CFCF’s
executives invoked the public’s interest as the grounds for
their refusal, their real concern was not the broader public
interest that the citizenry be well informed, but their fear
that they might alienate that narrower public - their own
listeners - by broadcasting unpopular material.
Financial Possibilities and the
Public’s Interest: CFCF’s Attempted Sale to Radio Futura
Ltd.,1963
In 1962 and 1963, CFCF was again in the spotlight when it
tried to sell its AM and FM stations to Radio Futura Ltd. Radio Futura owned CKVL-AM Verdun, a
bilingual station (25% English, 75% French programming) and had
a license as well for an FM station. The
most important issues arising during the public hearing held by
the new federal regulatory body, the BBG on March 26, 1963
concerned the implications of such a sale for Montreal’s radio
listeners.
As is normal in these cases. Marconi had apparently let
it be known quietly in the broadcasting community the previous
fall that its two stations were for sale. Some
eight or ten parties held meetings with Marconi officials, but
only Jack Teitolman, President of Radio Futura, made a firm
offer of just over $1 million (Montreal Star 1963). The
BBG hearing, then, was to confirm that the sale would be in
accord with the regulations of the Board, and most particularly
that it would be in the best interest of the industry and the
listening public. The end result
was that the Board concluded that the sale was not in fact in
the public interest, because it would, by the definition of the
broadcasting regulations, duplicate service.
As an official in the Department of Transport wrote to
CFCF: “It is the opinion of the Board that the issue to one
party of two licenses to operate in the same medium in a
particular market can be justified only where this appears to be
necessary to ensure the support of a minority service (e.g. in
another language) (Nixon 1963). It was apparently the Board’s
opinion that the English-language service of CFCF was secure
under Marconi’s ownership, and therefore that the sale was not
necessary to protect that minority interest.
On the other hand, it could have been argued that there
were disproportionately few French-language stations in the
Montreal market, and that CKVL’s suggestion that it would switch
to 100% French-language programming if the purchase went through
might have enhanced the francophone presence on Montreal
airwaves. This argument was
apparently not raised, however. CKVL
did
subsequently switch to all-French programming anyway.
The Board’s conclusion that Radio Futura should not be
allowed to own four stations (two AM and two FM) in the same
market was in accordance with its long-standing policies, so not
of great surprise. But in the
course of the hearing some points of interest about some of the
realities of English-language radio at the time were revealed. One of the issues raised concerned the
programming that would be broadcast on CFCF in the event of the
change of ownership. A lengthy
discussion occurred about where Radio Futura’s management hoped
to find English-language live talent for the new drama and
variety programs it proposed (CFCF 1963, 111-121).
Although Radio Futura’s lawyer, A.B.R. Lawrence, argued
that there was plenty of talent available, including
English-speakers, immigrants, and bilingual French-speakers, and
although evidence was produced that the Musicians’ Guild of
Montreal strongly supported the deal on the grounds that it
would increase “employment and revenue for our membership”
(105), the Board does not seem to have been completely
convinced. This discussion reveals,
moreover, that CFCF was perceived
to be lagging in its employment of local talent for its
programs. The reality was that CFCF was facing increasing
competition from CJAD and CFOX on the AM dial, and had
apparently decided not to make the increased investment in the
radio station necessary to salvage its share of the audience.
The members of the BBG were particularly interested in
this question: exactly why did Marconi want to sell “the oldest
station, not only in Canada but ... in the world?” (145). Victor George, General Manager of the
station by this time, was bluntly asked by a member of the Board
whether Marconi would be interested in selling the radio station
if it did not also own a television station.
George tried to evade the question, but admitted that it
remained important for the company to retain “a vehicle to carry
our image to the people” as it had done since 1919. His
questioner reached the obvious conclusion that “if you had not
got the TV you would still be wanting to present your image to
the people of Montreal [via radio]” (146-7).
Victor George in fact explained Marconi’s
calculations regarding its business interests to the Board
members quite frankly:
We have a very broad responsibility in our company
in this whole business of electronics. We
try
to live up to that responsibility. One
of
the immediate ones is the operation of the TV station in
Montreal, which we try to make carry a good image of our
organization and to win and hold the respect of the TV viewers. Quite apart from that and in addition
to it, we have responsibilities in other phases of electronics. We have many things coming along, new
products, better ways of doing things. We
are trying to do what we can for the Canadian economy in
building an export business... On
account of our other organizations, we do not have unlimited
resources, time, money and so on. So
all the time we of the general management are making decisions -
should be do this, or should we do that? This
is
not just altruistic talk, because as goes the Canadian economy,
so we go, and we feel that we must pay tribute to it. So one of the decisions we made was
that, having received an offer for the stations, we studied it
in the light of all these things and we thought
that we would best be serving the interests of the
company and all that the company
represents if we agreed to this sale. (98-99)
While he was somewhat disingenuous in his implication
that the offer for CFCF had come out of nowhere, it is clear
that Marconi considered two main questions when it made the
decision to sell: where it wanted to put its priorities in the
future, and the need to remain in the public eye through some
sort of broadcasting medium. The
future profitability of television was much more attractive than
that of radio; hence the radio station lost its place in the
company’s plans. Although George also argued that “there [was]
nothing desperate” (99) in the sale of CFCF, it is quite clear
that the company wished to divert its energies to its
manufacturing sector and that the expansion of the television
station fit better into that scenario. When the BBG turned the
sale down, however, the company accepted the verdict and
continued to operate the station for another decade.
CFCF and the CRTC
(173 K)
Le Jour, 1976
Bill 22 and the Petition that Might Have
Cost CFCF its License
The changes in Quebec politics in the 1970s had some
profound effects on how CFCF-AM interacted with its listening
public. Being an English-language
station in a province whose political agenda increasingly
focused on expanding the use of French
raised for the management the question of how best to represent
the interests of the anglophone community. A station which had
traditionally argued that it was motivated by the “public’s
interest,” more and more narrowed its focus to the interests of
English-speaking public. In
the charged political atmosphere, the station opted to define
service to its public - at least on occasion - as advocacy for
“English rights” rather than to maintain an attitude of
neutrality.
One opportunity for the station to assert its presence
was when the Liberal government of Robert Bourassa introduced
Bill 22 in 1974. From September 3
to September 16, 1975, CFCF-AM used air time to encouraged its
listeners to sign a petition against the Bill.
Not surprisingly, the petition campaign aroused anger
among some listeners, who complained to the BBG’s successor as
federal regulator, the Canadian Radio and Television Commission
(CRTC).
The CRTC responded to these protests by sending a telex
to the station requesting that it send in the tapes of the
controversial broadcasts. CFCF sent
the CRTC the audio recordings of all the broadcasts between the
3 and 16 of September, but the Commission was very unhappy with
the fact that the tapes of the programs on September 14 and 15
were inaudible - a breach of CRTC regulations.
The preliminary investigation by the Commission concluded
that CFCF seemed to be allowing discussion both for and against
Bill 22 itself, but that it did not broadcast any criticism of
the station’s decision to circulate the petition.
The CRTC therefore concluded that the station had failed
to provide a sufficient degree of balance in its programming.
(CRTC 1976, 453). More specifically, the Commission was
referring to Section 2 of the 1968 Broadcasting Act, which
stated:
2c. All persons licensed to carry on broadcasting
undertakings have a responsibility for programs they broadcast
but the right to freedom of expression and the right of persons
to receive programs, subject only to generally applicable
statues and regulations, is unquestioned;
2d. The programming provided by the Canadian
broadcasting system should be varied and comprehensive and
should provide reasonable, balanced opportunity for the
expression of differing views on matters of public concern....
(Bird 374)
In March 1976 CFCF’s license came up for renewal, and the
subject of its actions around the petition were presented and
discussed. In its report on “the
issues raised by CFCF’s anti-Bill 22 campaign,” the CRTC
concluded that the case was “not unique, but arose out of
contemporary conditions in which controversial programming takes
place throughout the system” (CRTC 1976, 1)
The report went on to assert that the CRTC believed
broadcasters should be “encouraged to experiment with and find
new approaches, formats and standards for controversial
programs.” While it concluded that
in this specific case CFCF had “dealt with a controversial
matter of public interest in which it espoused principally one
side of the issue [and] ... failed to provide adequately in its
own programming for a reasoned and responsible discussion of the
subject,” the CRTC nevertheless renewed the station’s license. As a number of scholars have noted
(see Hardin 1985), at the time the regulatory body’s only
realistically available penalty for even a minor indiscretion
was cancellation of the license - a rather draconian punishment
given the substantial investment involved in station ownership
and operation. Consequently in this
instance, as in virtually every other instance to that time, the
station’s license was renewed despite the CRTC’s conclusion that
it had breached Regulation 3d. CFCF
deemed its actions in the interests of its mainly anglophone
listening public; it risked license cancellation to cement that
relationship and was able to do so with impunity.
Knowing what the public wanted was always a primary
concern for Marconi and CFCF. As a
station that prided itself on being involved in its community
and representing what it believed were its listeners’ needs,
CFCF took it upon itself in many situations to argue that
whatever it did in business and programming had the public’s
interest at heart.
Thus, in rejecting Caron’s request in 1952, CFCF argued
that it was in fact respecting its listeners’ abhorrence of
communism. While it could be argued that a radio station like
CFCF has the responsibility to inform citizens about all of
their political choices, the reality was that no private station
wished to be associated with political messages outside the
mainstream. Ironically, this placed
the public broadcaster in the position of being the only station
that felt on principle that it must treat listeners as citizens
rather than consumers, and to have the problem of alienating
some of them by airing the views of unpopular political parties
(Vipond 1994).
Similarly, CFCF sponsored the petition against Bill 22 in
what it perceived to be the interests of its English-speaking
listeners. While aware that it
might lose the loyalty of some listeners who supported the
legislation, the station management apparently concluded that it
had to place higher priority on cementing its ties with the
English-speaking community which it considered its natural
“public.” Again in this case, then,
the listeners were not conceptualized as part of a broad public
of many diverse points of view, but as a narrower group whose
listenership could be sold to advertisers wishing to focus on a
particular demographic.
The attempted sale of the station to Radio Futura raises
a number of questions about the station management’s view of its
“public.” While it is apparent that the Marconi Company wished
to retain a broadcasting facility to keep its “image” in the
public eye, it concluded that television was a better (and more
profitable) medium for such a mission, which was supplementary
anyway to the company’s main focus on the manufacture and export
of electronic equipment. In this
case the management was unable to make an effective claim that
what it wished to do was in the “public interest.”
It was clearly only in the interest of the profitability
of the Marconi Company of Canada. The
CRTC forbade the sale precisely because it did not
consider it in the interest of the radio-listening public of
Montreal to allow a sale that would have concentrated radio
ownership in the local market in fewer hands.
While in 1952 and in 1975 CFCF successfully defied the
courts and the regulator, in 1963 its inability to make any
credible claim to be serving the public interest checked its
plans. The CBC, the BBG and the
CRTC respectively attempted to enforce a view of the “public
interest” that was quite different from that of the private
broadcaster, a view of the listener as citizen rather than
consumer, and a view of the public as comprising the whole
community, not just that part the station wished to target. The mixed results of these three cases
suggest that the tension between these two views of the
listening public bedevilled the Canadian broadcasting system in
the period in question. Indeed that
tension remains a factor in the ongoing relationships among the
CRTC, the private industry and the public broadcaster to this
day.
Bird,
Roger, ed. 1988. Documents of
Canadian Broadcasting (Ottawa: Carleton University Press).
CFCF,
1963. Executive Board Meeting,
March 26. National Archives of
Canada (hereafter NA), RG 97, vol. 149, file 6206-72, part 4;
CFCF-sale to Radio Futura Ltd. 1962-63 (proposed).
CRTC,
1976. Decisions and Policy Statements.
Finlayson,
S.M.,
1949. Brief
to be presented by Canadian Marconi Company to the Royal
Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and
Sciences at its hearing in Montreal, November, 1949.
NA, RG 28, ser. III 72, vol. 77.
Foudrault,
Maurice,
1952. Letter
to J. Allan Hammond, June 12. NA, RG 97, vol. 149, file 6206-72,
part 4, CFCF litigation, 1952.
Hammond,
J.Allan,
1952a. Letter to Maurice Foudrault,
June 17. NA, RG 97, vol. 149, file
6206-72, part 4, CFCF litigation, 1952.
Hammond,
J. Allan, 1952b. Letter to Maurice
Foudrault, June 19. NA, RG 97, vol.
149, file 6206-72, part 4, CFCF litigation, 1952.
Hardin,
Hershel,
1985. Closed Circuits: The
Sellout of Canadian Television (Vancouver: Douglas and
McIntyre).
Kingan,
J. J., 1952. Letter
to W. V. George, June 19. NA, RG 97, vol. 149, file 6206-72,
part 4, CFCF litigation, 1952.
Marcus,
Albert,
1952. Letter to J. Allan Hammond,
June 18. NA, RG 97, vol. 149, file
6206-72, part 4, CFCF litigation, 1952.
Montreal
Herald, 1952. “Caron
Unlikely to Broadcast Despite Ruling Against CFCF,” July 4. NA, MG28 III, vol. 19, file 11, CFCF
Radio AM, FM, President’s File Correspondence.
Montreal
Star, 1963. “Local Group Opposes Sale to Radio Station,”
March 27, p. 5B.
Nixon, F.
G., 1963. Letter
to W.V. George, April 29. NA, RG
97, vol. 149, file 6206-72, part 4, CFCF - sale to Radio Futura
Ltd., 1962-63 (proposed).
Superior
Court
of Canada, 1952. Decision of the
Superior Court of Canada, October 27. NA,
RG 97, vol. 149, file 6206-72, part 4, CFCF litigation, 1952.
Vipond,
Mary,
1994. “The
Beginnings of Public Broadcasting in Canada: The CRBC, 1932-36,"
Canadian Journal of Communication, 19, 151-171.
| Projets réalisés | ||
| English Radio in Quebec | ||
|
CFCF: The Early Years of Radio (see also Anecdotes...) |
In the Name of the "Public Interest": CFCF and some Controversies... |
Relations among the English Stations in Montreal Chronological Master List of Quebec's English-Language Radio Stations |
| Galerie d'images / Gallery | Extraits sonores / Sound Clips | |
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© 1997 Phonothèque québécoise / Musée du son.
Mise à jour le 29 juillet 2001
URL http://www.phonotheque.org/Hist-radio-anglo/Public-Interest-CFCF.html