Canada Lives Here: The Case for Public Broadcasting
Wade Rowland
August 2015
Canada Lives Here tells the tumultuous story of public broadcasting in Canada, from its inception in 1933 to the CBC’s current, controversial attempts to adapt to collapsing revenues and new technologies. It explores in detail the struggle to preserve public space and foster community in an environment devoted to profit-making, arguing that the ideals of public service broadcasting are more relevant now than ever. Rowland, author of the influential Saving the CBC: Balancing Profit and Public Service (2013), identifies the issues crucial to the CBC’s survival and proposes carefully considered policy options. This is a book for everyone who wants to understand what’s really at stake with the threatened eclipse of the nation’s most important cultural institution.
Ranked among Canada's leading literary journalists, Wade Rowland is the author of more than a dozen non-fiction books including Ockham’s Razor, Greed, Inc., and Saving the CBC. As a journalist he has spent many years in television news production at the network level and has held senior management roles at both CTV and CBC, where he was also senior producer of the consumer affairs program Marketplace. Rowland was Maclean Hunter Chair of Ethics in Media at Ryerson University from 2001-2003. He earned an MA in the philosophy of science from Trent University in 2003. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture and is currently an Associate Professor in York University’s Department of Communication Studies. Born in Montreal, Wade Rowland grew up in Regina and Winnipeg and currently lives in rural Port Hope, Ontario, with his wife Christine Collie Rowland.Author website
This is an urgent, important and timely book about how public broadcasting in Canada is being eviscerated. The CBC has been abandoned, both by a government that should support it but won’t, and by a management culture, unable to handle the political, economic and technological headwinds affecting all media but especially public broadcasting. The CBC was once Canada’s greatest cultural gift to the world, now in a perilous state of programming and financial decrepitude. But it’s not yet lost. Wade Rowland gives us reasons for optimism, showing us how the CBC might yet be saved – if it can demonstrate that it can engage Canadians as citizens first, not just as deliverables to commercial and political interests.
--Jeffrey Dvorkin. Lecturer and Director of the Journalism Program, University of Toronto (Scarborough).
FARLEY MOWAT ON SAVING THE CBC: "This book should be read by everyone who gives a damn about Canada and the publicly owned broadcaster that unites us in telling our own stories on radio and television. Wade Rowland convincingly documents the slow, politically directed erosion of the CBC and he has the expertise to show us how to save, and expand, this vital component in Canadian life. Will we listen to him? I hope to God we have enough sense to do so."
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