Sport and public service in Canada: The roots of the inherent bonds between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada and the Olympic Games

Abstract

This article outlines the evolution of sports broadcasting on Canadian television, focusing on the broadcast of the Olympic Games. I argue that history of the Olympics on national television exemplifies the evolution of the idea of public service television in Canada. Specifically, it reflects the delicate balance between the nation’s public and private broadcasters, whose relationship extends far beyond mere competition. The public service raison d’être and mission have nonetheless been called into question throughout the development of television. Incidentally, the values of the Olympic movement were also called into question in this period, during which the Games evolved from an all-amateur Olympiad to a fully commercial spectacle designed for (and by) television.

Keywords

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Société Radio-Canada Canadian television Olympic Games public service

Hockey, baseball, and Canadian football were among the very first sports broadcast on Canadian television.¹ On Friday, 25 July 1952, viewers in Montreal watched the first-ever public, yet experimental television broadcast in Canada: a baseball game between the Montreal Royals and the Springfield Cubs. A few weeks earlier, a group of distinguished guests had viewed the telecast of a Memorial Cup hockey game on an experimental closed-circuit television system in Toronto. In August 1952, the famous Montreal Alouettes quarterback Sam Etcheverry played his first televised football game. And finally, on Saturday, 11 October of the same year, the Montreal Canadiens played the first National Hockey League (NHL) game on Canadian television. Canada’s public broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), went on to become a major national player—if not the leader—in sports broadcasting for decades thereafter. Today, however, the CBC no longer holds the television rights to any of these sports. Even the longest running sports program in Canadian television history, Hockey Night in Canada, is now produced by a private broadcaster and its airing on public television faces an uncertain future. In fact, the only major sports events still produced by Canadian public television are the Summer and Winter Olympics.

Aside from NHL hockey games, no sports event seems more closely tied to the public broadcaster in Canada than the Olympics: from the first filmed coverage of Olympic competitions in 1960 to the upcoming multiplatform 2024 Games, the CBC will have hosted 24 of the 33 modern Olympic Games (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Olympic Broadcast Rights Agreements in Canada.

Year	City, country	Primary broadcaster in Canada	Cost of domestic rights (US American Dollars except for those noted in the table below)
1960 Winter	Squaw Valley, USA	CBC/SRC	N/A
1960 Summer	Rome, Italy	CBC/SRC	N/A
1964 Winter	Innsbruck, Austria	CTV	C$ 5,000
1964 Summer	Tokyo, Japan	CBC/SRC	N/A
1968 Winter	Grenoble, France	CBC/SRC	$80,000 (estimate)
1968 Summer	Mexico City, Mexico	CBC/SRC	$250,000
1972 Winter	Sapporo, Japan	CBC/SRC	$115,200
1972 Summer	Munich, West Germany	CBC/SRC	$257,000
1976 Winter	Innsbruck, Austria	CTV/TVA	C$360,000
1976 Summer	Montreal, Canada	CBC/SRC	$360,000
1980 Winter	Lake Placid, USA	CTV/TVA	C$907,000
1984 Winter	Sarajevo, Yugoslavia	CTV/TVA	$1,800,000
1984 Summer	Los Angeles, USA	CBC/SRC	$3,000,000
1988 Winter	Calgary, Canada	CTV/TVA	$3,330,000
1988 Summer	Seoul, South Korea	CBC/SRC	$4,170,000
1992 Winter	Albertville, France	CBC/SRC	$10,000,000
1992 Summer	Barcelona, Spain	CTV/TVA	$16,500,000
1994 Winter	Lillehammer, Norway	CTV/TVA	$12,000,000
1996 Summer	Atlanta, USA	CBC/SRC	$20,750,000
1998 Winter	Nagano, Japan	CBC/SRC	$16,000,000
2000 Summer	Sydney, Australia	CBC/SRC	$28,000,000
2002 Winter	Salt Lake City, USA	CBC/SRC	$22,000,000
2004 Summer	Athens, Greece	CBC/SRC	$37,000,000
2006 Winter	Turin, Italy	CBC/SRC	$28,000,000
2008 Summer	Beijing, China	CBC/SRC	$45,000,000
2010 Winter	Vancouver, Canada	CTV/V	$90,000,000
2012 Summer	London, UK	CTV/V	$63,000,000
2014 Winter	Sochi, Russia	CBC/SRC	N/A
2016 Summer	Rio de Janeiro, Brasil	CBC/SRC	N/A
2018 Winter	PyeongChang, South Korea	CBC/SRC	N/A
2020 Summer	To be determined	CBC/SRC	N/A
2022 Winter	To be determined	CBC/SRC	N/A
2024 Summer	To be determined	CBC/SRC	N/A

Source: Based on Dufault (2000) and MacNeill (1996).

This article examines the bonds that have, over the years, linked Canada’s public broadcaster—the CBC and its French language counterpart, Société Radio-Canada (SRC)—to the Olympics. It is primarily based on a thorough reading of Canadian television programming guides, television trade magazines, newspapers articles focusing on sports and television, and on other relevant academic publications.

From the first national broadcast of the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver to the beginning of the TV era of the Games in the 1980s, the challenges faced by the CBC/SRC with regard to sports broadcasting were primarily technical. However, private competition and the growing television interest in the Olympics worldwide brought new challenges to Games broadcasting and the Olympics themselves. Although these were primarily economic and political in nature, the spectacularization of the Games—as of sports in general—gave rise to a communicational challenge as well. Communication modified the way the Olympic Games were built as an event, and it transformed all related symbols. Today, the Olympics are built as a mediatized sports event (Papa, 2000) or simply a ‘media event’ (Whannel, 2009). In other words, the Olympics have become a televised show, or simply a ‘“means of communication”. That is to say, [to understand the games, we have to assess] all the existing objective relations between agents and institutions competing to produce and sell the images of, and commentary about, the Olympics’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 82).

The roots of Canadian public service television

The impetus for the creation of Canadian public service radio and television broadcasting reflects the three historical and general reasons for public service broadcasting identified by Atkinson (1997): the limited frequency spectrum, the usefulness and potential of communication devices, and distrust in the market’s ability to fulfill a public service mandate.

Various governments have decided that broadcasting is not just another industry to be left to the vagaries of the marketplace but that the airwaves are public property to be entrusted to the government as an instrument for nation-building and the survival of the country. (Zolf, 1988: 121)

In Canada, these factors led to the creation of the CBC/SRC in 1936, which was assigned both to regulate and expand the radio network, and to broadcast Canadian programming. In 1952, Canadian television was launched on the basis of the same principles, and the CBC/SRC was mandated to operate it. From its very beginning, the CBC/SRC thus has carried out a three-part mandate of accessibility; national unity; and promotion of education, information, and creation that characterizes public service broadcasting (Tremblay, 1986).

As a television network, the CBC/SRC was based on a public and commercial agreement, with sponsorship and advertising being a part of its funding from the outset. The Canadian television regime further involved private sector with the introduction of private television operators in 1961. As a result, ‘Canadian broadcasting can be viewed primarily as the continual struggle and tensions between commercial forces and incentives on the one hand and non-commercial public policy goals on the other’ (Babe, 1976 in Zolf (1988: 123)). In fact, these struggles and tensions arose partly from the fact that the objectives of public service broadcasting—which were mainly political and cultural—are irreconcilable with the economic objectives of the private sector (Tremblay, 1986).

The Canadian television is also divided linguistically. French-language television has never been subject to the same market pressures as its English-language counterpart. While the CBC is in direct competition with English-language US-American programming, the French broadcasters have a virtual monopoly on French-language television in Canada. In Quebec only, some of the SRC shows drew more audiences than the most popular television programs of the CBC for the whole country. While ‘English-speakers viewed television with suspicion and yearning’ (Attallah, 2000: 179), French speakers were in love with their television (Desaulniers, 1985 in Attallah (2000)).

Sports events, along with the occasional news item, have generally been the main content shared by the French- and English-language television broadcasters (Attallah, 2000). For the CBC, ‘the most significant Canadian content of television programming has consisted of local news, major national sporting events, and Canadian sports generally’ (Zolf, 1988: 129). As such, sports are a major asset in the competition for broadcast rights in Canada, which is also a competition for advertising revenues. This is especially true for the CBC/SRC, where a decline in public funding over time has resulted in a substantial increase in the advertising revenue required for operations. For both public and commercial television, sports—mostly commercial sports like hockey and football—have long been an important revenue stream and a major source of Canadian content. As well, sports have at times served as a unifying force, helping to forge a national identity, with the television broadcast of certain sports events bringing together a majority of the population around patriotic values and symbols. As part of its public service mission, Canadian public broadcasting can thus best serve national unity through a few events acting as ‘televisual ceremonies’ that have the potential to instantly produce the communities they wish to address (Dayan and Katz, 1996). Among the most significant of these events are the Olympic Games. Accordingly, the CBC/SRC has been a strong advocate of the importance of broadcasting major sports competitions such as hockey games, Canadian football championships, and the Olympics. It has invoked the national interest to justify the relevance of sports within the scope of public broadcaster programming and in asserting the cost-effectiveness of sports broadcasting. These considerations, and indeed the need for justification, arose out of the disappearance of the three raisons d’être of public service broadcasting (Raboy, 1997), essentially in the 1980s. With the introduction of new means of delivery for television programming (including community antenna systems, but mainly cable and satellite transmission), the primary reason for public service broadcasting—the limited frequency spectrum (Atkinson, 1997)—vanished. This, along with the growth of commercial television on the one hand and the disintegration of state radio and television models in a reassessment of the welfare state on the other,² helped strengthen the commercial television model to the detriment of a vision of broadcasting as a public service, along the lines of education and healthcare (Raboy, 1997).

Citius, Altius, Fortius: The rise and strength of Olympic television coverage

Television and the Games

In the first era of Olympic broadcasting, the technology of transmitting competition images was itself the biggest challenge. As an example, to ensure live coverage of the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver the CBC/SRC used an US-American network from Seattle to Buffalo to reach Toronto, and from there, the rest of Canada. In this way, it achieved the first simultaneous link between western and eastern Canada—although the Maritime provinces only received their images a day later, on film (Blaine, no date).

The CBC/SRC sent a TV team to the Olympics for the first time in 1960, with broadcasts from both Squaw Valley and Rome. From Squaw Valley, the CBC/SRC used an US-American network, CBS, to carry the images up to Toronto, as it had in 1954. For the Rome Olympics, the CBC/SRC had to share the US-American images transmitted via a transatlantic submarine cable. In 1964, the Tokyo Games marked another major step for Olympic broadcasting. Satellite transmission now enabled the CBC/SRC to broadcast images from Japan. But the process remained complex: a selection of clips from Japanese television was sent by satellite to Point Mugu, California, then relayed to the studios of the US broadcaster NBC in Burbank to be videotaped and finally sent to Montreal by plane (SRC, 1964). Initially, however, sports were granted little importance on television. Olympic reports and coverage represented only a small portion of programming and were often confined to the late evening time slot. As the legendary sportscaster Richard Garneau³ observed, ‘In those days, nobody really believed that sport was part of the culture of a people’ (cited in Baril (2016), our translation).

At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, satellite helped to extend the TV time for coverage of the event and allowed international color broadcasting of the Games. However, live broadcasting in Canada was extremely costly due to the US-American and European priority on satellite transmissions. Popularity still lagged, and it was not until the mid-1970s that the television broadcasts of the Games really gained in importance on Canadian television.

The challenges of the Olympics

The budding relationship between the Olympics and television posed more than just technical challenges. In fact, still according to Garneau, the Olympics faced a major hurdle from the 1960s to 1980: the professionalization of the Olympics as a consequence of the mediatization of the Games (Baril, 2016).

The year 1972 marked a significant shift toward the professionalization of international competitions. Historically, the Olympics were oriented toward youth. This is apparent in the words of Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, who was awarded the 1976 Olympics: ‘Olympism constitutes a great spiritual force,’ and ‘Olympism is there to serve youth’ (cited in Baril (2016), our translation). Of course, the Olympics have always served other purposes, as have professional sports events in general. For instance, they generally act as ‘civic boosters,’ spurring the building of city infrastructure and boosting commercial standing (Gruneau and Whitson, 2009), or they are instrumentalized for reconfiguring urban landscape for the benefit of political and economical elites (Sànchez and Broudehoux, 2013). Without question, the promotion of Olympic values was not the only reason for holding the Games in Montreal—and yet the 1976 Olympics in Montreal presented the very image of youth in the achievements of the 14-year-old gymnast Nadia Comaneci who was the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10 in an Olympic gymnastics event. Within the Olympic movement itself, however, a radical shift occurred in the discourse on the Games between the 1960s and the 1980s. Prior to 1972, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had upheld a firm commitment to amateurism, as expressed by its fifth president, Avery Brundage: ‘Sport must be amateur or it is not sport. Sports played professionally are entertainment’ (Gillon, 2011: 431). However, Brundage’s successors, Lord Killanin (appointed in 1972) and especially Juan Antonio Samaranch (appointed in 1980), opened the Olympics to professional athletes. At the time, Canada was coming to appreciate the impact on television ratings of professional participation in international sporting events. When Canada and Russia faced off against each other in the eighth and final hockey game of the 1972 Canada–Soviet Summit Series, 97% of Canadian television viewers were watching, according to the measures then available (CBC/SRC, 1973). In the 1970s, television was beginning to bring the Olympics to the attention of advertising, enjoyed by professional sports for at least a decade. The growing amount of money that sports organizations made from television rights, advertising, and sponsorship deals resulted in an inversion of their main revenue streams: the by-product of live sports events (television sports) gradually changed places with the primary product, the live sports events themselves (Andreff, 2011). At the time, Furst (1971) emphasized that the ‘zealous pursuit of pecuniary reward’ was not ‘just an extension of the past’ (153): both a qualitatively and quantitatively distinct ambience surrounded athletics. In commercial sports as in Olympic sports, the best athletes were receiving more and more money to practice sports at high-performance levels, in part because sports organizations were making more and more money from television rights and sponsorships.

Olympics on Canadian television—1970s

The 1970s marked the end of the Canadian public broadcaster’s monopoly over the Olympics. Since their creation, in 1961, the private broadcasters CTV (English) and TVA (French)⁴ had challenged the CBC/SRC’s leadership in sports matters. CTV has always been more aggressive than TVA with regard to sports rights. Partly for the reasons stated above, TVA’s popularity was due mostly to its dramatic and entertainment shows. In fact, during the 1960s, the SRC even broadcast some of CTV’s sports concessions to promote the national interests of bilingualism and accessibility. However, in 1976, for the first time in Canada, the broadcasting of the Olympics passed from public to private television, with CTV and TVA covering the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Admittedly, the CBC/SRC had been quite busy during the previous years, preparing for the upcoming coverage of the Summer Olympics in Montreal.

In charge of all the images of the 1976 Games, the Olympic Radio & Television Organization (ORTO), a division of the CBC/SRC and thus a symbol of Canadian public service television, brought together the Canadian public broadcaster, five private broadcasters from four different cities, and Quebec and Ontario’s provincial public broadcasters. The purpose of gathering together the broadcasters involved in ORTO was in part to avoid buying or renting technical equipment from other countries (Lessonini, 1976). Besides, the CBC/SRC prepared for 1976 by offering increased coverage of Olympics-related events from 1970 to 1974 and supplying international broadcast partners with technical and human resources.

During the 1970s, the CBC/SRC not only increased its television coverage of international sports competitions but also created more space for them in the national television schedule. However, with the introduction of competition in Canadian television, exclusivity became a key issue, since the CBC/SRC relied heavily on the exclusivity of its sports rights acquisitions. All Games presented on the CBC/SRC network were presented as an exclusivity of the CBC/SRC. And while the 1976 Winter Games rights were granted to CTV/TVA, the public broadcaster still was able to seal a deal allowing it to present a daily report on the Games, thereby undermining the private networks’ claims of exclusivity. In Innsbruck, the private networks presented a total of 54 h of coverage. In Montreal, the CBC/SRC presented 11 h of Olympic coverage daily on each of the 16 days of the Games. The trend toward longer coverage of such events continued over the next years: for instance, the CBC/SRC aired 60 h of coverage for the 1978 Commonwealth Games.

Nonetheless, the CBC/SRC had to wait eight years after the Montreal Games for the right to cover another Olympic Games. In the interim, the Canadian Parliament pressured the public broadcaster to give up part of the 1.2 million dollars in television rights it had already paid and to cancel the broadcast of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow (CBC, 1980), Canada being among the countries boycotting the Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The TV era games—1980s

During the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the CBC make up for lost time, airing Olympic coverage from noon till midnight every day, while the SRC live broadcast the Games 8 h a day. The 1980s marked the start of a ‘new sport age,’ ‘postmodern, hyper-mediatized, marked by an all-out Americanization of the world’s athletic space’ (Archambault and Artiaga, 2007: 138, our translation). It is generally acknowledged that, with the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, ‘the commercialization of sport […] acquired new relevance and reached previously unknown proportions’ (Seifart, 1984: 305). For Bourg and Gouguet (2005), 1984 marked the Olympics’ entry into the ‘age of the market,’ with the privatization of Olympic Games funding, the commercial exploitation of Olympic symbols, the creation of a global marketing program for the Games, and the end of the monopoly of many public television broadcasters in favor of emerging private broadcasters.

The 1984 Games are best known for the impressive increase in television rights fees in the USA: in 1976, ABC paid $25 million to broadcast the Montreal Olympics; in 1984, the network paid 10 times that price, paying $225 million to broadcast the Games and cover production and support costs. The CBC/SRC, which paid about $300,000 each to the Munich and Montreal Organizing committees, was also confronted with a 10-fold increase, paying $3 million to broadcast the 1984 Olympics (see Table 1).

To make up for the higher cost of television rights, Olympics broadcasting had to be profitable. In Canada, the 1980s generally benefited the private television sector over the public broadcaster. CTV/TVA were involved in four of the five Olympic Games held during the decade; notably, the private networks hosted the coverage of the Canadian Calgary Olympics of 1988. But while CTV/TVA paid around $3 million for the Television rights to the 1988 Olympics, overbidding continued in the USA, where ABC paid a record $309 million for the Winter Games, exceeding even the cost of the Summer Games. However, the US-American network failed to attract sufficient advertisers, and the 1988 Olympic adventure resulted in significant losses. As a result, US-American networks entered lower bids for the next Winter Games, and ABC’s Olympic coverage came to an end (the network was replaced by CBS and NBC). Conversely, in Canada, the late 1980s marked the start of an increase in rights fees.

As Bourg and Gouguet (2005) remark, the 1980s opened the way for an important wave of decentralization affecting several sectors, including television. In Canada, new private televisions channels emerged, and, as of 1982, the CRTC began accepting new means of providing television, such as satellite and cable providers. That also led to the launch, among others, of a first Canadian-owned specialized sports channel in 1984, The Sports Network (TSN)—its French counterpart, Le Réseau des Sports (RDS) followed in 1988. In 1988, CTV/TVA partnered with TSN to broadcast the Calgary Olympics, with the specialized network paying a small portion of the rights paid to the IOC (Duguay, 1988).

Meanwhile, the CBC/SRC underwent a first major wave of funding cuts. In Canada, deregulation led to a reduction in public funding for the public broadcaster and to a bigger place for private production. The debate about the relevance of sports on the CBC/SRC shifted its focus, turning from the cultural concerns to economic concerns. Critics strongly objected to the money paid by the public broadcaster to the IOC for rights clearance for the Games, claiming that the public broadcaster had an unfair competitive advantage with regard to both advertising and public funding. For its part, the CBC/SRC cited its duties toward national unity and the public interest to defend its involvement in ever more television sports rights. In this period, the CBC/SRC also generally paid greater attention than other broadcasters to Olympic sports outside the Olympics Games. The public broadcaster had always presented numerous other international and national competitions and offered sports programming aimed at youth, like Les héros du samedi, a show launched prior to the 1976 Montreal Olympics that offered to young athletes a chance to perform on television, and which remained on air for almost 20 years.

1990s struggles

Pay television was the second great challenge to public service broadcasting after the first wave of competition in the early 1960s. The new means of distribution for television programming also challenged the very model of public service television in Canada by breaking the monopoly of free-access television, which split apart into a basic free-to-air television service and subscription television. Major sports events once again became traffic builders for television channels, used to promote the scope of the channels’ programming (Duchet, 2000), and strategically employed as a spectacle of accumulation and legitimation to boost ratings, expand market positioning, and attract sponsors while blocking competitors (MacNeill, 1996). Instead of splitting up the demand for sports programming, competition among television channels in the 1980s boosted it, mainly in favor of commercial professional sports and mostly to the advantage of male sports.

In major sports events programming, the 1990s saw two types of relationships among Canadian television channels: a complementary one, based on the sharing of a wide portfolio of secondary sports events (e.g., baseball or hockey season games); a competitive one, based on the fight for the exclusive rights to major sports events such as the hockey finals or Olympic Games. While it was still possible for most television channels to buy the rights to a certain number of the many hockey or baseball games, not all the Canadian channels had the means to host Olympic Games coverage. In fact, there were only two possible candidates for Olympic Television rights in Canada: the CBC/SRC and CTV/TVA (Thibault and Crépault, 1994). Following the US-American trend, the networks overbid in the negotiations for the 1992 Olympic television rights. In one day of blind bidding, the CBC/SRC bought the rights to the Albertville Winter Games for $10 million in the morning, and CTV/TVA the Barcelona Summer Games rights for $16.5 million in the afternoon, at almost three and four times the costs of the television rights for the 1988 Games (Thibault and Crépault, 1994). It was the first time that the Summer Olympics were aired on a private network. CTV/TVA also bought the television rights to the 1994 Lillehammer Games. This burst of Canadian interest in Olympic rights came with a substantial amount of Olympic programming on television, reaching a total of about 180 h for each of the Games. In Lillehammer, host country excepted, no broadcaster provided more coverage than TVA, with its 171 h (Lemay, 1994).

The private networks’ approach to the Games differed from that of the public broadcaster. MacNeill (1996) and Papa (2000) have shown that televised sport is neither neutral nor natural. The number and position of the cameras, the editing, the commentary: all aspects of sports television contribute to some extent to the legitimization of certain values. From the 1980s on,

rather than being bound by the IOC to infuse the central philosophies set out in the Olympic Charter, the media were relatively free to present […] all sports in the manner they deemed necessary to garner the largest market share. (MacNeill, 1996: 107)

This resulted in focusing on Canadians or Quebecers, sometimes at the expense of the legacy of great Olympic moments (Lemay, 1994). But focusing on Canadian athletes was not specific to CTV/TVA. The CBC/SRC also tended to emphasize well-known faces and local figures and would progressively adjust its practices shifting from a formal journalistic style to a more human-interest approach.

Some questions about the relevance of the CBC/SRC during the 1990s and early 2000s pertained to sports and the commercialization of sports. Inside and outside the CBC/SRC, questions resurfaced about the cultural relevance of its sports coverage. At the French-language SRC, sports proved to be increasingly difficult to place in the programming facing very popular dramatic programs. From 1988 to 1995, the share of sports in the SRC schedule dropped from 13 to 3%, according to the CBC/SRC’s annual reports. At the English-language CBC, the emphasis on professional sports raised the issue of the relevance of professional sports to the cultural mandate of the public broadcaster.

In 1998, the CBC/SRC helped cover—and justify—the ever-growing cost of broadcast rights and ensure greater coverage on Canadian television by broadcasting the Games alongside private sports-specialized channels TSN/RDS. The alliance extended to other international sports events as well, including World Cup soccer games and Formula One Grand Prix races. During the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Canadian television aired more than 1,320 h of Olympic programming distributed across the CBC/SRC, TSN/RDS, and the 24 h news channels RDI and Newsworld. This multichannel coverage strategy would become the norm for the Games to come. In 1998/2000, the CBC/SRC also launched a comprehensive website dedicated to the Games and complementing TV coverage, although at the time it offered no webcasting of competitions.

Conclusion

The latest outburst embodied by new technological means of content production and distribution and mostly by the pervasiveness of Internet media raises again the question of the future of the public service media. Alongside the technological transformations, a series of ideological, political, and sociocultural transformation factors affect the public service. As pointed out by Tremblay (2015), the institutions in charge of the public service media have critical tasks to perform in order to preserve a collective vision of information, knowledge, culture, and communication as providers of common good worthily being universally accessible. Sports, as an essential and inextricable part of the media, could be part of the solution.

As an example, public service broadcasting by assuring pluralism and independency from economic pressure or political control should play a major role in sports diversity promotion. This might be done by preserving a certain public service journalistic style and by giving attention to underrepresented sports. In Canada, for instance, hockey still occupies a tremendous place in sports news coverage, whatever the season. Considering that two of the major Canadian private television providers and broadcasters, Rogers Communications and Bell Canada Enterprises, are heavily involved in commercial sports,⁵ questions may arise. Public service could be used to promote sports diversity as such as athletes’ diversity—for example by offering more exposure to women’s sports or Paralympics.

As we have seen above, the challenges faced by public service all along the last decades of the 20th century accompanied changes in Olympic Games core values. As television decentralized and privatized, the Olympics became an international communication tool serving mostly advertisers. Both public service television and Olympic Games have lost on the way some of their cultural specificity and collective legitimacy, to become organizations, among many, driven by a logic of accumulation. The economic discourse and the focus on performance have hidden the emphasis on youth; the approach of elite sports as an educational force; the promotion of diversity, of collectiveness, or even an approach of sport as part of human culture and civilization as did hope some like Richard Garneau. The concept of culture is alien to the current dominant vision of media and sports.

The concept of culture […] is either forgotten or reduced to an exchangeable group of goods and services through market-price regulation. By reducing culture to moneymaking goods and services, we witness the refusal to grant certain rights to citizens in favor of the consumers asserted freedom to gain access to this culture. This diversion involves the abandon of the principle of equality of individuals which, as consumers, are not equal as they don’t have the same buying power. (George, 1998; pp. 157, our translation)

In sports matters, on Canadian television, this inequality is almost a fait accompli. There are now a number of sports specialized pay-television channels—owned by major communication corporation such as Rogers and Bell—that broadcast almost all the televised sports events. In fact, the only major sports events still on free-to-air French- and English-television are the Olympic Games.⁶ Since 1952, the trend reversed from the monopoly of free-access public service television to an oligopoly of pay-TV specialized channels. However, the publicly funded CBC/SRC is still the best suited to acquire the rights for the Olympic Games and to provide free-to-air—or free-to-web—broadcast to all Canadians.⁷ As pointed out by Scherer and Whitson (2009; pp. 215), it is an ‘issue of cultural citizenship, and thus an important part of the mandate of a public broadcaster.’ In this respect, of course, ‘notions of access to, and equity in, television sport’ should constitute significant elements of citizenship (Rowe, 2004; pp. 388), and sport television is to be considered as a major component of a culture. Although without a political commitment to public service, and without a specific understanding of the role of public service, the CBC/SRC is compelled to compete on quite the same field as its competitors.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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