Media News Digest: CP makes it Indigenous, Sportsnet 650 morning team, Order of Canada appointments

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5 thoughts on “Media News Digest: CP makes it Indigenous, Sportsnet 650 morning team, Order of Canada appointments

  1. dilbert

    The CRTC’s decision in Ottawa is regulatory capture at work.

    If there is space on the radio dial and no technical issues, then people should be allowed to apply to open a new station. Quite simply, the existing station owners don’t want new competition, with no other valid reasons given.

    Yes, Ottawa has 19 stations. However, but their own admission tuning hours are dropping, which suggest that the existing stations are not meeting the public demand. With the population of the area stable or increasing, a drop in tuning hour reflects on the on air product and how it may or may not fit the lifestyles of the population they are suppose to serve. A new station in the market might be able to change that. In fact, many of the existing players have changed the programming, call signs, and even frequencies of their stations in the market in an attempt to improve their share of the market. It suggests that more competition would be good for the public who would be offered more new choices to consider.

    Protecting incumbent stations because they say so is regulatory capture at it’s finest. Once againm the CRTC does the shameful thing of kowtowing to big business, and ignoring the benefits to the public they are suppose to serve.

    Reply
    1. Fagstein Post author

      Protecting incumbent stations because they say so is regulatory capture at it’s finest.

      It would be if that’s what’s happening. The commission makes its decisions on these matters based on policy, and has not shied away from authorizing new stations in markets that could use them.

      In any case, the application here was for an ethnic station, not an English or French one (and so no direct competition with “big business”), and there were no other parties that expressed interest in starting a new station in the market.

      Reply
      1. dilbert

        Yet, big business was there to say “no, it would some how affect our bottom line”. That doesn’t add up.

        Reply
        1. Fagstein Post author

          Yet, big business was there to say “no, it would some how affect our bottom line”.

          Actually, the major broadcasters didn’t object to a new ethnic radio station (though the existing ethnic broadcasters certainly did). The big guys simply wanted to make a case against a new English or French-language station in case there were expressions of interest in those.

          Reply

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