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For Jan Pachul. Mr Pachul. I need your help in order to support you. I need the email address and individual/organizational component you want what follows to go to. I appreciate the submission is late but it will indicate to the CRTC that there are at least some citizens who are concerned about how the CRTC operates. If you would like to make suggestions to amend what follows, please feel free to express them. Gerry Masuda, 205-620 Dobson Road, Duncan, BC. V9L 4R8. (250) 701-0955 Subject: Low-level Community TV and Star Ray TV I received an urgent email from a friend asking for support for Star Ray TV’s application for a low-level community TV license. Attached to this request was a letter from Jan Pachul, the station manager of Star Ray TV, in which he makes very serious allegations against the CRTC. The flavour of the allegations are captured in the following quote from Mr Pashul’s letter. "The address in the Public Notice 2000-8 for interveners to send their submissions to:"206 Main Street, Toronto, Ontario" is a nonexistent address." As a citizen, I consider these allegations to be serious. However, the purpose of my letter is not to discuss Mr Pashul’s accusations but to express my concerns that the media is being taken over by monied interests which are consolidating TV into a few large integrated corporate entities. The result is a narrowing of content. A democracy needs diversity of information sources and opportunities to express dissent. Content on the large TV stations under ownership/control of a few corporations means that the content is restricted to safe topics and has been sanitized to ensure that no one can take offence because this could affect the ‘bottom line’. What is needed , in my opinion, is to provide a large number of sources of information so that program content is much more varied, where each station has different content and many more points of view can be expressed. Having 20 TV stations with centralized development of program content means that 20 TV stations put out the same material except for some local ‘modules’ which are inserted. The need for diveristy could be met, in part, by low-level community TV where totally different material would be broadcasted by each station rather than the syndicated content of the large broadcasters. It would also provide much wider opportunity for members of the public to present their views and interests. Diversity and variety are fundamental to democracy and diversity and variety becomes limited when a large number of affiliated TV stations use essentially the same restricted content. A five hundred channel TV universe is meaningless unless there are five hundred channels with different content. Mr Pashul’s letter alleges that he uncovered evidence of denial of licenses to new entrants into the television broadcasting industry since big corporate broadcasters objected to their applications. Small local TV stations which produce local relevant content could take market share away from the big corporate broadcasters. If this allegation is true, this is an abuse of power. It also raises the question of the part the CRTC is playing in the centralization of TV broadcasting.. Rather than allowing concentration of ownership and the narrowing down of diversity and content (in order to reduce costs), what is required is to allow ‘a thousand flowers to flourish’. This may not please the big corporate broadcasters but it certainly would provide more variety and diversity for the Canadian public. As a Canadian citizen and taxpayer, I am concerned about the lack of transparency and openess allegedly lacking in the CRTC licensing process. |