Tuning In The Global Village : Canada Leads Fight to Save Public Broadcasting : Leaders see international mergers as the key to preserving bulwark against crass commercialism.

Ever since the dawn of the radio age in Canada, it has been an article of patriotic faith that without public broadcasting--a national voice financed by the government and guided by non-commercial objectives--this country would simply disappear.

The evolution of that faith not only has developed public broadcasting as a stalwart Canadian institution but has cast industry leaders here into the forefront of an international effort to help public broadcasting flourish worldwide.

Back in the 1920s, American entrepreneurs were fanning fears of “cultural imperialism” here by buying Canadian radio stations at a ferocious clip and clogging the airwaves with American shows.

“The State or the United States” is how one noted Canadian public-broadcasting advocate, Graham Spry, described his country’s choices at the time, arguing that if the government itself didn’t step into radio programming, the United States would eventually take over everything in Canada that mattered.

Spry’s determined lobbying led in 1936 to the government’s formation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., or CBC, with a mandate to protect Canada from American intrusion by providing domestic programming and extending coverage to all settled areas.

Today, television has eclipsed radio in Canada as the paramount medium, as it has in most parts of the world. But Canada’s belief in public broadcasting as a bulwark against America’s overbearing commercial culture is as strong as ever.

“If there were no CBC and no TVOntario and no Canadian content requirements (for television), I don’t think that there would be a Canada,” says Bill Roberts, senior director general at TVOntario, Ontario’s public educational channel.

Canada’s fate, it seems, is bound up in its sheer geography. Because it is next to the United States, it is the first to be hit by “the inundation of American (television) production,” says Bernard Ostry, recent past chairman of TVOntario and a respected cultural mandarin. “Canada is notorious for having devised its own cultural suicide machine. By developing the most advanced communications technologies of our time, we Canadians in effect set ourselves up for a massive foreign cultural invasion.”

Yet for all that, Canadians still pick out differences between their country and the United States--differences they consider subtle but worth preserving.

Thus, here in Toronto, Roberts and Ostry have been caught up in a Canadian-led initiative to save public broadcasting worldwide--and, through enhanced public television, to protect the essence of their own country and those of others.

For all its critical and nationalistic achievements in Canada and elsewhere, public broadcasting is in serious trouble. Governments have been increasingly reluctant to fund public use of the airwaves. Specialty channels are proliferating, offering unheard-of new choices for viewers--and competition for public stations. And new technical breakthroughs--video compression; tiny, inexpensive satellite dishes; fiber optics; interactive TV; videodiscs and the like--raise the uncomfortable question of what public broadcasters have to offer any longer that’s unique.

The thinking in Toronto, though, is that public broadcasters will be able to survive if they imitate the commercial broadcasters--not in content but in the international mergers and other strategic linkages that they have busily, and profitably, been entering into of late.

“The commercial media command the big money and the big credits because they have gone multinational,” says Ostry. “We (public broadcasters) too must go multinational.” Fittingly, he has named his initiative Public Broadcasters International.

“Together, the public broadcasters of the world represent an industry worth billions of dollars and reaching hundreds of millions of citizens,” he says.

The trick will be uniting the individual broadcasters, however. Even though they are all government-sponsored, they present a wide, perhaps even incompatible, range of mandates, programming styles, and perceptions of “the national interest.”

Public broadcasters in developed countries, for example, have the luxury of focusing on the loftier concepts in life. Australia’s ABC boasts gender equity on its governing body, while Finland’s public network wants to promote “ethical views of life and healthy ways of life.” German public TV bans violence, pornography and “programs dangerous to children,” while in Canada, televised sex-role stereotyping is taboo. In Africa, by contrast, public broadcasting mandates tend to revolve around basic issues of economic development.

Government sponsorship of television has led to government influence and outright control in some places, while mandates of other public broadcasters--the United States among them--explicitly require them to represent a variety of ideological trends.

Public broadcasters are divided about whether to air advertising or not. In Belgium, for instance, the French service has ads but the Flemish service does not. Broadcasters that don’t allow ads finance themselves though government grants, licensing fees and PBS-style telethons.

Last year, 22 public broadcasters from around the world managed to put these and other differences aside long enough to meet in Toronto and begin charting a joint future. This December they will meet again in Brussels, and their ranks are expected to swell to about 35.

Public Broadcasters International is working on techniques for broadcasters to share existing programs, produce new shows jointly, pool information on archival material and perhaps form an international lobbying bloc for the very concept of public broadcasting. By putting their resources together and avoiding duplication, they hope to deal with financial problems that have beset them--and presumably offer richer programming at the same time.

As for specific projects, there has been talk of creating a 24-hour “unbiased” news network that would be an alternative to CNN, a general-interest network showcasing the best shows from around the world and a manpower-training and educational service.

Public Broadcasters International can trace its origins to 1985, when Ostry was asked to speak before a large group of broadcasters in Europe. He talked about the problems facing public broadcasting and the need for public broadcasters to form the kind of partnerships that were being forged in commercial television.

Prominent executives from American and British public networks popped up out of the audience and urged him to organize a forum and get his ideas off the ground. Over the next few months, letters began to show up on his desk in Ontario from still other foreign executives, saying that their networks had endorsed his scheme and asking when “the meeting” would be held.

Ostry hadn’t intended to convene any meeting, and TVOntario didn’t have the money to host one in any case. But luckily, the Canadians had a wealthy partner. Since the early 1980s, TVOntario has had a close working relationship with Nippon Hoso Kyokai, or NHK, the Japanese public broadcasting service.

NHK is generously financed and has been winning budget increases from the Japanese Parliament at a time when its foreign counterparts have faced impoverishment. NHK saw in its TVOntario linkup the makings of a beachhead in North America; when its top executives heard what Ostry was talking about, they committed the resources necessary to launch Public Broadcasters International.

At their first meeting last year, the broadcasters agreed on a nine-point platform with remarkably little dissent. Ostry acknowledged after the first meeting that the results “may not look like much on paper,” but he said that they represent a large step forward, simply in that so many diverse broadcasters were able to come together and agree on a set of principles.

Delegates to this winter’s meeting are expected to cover the question of whether public broadcasters should use advertising to finance themselves and to discuss further resource-pooling arrangements.