Canada before Television: Radio, Taste, and the Struggle for Cultural Democracy by Len Kuffert (review)

In Canada before Television, Len Kuffert seeks to understand and explain several related things about the culture of radio in Canada between the early 1930s and early 1950s. How were programs for specific audiences conceived of and made? How much did this involve the discovery of already formed public tastes and how much their creation? How did the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and its predecessor the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) as public broadcasters approach these questions differently (but not entirely differently) from private broadcasters? And what do the answers to these questions tell us about cultural democracy in Canada?

The notion of cultural democracy underlies almost everything else in this thought-provoking book. Kuffert defines it as "an environment in which minority or marginal cultures need not fear being silenced or ignored." It is like proportional representation in politics as opposed to a winner-take-all system. Radio should not serve only the largest slice of the audience that can be identified or assembled but should also seek to meet the needs and tastes of minorities that tend to be ignored in a narrowly majoritarian approach. The book is largely concerned with understanding how the CRBC (1932–36) and the CBC (post-1936) tried to work out how to go about this.

Kuffert presents his interpretation with vigour, but his analysis is nuanced. The CBC did not refuse to broadcast popular programs – including popular American programs – despite efforts by its private competitors to paint the public broadcaster as "coercive and dictatorial, actively denying the public what it wanted." Popular US entertainment programs like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy frequently appeared on the CBC for a variety of reasons: to increase revenue from sponsors, revenue that could be used to support other kinds of programming, to serve listeners in rural and frontier regions of Canada, beyond the range of US broadcasters, and to avoid driving other listeners to the US stations they could receive. They key difference for Kuffert was that the CBC, unlike private broadcasters, wanted to do more than this, reflecting the belief that it should strive to reach all listeners at least some of the time rather than most listeners most of the time.

Kuffert is particularly concerned to refute the view that audience size is an infallible indicator of "what the public wants," which, if accepted, implies that commercial broadcasters' mass audience programming was more democratic than the CBC's efforts to include minority tastes in the range of its programs. Ratings are far from being a pure reflection of audience desires, influenced as they are by promotion, scheduling, and the appeal of familiar formats, among other things. Beyond that, ratings do not indicate what other kinds of currently unavailable programs listeners might prefer. Taste is not simply discovered, Kuffert argues, but actively shaped – listeners' interest in "certain kinds or programming could only be created and maintained if those programs were made in the first place."

The book is organized thematically, with chapters on the peculiarly intimate appeal of radio, in which listeners are simultaneously addressed as individuals in the privacy of their homes and as members of an unprecedentedly large mass public, the influence of American programs , received directly in most parts of Canada, the role of the British Broadcasting Corporation (largely benign and sympathetic to the particular challenges of public broadcasting in Canada), how the CRBC and CBC carried out their roles as broadcast regulators, the role of taste in music programming, which accounted for the largest share of broadcast time on both public and private stations, and a concluding chapter about cultural democracy. Kuffert is well versed in the vibrant historical literature about radio, in Canada and internationally, and wisely does not bother re-examining the much-discussed question of the CBC and cultural nationalism. One question I wish he had examined in greater depth, though, was how the CBC decided which minority tastes should be served...