Re: WJIB-740-CHWO

[Garrett Wollman <wollman>]

<<On Sat, 13 Jan 2001 09:05:15 -0500, SteveOrdinetz <steveord@wavewizard.com> said:

> Imagine what the situation would have been if there had been AmCon content

There was never any need for any such thing; a market of 250 million
people is hardly threatened by the 24 million living just to the
north.  The converse cannot be said to be true.

> Or if the government had banned rock & roll radio in the 50s because
> a bunch of old fudds were offended by Elvis.

Of course, the government would have had no authority to do so -- and
that goes as much for the Canadian government (under the Charter and
its antecedents) as it does for ours.  Before 1968, however, the CBC
also served as the regulatory body for Canadian broadcasting, and the
enabling legislation made it quite clear that the public broadcasting
was paramount.  (It was the private broadcasters who lobbied most
strongly for the separation of the regulatory powers into a new
agency, the CRTC.)

(But also note that the Beatles and the Stones got little airplay in
Britain because the BBC didn't play that sort of music; if Brits heard
either band, they were probably listening to a pirate radio ship or to
Radio Luxembourg.  The BBC added a rock service in 1968, in response
to the pirate stations, but Britain did not have large-scale domestic
commercial radio until Mrs. Thatcher's time.  Until recently, Britain
had no supralegislative guarantees of civil rights, so if Parliament
chose to set up the broadcasting system in that way, no body could
overrule them.)

-GAWollman