The Similkameen News Leader
Editorial
March 4, 2008
SCORE ONE FOR THE LITTLE GUY
On February 25th the CRTC released Broadcasting Decision 2008-44.
To many it may not mean much of anything, but to me it made a lot of sense. Decision 2008-44 basically said no to a big huge corporation that was trying to buy up the last of the independents.
What I'm talking about goes back to last August when the announcement was made that the Jim Pattison Group had purchased Giant-FM (Great Valleys Radio) of Penticton.
It was a sad moment for me in many ways. Part of me was saddened by the fact that when the station first went on the air in 1981, it was the first independent FM station in Western Canada if not all of Canada.
Prior to CIGV-FM, all of the FM stations in business had an AM station in the same building that basically made all the money and paid the bills. I worked at stations like that in Kelowna and Penticton in the 1970s and O80s. It was also at a time when large corporately owned and operated radio stations were located mostly in Ontario or based in the larger cities across the country.
Rural British Columbia had a lot of smaller companies with radio stations and when you scanned up and down the dial you heard a lot of small town local radio. It was a format that connected people to their community and identified the community.
It also saddened me because when I was in Radio in the Okanagan, there were five companies running seven radio stations in the big three cities up and down Okanagan Lake. There were a lot of creative people moving up and down the valley and companies willing to try different things to sound different from the signal you could pick up in the next community.
Then something happened in the 1990's and the corporate giants were swallowing up smaller radio stations.
I was the Assistant Manager of Princeton's radio station from October 1986 until it closed its downtown studio in April 1999. It was a day Princeton lost its ability to share a form of its identity outside the Town Limits.
Giant-FM continued to represent the Okanagan and Similkameen Valleys without ignoring what kept people tuning in being real and connecting with it's listeners whether they were commuters on the Okanagan Lake Bridge, tourists on the beach in Penticton or a rancher surveying the herd in Keremeos or Princeton.
They did it without converting into the homogenized, formula-laden, uninspired radio formats of today where all you know is it's either Fred-FM, Smooth-FM or Light-FM with no other form of identity. You could tune into Blah-FM in Osoyoos and be able to hear it all the way to Kamloops because the same company owned a handful of them.
CRTC Decision 2008-44 goes against the trend as it denies the application by Jim Pattison's radio empire to acquire the assets of radio stations in Vernon and Giant-FM in Penticton.
The main reason for the denial?
"The Commission notes that although the licensing of new entrants might aid in the preservation of the diversity of voices, the region (Okanagan-Similkameen) would be served almost entirely by two operators."
The last time I counted, that would be in the neighbourhood of ten radio stations and as many repeater transmitters. Talk about monopolizing the media!
As the owner of one of only a handful of independently owned newspapers left in British Columbia, I applaud the CRTC's decision to deny the Pattison Group from eating up another part of our local and regional identity.
We need to support our independent voices in whatever way possible because without them, we end up losing our voice and sadly, part of the identity that separates us from the others.
