St. Urbain'S Mediaman

St. Urbain's Mediaman

Robert Rabinovitch is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's first Talmud Torah-educated CEO

Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles

ROBERT RABINOVITCH TOOK over as president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1999, at roughly the same time his younger brother, Victor, was appointed head of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, in Hull, Quebec, across the river from Ottawa's Parliament Hill.

Canadian Jews initially reveled in the prospect of two graduates from a Montreal Talmud Torah and, subsequently, McGill University, appointed to head such important cultural institutions. Many believed that the then-56-year-old senior brother's tenure would lead to a thorough revamping of the national broadcaster's approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In this, some of his more vigilant pro-Israel landsmen have been disappointed.

According to such Jewish watchdog groups as the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC), which purports to be Canadian Jewry's official voice in matters pertaining to Israel, and to the U.S.-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), CBC TV and CBC Radio share many of the shortcomings of their counterparts to the south.

Most notably, they do not always provide a needed context for events covered by their Jerusalem bureaus. As a result, viewers and listeners are often left with an impression of the Jewish State as a capricious juggernaut rolling over a powerless and largely innocent Palestinian population.

The Great White North's answer to AIPAC, the CIC has been particularly vigorous in its criticism. An example of the lack of balance it views as endemic and contrary to the CBC's own charter can be found in the TV network's August 20 coverage of a partial IDF withdrawal from Bethlehem and parts of Gaza.

Whereas most other Western correspondents reported the withdrawal as a positive development, complains the CIC, CBC Television's Middle East Correspondent Neil Macdonald chose to cite only those Palestinians who regarded the deal leading to the withdrawal as a "sellout." Writing in the Canadian Jewish News, CIC communications director Paul Michaels concluded that "one cannot be faulted for assuming that Macdonald is taking sides, expressing his own personal attitudes through the words of others. Indeed, Macdonald's reports have sounded so one-sided that the CBC's commitment to fairness and balance appears to lie in tatters."

"People always argue with us that there is a lack of balance," acknowledges the diminutive, bewhiskered Rabinovitch, who during a 12-year stint as head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Quebec Region, before joining the CBC, visited Israel on a yearly basis. Viewers will complain, he says, "'Yes, you reported that story correctly, but you didn't put it into context with everything else.'"

The Report caught up with Rabinovitch in Los Angeles, where he had flown with his wife, Cecil, an erstwhile executive director of Montreal's Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, to attend a gala 50th-anniversary celebration of CBC TV at the Museum of Television and Radio.

"The CBC's argument is twofold," Rabinovitch goes on. "One, we have an ombudsman. There are times when he has chastised people, and you know it when he does. As for balance, though, it has to occur over a period of time, albeit over a very tight period of time.

"The classic example was a piece we did two years ago on the impacts of roadblocks. We did a show that was pretty tough on roadblocks, on the humiliation and the frustrations for the individual Palestinian and the economy. Then we did another piece a few days later showing why this was occurring.

"If you took them together, everyone would have said they were balanced. If you looked at them separately, you would say, well yes, there was a problem. One Jewish group went to Jerusalem ready to kill. But after meeting with our reporter, they came back and said, 'You know, he has a case.'"

ROBERT RABINOVITCH GREW UP in Montreal's working-class Irish-French suburb of Lachine, the son of Sam Rabinovitch, a hard-working door-to-door peddler, and Esther, whom he describes as a "romantic communist," who imbued her offspring with "a concept of public duty."

"There was the concept of giving back something. My mother, in particular, believed very much in collectivism. And my father, who grew up in a French district in a very poor family, never grew with the kind of animus toward the French so typical of his generation."

The Rabinovitch brothers attended the Talmud Torah parochial school, then near the St. Urbain Street Jewish ghetto immortalized by the late Mordecai Richler. When the school moved out to the more upscale Snowdon district during the early 1950s, they followed it. The family did not, however, own a TV until Robert was 12, and even then his viewing time was limited.

Robert did his undergraduate work at McGill University, but his master's and PhD, in economics and finance, he acquired at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He went to the U.S. for graduate school, he says, "because I felt the Montreal Jewish community was just too ghettoized, too insular. I wanted to grow out into other communities."

Rabinovitch drifted into communications almost by happenstance. The year was 1968, and the data he required to complete his dissertation was stored on a mammoth Canadian government mainframe. He conveniently took up an appointment with the Department of Finance for the eight months he imagined it would take him to complete his PhD on the federal computer.

This was a propitious time to make one's way into government. Pierre Elliot Trudeau's election as prime minister that year blew some of the smoke out of the back rooms where the power-brokering that fueled Canadian politics traditionally took place. Rabinovitch quickly found himself under the tutelage of one of the luminaries of the Liberal Party, the Canadian secretary of state and early Trudeau partner-in-arms, Gerard Pelletier.

Among his other purviews, Pelletier was responsible for communications, and it was in this area that Rabinovitch began to accumulate expertise, as he moved up through the ranks of the Department of Communications. By 1985, he was named a deputy undersecretary of state.

Sacked during a purging of Liberals by incoming Conservative Party Prime Minister Brian Mulroney later that year, Rabinovitch traded in his mandarin's robes for the three-piece suit of the corporate boardroom. Not just any boardroom, moreover, but one of the Montreal remnants of Canadian billionaire Charles Bronfman's Seagram's empire carted off to New York after the Quebec separatist victory in 1976.

Rabinovitch joined Claridge Inc., a Charles Bronfman holding company involved in movie theaters and studios, communications companies and satellites, as chief operating officer and executive vice president, in 1987. At the same time, upon his return to Montreal from Ottawa, he began a decade-long involvement in local Jewish politics, largely through the auspices of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Quebec Region.

In 1998, the Toronto-based Financial Post announced that Rabinovitch was one of several people on a short list to head the CBC, characterizing him as "politically shrewd, intellectually courageous, strategically brilliant, and capable of fixing his vision on the long term."

The CBC has long served not only as a launching pad for Canadians intent on careers in film and television in Hollywood and New York, but also as a refuge for Jews excluded from many other lines of pursuit during the 30s, 40s and 50s.

Rabinovitch was the first Jew since the CBC was founded in 1936, however, to take the helm of this prestigious yet problematic Canadian institution. Still, those who expected him to bring about a dramatic change in the network's Middle East coverage were probably being a bit naive. As the first Jewish president of the CBC, and as an outspoken Canadian nationalist fearful of American assimilation, Rabinovitch could hardly begin his tenure with an editorial housecleaning over a matter of some partiality.

As one senior Jewish economist in the Canadian government suggested to The Report, Rabinovitch's easy and open Jewishness has actually worked against any fine-tuning of the network's Israel coverage. "I think we would have been better off with a fair-minded goy for that," he said.

Moreover, Rabinovitch began his tenure facing serious challenges to the very survival of the CBC itself. Propped up by roughly $ 800 million a year from the Canadian government, the CBC has been hard put to generate the kind of programming that would secure the ratings to compete with commercial TV available via antenna, cable and satellite. Indeed, much of the CBC budget had traditionally been earmarked to support the hardware necessary to ensure transmission to some of the most far-flung viewing communities of any television market in the world. Rather than create a vibrant corpus of Canadian programming in keeping with the CBC mandate of showing Canadians to themselves, the network found it easier, and cheaper, to screen "Law and Order" or the latest BBC comedies. Not surprisingly, some of its critics had come to refer to it as the Canadian Broadcasting Corpse.

One of its most vigorous and outspoken critics, it turned out, was CanWest Global's Izzy Asper, who, soon after Rabinovitch took over, launched a public tirade against propping up the CBC with taxes, and advocating using the money instead to decrease the national debt.

ASPER IS THE FOUNDER OF A thirty-year-old Winnipeg-based media conglomerate that boasts some 9,000 employees and broadcasting properties in Australia, Northern Ireland and New Zealand.

It's probably no coincidence that Asper and other commercial broadcasters have to compete with the CBC for an estimated $ 350 million in advertising money. So when Asper declared last February in various forums that the CBC was a "state within a state" that should be "expunged," Rabinovitch countered by characterizing Asper as a "blatantly self-interested" capitalist for whom the destruction of the CBC means increased profits.

"I think the enmity between me and Mr. Asper has been blown out of proportion," Rabinovitch told The Report." "He made a position, I countered, he countered with a letter and that was basically it."

"It is not carved in stone that the CBC should continue to exist," he says. "But when you are a country like Canada, the reason for public broadcasting is to have that Canadian interpretation, and to be an incubator for Canadian talent. It's not going to happen otherwise."

Rabinovitch certainly wasted little time upon taking the helm before attempting to revive the "Corpse." During his short tenure, CBC has produced and showcased a number of productions that, as he is keen to point out, would never have been made by a for-profit Canadian company, as they stand little chance of earning back their production costs.

These include the $ 25-million 14-part series "Canada: A People's History," the four-hour mini-series "Trudeau," "Random Passages," an eight-hour saga of salt cod and salaciousness set in 19th-century Newfoundland, and the gritty "The Last Chapter," a mini-series on the biker wars that have engulfed Quebec and Ontario.

"There's no chance of ever making any of this money back," he says. "But you don't do these kinds of things for money. You do them to tell a Canadian story. With all due respect to my competitors in this business, no one else is going to make them."