This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchler. Here's John Batchler.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Conrad Black, distinguished biographer, writing at the

National Post in praise of the CBC, almost all of it. French radio, French TV, English

radio, and English TV. We break it down into its four moving parts and ask what is to

be done. Conrad, a very good evening to you. My analogy when I was reading this is NPR,

National Public Radio in the US, and PBS, public broadcasting system. But I see that there

is no way to translate the two because you have two official languages in Canada. And

the French radio and French TV do extremely well. Are they well taken care of these two parts

of the CBC? Good evening to you. Yeah, good evening, Peter John. Well, in fairness, the

French CBC has an easier task than the English branch of the CBC or your public broadcasters

because practically the entire French population of North America is concentrated in Quebec

or in the neighboring provinces, but bordering Quebec. And so it's a community of approximately

10 million French-speaking people. It's a sizeable enough community. It's bigger than Denmark

or Finland or that sort of thing. But Switzerland or something. And the government of Canada

as broadcaster and telecaster, obviously, is a very well-financed, powerful entity to undertake

that task. Now, there are private sector radio and television stations in Quebec, but not

that many. And there is no incoming from another country the way there is for English language

media in Canada, 90% of Canadians live within 200 miles of the American border. I believe

Canada is the most wire-cabled country in the world. So everybody gets American television

and everyone can get American radio. And so the competition is much heavier, as you know,

and as most Americans know, is almost impossible to tell a Canadian from an American living in

a northern state. I don't mean somebody from Alabama or Texas. They're accents different,

...