Well, first of all, I assume your reference to Paris Hilton was metaphorical. The CBC, and I know this is shared by Radio-Canada, is aggressively hostile to the coverage of those stories. I won't bore you with the many examples over the past several months, or even recent years, of where we have been totally offside in contrast to American commercial cable, and to a certain extent Canadian cable. Toward those stories, our indifference and what I sense from you are the same.
The public broadcaster must do what it can do to expand its audience, to connect with as many Canadians as possible, but within reason and not at the expense of quality. We have never been indifferent to the size of our audience. I think the balancing act for us has always been how to provide a range of programming and to ensure that we don't sacrifice quality in the search of numbers and the search of ratings.
As far as I'm concerned, the connection of advertising with news and current affairs doesn't exist. I've been with the CBC in senior positions for about 20 years, and I can't remember one decision I made or my colleagues made that focused on trying to get audiences so that advertisers were happier with us. There is a firewall in our organization.
So I don't think that's an issue for us--advertising. What is an issue is that if we as an organization didn't have a large number of Canadians watching us or listening to us or reading us, people like you would be quite unhappy with the place of CBC and Radio-Canada in Canada. It's a balancing act.