POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
In the past, CBC could have counted me as a voice against Conservative cuts.
While I was no great admirer of CBC's television efforts - with a handful of exceptions - I considered the radio something special indeed
.
But current management at CBC has chosen to dumb-down the radio network horribly, and I cannot defend what is no longer special.
Yes, there still are some very special people on the radio - Bill Richardson, Robert Harris, Eleanor Wachtel, Bob McDonald, Bernard St-Laurent, Rita Celli, Michael Enright, and a few others presenting the kind of material no commercial station would present - but there is now also a vast wasteland of insipid new programming.
And the roll call of the remaining genuinely talented people includes mainly people not far from retirement. We can only expect their shoes to be filled by more droning mediocrity under CBC's existing management.
CBC Radio will never capture the "younger" audience with a dollop of pop music and younger faces, but it sure has alienated past CBC supporters with the loss of quality and authenticity.
If CBC doesn't represent the nation's best and most articulate and intelligent, what does it represent? Mush seems to be the answer, sadly.
Jian Ghomeshi is a pop record promoter pretending to be an intellectual, a person with a not-very-interesting mind, poor judgement in many areas, and, no matter how hard he tries, a mediocre interviewer with his lack of perceptive intelligence.
Evan Solomon's very voice is droning and annoying - he has none of the talents or vast store of knowledge of the people he replaced. He's a plodder with a raspy voice.
Matt Galloway is the best by far of a bad lot - a clearly sympathetic and decent man whose care about his city comes through, but he still cannot conduct an interesting interview, and his choice in music is bizarre to say the least.
Julie Nesrallah is a perky person who does know something about music, but she talks in teenage-silly-girl terms, almost sounding like a Valley Girl at times - not my idea of a great presenter of classical music.
The radio news anymore contains grammatical errors and often reflects poor judgment in the stories presented and how they are presented. Little real reporting is heard, just some young person on the scene making generalizations he or she might have made without the travel expenses. The questions in the listener's mind are so obvious at times, you just wonder how they did not occur to an editor or reporter.
The quality CBC should represent increasingly just is not there.
In the past, CBC could have counted me as a voice against Conservative cuts.
While I was no great admirer of CBC's television efforts - with a handful of exceptions - I considered the radio something special indeed
.
But current management at CBC has chosen to dumb-down the radio network horribly, and I cannot defend what is no longer special.
Yes, there still are some very special people on the radio - Bill Richardson, Robert Harris, Eleanor Wachtel, Bob McDonald, Bernard St-Laurent, Rita Celli, Michael Enright, and a few others presenting the kind of material no commercial station would present - but there is now also a vast wasteland of insipid new programming.
And the roll call of the remaining genuinely talented people includes mainly people not far from retirement. We can only expect their shoes to be filled by more droning mediocrity under CBC's existing management.
CBC Radio will never capture the "younger" audience with a dollop of pop music and younger faces, but it sure has alienated past CBC supporters with the loss of quality and authenticity.
If CBC doesn't represent the nation's best and most articulate and intelligent, what does it represent? Mush seems to be the answer, sadly.
Jian Ghomeshi is a pop record promoter pretending to be an intellectual, a person with a not-very-interesting mind, poor judgement in many areas, and, no matter how hard he tries, a mediocre interviewer with his lack of perceptive intelligence.
Evan Solomon's very voice is droning and annoying - he has none of the talents or vast store of knowledge of the people he replaced. He's a plodder with a raspy voice.
Matt Galloway is the best by far of a bad lot - a clearly sympathetic and decent man whose care about his city comes through, but he still cannot conduct an interesting interview, and his choice in music is bizarre to say the least.
Julie Nesrallah is a perky person who does know something about music, but she talks in teenage-silly-girl terms, almost sounding like a Valley Girl at times - not my idea of a great presenter of classical music.
The radio news anymore contains grammatical errors and often reflects poor judgment in the stories presented and how they are presented. Little real reporting is heard, just some young person on the scene making generalizations he or she might have made without the travel expenses. The questions in the listener's mind are so obvious at times, you just wonder how they did not occur to an editor or reporter.
The quality CBC should represent increasingly just is not there.
