CBC's MANAGEMENT TALKS ONLY OF TECHNICAL CHANGES TO COME, IGNORING THE VITAL MATTER OF DEGRADED CONTENT
JOHN CHUCKMAN
LETTER TO CBC
MANAGEMENT AFTER ANNOUNCEMENT OF COMING CHANGES BY SENIOR MANAGEMENT
CBC’s President and its Vice-president for English Broadcasting
spoke in radio interviews about technical matters, using words like “mobility”
and almost not a word about content.
It is CBC’s degraded content that deeply concerns those
concerned about CBC, not technical matters.
Of course the hope is that technology will reduce costs and
that is good but far, far from sufficient. CBC today - and I speak to CBC Radio, the service I have
long used - is fast approaching irrelevance. The emphasis on pop music, on
being almost an amateur-tryout outlet for hopeful wannabes, has swamped
everything.
Appointed new hosts over recent years are a collective disaster:
Jian Ghomeshi, Gill Deacon, Brent Bambury, Matt Galloway, and one or two others are
simply uninteresting minds, yet they dominate the schedule, people who talk in
trivialities about celebrities and pop music and never utter an incisive word.
Even guest hosts on shows now are often of the same poor quality, people who
cannot conduct an interesting or informative interview, for example the “The
Current”’s summer host, a person of minimal apparent talent.
CBC Radio’s broadcast news is filled with trivialities,
unexamined notions, pointless “soundbites,” even errors, and virtually no digging-in
to anything, besides being annoyingly and infinitely repeated. I am amazed at
times on hearing a story on so-called national news that no editor said before
putting it on air, “Well, that raises more questions than it answers.”
There are only a few hosts left worth hearing: Anna Maria
Tremonti, Bob McDonald, Eleanor Wachtel, Michael Enright, and one or two
others. Considering the ages of these excellent few, what comes after them?
More dull mediocrity, without a doubt.
Instead of a broadcast service featuring Canada’s best, something
of which we can be proud, something which informs, you’ve been building an
all-day Ed Sullivan Show.
