JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I wouldn’t have minded the expense had there been something genuinely to celebrate.

Instead such occasions only remind one of how far CBC has fallen.

And in doing this, current senior management has made a terrible strategic mistake, having partially or fully alienated its traditional listeners and supporters.

No one can doubt that the dark bulk we call prime minister is going after CBC eventually.

Why would the man who does things like end the Wheat Board without farmers’ approval or destroy the gun registry (against general public support) or end public support of election costs hesitate?

The man has a tyrant’s mindset, and he is quietly dedicated to turning Canada into a pathetic imitation of the United States by virtue of a 39.6% mandate – which is to say, by virtue of no mandate at all, but a purely technical victory in our flawed election system.

CBC’s current senior management has managed to destroy a good deal of what was valued by listeners while not really succeeding in gaining a hoped-for huge new audience.

How else could it be, stuffing dull mediocrities like Jian Ghomeshi, Evan Solomon, or George Stroumboulopoulos down our throats? Or playing the low end of popular music in a desperate effort to gain young listeners? Or its repeated wading up to its armpits in favoritism and nepotism, while mouthing stuff about prejudice of various kinds? Nepotism is prejudice of the most blatant kind.

CBC has no hope of being a hugely popular network, unless, that is, it just becomes like other networks, in which case, there is no case for keeping it.

It should be a showcase for Canada’s best in ideas, conversation, music, the arts, and comedy, and that necessarily means an appeal that is quite different than all the commercial networks. Not everyone wants to listen to the best, just like not everyone likes the opera or the ballet, but it should be there for anyone who is interested.

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

RESPONSE TO A BROADCAST ON CBC RADIO ONE’S SHOW, THE CURRENTThat was a terrible job of interviewing by Susan Ormiston in the item on typing facilitators.

She got across to the professor at Syracuse none of the essential criticisms by the lucid magician, a man from whom I first heard years ago.

The professor never answered her only meaningful question, and she let him slide off the hook with his silly, pompous “we don’t engage in that kind of thing.”

The fact is that the rigorous procedures of modern science can be gamed by people like those at the University of Syracuse. They may be a non-profit institution, but that doesn’t mean they have no motives to engage in unscientific research.

It brings money to the university and enhances the positions of people like the professor internally. Sadly, the money comes from desperate parents of autistic kids seeking miracles.

This facilitation business is an old fraud, going back some years, and it should surprise no one who knows some history.

We’ve had past unscientific fads galore, for example Mesmerism about two centuries ago or Krebiozen for cancer in the 1960s.

Or the years of “experiments” at Duke University – otherwise a perfectly respectable institution – on people’s psychic abilities with cards and other silliness. Millions were spent for nothing.

One can only conclude Ms Ormiston did not understand the magician’s points or she was unable to summon the skills to challenge the professor.

In either case, she has no business hosting a show like The Current.

I do hope, using her is not a sign of things to come on the show, pointing to the general trend of dumbing-down on CBC Radio which has been so painfully apparent in recent years.