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.

Content is everything, no matter how you distribute it. And content IS CBC Radio’s crucial problem, and the people who created the situation remain blind to what they’ve done. A few more such changes, and I just won’t bother ever tuning in.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

 

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

Hard to know from the information given here just what Stursberg’s departure means.

Executive rat leaving a ship he helped direct into sinking in a sea of dumbness?

I do think it is all rather hopeless. CBC is on a one way trip to nowhere.

New dumb shows and dumb hosts and dumb formats abound. Once the remaining quality people have reached retirement, the wreck deserves to be abandoned.

With people like George Stroumboulopoulos, Jian Ghomeshi, Evan Solomon, and now Jan Arden, CBC becomes less and less meaningful everyday, pop fluff with no core of genuine experience and broad knowledge.

God, recently, I gave a try to a CBC documentary series on World War II, hosted by Stroumbouloulos. George, dressed in his usual I’m-cooler-than-anyone outfit, appeared out of a cloud of special effects lighted mist like God descending from heaven and proceeded to make a completely inaccurate statement concerning the war. I didn’t watch another minute of this pop nonsense passing for documentary.

Good old Ghomeshi, Canada’s 2010 answer to Dick Clark’s Bandstand, has had endless promos for an interview with Paul McCartney. Oh, wow, one of the biggest egos on the planet, with almost nothing to say, whose genuine creative work was forty years ago, gives yet another interview. What’s the point and what’s Canadian about it?

Many of CBC Radios shows have become nothing more than amateur hour try-outs for pop singers – the stuff is larded into half the programs. Mary Ito’s show is simply a boring series of second-rate singers and wannabes interspersed with chat about her latest jaunt somewhere. Jann Arden sounds like the female version of Trailer Park Boys.

Who needs a public broadcaster for this kind of vacuous stuff?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY LAWRENCE MARTIN IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL

It’s only been a matter of time.

I’ve waited for our Neolithic Conservatives to take up the old Newt Gingrich theme. After all, everything else they do and say was done and said in the United States twenty years ago.

Old Newt used to go around talking about PBS as a sandbox for liberal yuppies to play in.

And he had an impact. PBS/NPR today is a very mediocre excuse for public broadcasting. It has lots of big glitzy shows, but its news and public affairs are toothless, just about as unchallenging as the rest of America’s major networks.

Well, the left/right business is almost meaningless now thanks to CBC’s own handiwork.

How can you talk about left or right when you are discussing a dumb marketing operation for pop music, surely what CBC Radio is well along to becoming totally?

Well, I guess the Neolithics are concerned about the last gasp of shows on CBC that have genuine meaning and challenge thought, a few intellectual gems in a stunningly meaningless broadcast universe.

Challenging thought we know sure ain’t the business of Harper’s gang of provincial incompetents and bellowers.

But I think they should just wait and save their righteous indignation and spewing and fuming: CBC management is killing the network with the death of a thousand little cuts.