Where the CBC went wrong

Cayley’s clear-eyed analysis of the Richard Stursberg-Ghomeshi era is superb and superbly funny. What those arguing that pop music, TV, and Hollywood are the natural vernacular of our time don’t say is that “popular entertainment” too is an elitist interest, with archives of information you have to have boned up on, its own insiderism, snobbery, movements and countermovements. Compared to, say, the several decades of history of popular music from R&B onward, getting the basics on Mozart or Handel looks less daunting. “No,” says the CBC, culture shows should be dissecting the latest episodes of Love Island, instead. The dawn of the parti pris era for the CBC, as Cayley sees it, is the early 1960s and the show called This Hour Has Seven Days, which the CBC has since made part of its lore. The tabloid-y, ambush-y show lasted two seasons, but its significance was that it ushered in a new era of directly involved television. One of the episodes took a resolute anti-psychiatry, anti-institutionalization stand at the time when anti-psychiatry was on the rise as a social movement in the West. In another segment, the host shed a tear on camera for his interview subject. This got the people watching, but also set a new tone. Muddling through the modern era  Fast forward to the last decade and the Ceeb is, paradoxically, at its most ideologically narrow in its mission to inform, while striving for (what it thinks is) the broadest appeal and accessibility in its mission to entertain. Two of the major recent subjects that the corporation didn’t do justice to, reporting on public health during the pandemic and the convoy blockade of Ottawa, get some of the best pages in the book. Those are just two of major recent events on which the CBC identified the “correct” political line and embraced it seemingly without hesitation or exception, especially in the selection of sources it deemed worthy of talking to. However you could add any other number of issues, notably trans activism and its demands, and the Indigenous activism and its demands. There are things that can be said on the CBC and things that must remain outside the framing, and, as Jonathan Kay put it, should not be raised in the polite society of the national broadcaster. It doesn’t matter if they are true. The CBC has lost the capacity to even approach them. Cayley is methodical on the reasons for the current state of the CBC and our national conversation, but a little less precise about what is to be done about it. He suggests a thorough pluralization, identifying different publics where it used to imagine one homogeneous public, and a big dash of humility, skepticism, formality, and respect. I would have appreciated hearing more on the hiring practices at the CBC and the reserve army of contract staff working at the corporation at any time. When a full-time job eventually opens, this is the pool from which the candidates are generally selected, which further narrows down the selection to “those who already work here.” There should instead be some sort of a training scheme instituted for recruitment of the genuinely new people—working class and low income; adult immigrants with degrees from other countries; people from other corners of ideological spectrum, conservatives included—instead of what passes for diversity at the CBC. Nearly 87 percent of new recruits are “racialized, Indigenous, or persons with disabilities,” and yet somehow the uniformity of opinion and ideological allegiance persists. Arts and books coverage has especially fallen at the CBC in the last decade. It’s become obvious that the corporation does not like any level of expertise and people who know about their subject matter. (Tune in to two remaining book shows and weep.) Currently the most successful arts and ideas shows available in the anglosphere are both podcasts and traditionally produced radio, usually by the BBC, and all have hosts who are extremely knowledgeable in their domains, whether in the podsphere or radio. History podcasts have become huge in the last five years, but when the Ceeb bothered to make its own effort, it hired two young hosts who work in theatre for the task. Not a surprising move by a media house that hates arts journalists and critics and keeps hiring retired musicians to host shows: Ben Heppner, Marion Newman, Julie Nesrallah, Tom Power, Shad, Jian Ghomeshi, Randy Bachman. Has anything replaced Quirks and Quarks in CBC science radio and podcasting? Nothing has replaced the CBC’s classical music shows from long ago, and drama, social science, and ideas shows are all almost nil. What’s next?  Personally, all my talk audio is now British or American. The originally very janky CBC radio app is now somewhat better designed, but its content is even worse than when I last listened to it, in the final days of Tapestry and Writers & Co. What will happen to local news reporting? Will the CBC end up being a streaming service, as its former CEO Catherine Tait suggested? Perhaps they should consider Jen Gerson’s idea to invest in training the local people in distant outposts in reporting and research basics and use them as local correspondents. (I’m sure the unions would embrace the idea wholeheartedly.) The just announced five year revival plan proposes something similar, but the rest of the blueprint doesn’t indicate that the bosses get the seriousness of the problem. It’s not just rural Alberta that’s switching off, as the new CEO admits; I don’t know anybody in downtown Toronto who still turns to CBC for anything. Returning to the CBC’s core directives—to enlighten and entertain—it has its impulses exactly backwards. On the news side, it should abandon its commitment to catering its reporting to the urban progressive set and aim to deliver neutral, fact-based, and local coverage. On the entertainment side, it should abandon its predilection for the lowest-common denominator pop culture that’s, more often than not, just repackaged American content, and embrace Canadian fare and look further into the anglosphere for impact and reach. Show Canada to itself and the world. There are huge challenges ahead and it looks like the CBC, now that the Liberals are back in the federal saddle, has no intention of tackling any of them.