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“The TV business is uglier than most
things. It is normally perceived as a cruel and shallow money trench through
the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves
and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
Did you breathe a
sigh of relief once a new head had been appointed for the CBC? Didn’t we
all? Will any of us ever forget the wild speculation, the heady anticipation
that preceded the naming of Robert Rabinovitch to the post? And what new
wondering and guesswork will ensue now that someone has finally been chosen?
What radical change in mission, mandate and purpose might we now expect from
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation?
Admit it. You
didn’t even know the post was vacant. You couldn’t pick Bob Rabinovitch out
of a police lineup that consisted of three people if he were wearing a name
tag reading “Hello My Name Is Bob Rabinovitch.” And why should you be able
to? The CBC does two things well: radio and This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Even the old reliable Hockey Night In Canada has been rendered
irrelevant with the rise of cable sports channels. And yet the CBC trudges
on, sucking more of our tax money into its gaping maw. To do what, exactly?
Train journalists
for work in the United States, put their work on regular satellite feeds
where U.S. recruiters can see it, demoralize the inspired and dedicated,
stomp the will to live out of most of the employees, and provide comfortable
lifelong sinecures for the otherwise unemployable — mostly bureaucrats for
whom nothing else can be found. I worked at the CBC for five years. I had a
great deal of respect for almost all the people I worked with daily — folks
who actually contributed to making television. They’re smart, creative and
seemingly inexhaustible. But they’re stymied in an outfit that views those
attributes as liabilities, and bosses who value obedience above everything.
These days, when I run into folks who still work for the Corp. and ask how
things are going, most of them just moan, mutter something about how they
quit making any effort a couple of years ago and then shrug.
About the only
person who does care about Mr. Rabinovitch and the CBC is Patrick Watson. He
offered Rabinovitch a full page of unsolicited advice in the Globe and
Mail. I thought there was nothing less relevant or boring than the
identity of the CBC boss...until I saw Patrick Watson’s advice to the CBC
boss. And then my entire being was overwhelmed with such stupefying torpor I
fell face-first onto the kitchen table.
When I woke up, I
remembered Watson was rumored to have run the CBC at the beginning of the
decade. He was installed in the slot while the Mulroney Tories were making a
series of much-needed cuts to the CBC’s bloated, unjustified and
unsustainable budget. Much of that cutting seemed motivated more by personal
pique than fiscal prudence, but that just amounted to doing the right thing
for the wrong reasons. Of course, faced with less money, the CBC started
canning the people who shot, edited and wrote its programming. The middle
management slugs stayed put. More illustrative during that episode was
Watson’s deafening silence. You’d think that Mr. “Itch For Democracy” would
have quit in protest, screeched his dissent or tried to explain to the staff
why the cuts were necessary. None of that happened.
Well, if people
who used to work at the CBC can offer unsolicited advice, here’s mine: The
CBC ought to decide whether it wants to be a state-operated broadcaster, a
private network or some hybrid. If it’s going to be a hybrid, then it ought
to go the PBS route, albeit with the caveat it offer better programming. And
following the PBS model, it’s going to have to get the public to pay for at
least part of its operations directly, rather than its current tax-skimming
MO.
The corporation is
used to going cap in hand to the government, so asking its viewers to pay
should be easy. If it’s going to be a commercial broadcaster — a business —
then it’s got to start operating like one. Make — or buy — programming that
people will want to watch, present it well, promote it so that people know
it’s on and when, and then sell an advertiser that audience. And no more
government money, unless it comes from media departments paying for
advertising like everybody else.
Nobody will take
this advice. The CBC will continue to offer middlebrow mediocrity in its
confused neither-fish-nor-fowl, quasi-commercial/kinda-public way. And in
doing so, it will continue to fulfill its true mandate: giving Canadians a
crummy, redundant entity that’s not good enough to celebrate, but not rotten
enough to be embarrassed about; something we don’t love enough to sustain,
but don’t care enough about to fix. And most important, something we can
passionately debate the merits and shortcomings of without intending to ever
do anything about the situation at all. |
