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The CBC would like
you to know that it is hip.
Or rather, it would
like you to please notice its hipness transfusion, or its synthetic hip
replacement or whatever it’s trying to promote with phase one of its
Razorfish-directed branding/marketing exercise: a billboard over Toronto’s
Don Valley Parkway featuring the half-sentence “. . . one of the world’s
great newscasts.” Below that, The National logo and, to the right,
anchor Peter Mansbridge looking eerily like a dyspeptic Orson Welles as the
elderly Charles Foster Kane. What brand are New York’s Razorfish and
Toronto’s Ammirati Puris trying to establish for The National,
exactly?
Is a half-hour
television “newscast of record” at 10 p.m.
of any use or commercial purpose anymore? Why would any corporation bother
to brand such a quaint antique? Didn’t the “futurists” assure us we’d have
no use or time for anything so outmoded as a “nightly newscast” by now?
The designation of
The National as “one of the world’s great newscasts” is attributed to
Wallpaper magazine. The ultra-hep style-bible is called Wallpaper*,
with an asterisk. Wallpaper, one could reasonably conclude, is
something entirely different — a trade publication for paperhangers,
possibly. That would be fine, too; it wouldn’t be the first time somebody
noticed The National made good wallpaper. Despite the refusal of
Razorfish/Am-I-really-Pocahontas/CBC to spell its name correctly, it is, in
fact, Wallpaper* — the style bible — that named the CBC’s news one of
the 100 coolest things on the planet in the year 2000 — the 59th
coolest thing on the planet, to be precise.
Self-appointed
groovaliciousness arbiters such as Wallpaper* have to be fickle, so
that “world’s greatest” designation has a short shelf life. Where will
The National place in this year’s rankings? It could become cooler, it
could drop off the list, or it could be deemed totally lacking in even trace
elements of coolness, or hotness, or whichever temperature it’s supposed to
have. Then what? A follow-up billboard, saying, “Wallpaper* hates us
now, but Lucky, the magazine about shopping, thinks we’re quite
ginchy, and W finds us amusing in a sleepy sort of way”?
Consider, also, the
source of that “. . . one of the world’s great newscasts” designation. It’s
Wallpaper*, a shelter book for people so lacking in taste they need a
magazine dreamed up by a guy from Winnipeg in a morphine stupor to tell them
which furniture and lifestyle accoutrements to acquire — and, apparently,
which television news to watch. Is an endorsement from a magazine dedicated
entirely to superficiality what The National needs? It’s like a
publishing company selling a new translation of Dante’s Inferno using
an endorsement from Pamela Anderson.
If you’re aiming to
— as Wallpaper* put it — “claim to be authoritative,” quoting a
publication like Wallpaper* about your greatness obviates any
authority you might have; it identifies you as confused, pathetic, uncertain
and desperate.
And if I could
stand to watch The National or had a reason to — say, if I’d failed
to glance at page one of that morning’s Globe and Mail and needed to
know what it contained at 10 p.m. that night — I’d want a newscast that
acted like it thought it was setting the agenda. I would not want the TV
news equivalent of finding my great uncle in balloon-leg rave-pants and a
Slipknot T-shirt chanting “ice ice baby” in an attempt to seem “with it.”
“We don’t want to
be seen to be old and stodgy,” says hip, now, a-go-go, “boss” boss, Mr.
Down-with-the-program-and-the-kids-can-relate His Own Bad Self, Robert
Rabinovitch, CBC Coolmaster General, by way of explaining why an endorsement
from a lifestyle/furniture book is a desirable thing for a network’s
flagship newscast. Good for you, Bob. That’s why you’re airing that far-out
freak-fest Coronation Street,
so as not to be perceived as old and stodgy, right? And The Magic School
Bus, Arthur — now those are cutting-edge efforts, clearly aimed
at the leaders of tomorrow. And the thousand-and-one hockey games that clog
the schedule from September through July — also très “now.” Right on, Bob-a-loo,
letting the CBC’s freak flag fly like that.
Why, if you guys
were any cooler, we’d have to check for a pulse.
Uh-oh. |
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