Rex Murphy: Just when the CBC could really help Canadians, it lets them down – National Post

The ability of the CBC to wound itself, to find ways to alienate its audience, reduce its impact, sometimes even drive viewers and listeners away from its services, is a fascinating subject. A subject, ironically, worthy of one of its multiple documentaries, which at one time were its hallmark.

We will never see such a documentary, for the CBC is constitutionally incapable of honestly assessing itself with any of the rigour and sometimes downright enthusiasm it turns its judgmental eye to on every subject but itself.

I refer to CBC managements fiat to close down all local supper-hour news shows. I have no idea what turns of mind or involutions of its internal bureaucracy and CBC has its bureaucracy can have led to such a decision. I would truly love to know how much consultation and dialogue and information-sharing processes that are lovingly highlighted in every Memo to Staff that CBC produces by the hundreds every day went on with the shows to be cancelled. How many on-air personnel or camera operators or sound technicians and editors, from P.E.I. or Newfoundland for example, were either brought to Toronto, or put on a live feed, to discuss with their sage management these cancellations?

The ability of the CBC to wound itself is a fascinating subject

The fatal ingenuity of the CBC is never more apparent than in the larger decisions of its senior management. With a full spread of plausible and sensible options politely knocking at their doors, they will send out, and only after establishing enough committees and study sessions to rival the Third International Congress, for the worst possible choice, and decree it down the line to the archipelago of what, in the Toronto emporium on Front Street, is known as the locals.

Hence, the strange nay, the eerie, the eldritch decision, now that the world is in pandemic mode, and reassurance is as much a part of news as information the bizarre choice, to bring the hammer down on all locally sourced and locally delivered supper-hour news shows across this truly broad and diverse country, with its decade of provinces and its trinity of territories. All the shows in other words that are closest to the pulse of the people they serve; are hosted by persons their audience actually meets and chats with going about their daily business.

Now instead of the double-band, nationalplus local, all news will come from the one over-lit and superfluously hosted national studio, as remote as remote can be from the wide, diverse and scattered regions of this great country.

When announcing the fiat, CBCs general manager of news, Susan Marjetti, offered this I would suggest bizarrely tendentious statement:As Canadians turn to us (CBC) for the latest developments during these unprecedented times, we are temporarily pooling our resources into one core news offering.

Theres more than a dollop of over-estimation and unjustified self-praise in that opening. What ratings I read suggest that Canadians are turning to many places, and CBC is not near the top of them. Secondly, if Canadians are turning to the CBC, is it not a very strange time to go dark, to shutter the screens on every local TV news show (save the North there, CBC wouldnt dare for obvious reasons)?

Thirdly, is it not curious and more, that in the early days of a national and international crisis whose proportions we have not seen in generations, that CBC management enter into one of their perpetual restructuring strategies? CBC has restructured so often even the buildings are dizzy, never mind the poor employees.

CBC has restructured so often even the buildings are dizzy

Just when local news in your own region (wherever that is) matters the most, CBC pulls it? Now more than ever, people need to hear whats going on in their own communities and provinces from the very people, on-air and technical, they have come to know.

Toronto-centric news transmission is not a solution for the CBC; it has always been the problem.

It is the Toronto centres distance, and lack of contact and genuine experience with life outside the centre, that leads to misjudgments on matters like the Alberta oil crisis, the plight of farmers, the facts of life in small towns, and just the general experience of common life in so many parts of Canada. That and an adhesion, which is almost perfect, to the nostrums of political correctness and the pieties of progressivism have made most national news a ghetto of received opinion and very tired social justice championship.

These causes, to be clear, do have their virtues. But the trendy is not everything. You cannot, as a broadcaster, be separate from the majority of your would-be viewers. And those who can most remedy the gaps in the CBCs centre-understood idea of Canada are the very local broadcasters the CBC is now in ignorance shutting off.

CBC is very comfortable with sensitivity-training for what it considers ill-behaviour.

There is only one sensitivity training session the CBC really needs, and that is sensitivity training for its executives and management, who are intellectually quarantined, and have been for years, to the ideas, opinions and daily conduct of allCanadians, just not those few under a chosen attitudinal umbrella.

The upper reaches of the CBC are strangers to more than half the land they purport to report upon. Their sensibility is a screen that bars them from the full range, and yes, the real diversity, of Canadian experience.

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Rex Murphy: Just when the CBC could really help Canadians, it lets them down - National Post