These are grim
days for Halifax journalists. After The Daily News shut
down last year, other media cut their reporting staffs to the bone.
Yet, on Monday, August 31, CBC is launching a brand new, expanded
90-minute supper-hour show. Please don’t break out the champagne. Not
if you care about local news. As I point out below, the CBC is
requiring its demoralized journalists to do a lot more with less. And
CBC journalism is getting weaker as the public broadcaster woos
advertisers to make up for federal cuts that have slashed its budget by
more than a third.
So why should you care about the grim state of local news? Well, for
all their faults, journalists are society’s first line of defence
against fraud, waste, incompetence and abuse in public institutions
that have power over your life. Cops and courts can clap you in jail;
governments can pass laws that restrict your rights while diverting the
taxes you pay into the pockets of fat cats and cheats.
OK. Business and cop-friendly local media aren’t that much of a
defense, but christ-Jesus, guys, they’re all we’ve got. No wonder Joe
Howe himself pleaded with the jury at his 1835 trial, “to leave an
unshackled press as a legacy to your children.” Howe faced jail for
exposing corrupt Halifax politicians. His acquittal helped establish
truth as a defence against libel. But someone has to dig up that truth,
and we need journalists to do it. As their ranks thin, and more and
more of them end up as PR flaks speaking for the very institutions that
need watching, all of us become less secure.
Which brings me to the CBC’s new TV supper-hour program. It begins
weekdays at 5pm and ends at 6:30 (not 7pm) to make way for three
foreign shows. The British soap Coronation Street, and the
American game shows Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are
supposed to generate cash and build bigger audiences for CBC’s evening
schedule.
CBC also hopes the expanded supper-hour show will attract more
advertising. To help make that happen, the Corp hired Frank Magid
Associates, a big American consulting firm that specializes in boosting
ratings and attracting advertisers by dumbing down the news. The
formula, already used widely by private TV broadcasters, goes like
this: Play up crime, accidents and weather, play down political and
economic news; make sure reporters are always “live” to create a fake
sense of immediacy and tell viewers repeatedly, “you’re seeing it here
first.”
But how can local CBC fill an extra half-hour of TV news while
continuing to cut jobs? (It lost two more full-time journalists in the
last round of cuts this spring.) The answer that CBC bean-counters came
up with was to move the CBC Radio news staff into the Bell Road TV
building, then require some of the radio journalists to file reports
for the expanded TV show. Sounds great on paper, doesn’t it? But TV
reporting is hellishly time-consuming and radio journalists will be
expected to file live, updated reports during the expanded supper-hour
show. It means they won’t have much time to do longer stories for the
radio current affairs shows that broadcast for six-and-a-half hours
every single weekday. Two of those programs, Information Morning and Mainstreet, already operate with a bare minimum of staff.
The third show, Maritime Noon, just had its air time cut in half
and its staff slashed from seven to two.
So, CBC Radio is being sacrificed to help pay for a dumbed-down,
American-style TV news show bent on boosting audiences and ad revenues.
And why not? CBC Radio consistently attracts huge and fiercely loyal
audiences, but it runs no advertising. For the bean counters, it’s a
financial drain, not a journalistic asset. Weakening CBC Radio is
another piece of grim news for local journalists and yes, it’s very bad
news for the rest of us.
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This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2, 2009.
The loss of quality journalism is the price all Canadians pay for government unwilling to sufficiently fund its public broadcaster. Canada pays about half, per capita, of what most countries put into their public broadcasters (the U-S, with its endless PBS fund-a-thons is the exception). So CBC brings in non-broadcasters to run the corporation on a “business footing” to try and increase revenue. Bad news for broadcasting, for radio in particular, and for journalism in general. I could weep.
We’ve already had plenty of examples of this, for years in fact, with “live in our newsroom” becoming a running gag. As for playing up the weather, did you see during No Show Bill the poor CBC reporter, no doubt instructed by her producer, who stood next to a building on the waterfront which funneled the rain and wind onto her to make it look feircer than it was? There, in the background of the shot, was a man walking with little concern along the boardwalk, unhindered by the little bit of wind and rain coming his way, making the reporter look like an idiot.
I find most TV news — CBC or CTV — unwatchable now, with more ads than content, more gore than sense, and less wit than wand-waving. I get my news on the web, when and where I want it, and in as much depth as I can stand.
Don’t expect TV to get better. It’s going low-brow to survivie.
thank you
thank you for writing what many of us have been thinking
– anon. cbc employee
Of course, those of us with an open mind might just resist the urge to prejudge until the program actually airs.
I am a former student of Bruce’s and a former CBC employee (contract work for 8 years). When we were students at King’s we all wanted to work for CBC. Not so much anymore. I have many friends, fine journalists, who were dicked around at CBC, and either split for another network or switched careers completely…never to return. I’m afraid I will have to do the same.
I think that the best part is that most people are pissed about losing the 5pm The Simpsons.
Quote from story:
“……… fraud, waste, incompetence and abuse in public institutions that have power over your life.”
Perfect description of the CBC.
BTW Real journalists are NOT government employees.
this makes me so sad. I listen to cbc radio all day every day, and love it to death. There needs to be more, not less !
“But TV reporting is hellishly time-consuming and radio journalists will be expected to file live, updated reports during the expanded supper-hour show.”
What you’re really going to love, Bruce, are the so-called “live” updates that will be coming from reporters in the first hour of the program…from 5 PM to 6 PM. They are actually pre-taped segments that are plugged into the show and passed off as live…when they are actually at least 2 hours old. They are actually called “fake lives” by the folks in the newsroom. Truth in journalism? Not at CBC anymore….
while the Harper Regime is in power, our ‘public’ broadcaster will never be properly funded… at least, not by you and me – the public.
i hear Ignatieff is ‘threatening’ yet another election… yawn
with opposition ‘leaders’ like Iggy, we’re never gonna get rid of Harper.
sigh
abc
Agreed, 100%. I was able to watch the whole 90 minutes for the first time today, and I saw several of their “news” pieces last less than 3 minutes. That’s not news, that’s a CNN scrollbar below the picture of the news anchor blathering on with the same story he’s already spoken about twice in the same broadcast.
It’s bad. We actually studied it for our Journalism class (yes I’m a King’s student, hoping not to be part of that type of mediocre journalism) and no one was very impressed.
I watched one episode that the “breaking” news was a car accident. Pretty sure that happens every day. Lame.
Is Peter Coade paid by minutes on air, because I don’t need THAT many weather updates. Cut Coade and add some hard hitting real news please, because my school lives and swears by CBC everything, and judging by this new newscast, I’m scared for my future.