Veteran broadcast newsman Tim Knight contributes a regular column to HuffPost, analyzing and rating broadcast and online journalistic programs.
Date -- Thursday, March 29, 2012
Subject -- Open letter to the CBC president and CEO after the government budget announced this afternoon.
Dear President Lacroix,
By now, you know most of the gory details of the damage. Ten per cent cut to the CBC. Blood on the floor. From some, wails of anguish. From others, roars of applause.
You have my deepest sympathy, sir. I've worked as a journalist at both PBS and CBC so know enough about the importance of public service broadcasting in our democracy to fear, as no doubt do you, that it's greatly threatened.
You said recently that you and your team are already planning how CBC can survive the Big Cut: "We're talking about making some really tough choices."
So allow me to make a few suggestions about those tough choices.
First, recognize the overwhelming importance of the CBC's news service to Canada. Like the BBC, upon which CBC is modeled, news is the flagship of the Mother Corp. When people think of CBC, for better or for worse, it's the news that first comes to mind.
Because news is -- far more than other programming -- the soul of CBC's public service mandate.
Whatever happens to the other departments, CBC news must be saved. For that to happen, it must be entirely re-thought and remodeled, dragged -- no doubt kicking and screaming -- into the 21st Century.
The time of the great networks is over. The Internet and social media have won. Viewers and listeners can find any information they want, where they want, when they want. If it's any consolation, in the future the private networks will be just as threatened as the public broadcaster. But they are far more flexible and have no public service mandate.
I leave it to others, better qualified, to advocate breaking the corporation into separate companies, dropping advertising on T.V., getting out of sports etc. etc. And I leave it to others (mostly much younger than you or me) to work on the technical details of a new Internet-based organization.
Instead, let me concentrate here on news content.
If it is to survive and properly serve Canadians, CBC news has to learn to tell stories again.
In the end (with all respect to bloggers, citizen journalists, Tweeters, Facebookers and the like who specialize in pure information), the ancient art of storytelling is by far the most efficient way to transfer information and the meaning of that information in broadcasts or on the Internet.
Always has been. Always will be.
Storytelling isn't just having a beginning, a middle, and an end -- as in so many CBC news reports. Anyone can put a bunch of facts together, one after the other, and call it storytelling. It's not.
Storytelling is at the very heart of our humanity. And, through our humanity, our self-interest. So we hang in to find out what happens. And we care.
Storytelling has an ancient structure -- context, dramatic development, climax, sometimes denouement. It goes back through the mists of the millennia, to our very roots, touches something ancient, primary, and elemental inside us all.
Storytelling seems to be bred in the bone -- part of our genes -- like a child's ability to pick up language. Over the millennia, passing on information through storytelling has, quite literally, helped humans survive in a hostile world.
Storytelling makes information relevant, accessible, digestible, and retainable.
Storytelling's genius is that it enables the viewer to understand both the events and the meaning of those events.
Storytelling is pretty much the same in all tribes, everywhere.
Verdict -- When you unsheathe the axe or the scalpel and make the inevitable cuts sir, please keep in mind that CBC News, far more than any other CBC programming, is a precious national resource.
It must be saved.
It must be radically reformed.
And storytelling is the single most effective way to do it.
One other thing: Isn't it time the CBC Board of Directors seated a journalist again? There hasn't been a single journalist in that august gathering since Peter Herrndorf and Trina McQueen, both dedicated to public service broadcasting, were ousted.
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The CBC is important to Canadians.
I look forward to more of your writing on HuffPost.
Simply do an aggregate 10 precent cut in wages, starting at 20 per cent of the salaries of the ones whose offices have windows and going as low as 5 per cent for those who actully get the work done. And encourage the pres to lay off those $247 club sandwiches.
I do agree with Mr. Knight that the CBC must learn to tell us stories again. But I find it hard to accept that those stories must emanate from the News Division which has become a pale imitation of what it was in the glory days. They shoot horses, don't they?
Okay, dumping news coverage on the main network and at O&O stations would make Newsworld (or whatever the brass has renamed it this month) somewhat impossible to run, but do we need that network too? Why not do as CTV has done with the A-Channel stations and Bravo, and turn its cable/satellite network into a rerun channel for the main network's prime time programs and spice that up with some of the more interesting foreign programming we never get to see in this country?
CBC local stations draw abysmal audience numbers at 6pm and get whipped by the private stations in just about every market. Not only that, but I have always contended the CBC on TV is really trying to compete for the same person as listens to its flagship radio newscast and current affairs show through the dinner hour. This has been an absurdity that costs hundreds of millions of scarce program dollars a year.
Stay tuned for Part III.
With all the information sources available today, I am beginning to wonder if we really need CBC television news at all, nationally or locally. Yes, by all means keep radio and its news gathering service, but television? Let's drop the charade. There's really too much news out there and the CBC no longer does the great job it did when Mr. Knight worked there. He himself said as much in his first HuffPost column. So what's the alternative?
Stay tuned for Part II.
Yep. Heck, for a number of years CBC.ca news was an expensive, large department full of people who basically just rewrote wire stories, to make them sound CBC-ish. All the other departments - radio news/TV news were disconnected from it. Heck, they'd have staff in meetings to look at power point presentations of demographic targets who they should be targeting stories to (the fictional example was Greg, I think, 30ish professional male who loved sports and tech stories).
Apart from some good radio docs, I rarely get anything from CBC news that I don't get from the CP stories in the free dailies or from watching any other Canadian newscast. The papers (Globe/Post/Star) generally go a little deeper, but much less than they used to.
Storytelling has nothing to do with Fox news style opinions or packaging/shaping the news -- it's telling the stories that are out there and are being missed or reduced to 10-second clips.
On the defence side of the equation, at some point we Canadians are going to have to stand together to defend our own culture, which may be more valuable than the cost of a single F-35 fighter jet (up to $75 million to $138 million, equipped, depending on what one reads).