Make Room At The CBC For The Young

[Abbreviated Text of remarks delivered by Linden MacIntyre as part of the Vic One guest lecture series at U of T on Nov. 19, 2014]

Linden MacIntyre Huffington Post – More than 50 years ago I became a “journalist” by the simple act of riding an elevator to the third floor of an office building in Halifax. I was shown to a desk in the far corner of a large newsroom and presented with the tools of my new trade — a rotary dial telephone, an ancient typewriter, a massive roll of carbon-separated copy paper, and the largest ashtray that I’d ever seen.

I wasn’t entirely inexperienced. I had attended evening courses at King’s College where I learned the basics of journalism — how to write a lead; the importance of finding the tiny details that reveal the larger more important aspects of the news, the fundamentals of reporting news in radio, television and print.

The revelation came after a hands-on learning session at the local CBC studios, where one of my instructors, a television producer, was deeply amused by my attempt to read a newscast. My presentation skills were okay for a beginner, but the producer told me I had a fatal disability for a broadcaster — I had an accent that was distinctly regional.

Stay away from microphones, he advised.

I got some slightly more diplomatic guidance — that turned out to be mostly true — from a radio producer who told me that I should start out on a newspaper where I’d learn more about reporting in a day than I’d learn on radio or television in a year. In broadcast news I’d basically be rewriting other people’s stories to be read on air by better-looking people whose accents had been refined somewhere half way between Halifax and England.

It would be 12 years before I got into television — by accident it would turn out — the accident of being fired by a newspaper for what management believed to be an unacceptable streak of editorial independence.

I found myself with a television job in 1976 and it couldn’t have happened at a better time — the early days of an era we now look back on as the high-water mark of television journalism, a time when there was a serious effort to demonstrate that television could deliver journalistic substance with clarity and impact at least as credibly as any newspaper or magazine or book.

A new kind of journalism — what was known as television current affairs — would thrive. New programs emerged: The fifth estate, W5, 60 Minutes, Marketplace, The Journal on CBC every night throughout the ’80s. These programs and others established television as a major vehicle for what the CBC’s mandate would call “information and enlightenment”.

Radio was no less vibrant. The programming was powerful — This Country in the Morning, later to be called Morningside; As It Happens; Sunday Morning, now called Sunday Edition — they all had a reach that gathered information from around the world, more often than not by sending teams of Canadian reporters to wherever important news was happening — and delivering it to Canadians with professionalism and production values equal to any in the world.

Times have changed.

The business of journalism is in serious decline. The business model doesn’t work anymore but the emphasis on profit is probably even more acute now than it ever was. That and the growth of technology that makes it possible to produce things without people have led to a crisis in employment opportunities in the news media. Young people are lined up begging to become slaves, also known as interns, to work hard without compensation, just for the opportunity to be noticed by a potential employer.

In the private sector, the emphasis on profit margins trumps public service and journalism every time — and I firmly believe that journalism, whether practiced in the private or public sectors, is an essential public service and should be nurtured for that reason. But as an example of the thinking in the private sector, my friends over at the CTV investigative program W5 learned this fall that, because of sagging profits, seven jobs were being axed and that the program will cut back its episodes from 21 per season to 14.

It is, in a sense, worse in the public sector where I’ve worked as a CBC journalist for the past 38 years. Canadians decided, through political consensus, 78 years ago that there should be a public sector presence in the airwaves — a public institution at arms-length from politics where programming reflecting the world to Canadians, and Canadians to one another, could flourish without dependence on the marketplace.

And for a long time it worked out that way. Politicians and the private sector media never liked the CBC because of its independence from political and market influences and its reliance on the public purse. But the institution thrived, became a mainstay of Canadian culture and a world-class delivery system for information.

That started to change in a big way about 40 years ago as a new ideology began to take root in North America. At the essence of this ideology there is a hostility to public institutions based on the belief that market economics are perfectly attuned to people’s needs and capable of delivering anything that people want — from news to transportation to health care. In that time, public institutions came under constant pressure to move out of the way and to let private enterprise, motivated by self-interest and disciplined to efficiency by the need to earn profits, run the system.

I would argue that no public institution in Canada has suffered more from this ideology than the CBC. And one fine day about six months ago, I decided to end a 50-year career in journalism mostly because of what hostile politicians with widespread public acquiescence are doing to destroy the place I worked in.

After a public announcement that there would be another round of job cuts totalling nearly 700 positions, after decades of budget and personnel cuts, I thought maybe it’s time for me to make a move. Make room for someone else. And also make a statement to the public, that there are real people affected by these cuts. And to my colleagues at the CBC, where there are about a thousand people who could take their pensions and retire if they wanted to. A thousand positions that could be filled by bright, motivated, sophisticated young people who would bring much needed fresh blood and talent into an organization that has been diminished and dispirited by years and years of political hostility and public apathy.

Something just suddenly clicked in my mind. A kind of an epiphany, if you will. The public sector is under attack which might or might not be a good thing — but the public doesn’t seem to know about it or, if they do, the public doesn’t care. Public broadcasters. Public health care providers. People who provide essential services — we’ve heard a lot lately about the Mounties, how ill-equipped they are to safely do their work. We’re even nickel and diming veterans of our wars. And nobody seems to give a damn.

Weigh this stinginess when it comes to public services against the generosity to private sector businesses — the policy protection and financial incentives to keep them happy doing what they make a lot of money doing. When we take into account the subsidies to private broadcasters like CTV and Global, and independent television producers, to generate Canadian programming it adds up to the same billion-dollar figure that keeps the CBC afloat.

Fair enough, except the public money by law entitles the public to make programming demands on the CBC — like providing a variety of services over radio and three television networks, in both official languages and a host of aboriginal dialects. Plus we have to grin and bear it every time some right-winger calls us a “state broadcaster” and throws the billion-dollar funding in our faces. And that billion dollars in public money is, by the way, a pittance compared to what other enlightened countries invest to support their public broadcasters.

Canada is one of the most expensive countries in the world to service because of its cultural diversity and vast geography. I’m using figures that are a few years old, but they still make the important point. Per capita spending by Canadians to support the CBC is a fraction of what other countries spend: $33, compared to $154 in Switzerland, $134 in Germany or $67 in Ireland. Among the 18 western countries that consider a publicly owned broadcaster to be worth a share of public money, we rank sixteenth.

Critics argue that the quality of the service offered by the CBC has deteriorated to the point where it’s hard to justify even the measly $33. But it takes us to that old chicken and egg dilemma: which comes first, stingy funding or mediocre programs. I can tell you because I was there for 38 years. The CBC I’m leaving is a shadow of the CBC I joined. In 1976, I joined an institution which was a place for young Canadians to grow and, eventually, contribute to the country in diverse ways. I’m leaving a place where people struggle to survive professionally and, sad to say in many cases — psychologically and emotionally. The difference can be explained to a very great extent by funding cutbacks driven largely by political hostility which has resulted in a hemorrhage of brains and talent from the corporation.

Since the announcement that sparked my decision to leave the CBC — the loss of 657 jobs — 400 more people have received redundancy notices and there will be 400 more positions lost in 2016 and that will not be the end of it, not by a long shot. The active abuse and the passive neglect have been going on for a long time and will continue until politicians get a clear signal from Canadians that a broadcaster dedicated to the service of Canadians is worth supporting.

***

A few months after I started working on a newspaper in 1964, I was assigned to cover Parliament in Ottawa. The parliamentary press gallery: At the time it was one of the plum assignments in the business. I was being sent up there as, essentially, a gofer to work with the correspondent who was one of the senior people on the paper.

I remember the first day, sitting in the gallery above the floor of the House of Commons — I was so excited that I got a nosebleed and had to be taken to a hospital to get it stopped. And I recall that a constant topic of debate in Ottawa, even then, was the CBC — its content was too controversial or elitist, its budget was an unnecessary drain on the public purse.

Later, in the ’70s and ’80s, Pierre Trudeau’s hostility toward the CBC took the form of direct interference with the budget and the television schedule with the upshot that the CBC’s top news anchor at the time, Peter Kent, publicly spoke out about it and swiftly lost his job. Mulroney, in the early ’90s, famously appointed a western hog farmer as minister of culture with responsibility for the CBC.

In the mid-’90s, in a drastic exercise at deficit control, the Chretien government cut the CBC’s budget by 25 per cent. Everybody in the public sector took a hit but it was revealing that as economic circumstances turned around, most public services, especially in culture, got their funding back — but not the CBC.

Chretien didn’t like the CBC, I’m told, because, like Trudeau, he saw it as a nest of English-speaking radicals and French-speaking separatists. And in the early days of his career, snobby CBC reporters seemed to think of him as kind of dim, compared to the other bright lights from Quebec — Marchand, Pelletier, Trudeau. It was payback time in 1995.

And so we arrive at 2006 and Stephen Harper, ideologically hostile to the public sector in general and, in particular, the CBC. Backed up by a party which considers the CBC to be dominated by left-wingers and closet Liberals. Eight years later, oversight of the CBC is by a board of directors made up of people with partisan Conservative credentials and little or no understanding of the ethos or the mission of a public broadcaster like the CBC. So I don’t think it overstates the contemporary situation much to say that the CBC — once one of Canada’s most important and successful public institutions — is on the cusp of a disaster.

But the politicians will respond: there’s still nearly a billion dollars flowing into the CBC from the public coffers every year. What’s your problem? A billion dollars is a lot of money.

But Canada is a lot of country and Canadians are deeply interested in the world. Covering the cultural, political and social life of Canada and the wider world competently and usefully costs a lot more than a billion dollars a year. And the imperative that keeps senior CBC managers awake at night is how to sustain, with diminishing resources, the public’s confidence that what they’re getting for the billion bucks is actually competent and relevant. There’s a growing uncertainty about the value of the CBC, driven I believe by ideology and envy — private sector broadcasters basically don’t like publicly funded competition even though most of them would be out of business in the absence of public policy and subsidies.

So what do people get that matters from the CBC?

I think there is a broad consensus that the French network, Radio-Canada, is vitally important to the whole country. It is a mainstay of Francophone culture and information and has deep and faithful backing from its audiences.

The English side presents a more ambiguous picture. There is great nostalgia for CBC radio — people respond viscerally to any perception of diminished programming and quality but the cuts in radio, while less conspicuous than television, are equally damaging. Important programs rely to an unprecedented extent on people with little or no job security and minimal prospects for developing careers.

Needless to say, things are worse in television where production is more expensive and where diminished quality is more conspicuous.

As is often the case in times of existential crisis it becomes a challenge for people running countries or institutions to project the kind of leadership that fosters confidence and morale — two qualities without which no troubled institution can survive. And so we have the understandable impulse to make small achievements seem large and to go overboard in praising anything that seems to be successful.

Featured image (Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)

From Stephen Pate, NJN Network