Defending the Corp

My good friend Peter took the CBC to task for a story that it broadcast recently. His criticisms are valid and, I think, fair. They sparked other discussions, notably at Humblebub's, and a slew of comments, most of them echoing HB's sentiments. And then there was this from Matt Rainnie.

I'm not in the habit of making excuses for the CBC. I quit the Corp., embittered and angry, back in 1996 ... and I still hold grudges to this day (and, despite my best efforts to be a better person, I probably always will).

Having said that, I'm going to do what for me is a rare thing: defend the CBC.

The first thing you learn when you go to work for CBC is that air time is a very hungry goat. It needs to be fed, constantly and without fail. While the rest of the world goes about its business and might take a minute or two to stop and smell the roses, there's no such luxury in the world of news broadcasting. Even five seconds of dead air is uncomfortable; ten is an eternity. So there is enormous pressure on line staff to find new stories, explore existing issues as fully as those issues merit (or as fully as the audience's interest will dictate), and investigate those stories as assiduously as ever-more-limited resources allow.

The key limiting factors in how far a story is taken are audience interest (if only a tiny number of people care, why continue to flog a horse?) and those pesky resources.

I began working for CBC in the salad days of $1 billion plus parliamentary allocations. I worked for programs that bought everybody associated with the show $150 team jackets, for God's sake. Morning shows had three or four producers, not to mention researchers, writers, directors, and secretaries to file all the paperwork. Reporters were routinely detached to work on "special projects" for as long as it took to get the story. As the end of March neared and budgets remained unspent, everybody would get new computers, new desks, new chairs.

Then came the 90's. The CBC budget was slashed, and the cuts were managed by the people at the top. So while a slew of Vice-Presidents kept and expanded their Toronto offices and continued to hold management retreats at fine resorts around the country, the local news-gathering organizations found they were having to fill the same amount of air time with fewer and fewer people. CBC executives, seemingly unaware of some basic Laws of Physics, repeatedly exhorted the troops to "Do more with less!", as if that were somehow possible.

Well, it's just not. What you do with less is ... well, less.

And that meant less time to explore stories fully. Fewer people to give to a given investigative project. Less time for the few remaining people to spend finding the stories, doing the interviews, writing the stories up, checking the facts. And through it all, the goat was still ravenous, chewing at their arses not just from the moment they arrived in the morning but from the moment they woke up and looked in the mirror and thought "What does today hold for me?"

In an atmosphere like that - which still exists today - it's not hard to see why a seemingly innocuous story like "Charlottetown Ranked Second-Best City in G7 Countries to Set Up a Business" can go to air virtually as received. Nobody is getting slandered or seriously hurt. If the facts are arguable (and they clearly are), the argument is more about process and interpretation than about life-and-death matters.

In a place that is recovering from a battering by that bitch Mother Nature; at a time when people might question why the hell they are living here and not in Florida or BC or some other place where you don't need a snow-probe to find your car; at a time when you and the people around you are exhausted from working round-the-clock giving your audience vital survival information; grabbing a plausible-looking puff piece off the fax machine and throwing it on the air to add a positive note to a seven minute newscast doesn't seem like such a shameful act.

Could the story have been researched more assiduously? Sure, given some spare resources, which I'm guessing weren't available. Was anybody hurt by this story? Perhaps. But I would argue that any business that bases its decisions on a single CBC news report has a lower-than-average life expectancy anyway.

It is easy to sit back and criticize the work being done by CBC, and I do more than my share of it. But I quit CBC because the geniuses in charge took me out of a position I was suited for and hired to do, and threw me into the world of news reporting. I hated every moment of it and, while I admired the dedication and passion of my colleagues in News and Current Affairs, I could not wait to escape the relentless pressure of that hideous, often thankless job.

The people who work at CBC - unlike their bosses in Toronto - have a passion for reporting the news. They do it with a minimum of bias (and before the roars begin, may I point out a curious, but universally true fact: Conservatives always accuse CBC of having a left-wing bias; New Democrats always accuse CBC of having a right-wing bias; Liberals always accuse CBC of having an anti-Liberal bias. Always.) - certainly less bias than most of us bring to our own political discussions. They do a difficult job, day in, day out, and are always open to public scrutiny and criticism for every stray, imperfect word or thought. Thank God none of us have to endure that.

They do their jobs, and then, when a weather bomb hits, they step forward and do more - when the rest of us are huddled in the bosom of family, riding out a storm, they're sleeping on the couch in a studio in funky two day old clothes, catching brief snatches of conversation with their families on the phone while that hungry frigging goat paws at the door. These odd people feel a very real responsibility to you, and to me, and to thousands of people they've never met and never will.

They're not always heroes, and sometimes they screw up. But before you jump all over them ... maybe try walking a mile in their shoes.

Keep an eye open for that goat. It'll bite your arse if you slow down.

Comments

[Davey]

Well said (er, typed.)

That said (er, typed), does anyone else find it ironic that those blog posters who called CBC staffers "sloppy" and "irrelevant" could also be accused of not digging into the whole story a bit more? ...pot calling the kettle black, anyone... anyone...

[christopher]

er, AFAIK bloggers are not paid big chunks of taxpayer dollars, bloggers do not have a national mandate, bloggers have no duty to inform nor canon of journalistic ethics/practice. [RantMode=Off] This poor little Island desperately needs some grown up media capable of looking beyond the fluff of a press release. Like many others, I depend on Tim's for hard news and, increasingly, look to the blogs for insight(s).

[Alan]

I am still unsure about what all the weeping and gnashing was about, then. Appeared more territorial than anything.