Part of the problem of the curse of a long memory is that I can recall the way things used to be and compare it with how they are now AND be accurate. My only subscriber listens to the same radio station that I do, probably for similar reasons, it was the station that was played at home when we grew up. We did not grow up together, but we did grow up listening to the CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The difference is that I grew up when it was great and she grew up when it was suffering.
How it has changed can be best expressed by looking at the Sunday Morning program schedule. Today's Sunday morning begins at 6AM with Fresh Air where the host interviews various people from around the province and plays light music. There are news intermissions and for the most part it is all prerecorded. Following this program comes Sunday Report or something, truth being is that I stopped listening to Sunday morning radio for the most part. This broadcast contains thoughtful interviews and interesting people and continues until 11:30 AM when a short twenty five minute prerecorded serial plays. The news updates between 6am and noon every half hour.
Contrasting what I listened to growing up was something that was not very different, but at the same time being totally different. Fresh Air began at 6am, there were two hosts and there was light conversation and light music, shortly after eight o'clock the over nineties birthday list was announced and then the show ended at 8:30. The Food Show would then commence and last until 9am. Not a huge change right? It wasn't and if you shut off your radio then it would not be. But if you kept the radio on, you would be blown away by the next three hours of radio. It was called Sunday Morning, but it was three hours of current news stories with teeth. By teeth I mean large pointy tearing teeth that ripped stories out of the world, and huge grinding teeth that ground it all down to the facts. These were three hours of current documentaries of current news events from out in the field. The kinds of stories that you will not hear anywhere anymore.
I remember listening to the story about the Freedom fighter in Afganistan who dressed only in his robe and wearing flimsy leather sandals walked out into the cold of the Afghanistan Winter and walked five hours out over rocks and uneven terrain just to launch one or two rocket propelled grenades of a small rocket at the Russians and then walk back to his camp another five hour journey. They talked with them and they lived with them and I felt I was talking that walk with them. There were many stories like this, reporters talking with Jesuit priests in El Salvador, where they were being butchered. Interviewing the Sandinistas and the Contras in the bloody civil war in Nicaragua, the famine of East Africa, this time Ethiopia. Where ever news was happening, every Sunday I went there with the CBC and listened to the people that were there, first in their language and then a translator would talk over the conversation. It was a golden age.
The truth of the matter is that the CBC has always been about its investigative reporters, truth finding and lastly about bringing it to the public. It is for this reason that it has suffered in the twenty years since then. Cuts forced many of their foreign correspondents to come home shows that exposed the truth of the world were cut back, because the truth is expensive. Before the CBC was a large fat cat that ate the best of foods but also produced the unique and great value too. Later because of cuts it was a fat cat on the prowel eating mice and dry food, but still producing quality programs. But it seams that some people think that a public broadcaster has not value today. In 2009 it received more cuts the cat was lean with no fat eating the food it could catch plus a very little food from the public purse. The CBC is a shadow of what it was, but they still produce quality programming, even if some of it is repeated at different times of the day and week. The radio has more entertainment news and talks with local people, they rely on other nations for foreign content and talk to people with skype.
2012 there are more cuts to the cat. This time there is no fat. There is very little left to cut that is not needed to keep it alive. The reports in the news try to keep it non partisan, but it is so hard as the government is corrupted by scandal after scandal, the government's solution is to try to kill the messenger, to cut muscle off the cat called CBC, draw blood. The government wil not be happy until the CBC becomes a puppet of the government parroting the news that it tells them to say and do the things it tells them to say.
The CBC was an institution to be proud of, a testament of what a national broadcaster should be about. Was. Now it is about to be gutted and next time decapitated.
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