Watson: Kill CBC to save it

Patrick Watson, a former chair of the CBC during the 1990s, has an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail in which he argues CBC - especially the television service - has esssentially failed. Watson advocates closing the CBC as we know it, selling off its real-estate assets, and putting the serice to a tender among private broadcasters:

In one excerpt, Watson says CBC's venerable radio service needs a rethink:

The mass indifference to the television service is not shared by CBC Radio listeners. Right now, during the lockout, they are, by the hundreds of thousands, feeling seriously deprived of news and discussion programming, upon which they have counted for years. But at the same time, many are complaining of the increasingly rapid slide into the pop mode that they have been hearing on CBC Radio over the past few years. Listeners have the impression that both the smart, experienced broadcasters and the new breed of chatty pea-brained hosts are constantly being interrupted by an obsessive commitment to pop-rock musical transitions (virtually never a classical voice or instrument on the Radio One basic AM service, just bang-bang-bang drumbeats, other percussion and guitars, reflecting the mythology that broadcasting now is all about the teens-to-30s consumer, and citizens can just go read the papers). Loyal old CBC Radio listeners want this fixed.

Another excerpt:

The CBC's current management would have to have the right to tender, along with the dozens of experienced private broadcasters and specialty-channel operators, many of whom have been saying quietly for years that they would love to get their hands on the dinosaur, to show the country what a really distinguished public-broadcasting service would look and sound like at, say, 30 per cent of the present cost.

Comments

[Robert McClelland]

I don't think people like Watson truly understand that there are a great number of people like me who will line up to repeatedly kick him in the nuts if we lose the CBC. Indifference. Hah. The saturday HNIC broadcasts draw in a million or more viewers. That is not indifference.

[Jay currie]

Nice to see an ex-CBC type actually get the fact that the CBC has long since jumped the shark.

I like CBC FM. I'd be willing to pay a few bucks a month for a subscription. I can, and do, easily live without the rest.