Source: Ottawa Citizen

You wonder if it was one of those "eureka" moments at CBC headquarters when the idea first got tossed around.

"I've got it," says one member of the brain trust, as the group sits around discussing how to get more people to watch CBC News. We'll call this guy Dick.

"Let's get our hosts out of their seats and have them standing up."

A buzz ripples around the room. Excited murmurs. A few hurrahs.

"I think you've cracked it Dick," pipes up another. "That's what the audience for Canada's public broadcaster needs. Hosts on their feet. But why stop at hosts? Let's have our guests stand, and our contributors too."

A feverish excitement sweeps the room. Backs are slapped, fists are pumped, cheers go up.

Then, from a small, timid voice at the back of the room ... "How about we put them all on skates?"

The room goes silent. All eyes turn toward Dick. He's thinking about it. You can see him mentally calculating the pros and cons. Eventually, he speaks.

"Geez Renaud, who invited you here? Come on, we're a serious news organization. We've got a brand to protect. Hosts on skates will not be part of the offering. At least not yet."

OK, so it probably didn't happen that way. But standing is a big part of the changes introduced to CBC News this week. I suspect it makes it easier to do all that "tracking" of stories the new CBC News is so keen to do. Start from an upright position.

I mock the standing, but it's important to note because it represents something larger happening at CBC News.

What the standing represents is the triumph of style over substance. CBC News is changing, and not for the better. It's deliberately dumbing itself down. It's doing so because senior managers don't believe that "smart" attracts a large enough audience. And attracting an audience is really the only thing that matters at the CBC these days. Don't get me wrong, ratings matter. But the way senior managers are chasing ratings is demeaning to CBC News and its audience.

How are they doing it? I think a statement I heard regularly from my former manager at the CBC sums up for me what CBC News is trying to do. His line was ... "we want more emotional engagement, and less intellectual engagement" in our newscasts.

Working in concert with Frank Magid Associates, an American company that specializes in boosting ratings, CBC managers are making changes that embody just that ethos. More emotion, less intelligence. More style, less substance.

And so you get more "lives" in your nightly newscast. You get more stuff "happening now," even though mostly what's "happening now" is that a reporter is standing "live" at a scene where nothing particularly interesting is going on. You get hosts on their feet, rather than in a seat.

That's the style. As for the substance, well CBC News is increasingly uninterested in policy, politics or process. Magid tells us that just plain folks -- "real people" -- find those things boring. Magid isn't about digging deeper, and finding out what's really going on in your community or your city, or your country. In fact, at the local level, Magid demands story counts -- each night a certain number of local news items must be run. Breadth over depth. Quantity trumps quality.

In the Magid world, what people are interested in is "news you can use," or news that suggests something fearful or terrible is in the offing. "This could happen to you, and your family."

It's the kind of emotion-laden stuff that comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have been mocking for years. But increasingly it's a staple of the diet at CBC News.

Is this really what we want from our national public broadcaster?

Again, don't get me wrong. I'm not against trying to have the audience emotionally invested in a story. But it ought to be a means to an end, and not the end in itself. Everyone is doing emotional engagement. Watch an hour of television. Watch an hour of television news. It ain't suffering from a lack of emotion.

CBC News ought to be consistently aiming to go beyond the orgy of emotion that parades across our TV screens on a daily basis. It ought to be trying to do more than simply cover events. It needs to aim higher, and do more. It needs to seek out those boring, detail-y things called "facts." It needs to understand process and policy. It should be helping us all make sense of what's happening not only in our community, and our city, but the world around us as well. I think people desperately want to understand, to make sense of things. CBC News ought to be helping us all do so.

So a crime happens in your community. I want more from my public broadcaster than simply shocked neighbours, and an anguished victim. I want to know what's going on in that community. The CBC should not to be in the business of using people's fears and anguish as product to garner a larger audience.

But watch your local supper-hour newscast. See where crime plays in that newscast. And watch how that story gets followed in the days afterward. I haven't done a content analysis, but I can tell you in the shop that I worked in until recently there was more playing to fear, and less attempting to understand in our newscasts. And that wasn't because the skill of the journalists doing the story had diminished. The place remains filled with outstanding journalists who are passionate about what they do. It's simply that the ones who are paying attention know exactly what the bosses want.

I could go on and on about the changes at CBC News, and what I think they mean. In fact I intend to, on a blog I'm starting. I think there needs to be a national conversation about the CBC.

I would argue the dumbification of CBC News represents a profound shift in the civic life of this country. What does a deliberately dumber CBC News mean for the Canadian body politic, or for civil society in this country? I ask, not because I have all the answers. I simply think it's a subject we ought to be talking about.

Andy Clarke once ran the newsroom at CBC Ottawa. He left the CBC at the end of August to try his hand at other things. He is not missed by his manager. His new blog is at cbcandme.wordpress.com

© The Ottawa Citizen