Radio host's removal is symptomatic of a wider malaise at the CBC

Source: Montreal Gazette

The firestorm over the CBC's Nancy Wood debacle rages on. I was going to write about something else for today's column, but my office email was jammed yesterday with copies of 50 letters (95 per cent of them pro-Nancy) to CBC management. I can't remember a hotter controversy regarding local English news media.

This latest batch of protest messages to CBC brass reveals fresh areas of concern.

To be sure, the writers remain as dismayed as ever over the decision against renewing Wood's one-year contract as host of Daybreak. Listeners to the radio show hail her fresh intelligence and ability to connect with Montreal's anglo community.

But, as one of Wood's fans, Nancy Marrelli, put it in a message to the president of the CBC, Hubert Lacroix, the Daybreak situation is "only a symptom" of a fundamental problem. CBC-Radio is fixated on audience ratings (which as a non-commercial network it could ignore) instead of focusing on being "intelligent radio that brings information, analysis, culture, and entertainment." She concludes: "You seem to be taking us in a bad direction."

Also targeting this larger picture is Eada Rubinger, a member of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting: "One reason this Nancy Wood situation is touching such a nerve is that it is one more example of the unrelenting destruction of the CBC. Everything we once valued about the CBC has been systematically removed, downgraded, replaced, changed for the worse." She includes music.

CBC listeners are also venting concern over the way managers are handling the Wood decision once they made it (as distinct from the pros and cons of the actual decision itself). People are upset that:

The CBC informed Wood in February that her contract would not be renewed when it expired this summer, yet it expected her to carry on with the show in the meantime. Says media blogger Fagstein: "To have someone on air with a noose around her neck for months is just cruel."

Management has refused to discuss the Wood case to the extent that it won't even say how many messages it is receiving from listeners.

Management is responding to listeners' messages with form letters that are not only smarmy ("First, we'd like to thank you for your dedication to Daybreak") but prevaricating, stating as they do that Wood's contract was an interim one. It wasn't.

The recipient of one such form letter, Dr. Nicolas Steinmetz, wrote back: "The return message ... is disrespectful, disdainful, and dismissive. It says nothing and hides behind fake HR claims. It is a high-handed management style that is deaf to the wants and needs of the public you are there to serve."

Barry Lazar, a former Daybreak producer and ex-acting director of CBC Radio for Quebec, observes: "I am disturbed that the local audience is apparently not seen as a valid constituency."

What should the CBC do?

Returning to across-the-board upscale programming, as the big-picture critics would like, would depend on Ontario headquarters, and it would take much more than the Wood case to make those honchos reconsider. It should be easier, however, for Montreal executives to extract themselves from the PR hole into which they've dug themselves with the Wood affair.

It so happens that one of the letters to CBC executives comes from a Malcolm Andrews, a veteran PR specialist for a national company here. His free expert advice: "You may feel that backing down in the face of this clamour would be difficult, that it would be an admission of bad decision-making, make the corporation lose face, etc. Wrong.

"An admission by the CBC that it may have misjudged the situation and has now reconsidered the decision would demonstrate the kind of responsiveness Canadians deserve and have a right to expect from their Crown corporations. The sooner that is done, the better for the CBC's reputation with its Montreal audience."

"After all," Andrews adds, "who is the CBC there for if not the audience?"

That's exactly the right question.

Henry Aubin is The Gazette's regional-affairs columnist.

© Montreal Gazette