The more I read of Richard Stursberg and his justifications for his controversial renovations to CBC English Language Services, the more I am convinced that he is—there is no way to say this nicely—on a fool’s errand.
My reasoning for this takes a little attention, just as it takes a modicum of mental sweat to understand the differences between cap and trade and a carbon tax. Maybe I am naive, but it seems to me that, given the seriousness of current issues facing Canadians across the board, we are more willing than we have been for some time to make the effort. So, here goes.
The fool’s errand is to try to shape CBC, our public broadcaster, into a vehicle capable of matching or exceeding the audience numbers posted by commercial broadcast media. Or, as Stursberg put it to Jennifer Wells in a...
Wade Rowland is a former producer and senior executive at both CBC and CTV, and is now a professor at York University, teaching in the joint York-Ryerson graduate program in communication and culture and in the Atkinson School of Arts and Letters program in culture and expression. He is a former Maclean Hunter Chair of Ethics in Communication at Ryerson University and is author of a number of books, including Greed, Inc. (Thomas Allen, 2005), Galileo’s Mistake (Arcade Publishing, 2003), Spirit of the Web (Key Porter, 1999) and Ockham’s Razor (Key Porter, 1999). He is an unreconstructed CBC radio addict.
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