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I grew up with a Dad who had a mania, who couldn't enter a room without switching on the radio. Who could never seem to switch off a radio behind him. Often you could feel the whole house gently reverberating to the rhythm of the same CBC Radio program.
My childhood memories are an aural kaleidoscope, sound-bites of Sunday Morning and The Royal Canadian Air Farce, The World at Six sign-on as dinner cooked, and Harry Brown and Barbara Frum on As It Happens to take us through to dessert. (A regular Pavlovian dog, to this day I still salivate at the sound of the CBC Radio News theme.)
And then there was The Box. In those naive four-channel days before we had cable, before fibre-optics and deathstar satellites, I grew up under the watchful eye of Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant, and learned French Chez Hélene. (Anyone else out there remember Chez Hélene?) Those cultural intruders from Sesame Street and The Electric Company didn't arrive till much later.
I wept when Barbara Frum died of leukemia in 1992. We had dinner together every night, she was virtually family. You cry when family dies.
And then there's Knowlton Nash. Quintessentially Canadian. Everybody's Dad. A quiet yet strong intellectual presence who could comfort us even while informing us of disaster. Who could make even the most arcane twists and turns of Canada's constitutional nightmare and Free Trade and NAFTA seem somehow, comprehensible. Somehow, encompassable.
And a man who, in the flesh, categorically rejects the status of celebrity that has attached itself to TV news people, particularly in the U.S.
"You never take yourself seriously. You take what you do seriously," he explains at the Montreal launch of his new book. "What's important about what I do is the news. The person delivering it is unimportant, or important only insofar as he gets out of the way. Even little things like loud clothes will distract people from the substance of what you're talking about."
According to Nash in The Microphone Wars: A History of Triumph and Betrayal at the CBC (McClelland & Stewart, 1994), the progenitors of public broadcasting in this country wanted to create an all-Canadian air space, a refuge from the unremitting commercialism and Americanism of the U.S. private networks.
Their success was equivocal, Nash says.
"(The CBC) was compromised from the very beginning," he explains. "The founders of public broadcasting, Alan Plaunt and Graham Spry, felt that they had to have some advertising in public broadcasting, partly to satisfy the commercial interests of industry, and partly to sell it to the Conservative government of R.B. Bennett.
"I think that compromise has always haunted the CBC. It would be wonderful in my judgement if CBC got out of commercial broadcasting altogether."
Like some of the other corporate histories I've been reading of late, The Microphone Wars and its exhaustively researched 552 pages can be viewed as something more than a strict chronology of a single organization. Though the book is, frankly, overly long and fairly bursting with extraneous detail, it also a microcosm of modern Canadian history as a whole.
All the essential debates are there: Private enterprise vs. public ownership. Bilingualism vs. unilingualism. Centralization vs. decentralization. Individual liberty vs. the common good.
And like the country it serves and represents, more than once the CBC has torn itself apart over issues both real and imagined. Over mandates and budgets and journalistic freedom. Over contracts and Quebec nationalism and Albertan distrust of big public institutions. Over the inability of manadarins in Ottawa and creative people in the studios to see or understand or even acknowledge each others' viewpoint.
Too many of the CBC's wounds have been self-inflicted, according to Nash. In the early days of the corporation, they so antagnozied the opposition by their obvious bias towards the governing Liberals that every successive Conservative government has sought to punish the CBC in some way. John Diefenbaker stripped them of their regulatory function in the late 1950s and promoted the creation of CTV. It was during Brian Mulroney's tenure --and an agonizing series of deeper and deeper budget cuts-- that the most damage was done.
"There was a much deeper philosophical antipathy towards the CBC on the part of many Conservatives to whom Mr. Mulroney listened," Nash explains. "I think Mr. Mulroney always viewed the CBC through the prism of how it treated him personally, and seldom as an institution.
"He didn't really care much about culture and therefore it was an easy issue to trade off. He had no commitment to public broadcasting or to culture at all, really."
It was also pressure from the CBC's Conservative-appointed Board of Directors which led, at least in part, to the disastrous decision to move CBC's main newscast to 9 PM and rename it Prime Time News.
"The board of directors felt uncomfortable with the Journal and used the rationale that it was very costly to cut it back a bit," he says. "But I think the change from the National/Journal to Prime Time News really came about for reasons of packaging. Gerard Veilleux wanted to show the government that this big, monolithic organization could, in fact, change and do something very dramatic.
"There was practically no research done into the move itself from a creative point of view, and I think it was damaging at the end."
"The American cultural invasion of Canada is very much self-invited," Nash
concludes. "And I'm not one who frankly suggests that we should cut out or reduce
American programming. But in this new universe of 400, 500 channels, there has to
be a Canadian voice in that cascade of American programming."