The
era of the personality cult finally appears to be ended at CBC’s The National.
The
daily 10 p.m. news program will replace, as expected, the saintly but boring
Peter Mansbridge with four anchors. The hope is that the change brings a much
overdue freshness to the failing newscast.
The
Mansbridge personality cult ended earlier this summer with the man’s retirement
as chief news anchor after 29 years. During those three decades The National’s credibility,
and its audience, sank steadily.
The
National viewership over the last year averaged 866,000 compared with 1.3 million
for the CTV National News.
Alternating
four anchors carries risks, but risks are needed for The National to have any hope
of regaining its former stature. The National has been with us in one form or
another since the early 1950s.
The
chosen four all carry journalistic credentials, which in recent years CBC has considered
less important than high profile personalities. Mansbridge had no serious
journalistic qualifications while other stars such as Amanda Lang, Rex Murphy,
Jian Ghomeshi and Evan Solomon, got themselves into pickles by forgetting that straight,
unbiased reporting takes precedence over being seen as a star.
Both
Adrienne Arsenault, the CBC’s senior correspondent, and Rosemary Barton, host
of Power and Politics, have excellent journalistic credentials. Ian
Hanomansing, often seen anchoring on CBC, and Andrew Chang, a CBC Vancouver
local news anchor, have journalistic experience but are viewed more as
presenters.
Chang
will anchor from Vancouver, Barton from Ottawa and Arsenault and Hanomansing
from Toronto. The CBC brass says the anchors will take turns reporting from the
field.
CBC
news chief Jennifer McGuire says The National will have more digital focus,
whatever that means, plus more original journalism, insight and analysis. The
Toronto
journalistic literati chimes in with other thoughts on what is needed:
background, context, investigative reporting.
Those
are all clichés and weary buzzwords that the journalism elite have been using
for years.
The
National, and most other news outfits, need a new journalism that tells people
more besides something has happened. People know something happened immediately
after it happens. They get it from hundreds of news sources: Twitter, Facebook,
other Internet sources, radio, television, newspapers, word of mouth.
They
need to know how what happened connects with their lives and what it says about
the society in which they are living.
An
important need for The National, and much of Canadian journalism in general, is
diversity. Not diversity in such things as colour, nationality and sex. We are
a reasonably advanced and tolerant society moving forward in understanding
diversity in race and sexual orientation. What we are lacking is knowledge and
understanding related to our geographic diversity.
Our
national news media is not reporting enough on how people in the regions are
living their lives. What are their successes, aspirations, troubles and fears?
What are their stories and how do they relate to our overall society?
News
media spending cutbacks have created huge black news holes across Canada. Knowledge
and understanding of other regions are sinking like houses consumed by a
Florida sinkhole.
Local
news operations, notably the weekly newspapers, are covering their communities
but national outfits such as news services, TV and radio networks and the larger
dailies have cut back cross-country coverage. Too much news focus today is on
the urban areas, particularly Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal. We need
to know more about the lives of people in less urban areas such as Nelson,
B.C., Biggar, Saskatchewan and Oromocto, New Brunswick.
Diversifying
its anchor team is a good first step toward The National returning to
prominence. Hopefully the anchors and their news teams will follow the simple
rules for news gathering excellence: Be curious and ask simple questions
without being obnoxious or putting yourself into the spotlight. Observe and
report clearly without bias.
Those
are the traits of the best journalists I have encountered. Interestingly, many
of those have come from the Atlantic provinces where personality cults appear
to be less important. Maritimers and Newfoundlanders have a “down home” way of
recognizing a good story and knowing how to tell it.
The
National could use a bit of that.
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