The blog’s been on the backburner for a bit, but recent events have got the typing fingers itchy, so here goes.
I find a lot of irony in the announcement by Sun Media that it wants to introduce a new news channel with a more conservative bent to Canadian television screens. Have they been watching the new CBC News Network, and the local supper hour casts currently on offer?
The CBC could not be trying harder to make itself more palatable to the Conservatives (and conservatives).
The entire remaking of CBC News could be taken from the Conservative playbook. The CBC is looking for a larger audience, and the consultants are telling it the way to do that is to focus on the things that matter to that (thankfully, so far uninterested) audience – the weather, their safety, their health, their lives. Furthermore, give the audience that stuff in a way that touches the emotions, but leaves the thinking out of it. Surveys say critical thinking is elitist. So is politics. And policy. So too really, is the whole concept of civil society – that there is something larger than you and your concerns. All of it elitist and unnecessary.
Instead, you have every right to be frightened beyond measure about the growing crime rate (wait a second, the evidence suggests otherwise), or the presence of a Muslim woman in a niqab, or the firebombing of an unoccupied bank in the middle of the night. And you have every right to be angered beyond measure about the inconveniences of everyday life – like the traffic backup you were subjected to this morning, or the presence of a group home for some marginalized group being built in your neighbourhood. The only thing that matters is what matters to you.
We promise you’ll see yourself and hear yourself on the new CBC News, but as for the business of challenging your comfortable assumptions, or offering up alternative ideas…forget about it.
The other irony in Kory Teneycke’s announcement is that while he’s got the diagnosis right, his prescription for what ails Canadian TV is likely to make the Canadian body politic even more unhealthy than it is at the moment. Teneycke is bang on when he says the CBC is smug, condescending and irrelevant. More so now than at any point in its history. But his prescription for the problem is to treat news as entertainment. More of the more emotion stuff, and less of that pesky, problematic thinking stuff.
But then Teneycke and the Sun chain aren’t really worried about the health of the Canadian body politic. They just want to continue the migration of the centre in Canadian politics to the right – a migration that’s happened over the course of a generation, but you can’t help but feel is speeding up. Especially now that the CBC News no longer even pretends it’s trying to be a public good, but is simply in the business of giving people what its consultants say they want. Simple, safe and unchallenging.
A quick word too about the CBC and the World Cup. It’s hard not to get caught up in all the greater meaning stuff being attached at the moment to soccer, or football, if you will. Smart people will always try to attach greater meaning to something they spend hours on end watching. Otherwise we’re simply wasting time watching a dumb game that doesn’t really mean anything. So we’re getting a lot of the soccer is life stuff at the moment. I get a kick out of a lot of it. And so in the same spirit, here is my attempt to attach greater meaning to CBC’s coverage of World Cup football.
Watch it and see how the new ideology at work at CBC dominates coverage. Content is secondary to the new prevailing ideology that people will only watch if they see themselves. And so we get the almost entirely vapid and content-less “Pulse of the Nation”. I defy anyone to identify one interesting moment from any of the “Pulse of the Nation” spots. But then its not meant to be interesting – its sole purpose is to convince Canadians of the CBC’s populist bona fides. Watch us, and eventually you’ll get to appear on camera . Maybe then you’ll watch, right? Promise? Please. Don’t make us beg. Because we’re very close to doing so. Right now we’re working on something that involves Stursberg coming to your house and pleading with you. He tears up very, very well. We’re market-testing it at the moment.
Anyway, look for some version of “Pulse of the Nation” to migrate over to the National once the World Cup is over.
Then there’s also spectacular commercialization of the World Cup coverage on Canada’s public broadcaster. You’ve got “Captain Morgan at the Half”, the “Budweiser Man of the Match”, the “CIBC Post-Game Show.” I know the World Cup is a real money-making opportunity for Canada’s public broadcaster, and I accept that money is an issue at the CBC. Given that, I think Stursberg’s missed a real opportunity. You’ve got 90 whole minutes with absolutely no commercial content. Stursberg should be getting Mitch Peacock and Scott Russell to regularly interject…”you’re watching the 13th minute of the match between Slovenia and Slovakia. It’s brought to you by TD Canada Trust. Coming up in 23 seconds, will be the 14th minute of the match, brought to you by Lakota.”
See, that’s where the real money is. I’m surprised a visionary like Richard Stursberg hasn’t thought of it. Oh well, it’s out there now. Maybe in four years time, eh?
One more thing on a completely different topic. I’ve just finished a terrific thriller that I think everyone should read. I’m just starting in on this Stieg Larsson trilogy, but I can’t believe any one of them will be better than “The Dying Light” by Henry Porter. It’s absolutely fantastic. And, as an added bonus, it makes you think as well. Mostly it makes you think about where our growing obsession with safety and security (are you paying attention CBC management types?) will lead us. Do yourself a favour, and read it this summer.
July 1, 2010 at 3:10 pm |
Neil Postman had a commentary on the kind of situation in which we find ourselves more and more in our society today. He explicitly gave permission to use it “should you be in an appropriate situation.”
Rather than clumsily paraphrasing it, here it is, in its entirety.
MY GRADUATION SPEECH
by Neil Postman
Members of the faculty, parents, guests, and graduates, have no fear. I am well aware that on a day of such high excitement, what you require, first and foremost, of any speaker is brevity. I shall not fail you in this respect. There are exactly eighty-five sentences in my speech, four of which you have just heard. It will take me about twelve minutes to speak all of them and I must tell you that such economy was not easy for me to arrange, because I have chosen as my topic the complex subject of your ancestors. Not, of course, your biological ancestors, about whom I know nothing, but your spiritual ancestors, about whom I know a little. To be specific, I want to tell you about two groups of people who lived many years ago but whose influence is still with us. They were very different from each other, representing opposite values and traditions. I think it is appropriate for you to be reminded of them on this day because, sooner than you know, you must align yourself with the spirit of one or the spirit of the other.
The first group lived about 2,500 years ago in the place which we now call Greece, in a city they called Athens. We do not know as much about their origins as we would like. But we do know a great deal about their accomplishments. They were, for example, the first people to develop a complete alphabet, and therefore they became the first truly literate population on earth. They invented the idea of political democracy, which they practiced with a vigor that puts us to shame. They invented what we call philosophy. And they also invented what we call logic and rhetoric. They came very close to inventing what we call science, and one of them-Democritus by name-conceived of the atomic theory of matter 2,300 years before it occurred to any modern scientist. They composed and sang epic poems of unsurpassed beauty and insight. And they wrote and performed plays that, almost three millennia later, still have the power to make audiences laugh and weep. They even invented what, today, we call the Olympics, and among their values none stood higher than that in all things one should strive for excellence. They believed in reason. They believed in beauty. They believed in moderation. And they invented the word and the idea which we know today as ecology.
About 2,000 years ago, the vitality of their culture declined and these people began to disappear. But not what they had created. Their imagination, art, politics, literature, and language spread all over the world so that, today, it is hardly possible to speak on any subject without repeating what some Athenian said on the matter 2,500 years ago.
The second group of people lived in the place we now call Germany, and flourished about 1,700 years ago. We call them the Visigoths, and you may remember that your sixth or seventh-grade teacher mentioned them. They were spectacularly good horsemen, which is about the only pleasant thing history can say of them. They were marauders-ruthless and brutal. Their language lacked subtlety and depth. Their art was crude and even grotesque. They swept down through Europe destroying everything in their path, and they overran the Roman Empire. There was nothing a Visigoth liked better than to burn a book, desecrate a building, or smash a work of art. From the Visigoths, we have no poetry, no theatre, no logic, no science, no humane politics.
Like the Athenians, the Visigoths also disappeared, but not before they had ushered in the period known as the Dark Ages. It took Europe almost a thousand years to recover from the Visigoths.
Now, the point I want to make is that the Athenians and the Visigoths still survive, and they do so through us, and the ways in which we conduct our lives. All around us-in this hall, in this community, in our city-there are people whose way of looking at the world reflects the way of the Athenians, and there are people whose way is the way of the Visigoths. I do not mean, of course, that our modern-day Athenians roam abstractedly through the streets reciting poetry and philosophy, or that the modern-day Visigoths are killers. I mean that to be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values. An Athenian is an idea. And a Visigoth is an idea. Let me tell you briefly what these ideas consist of.
To be an Athenian is to hold knowledge and, especially the quest for knowledge in high esteem. To contemplate, to reason, to experiment, to question-these are, to an Athenian, the most exalted activities a person can perform. To a Visigoth, the quest for knowledge is useless unless it can help you to earn money or to gain power over other people.
To be an Athenian is to cherish language because you believe it to be humankind’s most precious gift. In their use of language, Athenians strive for grace, precision, and variety. And they admire those who can achieve such skill. To a Visigoth, one word is as good as another, one sentence indistinguishable from another. A Visigoth’s language aspires to nothing higher than the cliché.
To be an Athenian is to understand that the thread, which holds civilized society together, is thin and vulnerable; therefore, Athenians place great value on tradition, social restraint, and continuity. To an Athenian, bad manners are acts of violence against the social order. The modern Visigoth cares very little about any of this. The Visigoths think of themselves as the centre of the universe. Tradition exists for their own convenience, good manners are an affectation and a burden, and history is merely what is in yesterday’s newspaper.
To be an Athenian is to take an interest in public affairs and the improvement of public behaviour. Indeed, the ancient Athenians had a word for people who did not. The word was idiotes, from which we get our word “idiot.” A modern Visigoth is interested only in his own affairs and has no sense of the meaning of community.
And, finally, to be an Athenian is to esteem the discipline, skill, and taste that are required to produce enduring art. Therefore, in approaching a work of art, Athenians prepare their imagination through learning and experience. To a Visigoth, there is no measure of artistic excellence except popularity. What catches the fancy of the multitude is good. No other standard is respected or even acknowledged by the Visigoth.
Now, it must be obvious what all of this has to do with you. Eventually, like the rest of us, you must be on one side or the other. You must be an Athenian or a Visigoth. Of course, it is much harder to be an Athenian, for you must learn how to be one, you must work at being one, whereas we are all, in a way, natural-born Visigoths. That is why there are so many more Visigoths than Athenians. And I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees. My father-in-law was one of the most committed Athenians I have ever known, and he spent his entire adult life working as a dress cutter on Seventh Avenue in New York City. On the other hand, I know physicians, lawyers, and engineers who are Visigoths of unmistakable persuasion. And I must also tell you, as much in sorrow as in shame, that at some of our great universities, perhaps even this one, there are professors of whom we may fairly say they are closet Visigoths. And yet, you must not doubt for a moment that a school, after all, is essentially an Athenian idea. There is a direct link between the cultural achievements of Athens and what the faculty at this university is all about. I have no difficulty imagining that Plato, Aristotle, or Democritus would be quite at home in our classrooms. A Visigoth would merely scrawl obscenities on the wall.
And so, whether you were aware of it or not, the purpose of your having been at this university was to give you a glimpse of the Athenian way, to interest you in the Athenian way. We cannot know on this day how many of you will choose that way and how many will not. You are young and it is not given to us to see your future. But I will tell you this, with which I will close: I can wish for you no higher compliment than that in the future it will be reported that among your graduating class the Athenians mightily outnumbered the Visigoths.
Thank you, and congratulations.