Happy New Year 2011

Happy New Year one and all.  I hope to find the time to write in this space more often in 2011. The original mission of this blog — to start a national conversation about what it means to be a public broadcaster in 2011 — remains as vital as it was when I started this thing a little over a year ago.  Shockingly, there’s not the big money in trying to kickstart that conversation that I was hoping there would be.  Who knew?

But the fight to save the CBC from its own senior management continues despite the meagre returns.  The firing of Richard Stursberg was one of the highlights of the past year, but the paucity of his vision — not to mention his deep contempt — for what public broadcasting ought to be remains deeply embedded in mindset of too many of the careerists who populate the senior managerial ranks at the CBC. 

That’s why 2011 will see the further Magidization of CBC News as its “if it bleeds, it leads” mantra takes over more of what you hear on CBC Radio. 

I’ll be writing about that in the near future, as well as some of the other egregious goings-on at the CBC.  It’s amazing the number of people inside the CBC who want to bend a guys ear about what’s happening to a place they deeply care about.   

I want to reiterate two things from that last sentence.  I plan to continue to plug away at this blog because I — and many, many, many other deeply unhappy people inside the CBC —  deeply care about public broadcasting and what it means.   Many of them also deeply feel it’s a conversation that ought to be happening inside the CBC.  What does it mean to be a public broadcaster in the 21st century?  How do we justify the money we get from the public purse?  What does that mean for the journalism we offer to the Canadian public on a daily basis?

But one of the really sad things about the current CBC is that conversation isn’t happening internally at all.  The culture of questioning, of probing, or meaningful dissent, is being lost.  Get with the program, or get lost is the mindset of too many CBC managers at the moment.  It is just one more way that group is contributing to the loss of something special – and something different — in our culture.

Anyway, I continue to hope we can find a way to talk about this.  You can find my occasional contributions to the conversation here.  Feel free to join in.

In the meantime, Happy New Year.

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