Locked out around the clock...

The attacks on CBC president Robert Rabinovitch continue.

Here's my take today on the messed-situation at CBC as 5,500 locked-out employees drag themselves around their buildings across the country.

Who gave CBC president and CEO Robert Rabinovitch and his appointees, Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president of CBC-TV, and Jane Chalmers, CBC Radio vice-president, the mandate to destroy our national public broadcasting system?

Not Parliament. Not the audience. Not citizens.

And yet, the longer they allow their lockout of 5,500 members of the Canadian Media Guild to grind on — it's now well into its fifth week — the more precarious CBC's position becomes.

The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor (sub. required) had a not dissimilar column. You can read it for free here.

That debate, at least, CBC president Robert Rabinovitch's ill-considered lockout has guaranteed. For a month now, the dispute has given CBC critics across the political spectrum a nice big platform from which to attack. CBC management and the Canadian Media Guild are currently at the negotiating table, picking their way through minor issues, and observers guess it will take the start of the hockey season next month to end the dispute. When the broadcaster does get back to work it will need to start demonstrating not its objectivity but its relevance -- and fast.

Not that relevancy seems to matter much to Rabinovitch. Check this account, written by some of the outlocks, of his appearance last night at McGill University:

Hammered with questions about when the lockout would end, Rabinovitch said only, “It will end when we negotiate it at the table.” Rabinovitch refused to answer questions about accountability or the impact of the lockout on public broadcasting. The locked-out workers broke into a spontaneous chorus of “shame, shame” as Rabinovitch made his way through the back door, followed by a McGill University security guard.

Rabinovitch would redeem himself somewhat a little later in the evening:

(H)e launched into perhaps his most scathing public commentary yet about a lack of government funding for the CBC. Rabinovitch says the public broadcaster has not received an extra cent in stabilized funding, aside from cost of living increases for labour, in 35 years.

A frustrated Rabinovitch said, “The government has said, 'We don’t mind if the CBC atrophies and disappears, because we’re not going help it.'”

He said the corporation’s efforts to save money from within through flexibility “are band-aid solutions. They’ve bought us a few years, but basically they’re not the real solution.”

What took you so long to speak up Bob? You should be shouting this from the rooftops, instead of locking out the heart and soul of CBC.

Speaking of which, also in today's Globe, Noah Richler has a scathing piece (sub. req'd) that essentially agrees with CBC management's position on contract workers. (Yabbut Noah, if CBC offered you a staff job hosting your own show, would you be singing the same tune I wonder?) The freebie version of his pensées is here:

It is possible to be dedicated to public service, as I am, but against the union's position. The CMG's argument that quality depends on full-time jobs is being made in bad faith by a union that has one goal, and that is to defend the already guaranteed jobs of its members against the possibility of creative competition. This just will not do in an age in which the rapid evolution of technology, and of public capability, means that a bright 12-year-old is quite able to produce a program of broadcast quality.

True enough. But do the people running the joint know how to produce anything, or do they have another agenda?

Consider what the Garret Tree has to say, after gathering some previously published intel on Richard Stursberg, who has been executive vice president of CBC-TV for about a year now. It's worth reading for what it says of his agenda for CBC, one I reported on in 1996 when he was angling for a senior job there.

In my view, despite his long track record in the media (never as a producer always as a bureaucrat or executive) Stursberg, it seems, is still stuck in 1996 and using a 1990s corporate and convergence model.

(SNIP)

Stursberg and Rabinovitch have always looked from the top down.

Or from the outside in, which is where they were for years.

Except now they're both on the inside, collecting their paycheques and putting the place in peril, while the people who really are the CBC, and who genuinely care about it, are locked out.

UPPITY DATE: At least one other Conservative has distanced herself from Senator Marjorie LeBreton's ill-considered and heartless desire that the lockout endure past the next election, about which both the Globe's Kate Taylor and I wrote about today.

"Sen. LeBreton doesn't speak for the Tory party," said (Heritage critic Bev) Oda, a former CTV vice-president and CRTC commissioner. Oda added that her party supports the CBC and wants it to have long-term stable funding. "We want the lockout to end as soon as possible.

Frankly, I like this reaction, from Arnold Amber, president of the CBC branch of the Canadian Media Guild, which represents the locked out workers:

"(LeBreton) has no understanding of what it's like to be working in any place – after all, she's a senator," Amber said. "She speaks like an idiot."

 

 

 

Comments

[True North]

Zebrisias for CBC Board Of Directors.
Now!

[T.R.Y.]

Big media in the U.S. is now mostly an arm of big corporations,
with an eye to delivering a healthy bottomline. News, if it is hard news, often proves either too expensive or too negative
(from the POV of coporate CEOS and CFOs) to countenance. Hence
those endless clips and snippets about Paris Hilton et al. The
fluff is easier to come by -- and still sells the advertisers' products. So, who needs hard news, eh? Meanwhile, there is the
CBC - sidelined for a whole month now - that used to deliver a
good news product but unlikely to do so any time soon. It's not
a good situation, needless to say.

[David Imrie]

Yes, why not Antonia on the CBC board?

When was the last time Marjory LeBreton or any Tory did anything positive for the country? Look only to LeBreton's defence of her former boss, Brian Mulroney, and his drunken rantings with Peter Newman. Maybe that's why the COnservatives are doomed to eternal opposition.

[Aaron]

Forget the CBC - Bring Back Don Hill!

http://tinyurl.com/du75f

You should interview Don and see what he's up to. I've got his email if you are interested.

[Diana-Marie]

Second that, True North!!

That Ms. LeBreton sounds as whiney as her erstwhile boss!

[Intcord]

The CBC is a collossal waste of taxpayer money. The sooner we either a) sell off and privatize the Corp. or b) draw a line under it and tag it R.I.P., the better off we'll be.