The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation should be Canada’s pride and joy. It should be ranked as one of the world’s great public broadcasters, such as the BBC. Instead, Harper’s government has been treating the CBC as a bastard child. When they are not cutting funding, they are doing their best to undermine the CBC’s journalistic independence. Meanwhile, it is painfully clear that they’d like nothing better than for the CBC to just go away.

A good example of how the CBC has been dumbed down over the years is CBC Radio 2. Once a high quality arts and culture network, Radio 2 in recent years has been unsuccessfully competing with commercial radio stations broadcasting pop music for a significant part of the day.

To be sure, they still allocate a set number of hours for “classical music”. As if “classical music” was just another genre like hip-hop or country! This more than anything demonstrates the philistine nature of the people behind these decisions: their failure to realize that “classical music” encompasses nearly all the musical history of humanity, and that an educated listener would gladly hear an eclectic mix of classical and popular, of ancient and modern music… which is what the CBC of decades past used to provide, in the form of programs like the late Jürgen Gothe’s unforgettable Disc Drive.

And then I have not even mentioned the demise of the CBC Radio Orchestra…

Philistines indeed.

(average: 9.00 cats out of 9)
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