in World News

Heads need to roll at the CBC

MOU843

Heads need to roll at the CBC

It’s time for someone to go.

It may be that a sturdier institution — one out of the public eye, back in the days of a slower news cycle — could withstand the whirlwind created by the revelations about Jian Ghomeshi.

But not the poor old CBC. Not now.

It is worth remembering that Q, for all its celebrity, is just a tiny unit within a huge organization. It’s not even the radio network’s number one national morning radio program — that honour belongs to Anna Maria Tremonti’s The Current.

The CBC may have its anchor monsters — as all broadcasters do — but most of its employees toil in relative obscurity. They go to work every day and create. They create diversion, entertainment, and the “items”, “packages” and programs that constitute the news.

They do it not just in the CBC Broadcasting Centre in Toronto, but also in Nunavut and Winnipeg and Happy Valley-Goose Bay. They do it in French and English, on radio, TV, online and in social media.

Anyone who has lived, as I have, in places like the United States and New Zealand, where they do not have a robust public broadcaster, knows how much those creative workers contribute to our mutual understanding as well as our pleasure.

But at a time of budget cuts and sanctification of the private sector, the CBC cannot afford any self-inflicted wounds which would put all that in further jeopardy.

So now to the appalling performance of Chris Boyce, the head of CBC Radio, on the CBC’s own investigative program, the fifth estate, on Friday.

By his own account, Boyce was the CBC executive principally involved in managing the swirl of rumour that began emerging around Ghomeshi last spring.

Apparently anxious to head off the allegations he knew were coming, in May Ghomeshi informed Boyce that he engaged in “rough sex” that was consensual. The rumours of something worse were no more that the rantings of a jilted ex-girlfriend, he said.

Boyce’s reaction, as he repeatedly told the fifth estate’s Gillian Findlay, was a kind of heart-to-heart with the network star. Ghomeshi “looked into my eyes,” Boyce said, and maintained his innocence of anything improper. Apparently, that was enough.

“We’re not the police,” Boyce said again and again. (As if you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to call the cops when you see people with balaclavas and crowbars hanging around your neighbour’s basement window.

One thing Boyce did do when confronted with Ghomeshi’s own account of sexualized violence was to dispatch the head of CBC’s department of public relations to meet with Ghomeshi’s “team”. Public relations. That tells you a lot about the frame within which Boyce saw the looming crisis.

Move on to the summer, when two Q producers met with Boyce on the Canada Day long weekend to voice their concerns about the growing suspicions that Ghomeshi had been violent with women. Boyce then conducted what he somewhat fancifully calls an “investigation” into Ghomeshi’s behavior at Q.

He told Findlay that management spoke to a “cross-section” of Q employees. Strange, that. Because the fifth estate contacted every single person working on the program, and all but one — the show’s exec — replied that no one had ever contacted them. (The exec did not reply at all.)

Findlay refrained from calling Boyce a liar.

Boyce told the fifth estate in Friday’s broadcast that one of the CBC managers who conducted this elusive investigation was Linda Groen. According to the Globe and Mail, Groen — more or less as soon as she got back to work on Monday — sent an internal CBC email denying that she had ever done any such thing or had ever been asked to do so.

If you have 40 minutes, listen to Boyce’s entire interview. He “corrects” the timeline of events laid down by his boss, Heather Conway, in the only previous, extended interview on the affair by a CBC executive, speaking with Peter Mansbridge last month.

Astonishingly, Boyce also says that he can’t remember whether he ever told Conway about the allegations of violence against Ghomeshi during the summer. Either he is a very, very forgetful man or he is trying to obscure his tracks, and those of Conway.

It’s almost endearing to hear Boyce, an executive of a media company, say that it is regrettable that the Ghomeshi story has so far “mostly played out in the media”. If it hadn’t been for Jesse Brown — the freelance reporter who unearthed the story — and the Toronto Star — which pursued and published it — Ghomeshi would not be facing criminal charges today.

Left to the tender mercies of CBC management, rather than “the media”, we would not be having a national conversation on sexual violence today. Not in the way we are.

Boyce insistently urged us to wait for the report of employment lawyer Janice Rubin, a well-respected expert on workplace harassment. But Rubin has been retained by CBC management. She works for the CBC — not for us citizens and not for the women who work for the CBC.

In a carefully parsed statement, the CBC’s president, Hubert Lacroix, has said that Rubin’s recommendations for the future will be shared with the public. It leaves open the possibility (the likelihood?) that we will never be given Rubin’s detailed account of how the Ghomeshi affair was bungled by management to begin with.

So here’s a question: From what we know now, if you were a woman working at the CBC, would you have confidence in the judgment of your managers to handle a complaint of sexual harassment? To ask the question is to answer it.

We know the CBC’s handling of the Ghomeshi affair was shambolic. We know their executives have not been forthright and consistent in their few public utterances.

It is time now for those responsible to resign or be fired. For the good of the CBC.

 

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2014/12/03/heads-need-to-roll-at-the-cbc/

Tags: , , , , , , , ,