Since I spend so much time with the CBC it seems appropriate that it’s the subject of my inaugural post.
On CBC Radio One, Anna Maria Tremonti and The Current, Eleanor Wachtel and Writers and Company, Nora Young’s Spark, Rex Murphy on Cross Country Check-up, and too many others to list. And I love documentaries, for which this country is world renowned: The Fifth Estate, the Nature of Things, Doc Zone and The Passionate Eye. And the foreign correspondents: Melissa Fung, Sasa Petricic, Neil MacDonald and Adrienne Arsenault. Too many incredible people to list. All smart, articulate, and dedicated who inform, educate, entertain and make me feel good and proud to be a Canadian.
Some hosts become like family and when they pass I grieve. When Peter Gzowski died, I cried and moped around for days. I still miss his smoky voice and laughter. And Barbara Frum on As it Happens, I still miss her, too.
I even love Peter Mansbridge, though a bit like a grandfather who can be out of step. For example, he recently used the term “visible minorities” when describing the absence of people of colour in this year’s line-up of Oscar contenders. I cringed, then fired off a protest email to the National. He has used this phrase before. So: Dear Mr. Dinosaur, there’s no “visible minority”, at best this is an offensive fiction which gets perpetuated by white people with glaring racial blind spots, not to mention delusions of an “invisible majority”.
And what’s with the editorial staff on the national news allowing this to be aired? Is the news patriarch too powerful to correct?
Shellie Troy Anderson 