CBC’s reformatted National needs to give its formidable hosts more rope
The old joke goes: “Do you have trouble making decisions?” Reply: “Well, yes and no.” If you wanted to tell that joke about the CBC’s new-format 10 p.m. national news, you would have to repeat it four times, one for each host.
In alphabetical order, those hosts are Adrienne Arsenault, Rosemary Barton, Andrew Chang and Ian Hanomansing, a perfect gender and très multicultural balance Prime Minister Trudeau II must have approved of.
The program is a fairly stripped-down affair, lots of black-and-white graphics sliding in and out, big open set without people everywhere, the hosts with their computers so close to them on the desk you would think they were doctors avoiding patient eye contact.
On a recent Sunday night, the very strong Arsenault interviewed Tina Brown, the former editor of everything from the New Yorker to Vanity Fair to the Harvey Weinstein-funded-and-failed Talk magazine.
Arsenault is not a gusher and even though her guest was a certifiable journalistic legend, she didn’t blink.
They shook hands at the end and we cut back to a beaming Hanomansing, who actually gushed, “That was a really good interview.”
As a matter of fact, it had been, but are co-hosts the best ones to be reviewing their colleagues’ work on air?
They are rarely all together. On other nights there were three hosts, sometimes two. They appear to do pretty much what they did before they were hosts. Barton still does great interviewers; Arsenault always looks like she is wearing battle fatigues under her colourful scarf and coat, ready, if needed, to run off into a war zone.
The men are the straight news readers, and good ones. Chang seems more comfortable talking to people than Hanomansing. The latter they have standing a lot, the former sits in full medium shot and delivers the news. In fact, there are a lot more of those medium shots, even in the old segment panel, At Issue, which has been brought back.
Instead of Peter Mansbridge and or others standing there asking questions, now all four heads divide the screen in equal proportions. They look into the camera and are therefore looking at us, and not each other.
Whether this is more effective as a way of filming talk, I do not know, but there is something distinctly American-looking about it.
There is not a whole lot of interplay among the hosts. What’s interesting is that each host takes care of his or her segment, calling on other journalists like a host would, which makes it possible for Arsenault to still speak like a host while she is in Jerusalem.
The pieces they cover seem longer and provide more info and background. The quality of the footage seems better, with more archival material. I have no idea what the budget of this version of the National is versus what it was in Mansbridge’s time, but it sure feels like they came into some dough.
Given these resources, I would still enjoy seeing more foreign news as opposed to magazinestyle pieces on people and their hobbies who are interesting, their stories heartwarming.
But frankly I don’t watch the news to have my heart warmed. (I know everybody who has seen a TV in the last week has now viewed the rescue of the rabbit from the California fires and cried, so I am clearly not the majority voice.)
There seems to be no compelling reason for having four hosts. They don’t exchange much, sometimes a couple of them do a little chuckling as they say good night, so reassuring. I would love, for example, to see the co-hosts go at it as a group in some other format than At Issue.
These are all people with knowledge and strong communication skills whose opinions and personalities should be allowed to shine a little more. Remember, CBC, the Pastor might be gone but he left the light on.