AFTER MANSBRIDGE
The CBC’s iconic anchor is about to retire. The job may go with him.
Comedian Mark Critch announced on Twitter this week that he would be the new anchor of CBC TV’s flagship newscast, The National.
His announcement featured a shot of the 22 Minutes star standing in the spot soon to be vacated by Peter Mansbridge. “In your face, @petermansbridge,” the tweet said.
Mansbridge, nearing the end of his tenure in the top journalistic post he’s held for nearly 30 years, was a good sport about it. In a Twitter reply, Mansbridge suggested that Critch might have too much hair.
The little exchange was a light-hearted joke, of course, but it was also a reminder that we haven’t actually heard all that much speculation on who will be the “next Peter Mansbridge.”
Isn’t that a bit odd? Just weeks away from Mansbridge’s scheduled Canada Day departure, we aren’t seeing stories about competition to replace him or even the garden-variety rumours about whether CBC will be looking inside or outside the corporation for the new host of The National. Besides Critch, no one seems to be publicly auditioning for the post, unless they’re being very subtle about it.
Is that perhaps because there won’t be another Mansbridge — at least as we’ve come to think of the all-powerful anchor job at the CBC?
Non-fans of the CBC (many of them gathered in Toronto this weekend to choose a new Conservative leader) will say that the lack of buzz over Mansbridge’s potential replacement is a sign of the network’s declining relevance — another argument in favour of cutting the subsidy it gets from the federal government.
Certainly that would be the view of front-running leadership contender Maxime Bernier, whose platform calls for “streamlining” the CBC and making it look more like the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in the United States.
But politics isn’t the dominant force driving future change at the CBC — it is culture; particularly the rapidly shifting culture around journalism and our old ideas about what defines a voice of authority.
Gathering around the TV every night at 10 p.m. to be told what happened in the world — by anyone — is simply not how we get our current affairs anymore. When we want news, we find it out on our own time, through our own devices and our own sources.
Many of the things we assume to be standard features of journalism, including the all-powerful news anchor, are actually products of the 1960s. Seeking some views beyond Canada about the evolving role of TV anchors for this column, I came across an interesting and succinct summary in a 2015 article by Mike Conway, an associate professor of journalism at Indiana University.
Contrary to popular belief, the anchor has not always dominated American television news, he writes. “The title wasn’t even affixed to the nightly newscaster until the mid-1960s.”
Anchors assumed greater authority as people increasingly looked to TV as a prime source for their news, instead of the papers. Journalism consumers wanted to invest their TV hosts with the same kind of clout that they once bestowed on the grey, old newspapers that landed on their doorstep.
Conway, in this article, argues that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for some of that old, 1960s-era power around the anchor to be dispersed and democratized, given that we are now living in the 21st century.
Even with declining audiences and impact these days, Conway says, U.S. news networks have been reluctant to abandon the powerful-anchor model — “mainly because it is less expensive — and more likely to positively impact ratings — to pay one person a lot of money, as opposed to gambling on a new approach, or investing in more news gathering capabilities.”
Here in Canada, the good news is that CBC may not be making the same mistake on this score as their American counterparts.
A couple of months ago, in a memo distributed to CBC staff, editor-in-chief Jennifer McGuire dropped some strong hints that The National after Mansbridge’s departure will be a very different beast — “more than just a one-hour program at 10 p.m.”
That suggested to me that CBC may be evolving more to what we’ve been seeing on CNN or MSNBC in the States, where there’s no one king of the network or journalistic commander in chief.
So we probably shouldn’t be surprised if Mansbridge’s power, like the National itself, is dispersed among a number of people — a rotating, diverse group. No passing of the mantle to one person and, thankfully, no “stars” seeking our adulation and deference. It isn’t the 1960s anymore, after all.
And who knows? Maybe one of the many replacements for Mansbridge may well be Mark Critch. sdelacourt@bell.net
Susan Delacourt The era of all-powerful TV anchor may have come to an end