REGINA — Here we are in August, a month when you normally do not expect much in the way of breaking news. Parliament and the legislature are not in session, the council meeting schedules are reduced, and people are in general taking vacation time and are not the least bit interested watching the news.
I guess the folks at Bell figured this would be a good time to drop the news that they had parted ways with their chief anchor Lisa LaFlamme. They must have figured enough people would be off the grid to not even notice she was gone.
Wow, did that ever not turn out well.
For the past week, Canada has seen a collective freak-out reaction to LaFlamme’s dismissal. CTV has been inundated with complaints from people accusing Bell executives of ageism, sexism, misogyny and worse over this decision. We are seeing stories about how LaFlamme was fired because she allowed her hair to go grey on air.
We are now seeing stories about how this sends a terrible message to young women who want to go into journalism. Never mind that — it sends a terrible message to men wanting to go into journalism, too, especially TV news.
Honestly, if what happened to LaFlamme discourages people from pursuing this lousy, unstable, low-pay TV news career path for a living, and they decide to do something better with their lives, maybe this will have done them all a public service. Heck, there are already lots of stories about how there is a shortage of males going into TV news. It’s true, most males have finally seen the light and are refusing to go into the business, opting for more money and stable career paths which don’t involve the public humiliation LaFlamme endured last week. Maybe women might finally come to the same conclusion, too. I hope so, because it would serve management right.
A career in “PR” looks pretty good right now. It seems like there are lots of places in Canada that could use good public relations people to do their crisis communications for them. Such as Bell, for example.
This whole mess that transpired this past week is a textbook case of how not to run a news organization, or your PR. Unfortunately, this purge of LaFlamme seems typical for TV news in this country.
For the past several years we have seen countless instances of media talent in this country being shoved aside or shown the door. What happened to LaFlamme is callous, but there is nothing new about this. There have been many callous departures from various TV operations in the past few years, with conglomerates Rogers and Bell being the worst offenders.
Rogers found a way to toss overboard such names as Gord Martineau at Citytv in Toronto, or Bob McCown at Prime Time Sports. (There was also Don Cherry, but that was kind of a different situation.)
Global has also had purges of their own. I read about how anchor Jamie Orchard was canned at Global Montreal, but at least she was given a chance to say goodbye to her viewers on the air, unlike LaFlamme.
Lately, the true master of the media purges has been Bell. They have conducted plenty of local-level bloodbaths in recent years, tossing out Carol Anne Meehan at CTV Ottawa, tossing out weather guys Tom Brown and Anwar Knight at CTV Toronto, and most notoriously wiping out local sportscasts and sportscasters across the country.
Last year, Bell went on their most notorious bloodbath yet where they blew out their radio newsrooms in major cities, closed down three entire TSN all-sports radio stations, and canned high-profile talent at TSN including Dan O’Toole, Natasha Staniszewski and eventually parted ways with Rod Black. At some point, they even parted ways with Ben Mulroney.
So, when I first heard that LaFlamme was out at CTV, I had a “surprised but not surprised” type of reaction. After what happened to TSN last year, nothing could shock me any more. This seemed like just another typical stupid move that I have come to expect in “Television Land.”
My point here is that these purges have been commonplace. It has always produced a level of outrage from the public and claims from viewers that they will never watch again. Then people calm down, and we get used to the new personalities, only for these same companies to conduct more periodic purges every year or so.
The sense now is that this particular axing went too far. This time, the target was way too high profile, it made far less business sense (anchor of the number one newscast in Canada), and the way this was handled came off as more cold-hearted than usual.
LaFlamme deserved a dignified departure after all those years on the air. Instead, she announced her goodbye suddenly, on social media, while sitting in a cabin somewhere. What’s more, she made it clear she wasn’t happy about it, saying she was blindsided.
So now everyone and their dog has been on Twitter freaking out about what Bell did. The main controversy revolves around claims of a double standard, with lots of people pointing out that LaFlamme’s predecessor Lloyd Robertson got to stay on until he was 77 years old.
Well, let’s talk about Lloyd for a moment. Back when Lloyd was doing the news, you didn’t have nearly the pressures on the Canadian media business that you do now.
Back in the old days, if you wanted to get your news, you waited until 10 or 11 p.m. to watch Peter Mansbridge or Lloyd Robertson. Now all you need to do is look at your mobile device when you get a notification. That’s it.
TV news is currently under existential threat from the internet and countless other competing news services, including streaming services. That’s part of why Robertson lasted as long as he did, because it wasn’t the same media environment. His nightly newscasts still had clout.
But he had other problems to deal with. A couple of decades or so ago, Robertson had to fend off competition for his anchor job from Keith Morrison, who is now with NBC. I read the accounts from back in the day about how Morrison was supposed to be angling for Robertson’s job, and how Robertson had to go to the president of CTV to put a stop to all of this nonsense, resulting in Morrison being fired from CTV News.
Morrison’s firing happened on the same day that Pamela Wallin was fired as co-anchor of “Prime Time News” on CBC, which was also a controversial move which prompted people to also claim “sexism” and so on.
Anyway, palace intrigue has been part of the TV news business in this country for a long time. As we have seen, it has been equal opportunity palace intrigue. Women and men have been getting the knife pretty much in equal numbers as far as I can tell.
But maybe now the pendulum has swung to the point where TV news anchors no longer carry the sort of sway they used to have back in Lloyd’s day. In the old days, a guy like Lloyd could have survived the pressures and all the behind-the-scenes nonsense. Not now.
The real question to me is whether the TV companies are going to reverse course about how they operate, after all this fallout from this past week. And by that, I mean “treat their employees the way people ought to be treated, like they try to do in the real world occasionally.”
I doubt it, but if anyone in management in other media organizations are interested in taking notes, this whole controversy at CTV News has been a great case study in what not to do. Bell management just took the number one newscast in Canada, and has run it right off the cliff.
As for the viewers, it’s obvious none of us have any power. Heck, we can tune in and make a newscast Number One, and it doesn’t mean a thing to the network executives anymore. They can still fire whomever they want.
We can also all say we are going to quit watching these TV newscasts in protest, and even delete their news apps from our cellphones, but guess what will happen if we do that? That’s right, there will be yet another purge.
Today, it’s Lisa LaFlamme, tomorrow it will be Omar Sachedina. Or whoever else.
