Cliche Ranting

I'm not sure about the inner workings of camera angles, interview techniques and the like because I only experience them from the audience's point of view. Still, the cliches are a bit wearisome. CBC and CTV each have their own and some they share.

Whenever CBC wants to set up a First Nations story, they feature the sound of a bunch of guys sitting around banging a drum and chanting a song in some Indian language. Always the same guys, the same drum, the same song. It's been done so much it's as racist as some 1950s cartoon about Injuns. It's in their tape library and has obviously been digitized for easy addition to the front of each First Nations story.

Another cliche is the reporter's desperate insistence on embarrassing the protagonist of a story by calling them a 'hero'. Listen there cub reporters, if you find your line of questioning is making your interview subject very uncomfortable - why push it? It's bad manners and the audience doesn't like it any more than the victim.

If there is any chance to obtain a tear drop from a man, it's editorial gold isn't it? The camera will stay focused ten inches from the victim's face until the sheer pressure causes them to break down. "Tears! I got tears! This is gonna be a lead I tell ya - male tears!" It is demeaning to the victim and the technique is transparent to the audience. It also shows you don't give a rat's ass about the subject at all.

The audience can always tell when the subject of the story has been co-opted to 'sell' the story. The subject is shown doing something ultra important at their desk, or taking an important phone call, self-consciously not looking at the camera; or else they walk the same twenty feet outside their place of work or down the hallway, so the camera can establish the subject as a sympathetic figure for the audience. The self-conscious victim has obviously been told that despite the hackneyed nature of the shot, it will play well on the noooooz. They never know what to do with their hands it seems.

So much for technique. Recently there has been a downhill slide in erudition. Reporters are ignorant. Proudly, admittedly, unabashedly, unrepentantly ignorant. They now profess not to be able to pronounce common English words, and they totally mangle French pronunciations. "Southern" is not pronounced south-ern it's suthern. I E R endings in French are pronounced eeyay. A foyer is pronounced fwah-yay, not foy-er. A foy-er is what a Newfoundland fire department responds to. This is pretty basic stuff for a Canadian reporter. It's hard enough to get a spot on the roster, why would a news agency hire an ignoramus? Maybe they are doing it by design? I hope not.

A fisher is a small brown animal in the mustelid family, related to weasels and martins. Most CBC types have never actually seen one, so perhaps they could be forgiven for their confusion...
If the CBC wants to be the Canadian broadcaster, then they should reflect the values of all Canadians, not just the vegetarian, far-left, gun-hating, pacifist, politically correct intelligentsia. Consider this - your budget comes from the taxpayer, and if you annoy the taxpayers enough, they'll write their members of parliament, who don't like you anyway. Try just reporting the news instead of shaping public opinion.

So what about the CTV? CTV are so cheap they re-issue the same news multiple times in the course of two days. We hear a news article on the national news, then it's repeated on the local late evening news, then it's reported on the national morning news, and finally on the local noon news. Mostly it wasn't very good or newsy the first time. What makes it really an egregious offence is to then repeat the same damn performance six to eight months later, in the hope that the audience has forgotten the item.

Global TV are in there fighting for a spot between the two major broadcasters. To that end, their local news and weather coverage isn't bad at all, and they seem to leave the right-wing politics out of their news. Where they really shine is in covering local sports. Way to go guys.