fawny.org

If you’re going to shitcan a show, have the guts to really shitcan it

CBC Radio programming director Chris Boyce:

And when we looked at Search Engine, we really liked what it was doing as a program, but we started to look at “Was half an hour every week the best way to get the content onto the airwaves?” And at the end of the day, what we felt was this shouldn’t be something that just sort of lived in this half an hour a week. Was there an opportunity here to get the same content on other shows across the network?

He said this on a brand-new 20-minute podcast of Search Engine, a show that was supposed to have been cancelled. Except now it obviously isn’t, because it’s a podcast, i.e., its format remains unchanged for its core audience, who never listened to it on the radio anyway.

Was half an hour once a week “the best way to get the content onto the airwaves”? I guess not, but the show still exists – with, admittedly, one-third the staff. Meanwhile, functionally equivalent arguments were trotted out for shitcanning Moving On, but almost no converage of disability issues has taken place on any outpost of the CBC since then.

Not only were we fed the lie that Search Engine was cancelled, the show still coexists with another radio program and podcast about technology, Spark. That gives the topic two full shows on CBC, plus guest hits from Jesse Hirsh and the like.

Meanwhile, Jesse Brown –  a continuing victim of horrifically unflattering official photographs – used the resurrected podcast to pre-sell a big segment he’s doing for The Current. (So he is being redeployed! That wasn’t a lie.) Meanwhile still, the BBC has three full disability-related shows on TV, on the radio, and on podcast. Any one of those could be used as a model. Let’s not pretend the CBC doesn’t look to the BBC as a model.

J. Brown ended the show with special thanks to me. You’re welcome. Now get somebody to give me my cripple shows back. I mean, you got yours back.