From Max to Carol Anne, a long line of sad good-byes
CJOH, later CTV Ottawa, has long been the home for drama.
It had a well-liked sportscaster (Brian Smith) shot to death in the parking lot in 1995. It had one of Canada’s longest-serving news anchors (Max Keeping) retire in 2010, wage a public battle with cancer, collect laurels by the bushel, only to die in October with a funeral in a hockey arena.
It had its landmark building burned down in 2010. It had its longtime night news anchor (Leigh Chapple) die in her sleep in 2013, not long after retiring, only 58. And it gave us Ottawa’s bestloved widow, Carol Anne Meehan, the nightly news co-anchor who lost her husband tragically in January 2012.
All of which to say Bell Media, which now owns CTV, doesn’t seem to understand its own story. But viewers do, because we lived it.
When it laid off Meehan on Tuesday — not to mention Carolyn Waldo and the others, by the way — it had her instantly vaporized off the CTV website and never let her utter a word on the air. Saying goodbye to a 27-year career via Twitter lacks a certain dignity. Somewhere, surely, Max’s rat-tail is twitching.
One of Meehan’s last community acts, by the way, was to lead the Santa Claus parade in Kanata on Saturday. Merry stinkin’ Christmas.
It’s not that one lost job is a tragedy. Lord knows, it’s the freight train running through traditional media. Rather, it’s the lack of recognition of a historical relationship, now severed: Carol Anne to Max, Fetterley to Greenwell, Waldo to Smith, to Lye and Luxton, way back to Bushnell.
Seriously, what would a phone/ Internet company know of Uncle Willy and Floyd? And Bell’s “ensuring ... cost structure ... reflects realities ...” blah blah statement, just reads like corporate, tin-ear, Grade A baloney. The division made tens of millions last year. Want corporate poverty? Try working for a newspaper.
It struck me the other day that several of Ottawa’s prominent broadcast anchors, Meehan included, have had their private lives become a peak in the public profile. CFRA’s just-departed Steve Madely shared with listeners the battle his wife Gayle fought with cancer.
Before she died in May 2013, together they turned her illness into a force for good. Max, as we know, was an open book, helping to raise millions. Lowell Green let us in on his open-heart surgery. Over at CBC, Lucy van Oldenbarneveld went public with her cancer diagnosis and, hair loss and all, provides regular video updates. Tell me we are all that brave. Forgotten in all the Meehan anger this week, though, was an important question: What is the future of the local supper-hour news, when CTV Ottawa is apparently down to three full-time reporters, and what are the consequences for the city?
“I think the traditional six o’clock news is not quite dead, but it’s on its last legs,” answered Christopher Waddell, a journalism professor and researcher at Carleton University.
“A city like Ottawa, with three or four full-time reporters? C’mon.”
The Internet makes news available to consumers when they want it, how they want it, and in quantities they choose, he points out.
The idea that the family gathers around the television at 6 p.m. — the CJOH model for decades — to hear its only news source, is long over.
“I think video-storytelling has a huge future, but it won’t be in a newscast.”
No kidding. Today’s media monolith in a nutshell: You can watch Seinfeld reruns on your watch but can’t know if your city councillor’s off to jail, or whether an axe-murderer lives next door, because covering that stuff takes time and money.
And, if only to reinforce, the Internet no more “creates” news than a printing press writes stories. It takes a trained somebody to create “content” — hideous word — lest we be reading Five Movie Stars Who Have Ugly Wives till the cows come home.
But, high-horsing aside, the loss of reliable voices, the dismissal of those “bringers” of news, is significant, because those human voices shape the raw information. Meehan, in particular, has a honey-tone to her pipes and a soft, sympathetic look, part of OH’s old mainstream, cosy appeal. It suited us.
There is a way, in other words, to deliver the news like every day is Doomsday. But that’s not the town we live in, or the rhythm of life here, where memory endures and familiar people aren’t easily erased.