RadioActive wrote:

A few days ago, the CBC announced to nearly blanket condemnation that it was discontinuing all of its 6 & 11 PM local news across the country, replacing it with its cable news instead. 

Now it appears it's slowly reversing that decision. But the explanation behind it all doesn't ring true for some. Including yours truly. 

In an interview with The Current on Tuesday, CBC News boss Catherine Tait tried to undo the damage. She told host Matt Galloway that the reason the broadcasts were "temporarily" cancelled and various people reassigned was because of the extraordinary nature of the COVID-19 story. 

She claims the network was taking some 37 press conferences in one day from across the country, what she referred to as "lives," whereas normally they might do around only eight. And she offered the excuse that, because of the manpower that involved and the fact that many people were out sick or self isolating, they needed all those extra local newsbodies elsewhere.

She now says things are settling down and the locals are slowly being restored. "We had to do it to stabilize the systems, and since that date [March 17] ... we have been restoring more and more local news each day."

And she insisted the fact that both CBC Radio and CBC online were picking up the slack meant that it wasn't that serious.

CBC.ca: 'We totally understand the frustration': CBC president defends local TV news suspension amid pandemic

Hmmm. Here's why that doesn't add up for me. The CBC is the single most staffed TV news organization in the country. Where a talk show in private radio might have one producer and a screener, the CBC has multiple people handling those jobs, far more than any other place could afford. Same with their TV news division. That's due to it getting millions of dollars in taxpayer money from all of us every year. 

Yet CTV's News Channel also carried dozens of pressers during the same time and I don't recall them cancelling any local news shows. And while Global doesn't have a national cable news station, they also continued with their own 6 & 11 coverage, despite many of their own personnel being forced into 14-day isolation.

I'm not calling Tait a liar. I'm sure there was some personnel pressure. But given their staffing levels, which far exceed everyone else's, I find it almost impossible to fathom that they simply ran out of people to keep their local news on the air. And how many people do you need to cover a press conference, beyond say, a reporter and a camera at the scene? (Even then, a pool feed is often available.)

Funny how after almost a week of endless criticism from viewers, columnists, politicians, groups like Friends of Canadian Broadcasting (which started a petition to get the shows restored), and possibly even their own staff, they're suddenly starting to reverse themselves - even though the number of press conferences haven't lessened. If anything, there seem to be more of them now than ever.

This kind of thing is just one of the reasons I've been keeping my social distance from the CBC for many, many, years. 

Just because management may suck doesn't mean all the programming sucks. There's long been some very good content (and, like everywhere else, some drech).
 

Re local news ... I agree ... and local is how you keep journos on the ground geographically dispersed... synergy between local and national.