Skip to main content

Krista's gone, so what is CKY so worried about?

Well, the new television season is upon us which means it's time for our second annual examination of the local television news scene.

The '05 season started with infinite possibilities and ended with echoes of Lost and MTV music awards past.

One television newscast dropped off the radar without warning one night.

And CBC host Krista Erickson split for Ottawa, but not before giving her favorite colleague Marisa Dragani a smooch live on TV. If CBC had scheduled it during sweeps week, it may have bumped ratings.

Instead, CBC now goes into the new season as the perpetual owner of the basement. And that's not even the most depressing part of the new season outlook.


Oh, how exciting last year looked compared to '06.
- Global was moving to 6 o'clock to go head-to-head with the CTV powerhouse.
- A-Channel had morphed into CityTV and we were wondering if they would close the narrowing distance between themselves and CBC.
- CBC had Leathergirl Krista as their Ace and Face.
And it was girls, girls, girls on every station you turned to.


So what happened? CityTV tanked. They went in with the "spirited energy" of their young staff who turned out a newshour that told viewers everything that happened in the city that day. Then they reigned in most of that young staff and saddled anchor Lisa Saunders with the gravitas of new co-host Glen Kirby. Half the audience switched stations, not because of Kirby, but because the show got slow and interchangeble with the rest at six..

Not even Mark Jardine's mimicking of Global's Mike Brown could convince viewers the show was fun anymore. When a corporate takeover swallowed CityTV, and the new owners executed the newscast, it was almost a mercy killing.

The big question starting the '06 season is where their viewers landed up.

CBC, which had been feeling A-Channel's breath on their neck as the station closed to within a few hundred viewers in the ratings, breathed a sigh of relief as CityTV shed viewers faster than, well, than CBC.

But that respite is over. CBC is now the least watched news in Winnipeg. It has a hardcore audience of 22,000 to 25,000 which loves the leftwing, politically correct slant on events that the public broadcaster spins out. (But someone who has seen the last ratings book swears they've slipped deeper into the abyss and into last gasp territory with barely 13,000 viewers.)

The only thing of interest in the coming season is to watch how the viewer numbers reflect Krista Erickson's attraction factor.

Auditions for her job won't have the same power of tryouts for Canadian Idol, and you can bet that the pc brass aren't even considering anyone with a penis.

(It was interesting, though, to watch Krista's bye-bye speech where she thanked everybody down to the line-up editor and the director, but failed to mention veteran producer Morris Karp, who did more than anybody to grease her way to the top.)

You would think all this churn in the local market would let CKY - er, CTV Winnipeg - sleep easy at night. But The Black Rod has learned that isn't the case. Not by a long shot.

CTV is worried. The station has been holding focus groups to compare their product with Global News at Six.

Now, given the vast gulf between ratings, its roughly 3 to 1 in CTV's favour, you have to ask -- what's CTV scared of?

Global has turned out a disappointment. Like the quarterback in motion, they were calling the play a year ago. At 5:30 they offered a unique product. Often opening with Mike Brown's irreverent approach to political news, Global had won a loyal audience.

But the move to 6 o'clock apparently spooked them. The station turned into CTV lite. Weatherthingy Kate Stutsman is so airy she defies gravity. Mike Brown can still deliver when they let him off his leash. But overall, the show has lost its sparkle.

Note to Global: Starting your show with a nine minute feature piece on Transcona is a death warrant. D-e-a-t-h. (Pssssssst: Wanna be part of the community? Do your little remotes from say, J-Town, the public housing complex at Burrows and Gilbert -- and tell their story about living with nightly gunplay.)

And yet, CTV is scared.

They have a state-of-the-art new downtown studio. The move was greeted with a big yawn by the public. The station wasn't able to translate the move from Polo Park into any excitement. Which is the definition of CTV News.

It's dull. Bloated. Slow.

Do we really need multiple "weather people" to tell us the temperatures? Jon Hendricks making the entertainment beat un-entertaining ? Eleanor Coopsammy doing a story about kids backpacks ?

But like the Red River, CTV keeps meandering along, gathering viewers by sheer momentum. Thankfully the braintrust has let Camilla and Leah be themselves and kept Kelly Dehn on the crime beat. Can their queasiness be related to something as simple as "our girls vs their girls" ?

Last year we had fun noting the sudden blooming of new, female faces on all the newscasts. This year we're wondering: where have all the men gone?

It's not time for a Royal Commission yet, but you must have noticed that there's hardly any male reporters left on Winnipeg television news.

We confess. We may have subliminally known something was missing, but we didn't consciously recognize it until reading a story in the Washington Post a couple of months ago.

Sea change in TV news
Men become increasingly scarce on-screen and off
By Paul Farhi The Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- As news director of WTTG-Ch. 5 here, Katherine Green gets stacks of tapes and resumes from reporters and anchors -- some young and green, others older and seasoned. But the most common characteristic: Most are women.

By Green's estimate, women applicants outnumber men about 3-1. Bill Lord, Green's counterpart at the local ABC affiliate, sees much the same ratio and says the percentage of women has increased yearly.



The article goes on to say that in the U.S:

Women reached statistical parity with men on the anchor desk in the early 1990s, and their ranks have been climbing since. The number of female anchors reached a record high last year, accounting for 57 percent of the positions in a nationwide survey conducted by the Radio and Television News Directors Association.

Just as impressive are the gains in the rest of the newsroom. Women account for more than half of TV reporters (58 percent) and such middle managers as executive producers (55 percent), news producers (66 percent) and news writers (56 percent).

At the bottom of the career ladder are even more women: Almost two-thirds of bachelor's degrees in journalism and mass communications were awarded to women in 2004, according to research by Lee Becker of the University of Georgia. These days, when educators such as Becker or Craig Allen of Arizona State University look over their broadcast journalism classes, they often don't see a single male student looking back.

Now, that's what's called news folks.

How has this feminization of the news been reflected?

In Winnipeg, not so much, other than watching the CBC's I-Team reporter Alex Freedman become the Consumer Reporter and start doing hardhitting stories about -- what else? backpacks for kids ! -- as he did Tuesday.


But nationally, things begin to make sense. Watching CTV's Lisa LaFlamme almost burst into tears to show her empathy for a Lebanon refugee was embarassing. We didn't know it was only a sign of the times and we could expect much, much more of this sort of news coverage. Only now we have an explanation.

It also explains why men now get their news from the Internet.

The Washington Post story noted that male centred news concentrated on government, politics and war.

When CBC followed that format, they were top of the heap with a hundred thousand more viewers than they can claim today.

There's a lesson there, somewhere.

Popular posts from this blog

The unreported bombshell conspiracy evidence in the Trudeau/SNC-Lavelin scandal

Wow. No, double-wow. A game-changing bombshell lies buried in the supplementary evidence provided to the House of Commons Judiciary Committee by former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. It has gone virtually unreported since she submitted the material almost a week ago. As far as we can find, only one journalist-- Andrew Coyne, columnist for the National Post--- has even mentioned it and even then he badly missed what it meant, burying it in paragraph 10 of a 14 paragraph story. The gist of the greatest political scandal in modern Canadian history is well-known by now. It's bigger than Adscam, the revelation 15 years ago that prominent members of the Liberal Party of Canada and the party itself funneled tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks into their own pockets from federal spending in Quebec sponsoring ads promoting Canadian unity. That was just venal politicians and a crooked political party helping themselves to public money. The Trudeau-Snc-Lavalin scandal is

Crips and Bloodz true cultural anchors of Winnipeg's aboriginal gangs

(Bebo tribute page to Aaron Nabess on the right, his handgun-toting friend on the left) At least six murder victims in Winnipeg in the past year are linked to a network of thuglife, gangster rap-styled, mainly aboriginal street gangs calling themselves Crips and Bloods after the major black gangs of L.A. The Black Rod has been monitoring these gangs for several months ever since discovering memorial tributes to victim Josh Prince on numerous pages on Bebo.com, a social networking website like Myspace and Facebook. Josh Prince , a student of Kildonan East Collegiate, was stabbed to death the night of May 26 allegedly while breaking up a fight. His family said at the time he had once been associated with an unidentified gang, but had since broken away. But the devotion to Prince on sites like Watt Street Bloodz and Kingk Notorious Bloodz (King-K-BLOODZ4Life) shows that at the time of his death he was still accepted as one of their own. Our searches of Bebo have turned up another five ga

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. There, we said it.

Manitoba Hydro is on its deathbed. Oh, you won't find anyone official to say it. Yet . Like relatives trying to appear cheery and optimistic around a loved one that's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, the people in power are in the first stage of grief -- denial. The prognosis for Hydro was delivered three weeks ago at hearings before the Public Utilities Board where the utility was seeking punishingly higher rates for customers in Manitoba. It took us this long to read through the hundred-plus pages of transcript, to decipher the coded language of the witnesses, to interpret what they were getting at, and, finally, to understand the terrible conclusion.  We couldn't believe it, just as, we're sure, you can't--- so we did it all again, to get a second opinion, so to speak.  Hydro conceded to the PUB that it undertook a massive expansion program--- involving three (it was once four) new dams and two new major powerlines (one in the United States)---whi

Nahanni Fontaine, the NDP's Christian-bashing, cop-smearing, other star candidate

As the vultures of the press circle over the wounded Liberal Party of Manitoba, one NDP star candidate must be laughing up her sleeve at how her extremist past has escaped the scrutiny of reporters and pundits. Parachuted into a safe NDP seat in Winnipeg's North End, she nonetheless feared a bruising campaign against a well-heeled Liberal opponent.  Ha ha.  Instead, the sleepy newspeeps have turned a blind eye to her years of vitriolic attacks on Christianity, white people, and police. * She's spent years  bashing Christianity  as the root cause of all the problems of native people in Canada. * She's called for  a boycott of white businesses . * And with her  Marxist research partner, she's  smeared city police as intransigent racists . Step up Nahanni Fontaine, running for election in St. John's riding as successor to the retiring Gord Macintosh. While her male counterpart in the NDP's galaxy of stars, Wab Kinew, has responded to the controversy over

Exposing the CBC/WFP double-team smear of a hero cop

Published since 2006 on territory ceded, released, surrendered and yielded up in 1871 to Her Majesty the Queen and successors forever. Exposing the CBC/FP double-team smear of a hero cop Some of the shoddiest journalism in recent times appeared this long August weekend when the CBC and Winnipeg Free Press doubled teamed on a blatant smear of a veteran city police officer. In the latest example of narrative journalism these media outlets spun stories with total disregard for facts that contradicted the central message of the reports which, simplified, is: police are bad and the system is covering up. Let's start with the story on the taxpayer funded CBC by Sarah Petz that can be summed up in the lead. "A February incident where an off-duty Winnipeg officer allegedly knocked a suspect unconscious wasn't reported to the province's police watchdog, and one criminologist says it shows how flawed oversight of law enforcement can be." There you have it. A policeman, not

Winnipeg needs a new police chief - ASAP

When did the magic die? A week ago the Winnipeg police department delivered the bad news---crime in the city is out of control. The picture painted by the numbers (for 2018) was appalling. Robberies up ten percent in  a single year.  (And that was the good news.) Property crimes were up almost 20 percent.  Total crime was 33 percent higher than the five year average. The measure of violent crime in Winnipeg had soared to a rating of 161.  Only four years earlier it stood at 116. That's a 38 percent deterioration in safety. How did it happen? How, when in 2015 the police and Winnipeg's police board announced they had discovered the magic solution to crime? "Smart Policing" they called it.    A team of crime analysts would pore through data to spot crime hot-spots and as soon as they identified a trend (car thefts, muggings, liquor store robberies) they could call in police resources to descend on the problem and nip it. The police