CBC radio dying too/Sook-Yin Lee sucks

Lorne Gunter's column (via Norman's Spectator)

According to a Statistics Canada study of 90,000 radio listeners released Thursday, the CBC has gone from a total audience of 11 per cent of Canadian listeners in early 2005 to just 8.8 per cent now.

The precipitous fall is due mostly to the 2004 labour dispute. During the lockout of on-air talent and others, tens of thousands of CBC listeners tuned to other stations and never tuned back. They found they didn't need a public broadcaster after all.

Where a year ago CBC was third nationally among formats on radio, today it is sixth, ranking behind adult contemporary, oldies/rock, talk, country and Top 40, and just ahead of "other."

In Alberta the numbers are even more disheartening for lovers of CBC. Here it is eighth, with just 6.5 per cent of listeners. Country is king (25.4 per cent), followed by oldies (20.5), adult contemporary (10.0), talk (9.4), album-oriented rock (8.7), other (7.4) and Top 40 (7.2).

And as Statistics Canada points out, the CBC's audience is typically middle-aged or older, well-educated and well-heeled. And as we know from other sources, it is also disproportionately non-immigrant.

In other words, CBC listeners tend to be well-off, university-educated, white people.

There is no reason not to have a radio service for that market.

It is just that the rest of us shouldn't have to subsidize it.

There are no government subsidies for the radio formats most Canadians are listening to, so why should the listeners best able to afford them expect their radio choices to be paid for by the rest of us?

All I care for now is Quirks and Quarks.

A particular recent reason. In the car, with nothing else to consider, I listened Saturday, July 22, for a while to Definitely Not the Opera. The show was spending large amounts of our money to do special programs from New Orleans.

Host Sook-Yin Lee achieved a truly great moment in postmodern irony. She asked some nice old black guy she was interviewing whether he considered her a lady. He replied that he certainly did unless evidence otherwise came to his attention, for instance that a woman was, say, truly sexually loose. Ms Lee ragged him about this for some time (what a hoot) knowing full well that the fellow did not know this: "Sook-Yin Lee Funny Porn Movie Shortbus".

How utterly disgusting, arrogant and condescending. Any you're paying for it.

Thank goodness for this:

Of course, the fact that Lee isn’t particularly good looking helps make her being naked and having sex un-erotic.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at July 23, 2006 08:46 PM