Where's Bobby - from blogger Ouimet, a manager in the CBC building in Toronto.
All these days, all these people, and not a single word from the President and CEO, inside or out.
More disappointing, perhaps, is the fact that no one expects him to say anything useful anyways. Truth be told, we all stopped listening long ago.
I know he has plenty of smart people around him in Ottawa, and I know they are strategizing out the yingyang, going around and around in circles, like, well... you know, polishing and buffing some document or other.
But a few honest words would go a lot farther than anything a publicist would write.
Bobby, this is it. Your entire professional career has lead up to this jam, and if you fix it, history will remember you as a leader who lead when leadership was most needed.
Speak up and tell the truth, for God's sake. If not now, then forget about it.
With the other lockout we just witnessed, the NHL lockout, it was pretty easy to see what the NHL owners strategy was - namely, risk losing the season in order to get a whole new economic arrangement with the players.
With this present CBC lockout, it's difficult to see if the CBC management even has a strategy. If they want to crush the union with a six month lockout, there wont be much of an audience left when the dispute is settled. (Except for Hockey Night In Canada) Do they think the audience is just gonna flow back to Andy Barrie's Radio One morning show in Toronto as soon as he shows up for work? Do they think there will be an audience who even remembers where CBC Newsword is for the crucial second season of George Stroumboulopoulos' The Hour? Maybe CBC management thinks so - I sure dont.
As for the NHL, if the owners wanted to risk losing half their audience to other sports and entertainment activities with an extended lockout - that's their business, after all, they own the teams.
But management don't own the CBC - we do, the Canadian audience, the Canadian taxpayer, the Canadian arts community who have been supplying the CBC with much of their content for years now.
So the CBC management better have a clear idea of what they are doing here and they had better start conveying it real soon.
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