41. Starowitcz and investigative journalism

Published.
(Section in italics was cut from published version.)
1st September 1996

Senior cultural managers at public agencies should not behave like smug, rich kids as Marc Starowitcz did in responding to complaints penned by documentary producer, Martyn Burke.
The Globe and Mail was correct to print the Burke story as written. Informed readers could adequately sort out what may or may not have been self-serving in Burke’s telling of his experience without Starowitcz’s subsequent intervention. (Feedback-August 31st) .What requires addressing here is not who makes the best “investigative journalism” but why institutions that employ journalists overvalue their own intellectual imaginations.
Numerous stories have circulated for years among independent producers (film or video, for profit or non-profit) about co-production disputes with the CBC and the NFB. Tales of editorial interferences and unnecessary production delays or projects that are never aired/ distributed are well-circulated. Haggling over appropriate content strategies, programme formats and predicted audience responses have been the norm. Yet in Starowitcz’s mindset only teams like his are custodially equipped to determine what might be “clear, focused and solidly based upon the evidence”.
While TV has helped audiences become more culturally literate, CBC-TV in particular has failed to imagine what updated critical cultural analyses might mean for news, current affairs and arts-cultural programming. For example why aside from legal protection must the CBC still make unconvincing distinctions between “objective” journalism and “point of view” documentaries?
Instead of attacking the Globe and Mail for its failure not to do enough in terms of “legwork journalism”, Starowitcz should compare his corporation’s overall efforts i.e. its allocation of resources towards all creatively analytical programming with, for example, Britain’s Channel Four or our southern neighbour’s PBS.
In contrast to its past relevances, CBC-TV during the seventies and eighties was unable to properly situate alternative cultural practices or to recognise which representative voices at any one time should be given priority to speak, and what programmes or entertainments required inventing to suit new contributions. Continued reliances upon such limited journalistic world views begun in news magazines have since become ends in and unto themselves. In the broad category of ‘current affairs’ do senior CBC-TV producers know how to originate in-house productions using anyone else but politicians, business lobbyists, market analysts and guest journalists?
What we expect to see from CBC-TV is a depth of other occupational representatives or persons with other affinities engaging fictionally or non-fictionally in their own social, cultural and economic discourse. Marc Starowitcz could better have acknowledged that the political good achieved by CBC’s investigative journalism cannot be at the expense of everything else expected and already paid for many times over from this public broadcaster.