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The local NPR station broadcasts CBC's evening program As It Happens after All Things Considered every weeknight. It is unbelievably bad; the two female "anchors" are inane; they are of the quality level one would expect to see in a college campus production of a news program, for broadcast to TV sets in the dorm rec rooms.

Anyway, the past few nights, as the scandals of Canadian politics roared within Parliament, CBC's nightly news program typically does one story about it each night. The story invariably focuses on the procedural details of the days machinations; no mention whatsoever is made of anything larget than that. Until I read this article, I had no idea that anything serious was going on. The questions that are put, by the show's anchors, to whatever guests they have on, seem to be calculated to make the guests sound like airheads (the anchorettes always sound like airheads anyway; they actually seem to cultivate a style that says everything in the news is just sillyness, except when the American Government does something nasty somewhere; then the tut-tutting goes into overdrive).

After the one nightly story about procedural details of the days action in Parliament, which would bore to tears anyone who happened to be listening, they proceed to devote the remainder of the hour to stories about lost kittens and eccentric Englishmen, or at any rate to minor research by English scientists, who are made to sound eccentric by the condescending interviewers.

I guess this is the European style. Make yourself sound grand and enlightened by laughing at the world around you, and if there's a massive fire in the basement, why, that's a big joke too, can't you see the humor?

(steely)