Peter Mansbridge has announced his retirement as host of The National, CBC's flagship evening TV news program, on July 1, Canada's 150th birthday. In other words, CBC's broadcast of the nation's sesquicentennial will be as much or more about Mansbridge than it will be about Canada.
It's too bad Mansbridge didn't follow the example set by his predecessor and mentor Knowlton Nash, who retired in 1988 as The National's host at age 61, so Mansbridge would stay in Canada and with the CBC, instead of jumping to the U.S. and a lucrative deal with CBS.
Mansbridge should have stepped aside years ago for Ian Hanomansing or Diana Swain or Evan Solomon or Amanda Lang or Wendy Mesley, an outstanding journalist who also happens to be Mansbridge's ex-wife. Like Nash did, Mansbridge in semi-retirement could have continued to be a sub on The National for weekends and vacations, while also putting together special reports and other additional news programming.
Instead, he stayed too long, announced his retirement 10 months early and then scheduled his last broadcast as host of The National (he's made it clear he intends to remain with the CBC in some role) to coincide with a major national celebration. A more humble and less selfish man would retire the day before and let his successor make her or his official debut on that special Canada Day.
Sadly, his gaudy exit tarnishes a well-earned reputation as a genuinely warm man with a quick wit and a solid sense of humor, self-deprecating and otherwise, who plays well with others. As a journalist and a broadcaster, Mansbridge evolved into the voice of Canada. He was there for the fall of the Berlin Wall and spent more than 15 hours on the air on that horrible Tuesday a decade and a half ago when the World Trade Center buildings fell and Osama bin Laden became a household name. Barbara Frum was a better interviewer then and Rosemary Barton is better at grilling her subjects now but Mansbridge was still decent, an interrogator who scored points with body blows and deft jabs.
Mansbridge's great strength has always been his common touch, both scripted and unscripted, in the host's chair. His cool, gentle blandness is somehow so typically Canadian but it's also increasingly out of step with a younger, louder, more diverse Canada that cares little for the star power of a traditional news anchor delivering "by-appointment journalism" at the anointed hour and seeks reliable, on-demand nuggets of news delivered from diverse sources.
That's why CTV and Global, with Lisa LaFlamme and Dawna Friesen in the host chairs, routinely relegate Mansbridge to third place in the ratings. They are solid broadcast reporters who put the news ahead of themselves, rather than cultivating an iconic image and wearing the Order of Canada pin on-air.
Journalism's great strength, then and now, has always been its diversity of voices and perspectives. Traditional news outlets - newspapers, radio and TV - have been relegated to "legacy media" status but continue to play key roles in offering those voices and perspectives. The remaining ones, including The Citizen, have had to work hard to adapt to new business models and changing audiences or go extinct.
By contrast, the CBC, funded by taxpayers, has not had to make meaningful changes to the way it manages itself and to the way it engages with Canadians. As a result, the CBC cries poor from one side of its mouth while paying its stars big money and its chief correspondent - Mansbridge's official title - more than $1 million a year, a figure the CBC won't confirm but was disclosed last week with some persistent digging by Jesse Brown at Canadaland, the same reporter who played a key role in the undoing of Jian Ghomeshi.
That's a lot of money that could be invested in more reporters telling Canada's story, working in better-staffed bureaus than the bare bones Prince George division that continues to earn the accolades (congratulations, Wil Fundal and Robert Doane, on your well-deserved Webster Award nomination this week) with embarrassingly little resources.
Mansbridge deserves praise for his stellar career and his contribution to Canadian journalism and culture. It's unfortunate he hadn't left earlier and with more grace. It would have been more befitting for his legacy and the CBC would have been better for it.
