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One is the CBC of brainy poli-sci and English lit grads who chose poorly, who could have been raking it in as lawyers, but who wanted to make documentaries and annoy politicians instead. The other is the CBC of hungry j-school grads, trained to dutifully rip headlines from newspapers and package them into five-minute cable news segments, over and over again.

One is the CBC of Linden MacIntyre, who just prematurely ended a career of rigorous investigative journalism in order to save the jobs of younger colleagues, and to put a recognizable face to the budget cuts. The other is the CBC of Peter Mansbridge, who won’t disclose the celebrity-sized salary he receives for his third-place newscast, and who pretends he doesn’t understand why taking enormous speaking fees from the oil companies he covers on the air taints his journalism.

The Stursbergians handily beat the snot out of the Gzowskiteers

One is the CBC of Gzowski. The other is the CBC of Stursberg.

The Stursbergians handily beat the snot out of the Gzowskiteers, and have since had free reign to run the joint into the ground. Their dream is a CBC with sitcoms like CBS and news like CNN. It’s been a flop from the start, but no amount of failure has stopped them from doubling down on their shabby vision.

Did they not see this coming?

Was CBC president Hubert Lacroix surprised to lose NHL broadcast rights to Rogers? Did he have no idea that he might be stripped of a major revenue source and left with a coming void in his programming schedule and no production budget to fill it? Did the Internet also take him unawares? Had he no idea that advertising dollars were shifting quickly from television to online, even as the CBC approved one lousy and expensive TV series after the next? Does he still think the CBC’s digital strategy, which will miss its target of increasing online spending to a measly 5% by 2015, is anything but pathetic? When he invested in an expensive “news renewal” rebranding effort to give CBC journalism a slick new look while simultaneously laying off actual CBC journalists (I was among them, but I’m totally over it) did he think no one would notice?