From the wonderful folks at Raise The Hammer:
Surprise, surprise: the Hamilton Spectator's editorial board doesn't want the CBC to open a new radio station in Hamilton.
Yesterday's editorial by Kevin Cavanagh make some noise aobut operating costs and then drops the clincher:
[T]he first city on their sheet of potential new addresses is Hamilton. That's flattering, but we're all of 60 kilometres from the Broadcast Centre in Toronto - whose current signal booms into radios in Hamilton, Niagara and the southwestern tier.
Rather than seeking major gobs of cash for a new radio station so near the mother ship, private-sector companies would first try adding staff and adjusting programming to better engage a regional market that their signal already reaches.
Oh, those greedy public-sector mandarins and their outrageous plans to burn through taxpayer money! What Cavanagh doesn't mention in his paean to the superiority of the private sector is that no Toronto-based station is going to cater to Hamilton listeners, for the simple reason that their primary listeners absolutely don't want to hear about Hamilton.
Cavanagh pillories "the suits at the CBC" who "are only too happy to put Hamilton at the top of their wish list," but neglects to make the connection that the CBC is trying to do the same thing the private-sector stations do: give its audience what they want to hear.
The real issue, of course, is that a CBC station might actually break ranks with the media monopoly in Hamilton and provide news and editorial coverage that serves to undermine bidness as usual in a city long known for back-room backslapping and pernicious, self-defeating cronyism.
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