FFWD Weekly
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| LETTERS Re: VOX article, May 21 issue The sale of VOX was a rude awakening, but it wasn't until I read CJSW's various disclaimers that I realized just how thoroughly we are being shafted. In your interview, whenever they were asked to explain an ethically suspect action, they responded with bureaucratic platitudes such as, "It was a business decision" or "It's a competitive industry." The arguments they advance can just as easily be used to justify the downsizing of any other public service, whether it's selling campus radio air time to fundamentalist preachers (as has happened elsewhere in Canada) or privatizing health care. We all know the VOX sale was a business decision, the question is whether it was motivated by financial necessity or by laziness and greed.... CJSW, which used to be run by one person at minimum wage, now boasts - as well as a well paid manager (and an unspecified number of part-timers) - full-time programme and music directors, two positions which are not only largely unnecessary but, in the context of alternative radio's decentralized philosophy, actually counter-productive. Throughout much of its history VOX was run (quite adequately) by a single part-time manager/editor. At the time of the sale, it employed one full-time editor and two part-time assistants. This leads us into the next issue, the claim that "It's a competitive industry." If VOX found itself in direct competition with other organizations, both in terms of subject matter and in the way it is presented, it should be asking itself why. VOX may have been competing directly with others in the industry, but only because, to support CJSW's inflated bureaucratic overheads, it decided to concentrate on the most lucrative area of what used to be alternative culture, but which has long since been absorbed by the mainstream.... VOX's musical coverage used to be pretty evenly spread between several areas, but in recent years it concentrated almost exclusively on rock because, to quote the last editor, that's what sells beer.... No bureaucracy will ever suggest downsizing itself as an alternative to cutting services to the public, nor will it acknowledge the need to rethink its role in the light of outside change, but CJSW has gone to great lengths to prevent others from making these points, justifying this with two arguments. First, they have pointed out that the policy review board is chosen to make decisions on behalf of the community and of the membership. This is equally true of our Members of Parliament, yet we would still be a bit upset if we found that they'd sold Nova Scotia to the US in order to finance their next raise. The second excuse was that the sale would be more lucrative if kept secret, and I am sure that that is true as well. Theft and embezzlement are also more profitable when not disclosed until after the fact. But all this is perhaps irrelevant. What is important is to recognize the intimate relation between what you do and how it is done - a magazine which decides that it needs to print 20,000 copies a month in full color will not be able to cover the same subjects as one which works on a smaller budget, and it is likely that the ones it abandons will be precisely those with which CJSW claims to be most concerned. More to the point, an organization which systematically discourages the open discussion of such issues and expels all those who challenge the bureaucratic status quo eventually ceases to be part of alternative culture and joins the larger society of hypocrites, cowards, fascists, and cretins. Timothy C. Heck, |
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