An autopsy of an interview

How CBC ensures that nothing really is said about the issues that matter

CBC Radio’s Commotion recently had a discussion about music and Palestinian activism. It was a master class in how to control a discussion, make sure that the guests never bump up against one another, and obscure the issue so much that you find yourself listening and thinking … wait … what are they even talking about right now?

The tactics that they use in this conversation ensured that no one got too deep into anything. And they’re common. While this post will take apart a single interview, watch how these tactics are used in other interviews and on other shows. You’ll see that this isn’t just how this interview happened to go — these patterns are actually tactics to tightly control what might be said in the course of an interview.

In this case, the three guests were kept in rigid boxes and the boxes were built strong enough to make sure that no one would accidentally run out. Where I think the three guests could have had an engaging conversation looking for consensus and perhaps debating where they disagree, the walls of their boxes prevented any cross-pollination. What the audience is given is something that is undeniably boring.

That boringness is at the heart of the crisis at CBC. No one wants to waste their time on boring. And a fully controlled, choreographed conversation is dreadfully boring. In this conversation, CBC exerts too much control over the conversation. This isn’t ideal ever, even if CBC is the only thing that you can listen to in the entire world. But since the Internet became a thing, we now have choice in abundance. The Corporation cannot survive if what it has on offer is boring and controlled in a sea of more entertaining and enlightening programming.

Watch how the CBC ensures its own self-desctruction by being as absolutely boring as possible, making sure that no one tunes in, in an autopsy of this recent interview.

1. The choice of guests

The conservation explored musicians who take political stances, and it started off with Canadian-Palestinian pianist John Kameel Farah — a very good friend of mine. John was the only Canadian, the only Palestinian and the only touring musician on the panel. Aside from John, Commotion chose people who are not going to talk about Canada, who are outside the conflict in Gaza (though one of the guests positions herself as someone with skin in the game, indirectly — and I think unconsciously —suggesting that Farah does not) and whose comments about protest music made me scratch my head.

The other two guests aren’t terrible. But they are barely relevant for a Canadian audience. They don’t (likely couldn’t) speak to Canadian anything. Whereas any Canadian artist who is sympathetic to Gaza has to balance the very real threat of losing a career over expressing their support for Palestine, neither of the other two guests have any experience with this at all — because even if you experience this in the United States, being in a market so large changes the risk.

In general, you can have a decent conversation with any kind of guest, if you have the time. This interview certainly had the time but what was lost by not having other touring musicians, or Canadians, to talk about it in a way that is relevant to their audience makes sure that people tune out.

What’s more, there’s no skin in the game for either of the Americans to talk about this issue in the way that a Canadian academic, culture writer or musician has. This isn’t something that their colleagues or friends might catch on the radio. There is no local accountability for anything they say. While going viral has no boundaries, the stakes are way higher for a Canadian at the Canadian broadcaster than anyone else, and right off the bat, that puts Farah into a very difficult situation: not only is he the only one explicitly defending artists who use their platform to talk about Palestine, he’s the only one on the panel who risks losing gigs over his intervention. And in Canada, where the market is small and everyone is related to each other, that risk cannot be overstated. While non-Canadians may face other kinds of repercussions, there’s a localness to the medium that can make speaking out much, much harder. Believe me — I used to do live TV with i24 in Tel Aviv. I was way less concerned with what I said there than I was when I was on CBC.

Another pet peeve of mine, having participated in many panels like this for CBC before Oct. 7 2023 changed everything, is that there are often too many people on it. Three people is a lot, particularly when the host interjects SO MUCH as is the case in this interview. The conversation could have been better had it just been one or two guests. In this case, the three people, plus always having to hear from the host in between each intervention, created a disjointed and unfollowable conversation.

2. Fake questions

The interview starts out with Farah explaining how it’s been important for him to speak out about Gaza. Host Elamin Abdelmahmood then asks Justin Patch, a music professor, if he looks to artists to speak out about stuff. Patch gives a predictable answer — no, he doesn’t look to artists to speak out about politics. Given that Farah has just said that he wants to speak out about politics, mutating the issue into whether or not artists should be forced to speak out, turns the conversation on its head. We aren’t able to hear any reflection on the consequences that happen when you do speak out, or whether or not people are even able to speak out. Patch doesn’t respond to anything that Farah says. He’s just like a floating comment, as if Farah had just said nothing. Patch takes Abdelmahmood’s bait and turns the issue into “requiring artists who we love” to say something about politics. (Are we as a society actually doing this?)

This fundamentally gets the issue wrong. Artists as a mass are a litmus test, not a political instrument. What does it say about Israel’s genocide when Coldplay’s Chris Martin is tepidly acknowledging a Palestinian flag in the crowd? The analysis cannot be: Chris Martin is now an expert on Palestine. It is: there is enough public awareness and pressure that someone like Chris Martin is even saying something.

And then, what’s worse, Chris Martin is lumped into the same box as Bob Vylan and Kneecap. The latter two are political acts, the former is the lead singer of Coldplay. They are fundamentally different kinds of musicians!

The segment pretends to talk about protest music and protest musicians but failed to actually ask what either thing actually is (Farah’s reference aside to the classic Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer chant). You can’t really have that conversation if you don’t have someone who can explain that. For example, Lux Alpetrum, an Israeli-American culture writer, mentions that even with all the awareness, it hasn’t changed the conditions in Gaza. And no shit it hasn’t — because that isn’t how it works. That’s like saying that students who have an occupation at the University of Windsor haven’t convinced Netenyahu to stop. No shit they haven’t, because that isn’t how it works!

Alpetrum then falls into the same trap that Patch pushes — artists shouldn’t be mandated to make political statements. All while Farah sits there as the only artist on the panel who has already made it clear that what he experiences is that it’s very difficult to actually speak out — the opposite of what the other two guests say. Again, the questions create the most boring fake conversation that doesn’t advance any kind of collective, useful knowledge.

3. Pre-recorded tape in the questions

CBC has, for a few years, insisted on putting tape (recordings) into their questions. I have always absolutely hated it. These recordings destroy the conversation flow. But for CBC, they also allow the host a safety net to get back to the pre-determind interview that they want to have, and not allow the guests to go too far off track. If an answer veers too far off track, the pre-selected canned content is like a hook dragging the conversation back to where the producers want it to be.

Any journalist knows that while you have your questions to ask someone, by the time you hit question three, the rest of the questions are usually more things that you have to make sure you cover, but that you need to allow the conversation to go in whatever direction it goes. That’s where the magic happens. If you’re tight for time, you sacrifice engaging for constrained. But if you have 30 minutes, the field is wide open. All you need is the freedom to allow for the conversation to unfold and the talent to guide it so that it remains coherant.

When you have three people who are reacting to one another, riffing off one another, finding common ground, rejecting non-common ground: that’s engaging. That’s what people want to hear. But CBC in general, and Commotion in particular, puts these canned recordings into the questions to constantly push back against the tendency to be interesting.

For example, Abdelmahmood spends more than two minutes (that is so much) talking about Bob Vylan and Kneecap, including playing clips, and then asks Farah, “what do you think about the space that these stories have taken up.” I wonder if the producers of Commotion realize what had just happened there — they take up their own space talking about two foreign acts, and then ask the one Canadian musician on the panel: what do you think about that? What is Farah supposed to say? “Why are you doing the same thing? Don’t you think that that question was a bit of a waste? Can I instead respond to what the other two people just said?” No, Farah has to respond, and he does, by trying to pull the conversation back to something useful and interesting. Then, as if Abdelmahmood wasn’t listening to Farah at all, he goes on to read the statement from Glastonbery about Bob Vylan as if Farah had just said absolutely nothing. And I’m sitting here saying to myself WHO CARES ABOUT GLASTONBURY? WHO CARES?!

And then, the producers have lined up … tape of Thom Yorke. Thom Fucking Yorke! The three guests have all just said something and, again, as if Abdelmahmood wasn’t listening to them, Thom Yorke is randomly dropped into the conversation. We have to listen to Thom Yorke and then a random blogger or music journalist or someone in a TikTok video rant about Thom Yorke. All three guests don’t really know what to do with this one.

There’s no danger that the conversation could go off the rails here. Thom Yorke is standing by to make sure that there is no way to have the guests react to what they just heard each other say.

4. Taking the conversation way off track

Despite the fact that no one on the panel is seemingly an expert on protest music (and if the professor was, he didn’t show it), and certainly the Americans had no idea about protest music in Canada, the final set of questions were given to the two Americans about protest music. Abdelmahmood talks about the “tendency to romanticize alllll the music from the 60s about the Vietnam war” (?????? what on earth is he talking about?). The question that likely came from Patch himself in the pre-interview, as Patch has a story locked and loaded about how he worked with anti-war activists in Texas (??) who all thought that protest music is what ended the Vietnam war (?????). The question was so odd and so obviously intended to give Patch the chance to showcase some of his knowledge, because it isn’t as if Canadians talk much these days about Vietnam and its protest music (and, of course, let’s just pretend that Quebec doesn’t exist and didn’t create a star system out of independentist protest music/poetry/literature/film/theatre). It literally could not be less relevant to a Canadian audience.

At this point in the interview, we are so far off the path about musicians speaking out about Gaza that you might even forget what this segment promissed us. Who is making protest music about Gaza? Like, actually — where is this happening? Kneecap? An Irish trio that most Canadians have never heard of? Who is arguing that we will save Gaza through protest music, or even with a musician that condemns Israel’s genocide? And, just to demonstrate how out of his league he is on this issue, Abdelmahmood throws in this line, pitched perfectly to trigger a stroke in my frontal cortex: “Justin is what you’re saying is that they didn’t just write a bunch of protest songs and policies changed? Is that what you’re telling me right now?”

This kind of smug misunderstanding of culture would be irritating if I had heard it at a party talking with a bunch of strangers, but if this is what we have on offer at the national public broadcaster, on a show that is supposed to be about culture, no wonder CBC is in crisis.

5. Offering boring so that no one notices that Real Issues aren’t discussed too much

Everything about this conversation is linked to broader, systemic forces — from granting agencies and awards that will blacklist artists who are anti-Zionist to precarity and desperation among professional artists in Canada, from the broken connection between what the people want and what politicians do, to the lies that our government are peddling as they quietly support Israel’s genocide, from the attacks on free speech to the subversiveness of art. None of this was covered in the questions and only Farah talked about the real-life experience of trying to speak out while maintaining a career. In the interview, Farah mentions one song that he performs alongside a stopmotion animation of a drawing that he has created of an olive tree. It’s a powerful piece that I’ve seen him perform many times, and the audience always reacts as if they have seen something truly special. And yet, to even pull off some of those performances (the ones he did with our touring podcast live show), landed us all in the red. No discussion about housing affordability or findability or the cost to tour or the cost to rent theatres or how the Canadian state and its institutions absolutely despise Canadian artists and hopes we live in total destitution — especially if we speak out.

No, instead, we get quips and meaningless questions about Thom Fucking Yorke. The audience doesn’t learn anything more that might help them understand why it’s been impossible to get Canada to stand up to Israel. The audience learns literally nothing about protest music in Canada and what are the challenges to it being heard broadly. The audience doesn’t have the connection made for them between consciousness raising, music and arts. They hear nothing about how many artists have had their careers destroyed over speaking out about Gaza. We hear nothing, at all, about anything that may be effective. The interview is so tightly controlled that we get nothing of substance, and the CBC can check off a box that it had a conversation about this Very Difficult and Complex issue.

The last question, as if we hadn’t had 25 minutes already to talk about what should have been the primary point of this discussion, is to Farah, asking, “What is the role of the artist?” — which is effectively the first question that Abdelmahmood asks of Farah. We have gotten nowhere.

The stakes are really, really high right now for the public broadcaster. Canadians are not going to tune in if they can get the straight goods, without the censorship of message control, tightly controlled interviews and sterile conversations. I felt this directly when I was a regular on CBC’s Sunday morning television panels. I felt hamstrung by the constraints and I had to go off script if I wanted to respond to something a fellow panellist had said. Or, I had to keep in my mind the question that the host asked, respond to a co-pannellist and then answer the host. It was fine because we were regulars and built a rapport. But it didn’t make for the most engaging television, as we would find ourselves with too much to say and not enough time to say it.

I think Farah did an excellent job, given how difficult it is to speak out for Gaza (contrary to the message that this show somehow gave). And I think that the other two guests also suffered under the same constraints. But ultimately, this isn’t about them, or even about Abdelmahmood — to have a host gig at the public broadcaster means that you agree with how these models have shifted, and you do your best to operate within them.

But until the CBC can get back to a freer, more open and honest form of debate, it’s cooked. It’s undeniably and irreparably cooked.

Which … it can’t. The CBC is an institution like all other institutions and it has a fidelity to the ruling class, even if that means it goes down while trying to defend an indefensible and unpopular political line. The CBC has been one of the worst censors related to Gaza in Canada. Of course it wouldn’t be able to allow three strangers to have an unconstrained discussion about this issue. Of course it couldn’t.

And if you’re still reading and you aren’t being paid to read this to elaborate the file at the CBC for why I should never be invited on ever again, God bless ya!