CBC’s Dispatches is No More

This week marked the last episode of CBC’s Dispatches, a news programme that covered issues big and small from the world around. Officially it was a victim of the latest rounds of budget cuts at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, though one could argue this was also part of a larger international trend towards the reduction of state-sponsored journalism. Radio Netherlands, another credible producer of news, have also slashed their programming, as have the BBC.

This is quite unfortunate, because the likes of CBC and Radio Netherlands had produced some of the highest quality reporting available anywhere. Dispatches was particularly valuable as its extended format allowed journalists to go beyond the formula demanded by condensing stories to thirty seconds for newscasts. Instead of the standard “there was a bomb/riot/flood, thirty people are dead”, we could actually go behind the stories and get valuable insights into unfolding events.

Dispatches had no real equal, magnifying the loss of this kind of perspective. Everyone who appreciates the world for all its wonder will be the poorer for it. As unfortunate as it is unsurprising, the archives of the show are also only to stay online until December 2013.

The world is moving away from spending big money on journalism. Newspapers have been closing foreign offices for years now, with their own domestic reporting being substituted for material obtained from news agencies. Public broadcasters have seen cuts after cuts, dumping their more intellectual programming for the sake of easy sells to remain palatable in the face of its commercial competition. Rare are the likes of The Economist, who have survived this tumultuous transition period in consumer preference.

The Internet, and the rise of free news have been the catalyst for this shift. The is much good in this, in the form of greater accessibility. The cost, meanwhile, has been content. You need money to be able to conduct good journalism in foreign places, and that’s just no longer possible. The solution ought to be to invest more in public broadcasters to pick up the slack where private entities have no capacity or interest, but that seems counter to public sentiments. So instead, we are closing our eyes off to the world. What a loss for us all.

Listen to the final episode of CBC’s Dispatches here.