Vomit Comet

Corus has laid off tons of people across the country and axed some pretty major things lately (Entertainment Tonight Canada and Big Brother Canada, for instance), but pulling the plug on CHML was one I wasn’t expecting when it happened out of the blue two weeks ago.

The reasons for its demise should be all too familiar to anyone who pays attention to this stuff. Overly large company wants to own everything, but doesn’t much care for the part where it has to pay to run it.

The embattled media company said Wednesday that the closure follows years of financial losses related to shrinking advertising revenues that have gone to “unregulated foreign platforms.”
Last month, Corus reported a third-quarter loss attributable to shareholders of $769.9 million and said it is actively looking to cut costs.
Executives revealed they expect to have slashed one-quarter of the company’s full-time workforce by the end of August when compared with the beginning of Corus’s 2023 fiscal year.

They also blamed Canada’s unfavourable regulatory environment, because that’s what you do when you’re a private company that historically gets whatever it wants from the CRTC and the government but still don’t think it’s enough.

I hate to have to go on this rant again, but if anyone should be complaining about the regulatory environment, it should be the people of Hamilton who just lost a nearly century old radio station because of shareholders who have probably never been there or listened to it. If we hadn’t spent decades allowing the rampant media consolidation that creates monsters like Postmedia, Bell, Rogers, Corus and the like, chances are we wouldn’t be seeing this sort of thing happen over and over again at the pace it’s been happening in the last five-ten years. Those companies exist solely to wring every bit of value they can out of assets and then discard them. They have zero interest in running properly scaled, sustainable businesses or in the communities that those businesses are supposed to serve.

On a personal note, I listened to CHML like my dial twisting self listened to everything else. It often wasn’t the best signal wherever I lived, but I caught enough of it to be familiar with many of the famous voices like Bob Bratina, Roy Green, Bill Kelly, Ted Michaels and John Hardy who came through it.

My strongest memories of it were only made in the last few years, though. When we moved to Kitchener in 2012, CHML was suddenly one of the most powerful stations we could get, day and night. I’m not kidding when I say that it rivalled the strength of 570 News. Since 570 didn’t have much to offer at night once baseball or hockey was over, we spent years falling asleep to “Those Old Radio Shows”, a block of old time radio that aired seven nights a week until it was replaced by a network talk show called “A Little More Conversation” in 2022. This often meant waking up in the middle of the night to “Coast to Coast AM”, which was always an adventure especially if you were having a night full of strange dreams. There was also the morning news wheel hosted by Paul Tipple and Shiona Thompson, which sometimes had me feeling more connected with Hamilton than with my own city. And just for Carin, I must mention that there was, at times, Doctor Michael Pinkus! on the weekends.

I guess all that’s left to say now is goodbye. Goodbye to a station that didn’t have to die. The city of Hamilton should not be without one of its largest, most important news outlets because of corporate greed and mismanagement. I hope that everyone who lost their jobs will be ok. And most of all, I hope that something worthwhile can fill the gaps that this closure has left. For the sake of the future, we need a strong media. Events like this are a huge step in the wrong direction.