Media Beat: October 29, 2018

By David Farrell

Cable firms lambasted at CRTC hearing

The federal telecom regulator is holding a five-day public hearing this week in Gatineau, Que., part of an inquiry into misleading and aggressive telco sales practices, ordered in June by the federal government. The CBC reports on Day 1 and Christine Dobby offers her take on the five-day hearing in Friday’s Globe and Mail. From her story in the Report On Business:
“You say a vast majority of Canadians aren’t complaining,” CRTC chairman Ian Scott told a panel of executives from BCE, but asked how they could square that assertion with the fact that more than 600 customers and more than 30 employees or former employees had complained about BCE during the CRTC proceeding alone.

“We’ve dropped the ball in some instances, so we’ve come forward with proposals we think will … go a long way to rectifying problems,” said BCE’s Robert Malcolmson, senior vice-president of regulatory affairs.

Are the Toronto film and TV industries headed for a bubble?

Not something Bell Media wants to hear, but this is a vision put forward by Toronto Star TV critic Tony Wong – subscription needed

Jj Johnston salutes John Parikhal

Welcome to the 300th of our JJ-365 Salutes!

Over 2018, we pay tribute daily to one of “The Good Ones”. Today we are shining the light on John Parikhal.

The guy is a guru. I had the opportunity to meet him when working with Moffat and have to say I was very intimidated at first. I mean Joint Communications was the hottest radio consultancy, and I was just a little guy trying to make a go in the business. I was so thrilled, once in a Programming role, that I got to work with him (and Dave Charles). I knew there was lots of learning to come and I wasn't wrong. I was a sponge around John, and he is one of the people I respect most in the business.

John loved music as a child but says they grew up very poor. No joke he says, the family’s first ‘record player’ was one you had to crank by hand and he played the few discs they had like Arthur Godfrey and Mario Lanza. It was when his dad came home with a Mahalia Jackson record that his musical ears were born.

When he was eight, they had enough money to buy a radio and suddenly his audio universe exploded. Shortwave, music from Europe, AM stations, it was heaven he says. It was in the living room, but he wanted one in his room, a radio of his own, but he couldn’t imagine how it could happen.

Then came the transistor radio. John worked picking raspberries in the summer to get enough to buy one but never got to the $25 he’d need. He had amassed the grand sum of $12. And then, a kid in his class said he’d sell him his used SONY for $12. That was it!

Nighttime was the right time. All the big signals from New York and Chicago appeared by magic after dark. Soon he knew every song on the hit parade and dreamed of that amazing world. At age fifteen, he got a record player and started saving money to buy music, which was very expensive by today’s standards. His first single was by Roy Orbison, and strangely, his first album was by Marty Robbins (for the song ‘El Paso’).

Fast forward through high school (he was the DJ at many high school dances because he was too shy to ask girls to dance. Sound familiar to all the DJs out there? And then he was off to University to study Economics which he hated because he thought economists had it all wrong (‘which turns out was true’ he says), and Business which he enjoyed. And, he heard his first 'Progressive' radio station on FM in London, Ontario two hours a week on Friday nights at 10 pm. It was a promise of a better musical world.

A life change happened when he was at U. of T. doing his Master’s Degree – continue reading on Facebook

Revisiting Gordon Sinclair’s ‘The Americans’

It’s a rosy vision that some of our readers will shake their heads over but in the cause of fairness… (by way of Warren’s List)