Editorial

The CBC has been in crisis for decades and continues to limp along as one of the most poorly funded public broadcasters in the world. Here, Brooks DeCillia and Patrick McCurdy examine Canadian news and commentary coverage of the CBC between 2009 and 2014 quantitatively and qualitatively. Although 66 percent of their sample referred to the CBC’s troubled status (N = 467), only 10.5 percent connected the discussion to the idea of public service broadcasting. That silence means, DeCillia and McCurdy argue, that in the absence of more extended discussion of public service broadcasting, a neoliberal discourse has become discursively hegemonic for news media’s treatment of the CBC. They go on to show the extent of CBC executives’ entanglement with the assumptions of neoliberal discourse. What the authors’ analysis shows, above all, is the disconnect between an “idealized academic discussion” of public service broadcasting and the neoliberal conversation in popular media in Canada. As a result of this disconnect,public broadcasting in Canada is viewed—in large part— as an extension of the market. Efficiency, ratings, and accountability define and narrow the horizon of possibilities for communication and action surrounding the public broadcaster. Values of citizenship, democracy, and bolstering arts and culture are largely marginalized—and rarely given a full-throated defence by CBC officials and others. In contrast to neoliberal discourse, Jennifer Dell draws upon Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical model of Scene-Performance-Audience to examine the press conference given four days after the 2013 Lac-Mégantic train disaster by Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway CEO Ed Burckhart. Burkhardt gave a 40-minute, unscripted news scrum before agitated reporters and jeering members of the public. While he repeatedly attempted an apology, its effectiveness was weakened by shrugs, other body movements, and subvocalizations (ums, ahs). That weakness was further amplified by his attempt to blame the train engineer for the disaster. These actions created a binary in Burkhardt’s performance—he was trying to apologize for the disaster’s occurrence and represent his organization in a favourable way, yet he could not display the proper demeanour of decorum to his immediate audience, the reporters. Nor was he able to adequately assess his audience’s reception of his performance, and thus he was unable to make the performative adjustments that Goffman suggests are necessary to ensure a successful performance. For Jennifer Ellen Good, the iPhone is both an icon of our times and the most wasteful of our electronic gadgets, part of a rising “tsunami” of e-waste. She reports that more than 142,000 computers and 416,000 mobile devices are discarded daily in the United States, and the life cycle of smartphones is shrinking. E-waste represents