Andy Barrie pulls up in a taxi to the Front Street entrance of CBC’s downtown Toronto fortress at approximately 5:30 a.m. After settling the fare with his long-term driver, who jokes that Barrie has paid for at least 10 per cent of his mortgage, the king of morning radio grabs his copies of The Globe and Mail and Now, a Toronto alternative weekly. He shuffles toward the doors, letting a few flyers fall out of the papers. Then the soft-bellied man with pure white hair passes through the restricted-access interior gates. He takes the elevator up CBC’s tower to the third floor and heads to his desk. Amid family photographs, books, notes and a computer, there is a little black pillow with white lettering that reads, “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.” A large picture of Barrie as a young boy at Camp Skylemar in Naples, Maine, shows him wearing headphones, leaning over a microphone. As the camp’s radio host for “The Wake-up,” the nine-year-old played records, gave ball scores and led “camp chatter.” Barrie’s desk also boasts a plaque congratulating him for 10 years of “outstanding contribution to the success of Metro Morning.” These are not empty words of praise. He is the voice of the morning show ranked No. 1 in Canada’s largest city.

While Barrie flips through his morning papers, technician and associate producer Kim Holmgren is already in the control room. Sitting to his left is Gord Cochrane, a wiry, hunched-over man who rattles his knees incessantly. According to Barrie, Metro Morning’s studio director is one of the most valuable players on the “incredibly functional” morning team. The extent to which the show sounds fluid and relaxed, Barrie says, is largely due to Cochrane. The ever-smiling Jim Curran, who has reported on traffic since the show began in 1973, walks in not long after Barrie, carrying a cooler with milk for the crew’s coffee. Other team members, like producer Jessica Low, will trickle in later. At 6:12 a.m. Barrie sits comfortably in the studio with his headphones on, waiting for Judy Maddren to wrap up World Report. Then a red light above Barrie goes on to indicate ‘on-air’ and his voice unfurls like velvet over the airwaves with a leisurely morning greeting.

Across town and a few weeks later, in CFRB studios at the corner of Yonge and St. Clair, Ted Woloshyn entertains himself between on-air moments with cracks about a dating website he’s discovered. “We’ve lost him for the whole morning,” board operator Robert Turner says of Newstalk 1010’s morning show host. Meanwhile, producer Amy Allison chases a story about a Durham farmer who has been selling raw milk without a license and is on a hunger strike. She and Woloshyn disagree about what he and Globe columnist Christie Blatchford, a regular commentator, should discuss. When Blatchford comes on, Woloshyn goes ahead with his idea, ignoring his producer’s wishes. Allison rolls her eyes, huffing audibly. It’s near the end of November 2006, just a few weeks after Woloshyn celebrated his 10th anniversary as the show’s host. On December 15, he will unexpectedly resign, leaving management temporarily unsure of what to do with the show.

Two things are clear about Woloshyn’s departure: “It’s a major change for a major station,” says Brian Thomas, professor of radio news and media issues at Toronto’s Seneca College School of Communication Arts, and Barrie’s success will influence the new show’s direction. Woloshyn’s show was dry, in need of energy, Thomas says, and suggests that CFRB has been tuning in to Metro Morning. “All stations in town compete with each other in one form or another,” he says. “Barrie’s strengthening in the morning would affect CFRB — they’ll pay close attention to what he’s doing to get the ratings.”

So CFRB is fighting to reclaim a larger share of the morning audience with Woloshyn’s mic now in the hands of Bill Carroll. The station has flexed its marketing muscle for the new host with an ad campaign occupying almost 400 of Toronto’s billboards. None of this has anything to do with overtaking CBC though, says Carroll, because his listeners are “much busier, more active people” who would never listen to Barrie in the first place. After stints as co-host on MuchMusic, and news man on Q107 and then AM 640, Carroll joined CFRB as a weekend newscaster, then became news director, until 1999 when he started hosting his own late-morning show. Carroll’s hair and beard are the colour of fire and ash. The man is small but his personality is big and his opinions bigger. Industry veterans such as Jerry Chomyn, director broadcast media at Humber College’s School of Media Studies and Information Technology in Toronto, call Carroll an intelligent interviewer. “He has solid credentials as far as current affairs go,” he says. “His speed to be able to hear what the caller is actually saying and react is one of his strongest skills.” CFRB is using Carroll’s strengths with the hope that they will return the morning show to its glory days of a decade ago.

Perhaps, but back at the CBC building Barrie is safe in the belief that his audience is growing because people want more with their morning coffee than news-talk staples: a constant drumbeat of crime and highway carnage combined with open-line radio and aggressively opinionated hosts. “Private radio, and CFRB in particular, has gone seriously down-market,” says Barrie. “At one time it was an important current affairs station.” Former Metro  Morning host David Schatzky goes even further: “Compared to CBC, CFRB is mindless drivel.”

Metro Morning shot to No. 1 in the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement Canada’s (BBM) ratings, surpassing private morning shows, for the first time in summer 2004. Now nearly a quarter of a million listeners tune in to CBC Radio One’s Toronto morning flagship. But those numbers didn’t happen overnight. A series of changes, beginning in 1995 when CBC hired Barrie away from CFRB, perceptively altered the show’s tone and content.

CBC Radio Toronto launched the first incarnation of its early morning show on April 2, 1973, with a mandate strikingly similar to what it is today. The open-door studio at 509 Parliament Street sat in a former 450-seat cinema, built in 1913. The show was originally called Tomorrow Is Here, a title host Bruce Rogers thought too “hokey” to say on air. A year later it was renamed Metro Morning. Rogers left that same year and four other hosts led the morning show before Barrie. The late Harry Brown lasted from 1974 to ’76, followed by Schatzky from ’76 to ’79. Joe Coté hopped aboard in 1979 and took the helm for 13 years. Finally, Matt Maychak played host from 1993 to ’95 — when Barrie took over — after leaving his long-time position as host of his namesake CFRB show.

Hosts have come and gone but there haven’t been many fundamental changes to programming or ideology since the early 1970s, says Alex Frame, who started at CBC Radio in 1971 and was vice-president from 1999 until 2003. “Probably the description you read in ’75 is the same one you read in 2006.”

The basic elements of Metro Morning remain: news, weather, traffic and a range of interviews.  Reflecting on the original purpose of the show during Metro Morning’s 30th anniversary celebrations in 2003, initial host Rogers said, “The idea was to transform mornings across the CBC from DJ shows into programs reflecting their communities. In Toronto it would be multicultural and would make an effort to report on issues and events important to Toronto’s many neighbourhoods.”

But at the time, there were limits to how well the show could accomplish its goals. Schatzky says, “CBC hesitated to put someone on the air with an accent because they thought no one would understand them.” The show was trying, but not quite succeeding, to reflect the city’s diversity. This is where, in recent years,Metro Morning has truly shifted. “The sensibility of the program may have changed,” Frame says. “The consciousness changed.” Jim Carr, coordinator of the broadcast radio program at Seneca College and a habitual radio listener, picked up on the nuances Frame refers to. “I thought the show had changed, but I couldn’t put my finger on how,” he says. Now he’s better able to articulate the differences. “It sounds like you’re walking around in any one of the neighbourhoods downtown.” This was the effect Susan Marjetti, regional director of radio for Toronto, strove to create when she initiated Metro Morning’s revamp in spring 2001.

When CBC hired Marjetti, she immediately walked onto the floor, gathered up relevant staff and asked her “folks” if they thought Metro Morning reflected the fact that Toronto is the most multicultural city in Canada. The answer was a “resounding no.” Thus began a year of research in order to “move forward” and “become more relevant” to the city’s residents. Hosts, journalists, producers, as well as music and performance contributors met to discuss the gap between market research and what was actually being heard on the radio. The “transformation team” also brought in people from all walks of life and different communities to tell CBC about issues in their neighbourhoods. “I wanted to add music and performance under the same program values we’d choose for the news,” Marjetti says. They chose to “build a cast of characters around Andy,” regular columnists who host segments like “What’s Goin’ On,” or “Beyond Burgers,” bringing “new, diverse voices” and “fresh perspectives.”

The new voices make Metro Morning successful in “catering to a multicultural reality,” says Schatzky, although he’s less enthusiastic about how the changes have been accomplished journalistically. “Sometimes they do it through music and food, a softer approach,” he says. Schatzky laments, or perhaps nostalgically romanticizes, earlier days when the show had “harder hitting” content. “For the flagship current affairs morning show, it spends a lot of time telling people about new CDs and infotainment.” He wonders aloud whether taxpayer’s money should be spent on tips about consumer items, but acknowledges, “The ratings reflect that as a corporate strategy it has worked extremely well.”

For Metro Morning staff, the six columnists who have regular spots on the morning show are a part of how it better reflects Toronto’s diversity. Critics, on the other hand, might dub them leftovers from what Robert Fulford of the National Post calls “the year of trauma.” No one pointed out more scathingly how rough the show sounded during its makeover. In a 2002 Toronto Life, Gold National Magazine Award–winning column called “Mourning Show,” Fulford ripped apart the changes. “It sounded like Barrie was a guest on his own show,” he says. “It was so pitiful, so pathetic.” He explains, “People who grew up in Toronto and had pure Toronto accents, and poor Andy had to find a way to get them to say they weren’t white people.”

Frame defends the choices made as well as the challenges that ensued. “The move to be more contemporary is going to be rough for a while.” He says CBC’s ultimate job is to reflect the country back to itself. Toronto’s cultural make-up changed so radically over four decades — according to Statistics Canada, in 2001, 44 per cent of Toronto’s population was born outside of Canada — that Metro Morning had to change with it. The show moved “to tell the story from different perspectives, not just middle- class, white liberals,” he says. “Change and development is risky, but not changing is more risky. It would become irrelevant.”

Listening to the show now, Fulford says he doesn’t think many of the changes stuck and the show has reverted to the way it was before he wrote his cutting column. “The weird self-consciousness they developed about ethnicity is gone,” he says. But other than Priya Ramu, the senior producer who worked through much of the seven-month transformation process, and Natasha Ramsahai, a meteorologist Fulford called too “perky,” who moved on, Marjetti says the changes made between February and September 2002 have remained a part of the show and Metro Morning’s audience share has doubled as a direct consequence. “The track and path we’ve chosen has proven to be a good one,” she says. “Those changes actually catapulted the show to No. 1.”

Designed to help set advertising rates, BBM ratings play an even more significant role in the world of private radio. Pat Holiday, general manager of Standard Radio Toronto, which owns CFRB, says the 2006 fall ratings (the most important quarterly period) that placed Metro Morning at the top and CFRB in fifth place, don’t matter. He looks at trends, not specific periods. It’s hard to believe CFRB isn’t concerned about its morning show’s BBM position. The program used to be the No. 1 morning show back in fall 1995 and summer 1996, and even after that was well ahead of CBC, but its ratings have withered to the point where three music stations now stand between it and CBC.

James Cullingham, program coordinator in broadcast journalism at Seneca College, says the fact that CBC’s morning show is No. 1 “must just make the private stations mental.” He says he imagines they’re now looking at what CBC does successfully in order to move forward. Besides having the highest audience share in the 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., Monday through Friday, all-ages (12-years-old plus) category, what the ratings really say is that Metro Morning is winning the battle to stay relevant by giving the audience what it’s looking for. “People are starved for news content,” Cullingham says. “Despite what advertisers and private radio want us to believe, people are interested in a slower paced, more substantive morning show.” In addition, he says, CBC has “carefully tuned itself to a newer and rapidly changing audience.”

Seneca College journalism instructor Thomas, who attends a convention every year held by the Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada, as well as one in the U.S. held by the same group, says what invariably comes to the top of the agenda is that people want not only a fair, objective report of what’s happening, but more news. Unfortunately, not all news-talk stations have heeded the trend.

“The last few years, CFRB had its head in the sand about CBC,” says Seneca College’s Carr. He claims high-ranking people in private radio listen to CBC, even if they say they don’t. “It’s the dirty little secret in Toronto broadcasting. No one talks about counter programming with the CBC.” They may have been listening, but they failed to respond. Metro Morning is successful, Carr says, because “CBC has gone back to the roots of what radio is all about — local issues and stories.” Starting the morning show over with a new host gives CFRB the perfect opportunity to follow the public broadcaster’s example. Carr suspected the show would be “completely retooled.” Sure enough, it’s happening.

“What ’RB has done, if you listen carefully, they’ve reduced and repositioned the commercial load in the morning show,” says Humber’s Chomyn, who has worked in the broadcasting industry for more than 38 years. “The result is a nicer flowing show.” And there are other notable changes. Chomyn says, “We’re seeing a kinder, gentler side of Bill Carroll.” This is a big change for someone who has made a name for himself as an edgy, opinionated host. Lastly, Chomyn says, “You’ll notice there’s a team around Bill, it’s not just him.” The news anchors and other contributors constantly interact with Carroll on air. These transformations sound familiar.

Carroll goes on air at CFRB weekday mornings from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. Right now it’s 8:30 a.m. and time to shift to the show’s open-line segment. Sitting in the studio in a high- backed leather chair on wheels, dressed in jeans and a button-up black shirt, he’s asking callers whether Toronto members of the Ontario Teachers’ Federation should be using union time to bring up Middle East issues. “The stronger my opinion is,” he declares, “the more reaction we get.”

Carroll pulls out his wallet, unprompted, to reveal a photo of his wife and two children. This is the new Bill Carroll, and perhaps why, according to Chomyn, he’s ready for the morning show, whereas a few years ago he wasn’t. Carroll is a family man now, more people can relate to him.

Eager to point out the show’s format changes, Carroll says there are “fewer regular features, fewer commercials, more opportunities for me to speak.” As for how his employer will handle the decrease in advertising revenue, he says, “The station makes less money, but in the long run you hope you’ll get more listeners and be able to charge more for the ads.”

Carroll has a specific strategy for gaining listeners. He says CFRB spent way too much time in the past competing against other news stations, so to recapture some of the lucrative morning audience he’s going after the people who tune into FM music stations. “I want John Derringer’s listeners, Erin Davis’s listeners.” The public broadcaster doesn’t come into Carroll’s crosshairs at all. “The CBC is too sleepy for me,” he says. “I don’t want to hear about Darfur, not for 20 minutes anyway. I’d rather know what’s going on in my backyard.” It’s a peculiar criticism directed at a show that owes its success to becoming more relevant and more local.

Apparently, CFRB’s ratings don’t concern the Metro Morning team either. Producer Jessica Low and her right-hand man, senior producer Nicholas Davis, who will be interviewed only in tandem, say it’s like comparing apples and oranges. “We’re CBC — we don’t have to cater to advertisers. Our mandate is to serve the public. We have two distinct operating principles,” they say over speakerphone, never interrupting each other’s answers. They attribute Metro Morning’s success not only to the way it reflects the audience it serves, but also to the way its stories have a strong impact on its audience.

Marjetti identifies another important factor that helped Metro Morning climb to “the top of the heap,” one CFRB won’t be replicating any time soon — CBC Toronto’s move from 740 AM to 99.1 FM in 1998. There is an obvious difference in sound quality between the AM and FM bands — the former sounds hollow, tinny and fuzzy, while the latter projects full and clear. But, according to Standard Radio’s Holiday, more than the improved sound quality it’s the increased number of people who tune in to the FM band. “If Metro Morningwasn’t on FM it wouldn’t be half the show it is because it wasn’t before it went to FM,” he says. “I’m not knocking the show — they still do a really good show.”

There is one last thing the Bill Carroll Show will never have, which is crucial to Metro Morning’s success: Andy Barrie. The show’s ratings have gone up with a host who even critics such as Fulford admit is “smooth” and “professional.”

The American-born Barrie studied theatre at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, hoping one day to be an actor. He volunteered at the student radio station, which quickly became his main outlet for performing. “You could actually get better and better,” he says. “Unlike an actor, where you might get a show every two years if you were lucky, you could be on every day.”

Although he was a conscientious objector, he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. On orders to ship out, he deserted and came to Canada in 1969 — a past that surfaces on his show and contributes to his style. Now a Canadian citizen, he refers to himself on-air as an immigrant and is obsessively patriotic about his adopted country.

Still, CBC makes a mantra out of the cliché, “a station is more than the sum of its parts,” in a way that private stations don’t, which places limits on Barrie’s voice. “There are judgments I’ve made about what we ought to do on the show — everything from what kind of music we ought to play to who we ought to interview — that aren’t shared.”

But he plays ball with the team format, and attributes the show’s continued success to the entire staff, not just him. “I cannot claim, as I once could when I did my own program, that what you hear on that show belongs to me,” he says. “This isn’t The Andy Barrie Show, and I’m thrilled it’s not.”

Just after 8:30 a.m. Barrie signs off Metro Morning for the day. Following the requisite story meeting, he heads down to the ooh la la! café in the main atrium. He orders a BLT and a fruit salad. “My first love was puppetry,” he says, eating pieces of watermelon and berries with his fingers while still in line. He admits he thrives on having an audience. On Metro Morning, CBC is master puppeteer, the airwaves the strings and Barrie’s voice the puppet. They perform a show about a diverse city called Toronto for a very pleased audience. “There’s something wonderfully powerful,” he says, “about projecting yourself into a world where you can’t be seen.”

In 1986 alone, according to a study by University of Missouri journalism professor Vernon Stone, 2,000 full-time positions in radio news disappeared. Stone also found that more than 20 per cent of all major-market radio stations made cutbacks in news broadcasts, while only four per cent increased their coverage. Indeed, from 1985 to 1986 fulltime news staffs dropped by nearly half-from an average of 2.7 people to 1.4. In fact, since 1981, whole news departments have been put on the street. This is bad news for American radio journalists, but what is the situation in Canada? Here, radio news directors are thankful that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission exists to control content, and they trust that the CRTC will not take our broadcast news industry down the FCC route. CRTC Chairman Andre Bureau gave this assurance in a 1986 speech to the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ convention in Toronto, where he said the commission regards news as an integral part of Canadian culture and identity. And Richard Frith, a senior planning officer at the CRTC’s radio policy planning and analysis department, says, “I can’t see the commission allowing a station to eliminate news altogether. It wants to see stations providing well-rounded service to the communities they serve.” But is the news directors’ faith in the CRTC well placed?

The latest regulations, published in 1986, contain nothing about news content nor any rules governing the minimum number of hours a station must devote to news. While all stations must submit a Promise of Performance, which outlines their specific programing plans, adhering to the PoP is a condition of licence for FM stations only. If an FM station wants to reduce the amount of news it has agreed to air by 20 per cent or more, Frith says it has to make prior application to the commission; for any change below 20 per cent, stations just inform the CRTC. As for AM stations, he says they “can do pretty much what they want as far as reductions go during the licence term, but when that term is up they have to explain what’s going on if the commission wants to talk it over with them.” Frith says that a station’s own perception of what its audience needs and wants, combined with CRTC regulations and market forces, controls news on AM stations. There’s evidence that at least in some cases stations’ commitment to news is gradually being eroded. For example, according to its 1979 PoP statement, CKEY, a Toronto AM station, broadcast 13 hours and 54 minutes of news each week; at the time of its most recent licence renewal, in 1985, it pledged only 12 hours and 17 minutes. And in 10 years Toronto’s CHUM-FM has reduced the amount of news and information programming It runs Monday to Friday by nearly half, from 8.3 hours to 4.5 hours.

The CRTC defines news as “the recounting or reporting of information on recent local, regional, national and international events, with little or no interpretation.” Frith says many stations meet their PoP agreement by supplementing news content with softer material such as human interest and so-called enrichment programming, which encompasses everything from items on new developments in medicine and science to business and entertainment features. While the CRTC doesn’t disapprove of this practice, at licence renewal time a station is expected to show why lifestyle news rather than hard news is appropriate for its audience. Brian Thomas, CHUM-FM’s manager of news operations and public affairs, says some stations have cut back on news with permission from the CRTC. “The way the commission sees it, times have changed,” he says. “There are more stations now and listeners have many places to get news.” Some argue that where a strong AM news station already exists in a crowded market, it’s redundant for music-oriented stations to carry news. “I think most programmers would say they do news because they feel an obligation to their audience,” says Henry Mietkiewicz, radio columnist for The Toronto Star from 1983 to 1987. “But I think if they had the choice, they’d drop most of their information programming. Basically, music stations don’t really want to be bothered with news.” Cutting news content to zero, even if it were allowed by the CRTC, would likely mean losing listeners. There is a point beyond which no station is going to go. “Even those listeners least interested in Amount of it,” says Pierre Nadeau, senior vice-president for radio at the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. Nadeau says he wouldn’t be surprised to find that some FM stations have reduced their commitment to news, but he also wouldn’t be surprised if some AM stations have increased theirs.

Generally, Nadeau says, listeners tune to AM stations for news and information and to FM for music. “Rock and pop stations don’t consider news a strong part of what they do,” says Mietkiewicz. “They don’t consider it important for their audience. So to criticize them for not covering local events as well as they ought to means nothing, because they are doing exactly as they intend.” Certainly, Toronto’s music oriented CHFI clearly intended last October to drop its 9 a.m. newscast in favor of a commercial free half hour of music. “Let’s just say the change was made to fit various programming competitive strategies,” News Director Ben Steinfeld says. Then he adds, “Go talk to the program director. It was his decision.” The morning the newscast was cut, Steinfeld went to the mike to read the nine o’clock news only to officially learn it no longer existed. In Metropolitan Toronto alone, there are 16 private radio stations competing for a slice of the market, plus another half dozen or so nearby. For all of them, producing news is costly. “News directors have to fight like hell for what they want and they don’t always win,” says Warren Beck, news director at Hamilton’s CHML from 1966 to 1985, and now coordinator of broadcast journalism at Hamilton’s Mohawk College. “But management sees the newsroom as the area where they can cut back.” Steinfeld believes the problem lies with the programmers. “They only understand numbers,” he says. “What wins is going to stay, what loses is going to go.” The only way to convince them news is worth keeping is by getting good ratings. “Programmers will say, ‘Those blankety-blank CRTC rules.

If it wasn’t for them, we’d be able to play more music.'” Steinfeld says that if the CRTC rules were dissolved tomorrow, half the news broadcasts now aired would cease to exist. News directors also have to contend with radio consultants “modern-day rainmakers,” Steinfeld calls them-who tell their bosses less news means more profit. Their “propagandistic drivel” includes cutting the news and playing the hits. But radio consultant David Oakes, president of Toronto’s Forecast Communications Research, has this to say: “The best thing for journalists to do, from my way of thinking, is to go out into the real world and leave their journalism behind.” According to Oakes’s research, what people want right now are updates. To him, news directors who think it’s their role in life to tell people what’s going on in the world are using their natural human egoism as a defence against change. He says there is only so much news an audience will take. Getting to the main stories and getting “the hell off of them quick” is the key. However, John Hardy, Warren Beck’s successor as news director at CHML, says one-minute news updates cheat people: “It takes 40 seconds to tell them the weather details, and the news in 68 seconds is almost an insult. You may as well not say anything at all.” Steinfeld agrees: “You’re just giving them the hits and misses.” News directors believe they might be less vulnerable if management came from the newsroom instead of the sales department; however, this is not often the case. Beck suggests instead that news directors get out of their cocoons and find out what the rest of the station is doing. “If you’re not involved in management decisions, your department is the one that’s going to be hit the hardest.” You have to spend money to make money, but Pierre Nadeau says few stations have strong enough financial backing to commit the millions of dollars needed for the long term-say, five years -to develop a top-ranked newsroom. “You certainly wouldn’t get there without ulcers,” he says. “You could pump $5 million a year into it and still not know what the results will be.”

The future of news on private radio stations doesn’t rest solely with the CRTC. The decision to make the necessary investment in news budgets to pay for the labor-intensive news coverage rests with station management. News directors, take heed.

“It’s weird,” comes the reply. Pulling her chair closer and lowering that famous throaty voice, Gray tells a story that underlines the ironies of her situation. She points out the staff mailboxes where a thoughtful new clerk has appointed her a new slot. “She was very well meaning, but she put me right under Dennis Trudeau,” Gray says. “I had to laugh.” Trudeau, another long-time CBC employee, began hosting As It Happens in September, 1985, three and a half months after Gray was dumped from the position.

Gray, 48, became host of As It Happens four years ago after 19 years of radio journalism experience, including previous guest host spots on As It Happens. Her resume reads like a current affairs program guide. In the early ’70s she hosted the first 4-to-6 p.m. talk show in Canada, a CBC Ottawa production calledNow…Just Listen! Besides As It Happens and Sunday Morning, she’s written for, reported, hosted or commented on Morningside, The House, Cross-Country Check-Up, This Country in the Morning, and in 1976 the weekly program Politically Speaking. She won an ACTRA award in 1976 for her hour-long documentaryThe Supreme Court of Canada and another in 1984 for “excellence in broadcast journalism, radio and television” for her work on As It Happens. Gray’s credentials outside of radio also shine, including magazine and newspaper writing and guest host spots on television.

There was a general cry of disbelief and anger when Gray was let go last summer. Allan Fotheringham, in his weekly column for Maclean’s, called it, “quite about the most stupid decision in years in an organization that has quite a record in stupidities…. Her abrupt dismissal after four distinguished and hardworking years on the job makes you wonder if the CBC budget cuts did not also include a few cuts in the intelligence of those responsible for the decision.” Richard Gwyn, a friend of Gray’s, commented in his column in The Toronto Star, “Gray’s fault, so one bureaucrat has allowed, was that she wasn’t ‘showbiz’ enough. This is to say she preferred to be excellent rather than to be a celebrity, a questioner of others rather than a projector of herself.”

Gwyn added that there is a problem at large concerning the future of CBC radio: “Certainly CBC Radio was overdue for polishing; As It Happens certainly needed brightening. Instead, the best are being thrown away.” And Sid Adilman, also for the Star, said, “It’s not because Gray lacks talent, but because she’s a scapegoat for problems with the show, which now has imitators around the world but still remains the best of them.” A faithful listener, Stan C. Roberts of Burnaby, B.C. was one of about 30 who wrote letters to The Globe and Mail. “She was just doing too well,” Roberts wrote. “Her interviews are too penetrating. She’s making the mistake of asking the tough questions. Worse, she refuses to accept wishy-washy or evasive answers. Or, perhaps the toes she occasionally steps on are located under a particularly influential desk in Ottawa.”

The CBC received about 200 letters in Toronto. Twenty-three senior parliamentary reporters in Ottawa petitioned against the change in hosts as did more than 100 CBC hosts and producers. They feared radio was losing a first-rate journalist. Many on the CBC petition had left radio themselves against their will and they wanted to stop the exodus. “It is difficult enough for those of us who love and are loyal to CBC to withstand the body blows dealt from the outside in the form of budget cuts and criticism; it is unbearable when those body blows come from within,” stated the letter dated June 10 and addressed to Pierre Juneau, president of CBC.

While the CBC petitioners accepted that it is management’s right to change on-air talent as it sees fit, they objected to the method by which the change was made. There was never any discussion with Gray about her shortcomings as a high-profile host, no evaluation, no constructive criticism, no opportunity for improvement. They couldn’t understand why Gray was not offered an “equally challenging alternative so that the corporation could continue to benefit from her abilities.” The letter concluded, “We give loyalty and we expect loyalty in return. We cannot remain silent while a colleague like Elizabeth Gray is so capriciously and wrongfully dismissed.” The letter was meant to provoke an honest probe into poor management/staff relations. Instead it provoked a rebuff from Margaret Lyons, vice-president of English radio networks, and little was accomplished. So Gray’s colleagues supported her in other ways, offering her work when they could. She co-hosted CBC-TV’s Midday for one week in August and did a series of commentaries for CBC Radio’s Saturday morning parliamentary review, The House, in September.

“Our regular commentator, Brian Kelleher, has been temporarily assigned to host As It Happens,” the introduction to The House began on Sept. 7. “So during his absence, we’ve invited broadcaster Elizabeth Gray to assess the government’s first year.” In the commentary that followed, Gray referred to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney as a slippery character who slides under doors and compared his voice to that of an obscene phone caller-“that perfectly modulated voice that manages to sound like an anonymous, unwelcome phone call in the middle of the night.”

“That’s fairly gutsy commentary,” says Susan Murray, then acting producer of the program. “Some CBC producers would not allow that on air because it steps over the line of what the public sensibility will accept. Because we’re publicly funded, we don’t want to upset that sensibility.” Murray adds that The House generally gets very little feedback from its listeners, “but as soon as we put Elizabeth Gray on the air we did” and it was not all favorable. She had indeed stepped over the line for some listeners.

The man who told Gray her annual contract at As It Happens would not be renewed was Andrew Simon, head of CBC Radio current affairs. “It had nothing to do with her journalistic abilities,” Simon stressed in a telephone interview. He said that after much thought and discussion, management decided Gray was not attracting a wide enough audience, and that her tone and range of interests were too narrow. “One reason, but on a very secondary level, was the issue that in four years she should have accomplished a wider public profile,” he added. Months earlier he had banteringly told Gray over dinner that she should accept the fact that she was supposed to be a “star.” Barbara Frum’s personality had defined the initial tone of As It Happensand Simon wanted that star quality back. Simon underlined that Gray had not been blacklisted. “We just didn’t want her as host of that program.”

Simon wanted more listeners and As It Happens‘ audience share seemed to be dropping. Since the BBM Bureau of Measurement changed its method of compiling statistics between spring 1981 and spring 1982, it’s impossible to accurately assess As It Happens‘ audience over the span of Gray’s four years as host. But the number of people who tuned in at any time during a week in spring 1982 was 632,000 compared with 555,400 in 1985, just before Gray left the show. However this drop must be viewed in connection with the reduction in 1983 of the show’s length to one hour from 1½.

As It Happens‘ share of the English-speaking audience in CBC areas was nine per cent between fall 1984 and spring 1985 when Gray was host. It rose to 10 per cent in fall 1985 after she left. However, bothMorningside and Sunday Morning experienced similar one-percentage-point increases in audience share between spring and fall 1985. Morningside went to nine per cent from eight, while Sunday Morning rose to 13 per cent from 12. Increases for all three programs make it unreasonable to conclude that specific changes within one program drew more listeners.

Nevertheless, Doug Caldwell, As It Happens‘ executive producer, maintains that Gray was wrong for the job. He says there had been too heavy an emphasis on “political institutions and political process” during Gray’s time and he hopes to restore to the program an “entertainment value” that existed under Frum. Caldwell says new host Dennis Trudeau has the “lively, curious, informal approach to interviews” that’s needed. Caldwell recognized that changing the host was not enough to improve the show, but, “in order to do a complete re-examination, a new host was necessary.”

Gray agrees that the zing had gone out of As It Happens during her final year. But she feels it was because the show, whose strength lies in getting right to the heart of current events, was badly produced. The executive producer must be able to read the news, understand if it’s important, and then decide whether As It Happens should handle it and if so how. “More and more in that final year, we were missing things,” Gray says, citing an international hijacking and an Ontario mining accident as two examples of stories that were not covered as they unfolded. Gray’s vision of the program was to play up its immediacy and ability to go straight to the principal characters involved, capitalizing on direct phone lines and a team of first-rate researchers. Being in the middle of breaking news stories resulted in fascinating listening. On one occasion, for example, Gray tried to phone someone in Beirut and instead reached a 21-year-old woman. “You never know if you’re going to be alive tomorrow,” the woman told Gray as Israeli bombs exploded around her. Her words turned out to be prophetic; the As It Happens crew found out later that she had been killed the next day, and Gray wrote a poignant epitaph. On another show, Gray spoke directly to New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange during the controversy surrounding his decision to keep nuclear-equipped warships out of his country’s ports.

“You want to know why she was really fired?” asks a former As It Happens producer now at The Journal. “She wanted to take the show to new heights and the executive producers couldn’t meet her challenge.”

Gray worked with three executive producers during her time as host. The first was Bob Campbell. He left the show in 1983 after many years and Ian Wiseman replaced him. Wiseman had taken leave from a teaching position at King’s College School of Journalism, and was hired in part to incorporate a documentary style intoAs It Happens. He was fired several months later. Wiseman now says that he may have unwittingly added to management/ staff tensions by coming in from outside the corporation and trying to alter an established program. “CBC management know they want changes in the show but they have no idea what changes they want or how to impose them,” Wiseman said retrospectively in a telephone interview from Halifax, adding that a typical change means some experimental elements are thrown together and if they don’t work, they are dumped.

Wiseman believes Gray should have been made executive producer. “She had a vision of what the show should be, the strength of character to carry it through and the support of the producers.” Even though Gray had never been interested in Caldwell’s position, there was antagonism between the two because they had separate visions of what the show should be. Gray was convinced that As It Happens should be more reflexive and immediate, contrary to Wiseman’s documentary ideas.

Caldwell also found Gray difficult to produce. However, he never gave her any formal evaluation or feedback. He had difficulties, as well, in holding on to a senior producer. The program went for seven months in 1985 with no one in this vital right-hand role until Ian Porter, a current affairs producer from CBC-Halifax, joined the show last November.

“It’s a fact that Elizabeth is difficult to produce,” says The House‘s Susan Murray. Gray is “talented and opinionated and she drives herself and those around her,” Murray says, adding that she’s also a lot of fun. “She’s the type of person who fills a room with her energy.” She’s also the type of journalist who will “fight for every word.”

Gray, meanwhile, admits that she didn’t want to leave As It Happens. “I will not be on As It Happens after today and I’m very sad about that,” she announced to her listeners last June 14. “I have had, for the past four years, the best job anyone could ever possibly have and I cannot think of any other time in my life when I have learned so much-every day-when I’ve been more excited by what I have learned and felt as privileged because I was in a position to pass it on.”

“Maybe at heart I’m a bit of a firechaser,” she admits today. “I don’t know how I’ll look back on it. I don’t know what it’s done for me in the long run. I mean, I’m getting all sorts of bloody speaking engagements that I never got before.” She spoke on “Journalism in South Africa” at the 1985 Lethbridge Herald Lecture series last November. “The hardest part of the whole thing was not the summer, because I was going to take the summer off anyway. It was getting back in the fall and realizing that I was suddenly totally peripheral. It was as if I just didn’t belong anywhere.”

Radio was not something Gray had originally aimed for, or been brought up to consider. Her father worked in insurance; her mother sometimes wrote short stories. Gray too was going to be a writer (“That was the plan”) and after growing up in Toronto and graduating from Havergal College with top grades, she studied for a B.A. in English language and literature at the University of Toronto. It was there, working for the Varsitynewspaper with John Gray, her husband-to-be, under the “wonderful” editorial guidance of Peter Gzowski, that her interest in journalism grew.

She did her first radio story while she and John were living in England, where they had moved after working for Toronto newspapers for a year-she at the old Toronto Telegram and he at The Toronto Star. She did a series of stories for a CBC show called Countdown, and continued to freelance until her children were teenagers. Then she went after the As It Happens position.

Probably more than anything else, strong family support has helped her weather the events of the past months and given her the courage to walk back into the CBC. Gray shares a sprawling three-storey house with her husband, now foreign editor at The Globe and Mail. Their three children are 18, 20 and 24. Last summer was hard on them, she says, and on her dad, 82, who just can’t understand why his only child was sacked from a job in which she had excelled. Losing the job, she says, was much harder on her family than the years she spent commuting from Ottawa when she first accepted the As It Happens position in Toronto. The family moved to Toronto last year.

When she’s not working, Gray is often reading. Relaxing over coffee in her kitchen, she says that she is currently very interested in South Africa-she recently reported for Sunday Morning on South Africa’s ambassador to Canada, Glen Babb. Though it’s 6:30 p.m., the radio is not tuned in to As It Happens. Instead we listen to a tape by Tony Bird, a South African musician. Gray finds time for such special interests despite a heavy weekly ration of newspapers and magazines; a favorite is The New Yorker‘s “Talk of the Town” column. The high calibre of it “makes you feel how inadequate you are as a journalist,” she says.

There is nothing inadequate about Gray’s work in the Sunday Morning studios as the show nears its weekend deadline. To say the pace is picking up is an understatement. Gray is trying to clear up the technical details needed to record an interview with leftist author James Laxer for the National Energy Program story. He’s waiting to talk from a pay phone in a Texas restaurant. And between coordinating soundmen, technicians and Laxer’s public relations people, she’s madly trying to collect a coherent set of questions for an interview she hadn’t expected to get for another three hours. “I hate to go in unprepared,” she says later. She rushes down the sleek grey corridors to the studio where one of Sunday Morning‘s hosts, Barbara Smith, interrupts her own work to free up the equipment. Headphones clamped on, nervously rolling a pen in one hand and chewing on a finger, Gray launches in. Her questions are well-framed and to the point. She sounds totally collected. You can tell she’s got something good when she starts nodding along with his answer. You’d never know that she was mapping things out as she went.

“I hired her because she’s a good journalist,” says Norm Bolen, executive producer of Sunday Morning, who renewed Gray’s 13-week contract in early January. But whether or not she’ll still have a job at the end of this second stint depends on other things, such as budgets and shuffles. “If I have budget problems she would be the most vulnerable,” Bolen states frankly. Gray knows this. And she accepts it. But she’s not giving up. “I love the CBC,” she says. “I have major differences with a few people there, but I figure the radio service is bigger than all of them. To their credit they’re not stopping me.”

She doesn’t blame the institution. Gray believes in public broadcasting. “I think they made a mistake,” she says of CBC management’s decision to drop her from As It Happens. “And I’m not really prepared to let them get away with it, that’s all. So I will haunt the place and see what happens.”