I’ve written about Joe Clark before. Why? As he puts it:
Seasoned readers will be aware that I am engaged in a Sisyphean battle with feudal management at CBC and antagonistic petits fonctionnaires at the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The topic? CBC’s proven, and in fact uncontested, noncompliance with a human-rights ruling requiring 100% captioning on CBC Television and Newsworld (q.v.).
Caught up in this new spirit of CBC blogging openness, he’s made an RSS feed of his running tally of CBC captioning mistakes, such as this one:
Zed is a rerun and shows K-Os (always captioned as “Chaosâ€) practising with the CBC Radio Orchestra. Real-time captions remain as inaccurate as in the original airing, with many blank lines and so many missed words (including “maestro†and “tablaâ€) that many sentences are incomprehensible. Many minutes of calm, melodic, unraplike singing passed with almost no captions. A rap artist singing with a symphony orchestra is no kind of show to real-time-caption.
Unlike this incredibly stupid Tommy Douglas debacle the CBC finds itself embroiled in, Joe is actually correct and knows what he’s talking about.
And like Marg Gardiner, granddaughter of late Saskatchewan Liberal politician Jimmy Gardiner, Joe Clark isn’t going anywhere.
It’s time for the CBC to answer his calls.
And to all the Master Class Googlers out there, can you find “the only straight male in offline captioning in Canada actually works at the CBC and runs a blog”?
3 Comments
We, or indeed they, are totally captioning music.
Badly.
I’™m gonna update the posting, but let me just add here that the captioning departments (there are more than one) are a perfect test case for blogging. Why? They toil in obscurity (always a bugbear of captioners, who feel, and are, unappreciated), yet resent outside attention (a parallel bugbear, the other side of the coin). They could document their days, their processes, their decisions, and so on. Deaf people will totally read it on their CrackBerrys.
And actually, several other departments within CBC could do the same thing. CBC Engineering in Montreal is a good example ’“ just a discussion about HDTV at CBC is a blog in itself.
Additionally, it goes without saying that a CBC Captioner Blogâ„¢ could simply rebut whatever I write. And then I can rebut the rebuttal, in the grand tradition of Weblogs.
By the way, how long before the standard-issue Anonymous Cowards, who might or might not be the people I identified in my posting, write comments here in an attempt at defamation? They’ve got nothing better to do, right, like improve their work or accept my invitations to coffee dates?
Too bad the bitching and whining from the Writers’ Guild isn’t going away for the movie’s getting canned.
It’s not like the union got portrayed as mobsters or a glorified pressure group. A role which it appears now to be filling gleefully.
But then again, who cares about a little revisionist history if it makes sense to the NDP funded, union backed, plotline.
umm…. we’re captioning music?