28 May In stunning act of altruism, journalist retires at 70

I thought my friend the annoyed media critic was going to have a stroke when she heard CBC host Linden MacIntyre was retiring for the good of the children.

This Linden MacIntyre story is gag-inducing.

MacIntyre should have left five years ago if he wanted to help younger journalists. Seriously. What Spin. He’s 70. Wonder how many full days he was putting in for his salary (which he wouldn’t disclose, of course). Apparently 130 young journalists can be hired now. Yippee!

The country’s 20- and 30-somethings are all underemployed because of the glut of boomers sitting at the top, waiting for the their savings to rebound from the damn recession (which they caused). FFS.

I understood what she meant. Media coverage took a slo-pitch approach to the MacIntyre retirement story. In particular, no one that I read asked how retiring at 70 could be regarded as premature, let alone a sacrifice. But CanadaLand blogger Jesse Brown has put the question in a friendly but thought-provoking interview.*

JB: You know, when I read about your departure decision, I actually felt ambivalent. On the one hand, my initial reaction was, I thought it was a terrifically noble gesture…. And then I also thought, “You’re 70 years old. Seventy-year-old dudes are supposed to retire so that young people can have jobs. That’s not news. That’s what’s supposed to happen.

LM: Depends on the 70-year-old dude. [Laughs.] I mean if this was 60 Minutes, I’d have 20 more years of productivity ahead of me. Nobody on that show ever goes until they’re 90.

I got, mercifully, good genes. My mother is still living in her own house at 97. And I got a lot of years that I could have done the job at the fifth estate. This is not an issue.

I mean, I do the job, and I have a role there, which—I’m kind of like an elder, and that’s important. But I had to sit down and do a little pragmatic calculation. I found out, by asking questions, that we are going to take a hit. The show is going to take a hit. A position or two will go. And I just did a kind of an inventory, and I said, “What position could be eliminated with the least peril to the outfit?” And I looked. Four hosts. We have the best crop of hosts I think the show has ever had. Four people. Maybe they’re not all as famous as Adrienne Clarkson and Eric Malling, but they are as good, if not better.

JB: That’s a lot of hosts

LM: That’s a lot of hosts. Four hosts. So I said to myself, we can get rid of one and work with three, save the producers’ positions, particularly the associate producers’ positions.

JB: I know that CBC salaries are a touchy subject these days, but the truth is you can keep two, three, four people for what someone like you—

LM: Yeah. On a host’s salary. [Laughs] Notwithstanding that poor Peter Mansbridge only makes 80 a year.

JB: [Laughing] Now I feel badly about the whole thing.

LM: Now you can have three Peter Mansbridges for a MacIntyre, or something like that. Anyway, the bottom line is, I can cut a large, you know, relatively large salary—we’re not on the American scale of magnitude—but you can cut a significant salary, and one position, and save one or two other positions, and make a statement at the same time to the CBC, and to the people that are watching.

There’s lots more of value in Brown’s CanadaLand interview, including blunt, unflattering assessments of CBC management. I will return to it in the days ahead, because MacIntyre touches on a favourite topic of mine. In the meantime, the whole 40 minutes is worth listening to.

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* I have edited the text slightly for readability.