Yesterday (Sunday) I was puttering in the kitchen and hoped to listen to some Calgary takes on how their team was doing--they have lost their last three by a combined 14-3 score. Calgary sports radio has game and post game shows on demand in podcast form, but it hadn't been updated since a January 11 victory over the Canucks. I tuned in the live feed, only to hear American accents discussing Cam Newton.
I then tried Sportsnet 590 (Toronto), Sportsnet 650 (Vancouver) and TSN Toronto. There was a Deshaun Watson chat, baseball talk, and another station carrying the Cam Newton discussion.
This is at noon on a weekend in Canada--NFL season is over, and baseball hasn't started yet. Calgary and Vancouver are both at crucial moments in their seasons, and there's nothing much sports wise to watch on TV--yet Canadian sports radio offers nothing but American network feeds.
Sports talk radio in Canada is a Monday-Friday 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. thing--otherwise we hear canned network talk from the U.S. that will give us NCAA soccer or NASCAR before anything hockey related is mentioned, likely because their hosts have no knowledge or interest when it comes to the NHL. Many of us--most, I would venture--work during weekdays, but are often at home doing things that allow us to listen while we work, but there is nothing to listen to, unless we want to engage in off-season NFL or baseball speculation.
All this at a time when Bellmedia has shuttered Canadian sports radio in western Canada and replaced these stations with non-stop stand up comedy. The comedy is clearly from a packaged service that probably only requires one person in the station to give the traffic updates a couple of times an hour.
No doubt some of these old comedy shows violate current social conscience sensibilities fairly often, and I wouldn't think that the Canadian content rules are being strictly followed either. Certainly these stations have gone from providing a decent amount of local content in their markets to none at all.
Where is the CRTC in all of this?
Twitter: @jgray001
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