Lisa LaFlamme, CTV News, and Bad Executive Decisions

There will be no bittersweet on-air goodbye for (now previous) CTV national news anchor Lisa LaFlamme, no ceremonial passing of the baton to the next technology, no broadcast retrospectives lionizing a journalist with a storied and award-successful occupation. As LaFlamme announced yesterday, CTV’s dad or mum enterprise, Bell Media, has decided to unilaterally finish her contract. (See also the CBC’s reporting of the story in this article.)

When LaFlamme herself doesn’t make this declare, there was of system fast speculation that the network’s final decision has some thing to do with the point that LaFlamme is a lady of a selected age. LaFlamme is 58, which by Television specifications is not precisely youthful — besides when you review it to the age at which well-known adult men who proceeded her have remaining their respective anchor’s chairs: take into consideration Peter Mansbridge (who was 69), and Lloyd Robertson (who was 77).

But an even additional sinister idea is now afoot: rather than mere, shallow misogyny, evidence has arisen of not just sexism, but sexism conjoined with company interference in newscasting. Two evils for the cost of a person! LaFlamme was fired, suggests journalist Jesse Brown, “because she pushed again from one particular Bell Media executive.” Brown studies insiders as proclaiming that Michael Melling, vice president of information at Bell Media, has bumped heads with LaFlamme a range of occasions, and has a background of interfering with news coverage. Brown further studies that “Melling has persistently shown a lack of respect for women in senior roles in the newsroom.”

Pointless to say, even if a personalized grudge furthermore sexism make clear what’s likely on, here, it nonetheless will seem to most as a “foolish decision,” a person absolutely sure to induce the firm problems. Now, I make it a policy not to query the organization savvy of knowledgeable executives in industries I really do not know properly. And I advise my students not to leap to the conclusion that “that was a dumb decision” just simply because it’s a person they really do not realize. But even now, in 2022, it’s really hard to envision that the corporation (or Melling a lot more especially) didn’t see that there would be blowback in this case. It is just one thing to have disagreements, but it’s one more to unceremoniously dump a beloved and award-winning woman anchor. And it is bizarre that a senior government at a information organization would consider that the truth would not come out, presented that, following all, he’s surrounded by persons whose task, and individual commitment, is to report the news.

And it is tough not to suspect that this a much less than satisfied changeover for LaFlamme’s alternative, Omar Sachedina. Of study course, I’m guaranteed he’s joyful to get the task. But even though Bell Media’s press release prices Sachedina indicating sleek issues about LaFlamme, undoubtedly he didn’t want to assume the anchor chair amidst widespread criticism of the changeover. He’s using on the job under a shadow. Maybe the prize is really worth the rate, but it is also tough not to consider that Sachedina experienced (or now has) some pull, some ability to affect that way of the changeover. I’m not stating (as some surely will) that — as an insider who is familiar with the authentic tale — he should really have declined the position as unwell-gotten gains. But at the quite least, it appears fair to argue that he should really have applied his affect to shape the transition. And if the now-senior anchor doesn’t have that sort of impact, we really should be anxious in fact about the independence of that function, and of that newsroom.

A last, connected observe about authority and governance in complex organizations. In any moderately very well-governed corporation, the selection to axe a key, community-struggling with expertise like LaFlamme would have to have indicator-off — or at the very least tacit acceptance — from much more than a person senior executive. This indicates that a single of two factors is correct. Either Bell Media is not that kind of properly-governed business, or a significant number of people today were being involved in, and culpable of, unceremoniously dumping an award-successful journalist. Which is even worse?