by Pat Hickey, Montreal Gazette
Randy Tieman is among the CTV Montreal sportscasters laid off on Tuesday, June 20, 2017.
Brian Wilde, Randy Tieman and Sean Coleman are the latest casualties in CTV’s nationwide restructuring of its local news operations.
The sportscasters are being laid off as the CTV outlet in Montreal drops the local sports segments.
If Montreal follows the lead of other CTV stations across the country, there will be sports content supplied by TSN.
“It’s the nature of business,” Wilde said. “I’m sure I’ll land somewhere.”
The decision wasn’t unexpected. Earlier this year, CTV cancelled its local sportscasts in Calgary, Edmonton, Windsor and Kitchener.
(The local sportscast was also cancelled at CTV Vancouver Island, and sportscaster Jordan Cunningham was absorbed into the general reporting pool. Since then, he has filed local sports feature stories a couple of times a week, blended in with the rest of the local news run, and has found himself anchoring the late night news on a semi-regular basis.)
What they’ve actually done is made sports into “news” and inserted local sports segments into the main “news” cast. So when the hapless viewer tunes into CTV or GLOBAL news to see what’s going on with the latest fires and accidents, they are treated to interviews with assorted toothless goons talking about their great achievement of putting a piece of rubber into a net. I’ve long ago started watching these “news” casts on PVR so I can skip through the sports and puff pieces and paid advertisements for drug companies to see what little actual news is still being shown. The newspapers are doing the same. Pretty soon all we’ll have left is Twitter!
Sad,Randy has been there for decades.
When people join Blue Jays nation like sheep, it’s no surprise. They don’t realize how much they’re contributing to the erosion of anything local on our sportscast options in the summer.
Essentially, the real story is that CTV is shuttering the legendary CFCF TV Sports department, once home to Hall of Fame broadcasters like Dick Irvin, Ron Reusch, Jim Bay, Dave Van Horne, and many others.
However, oh brother makes a great point about news journalists essentially taking over the sports broadcasting business. In other words, it’s like small market television, like CJDC Dawson Creek, coming to Montreal, where the news reader does news, sports, and weather all in the same breath, is it not ?
Meanwhile, CTV Toronto will still have a separate sports department, true. Not fair !