Edited by author 05-09-2005 11:32 AM
Moses' "sabbatical" doesn't have anything to do with the scuttlebutt about a police investigation and images reputedly saved on his computer, does it?

You have got to hand it to Moses, he is the creation of the CRTC, as pointed out his idea of 'originality' is to take an idea (MTV, BRAVO, SCI-FI channel) and develop a Canadian version, to satisfy the demands of the CRTC. His crown jewel, City TV got popular not because of his concept of the 'open' newsroom, but rather because he showed soft-core late at night.
  If you want to know about his tastes, consider this, early in the days of Bravo, it played, over and over and over the movie "can't stop the music". I guess he wanted to show how hip he was, but in the end he revealed such abysmal tastes.

Add to this his 'famous' quote: "Reading causes illiteracy, and television is democratic". Just dwell upon that saying for a time and you will realize one thing, 'what the heck does he mean by that?'

Oh man, so he's the b*st*rd who invented /m3? That's become the ISO-standard network (and local) news format around here for the last decade or so. Except sometimes, in the evening news, they'll also have someone pop in from the late-night news crew to tell us that they're going to be repeating the same empty crap at 11.

John Doyle has a good column in the Globe and Mail about Znaimer. Among other things, he points out that other than the CITY-TV news format, "A lot of what became part of the Znaimer empire was not original. MuchMusic was launched after MTV had already succeeded in the United States. Bravo! was launched after the arts channel Bravo existed for years in the U.S. The Space channel came into being after the American Sci-Fi channel. There is nothing visionary about copying a successful idea."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Art...hearts_temp/2/2/12/

> He launched community station CITY-TV in 1972

In this item, I think the newpaper article misses the point. This makes him sound like a community activist, when he's actually a conniving genius.

He noticed that cable tv penetration rates were climbing. He also noticed that CRTC regs required cable to carry all current local stations in the preferred band - as low as possible, essentially.

So, he starts CITY-TV in the UHF band with a 300 watt transmitter. That's enough to trigger the cable carriage requirement, and suddenly a whole bunch of people in Toronto get CITY-TV on channel 7 (this is in an era when a cable box was needed for high number cable stations).

Essentially, he can pull the advertsing dollars for a much bigger station than he actually builds the infrastructure for.

Cool.

Unfortunately, Znaimer has inflicted his "vision" on way too many places. One classic Znaimer touch: stretch a 15 minute news show into an hour in the following manner:

Gord: Now we take you to Harold to see what he's going to saying about the weather.
Harold: Well, Gord, later I'm going to tell you what the weather was like today, and what you can expect tomorrow. Now back to Gord.
Gord: Let's check with Jim and see what's happening in sports.
Jim: Lots of sports today. I'll have that report later.
Gord: Thanks Jim. How about entertainment, Monica?
Monica: We've got entertainment news coming up later in the show. Now back to Gord.
Gord: Now for a report on Queen's Park from Ben Chin.

Then Ben does a bit of actual news, after which they rinse and repeat several times. Then, at the half hour mark, they repeat it all.

I used to work in TV, and it never ceased to amuse me how Znaimer's "rock and roll" approach to studio based shows would get stolen by everyone, and then they'd claim they invented it. For instance, the cable company I worked for ripped off the "Znaimer method", and then when Access (another station in town) got bought out by CityTV, they naturally aped the shooting style of City (as well they should.) My employers were livid, claiming "thier style" had been stolen. Right, guys, right.


Also, I actually sat a couple tables down from Znaimer at a local Japanese restaurant here in Vancouver (Clubhouse, great okonomiyaki), which is just down the road from CityTV. He was a lot quieter in person then he appears in the media.

If you don't know who he is, I'm pretty sure that VideoDrome was based on him & City TV.