What Was Said: Knowlton Nash & the CBC

"'In recent years,' Maclean's has written, 'the CBC has been publicly called bullheaded, autocratic, dictatorial, spineless, weak, pathetic, extravagant, cheap, high handed, bumbling, nonsensical, dishonest, power crazy, idiotic and absurd. It has been called a milch cow, a centaur and a dog.' Maclean's said all that in 1951 at the height of the so-called golden era of radio. In different words, the comment has been made before that and repeated many times since, for no other Canadian organization has endured the intensity of scrutiny the CBC is constantly under....

One of the essential tasks of a broadcasting system is to stir up the minds and emotions of the people and occasionally to make large numbers of them acutely uncomfortable... There must be room for the thinker, the disturber and the creator of new forms and ideas."

—  Knowlton Nash, The Microphone Wars (1991)