This is CTV. You will not be funny

Christie Blatchford

National Post

Well, at least Avery Haines has her hair back.

This is the terrible scandal which should have broken out at CTV NewsNet -- not the alleged "slurs" its rookie anchor made during a broadcast last weekend and which, astonishingly, have resulted in her firing, but rather what those prissy white-bread stooges at CTV did to Ms. Haines' locks.

This is a young woman with the best hair in town -- lustrous, thick, swingy (or, as the boys on Wayne's World rightly would have it, even schwingy) stuff naturally and dramatically shot with a single spray of silver. So what did the network bozos do but stiff it up so that it looked not merely like a birds' nest, but one in which the birds had also shat?

Ms. Haines has far too much class to complain, even yesterday, mere hours after she was given the boot. All she would allow is that the silver streak was the source of much backroom angst (the powers-that-be had deemed it distracting) and that they had "pouffed" up her tresses.

CTV, mind, is a network which delights in turning smart men and women into automatons known in the business as Kens and Barbies: Give CTV Lauryn Hill and what you'd get on the air is Celine Dion; give 'em Puff Daddy and a few hours in the makeup room and there would be a light-skinned black version of Wayne Newton; fiddler Ashley MacIsaac would become Don Messer. You get the drift.

What they wrought with Ms. Haines' hair (and hair is the metaphor for style on television; ask any newsreader what people notice first, last and always) is merely the network's latest egregious sin against on-air intelligence and, dare I say it, diversity. The CTV folks are appearance-ists: They want everyone to look the same -- pancaked and sprayed to within an inch of their lives, prone to chirpy domestic chit-chat, benign, white (or white-ish) and of indeterminate, but inarguably unthreatening, age and from some indeterminate, but inarguably unthreatening, part of Don Mills, a particularly horrid and dull part of Toronto.

But I digress.

Only in this tight-sphinctered part of Canada would anyone be talking about any of this.

Ms. Haines' grievous offence went as follows: Last Saturday morning, reading a newscast for NewsNet, which is the network's all-news cable channel, she stuttered while introducing a report on aid to farmers.

Virtually everything on these newscasts is taped in advance.

What was supposed to air was take No. 2. The tape that ran by mistake -- not Ms. Haines' either, but someone in the control booth -- was the proverbial take No. 1, and Ms. Haines knew it would never see the light of day, and thus made her supposedly contentious remarks.

What she said was: "I kind of like the little stuttering thing. It's like equal opportunity, right? We've got a stuttering newscaster. We've got the black, we've got the Asian, we've got the woman. I could be a lesbian, folk-dancing, black woman stutterer." At this point, in her little earpiece, someone in the studio clearly joined in the fun and said something.

She continued: "In a wheelchair ... with a gimping, rubber legs. Yeah, really, I'd have a successful career, let me tell you."

(Now, what Ms. Haines forgot is that such is the wretched alchemy worked by her former employer that a gimping, black, folk-dancing lesbian would appear indistinguishable from any other of the happily married young mother newsreaders, by which I mean they might hire one such, but you and I would never know it because she would look and sound exactly like all the others. But again, I digress.)

What happened next is that Ms. Haines came on the air about 90 minutes later, apologizing for the "insulting and derogatory" remarks; I understand why she might have done this, and feel sure the network brass was squirming uncomfortably, but I think it was a mistake, because there was nothing insulting or derogatory about what she said.

The apology ran three times.

The Sun newspaper chain waded in next. It being a news day of apparently monumental slowness in Toronto, the local paper put a teaser on its Sunday front page and played the story on its lead inside news page with the following headline: "CTV news anchor's slurs go on the air."

About 4:30 that very morning Ms. Haines, correctly sensing this was not going to go her way and unable to sleep, went out to the 24-hour convenience store near her east-end Toronto home. Page 3 of the Sun is where the paper displays its nubile SUNShine Girl, and as she walked into the store, a man was walking out, predictably flipping to that very page. "The tits didn't even come into my image," Ms. Haines said wryly yesterday. "All I saw were the four little pictures of me from the newscast."

(In the body of that story, by the by, reporter Greg MacDonald breathlessly noted Ms. Haines was "ashen-faced" when she apologized. No honey, that was the bleeping makeup; she was ashen-faced before the apology. They all are; see above. But I digress.)

But slurs? What slurs? Ms. Haines was slurring herself.

She's a radio chick, been one half her 33 years (she started doing newscasts while still in Grade 11 in Lindsay, Ont.), and despite pleas throughout her career to make the move to the small screen, did so only this fall, largely, I always suspected, because she was bored.

But the point is, television is a new medium for her; Saturday was precisely her two-month anniversary in the TV game. So when she flubbed her lines on Saturday, her first instinct was to belittle herself, which is what women in general do and what Ms. Haines in particular does. The subtext of what she said was that Cheez Whiz, if she wasn't a pretty girl, she wouldn't have landed the gig in the first place.

There's an element of truth to this, of course, which is why this sort of humour, like every other kind, works.

Avery Haines was a colleague of mine at CFRB Radio, where she worked for 12 years and where I work part-time (and where, to my mind, the station still misses her wide-ranging competence), and though I don't know her well, I know her well enough to know that she is both terrifically accomplished and terribly self-deprecating.

She makes everything look easy, whether running marathons or regaining her near-elite level of fitness within weeks of having her first baby or being well-read and having a superb handle on world events.

But she's also gorgeous, slim, tall, with luminous skin and huge eyes and well, I've already told you about her hair. Until she went into the glamour biz, I never saw a stitch of makeup on her face. If she wasn't so decent, she would be entirely hateful. And being easy on the eyes is a prerequisite for television.

Anyway, what happened then is that yesterday, the slow news day turned to molasses and the Sun inexplicably played the story huge, with a front-page headline that read, "CTV anchor's gaffe 'stupid, hurtful' ", and the National Post and The Globe and Mail carried smaller pieces. All referred to an ongoing network "investigation." The Sun rounded up the usual suspects (the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists' Association, the Canadian Abilities Foundation), whose spokesmen variously pronounced the offending remarks as tasteless, flippant and, that lowest of modern blows, even inappropriate. It would have been news if they had done otherwise, since they are essentially lobbyists.

(Worth noting is that the same groups are the very ilk who, over the years, have regularly deemed the Toronto Sun itself to be racist and sexist, which I presume is how the reporter had the numbers so handy, though it doesn't explain the paper's glee at seeing someone else in the same soup.)

By midday, many of Ms. Haines' former colleagues at CFRB had done what talk radio does so well, and turned misfortune (in this case, a friend's) into a way to fill a few hours of airtime. Callers, duly prepped by the Sun stories to be outraged, were happy to oblige.

By early afternoon, Ms. Haines' career at CTV was over. Summoned in by vice-president Henry Kowalski, who broke the news to her with tears in his eyes (yeah baby), he gave her her walking papers -- and two weeks' pay.

She had done nothing but make fun of herself and state the truth, which is that in the real world, companies -- particularly those like television networks and newspapers, in the public eye -- occasionally hire on the basis of gender, or skin colour, or disability or sexual preference.

Employment equity is a fact of life in this country, and besides, when you have an outfit like the CRTC watching your back and controlling your licence, it doesn't hurt to get a few more black faces on air, or a few more girls, or the odd presenter with a limp -- so long as they're cute and telegenic, of course, and competent. Ms. Haines knew this, as we all do; I got my first job as a sportswriter because I was a chick, back in the Seventies when every newspaper in town wanted one. If there's something arguably wrong with the practice, and there may well be, there's certainly nothing wrong with acknowledging it exists.

As for Ms. Haines, she was taking her first-ever firing in stride yesterday, as I knew she would.

"It's only fucking television," she said. "It's not my son, it's not my husband, it's not my mum and dad."

What a babe.

January 18, 2000
Courtesy of the National Post