Where Have You Gone, Knowlton Nash?

A Brief Reflection by Niagara At Large Doug Draper

He was, through his many years as a front-line reporter and news anchor in the last half of the 20^th century, our very own Canadian equivalent of legendary American news broadcaster Walter Cronkite.

CBC news legend Knowlton Nash

His name was Knowlton Nash and he played a lead role in steering CBC Television through its best years of national and international news. And with his death this May 24^th, at age 86 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, it is a reminder that those golden years of news coverage at CBC and other broadcast and print media across the country, have all but died with him.

Nash dedicated many years to covering some of the most important stories of his era, from the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster in the early 1960s to the separatist movement in Quebec and the Watergate scandal during his years as a Washington correspondent before taking over as anchor of The National and bringing it to fruition as CBC’s flag-ship television news program. 

Nash also played a key role in producing a follow-up program to The National called The Journal hosted by Barbara Frum which broadcast some of the most in-depth investigative broadcast reporting on the continent.

Almost two decades after he retired from The National anchor chair in 1988, he used an occasion where he received a lifetime achievement award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation to express his concern over the cutting of resources for news coverage, and the general dumbing down of programming and proliferation of reality shows at his beloved CBC and elsewhere.

If CBC and other networks want reality TV, Nash said in so many words, let people turn on programs that feature real news.

“News is a public trust,” Nash added. “That’s what Dan McArthur proclaimed when he founded the CBC News Service back in 1941 and that’s always been the standard of the Canadian Journalism Foundation. News is a public trust and a critically important public service.”

Hardly anyone talks that way about the news anymore. You now have two or three generations of younger people who may never have heard of Knowlton Nash and who simply accept broadcast news and newspapers for what they are today.

I’ve even had a number of people who were around when Knowlton Nash was still on the air say they don’t want to hear any more about the state of news coverage and how much better it may have been 20 r 30 years ago. What’s the point, they say. There is nothing you can do about it anyway. So I will stop now.

I supposed I should have joined the rush to the cinemas this past winter to see Will Ferrell in Anchorman 2. Is it out on DVD yet?

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