Shiftless? Incompetent? Ignorant? – Get a Job Reading the News with CHQR AM 770

There’s little reason for anyone on the internet to know of CHQR AM 770, a hard-right radio station in southern Alberta, Canada’s Bible belt.  Most of the time it plays syndicated far-right talk hacks.  Late at night it pipes in American conspiracy and UFO shows—you know, the kinds of shows that are definitely going to advance the world and make their programmers proud as they lie on their deathbeds toting up the goods they did to society. 

I guess CHQR AM 770’s main personage must be Dave Rutherford, the hate-filled morning man who hosts a show in which he cuts off even the pre-screened callers who *agree* with him.  He has a high, whiny, whinging adenoidal voice.  If you see him, he kind of looks like what you’d expect: he’s a lined and paranoid-nervous looking guy, with thinning light hair and a pinched face; he undeniably looks like the keening, wailing baby that he is.

Dave’s job is to spew hate; people won’t call if they aren’t pissed off, so Dave has to develop that hatred, day in and day out.  It’s a tough gig.  I’d look like a 70-year-old 7-year-old, too, I don’t doubt.

Anyway, how would I know of CHQR AM 770 so well?  Because I very often listen to the Old Radio Show segment between 11 and 1 a.m.  I really enjoy this show.  Admittedly, it, too, is a syndication job, and very often CHQR gaily garbles it—skipping records, shows cut off, incorrect shows announced and played, and so on.  It’s just CHQR AM 770’s general disrespect for the listener at work.  Like any good company, CHQR AM 770 has only one constituency in mind, the advertisers who make it money (CHQR AM 770 is rather well known for taking ads from companies charged with criminal offenses).

Late at night, once the old radio shows are done, one can often expect to hear Steve Norton take over the tough 4-minute news slot.  To hear Steve really is something.  Garbled, illiterate, yawning and pausing—his stunning lack of professionalism (and, well, let’s just face it—outright stupidity) is truly amazing.  When I first heard this guy, I just figured he was a nepotism case and that someone was giving his son a job.  But no, Steve stayed on the air, butchering and bastardizing every 4-minute segment he was manfully called upon to do once per hour.  There’s really nothing Steve can’t mess up, but he takes pride in it, and obviously CHQR AM 770 does, too.  During Steve’s pauses, coins could appear on your eyelids.  He stumbles and bumbles over 1- to 2-sentence news items.  It is mind-blowing just how amateurish and 4^th rate CHQR AM 770 delights in being.  If I were tired, but knowing I had to go on for a (huge!!!) 4-min. stint, I’d probably throw some water on my face and just do it.  Not Steve, though.

I’m not uncharitable.  Being a night man can be a dull and boring thing.  You might get tired, indeed, even if it was your JOB to be awake 5 nights a week and settle into a routine.  But not for Steve, oh no.

As I’ve indicated before on this blog, I have no little experience of radio.  My very first experience with radio was back with 5MMM public radio in Australia.  I have good memories, in the sense that, despite my youth, everyone there, from the Station Manager to the emphysematous night jockey, treated me well.  They weren’t interested in me, nor had they any reason to be, but they took their work seriously and they treated me seriously.  I remember a couple of tall, handsome, sharp-dressed guys who read the news.  I remember glancing at their copy and laughing over their hilarious misspellings.  They looked at me very soberly and told me that, when they were reading the news, they used phonetic spellings so that they wouldn’t get anything wrong.  Then or now, I would never use such things, because I would almost never need them, and would mess up horribly if I did that, and I had no way of knowing what they were doing, but still I did feel a bit small as they calmly and dryly pointed out to me why they did what they did—they wanted to get the pronunciations right.  And these were just a couple of guys at a public radio station!!

Needless to say, I learned from moments like that, and I still remember times I screwed up on radio, even though I had nothing near the technology and producers CHQR AM 770 has.  Anytime I ever screwed up, I never forgot it, and I tried to make sure it never happened again.  I guess I just had a hint o’ pride, and a bit of work ethic, unlike those at CHQR AM 770.

We’re now in the internet age, when and where you can get virtually anything you want virtually any minute.  All night tonight, a person named “Josie Fotah” (I have no way of verifying the spelling of her last name because CHQR AM 770 does not want to let us know who is employed at its station—I’m just going by what the phonetic sound of her last name, as she says it, seems to be), has been stumbling and bumbling and crashing over names such as Arencibia, or Djokovic.  This, again, is in the age of the internet, when you can go online and check something virtually instantly.  And, if you’re uncertain or responsible, you can *double-check* it instantly, too.  But would Josie do that?  Oh, no.  Never.  That just ain’t ‘QR style, by which ignorance is at a premium.  Each hour, a name she finds hard comes up, and each hour, there’s an agonizing wait as her halting mind tries to shift the heavy boulder of a (!foreign!!—in Canada!!) name, and each time, she comes up with a new bastardization.  I don’t know what her last name is, but I suspect that if I kept announcing it wrongly over the airwaves, time after time, she might find that a bit disrespectful.  She might say: “What’s your problem?  Why can’t you just look it up?”  But no, that ain’t the way ‘QR rolls.

Djokovic has been one of the top tennis players in the world for several years.  He has been having a record-breaking season.  He has won 2, and is on the verge of winning 3 of 4 available major tournaments this year.  Simply to be alive would have been to have heard his name innumerable times over the past, oh, I don’t know, 36 months or so.  But good ol’ Josie, she can’t even look it up or go to YouTube.  And, for many hours now, she has been announcing that Djokovic’s opponent for the U.S. Open final has not been determined.  The last time she said this was at 3 a.m. MST, some 7 hours after Djokovic’s opponent, Rafael Nadal, had, indeed, been determined.

So now let’s get in CHQR AM 770’s backyard about this.  As the far-right station of note in southern Alberta, CHQR boasts on an hourly basis just how it is the place to go to for any kind of instant updates or important news bulletins.  Let’s just say there were a firebug, or, say, a PEDOPHILE in your neighbourhood.  Could CHQR AM 770 be relied upon to let you know, even during the course of a standard 8-hour business day?  Of course not.  Josie knows it, ‘QR knows it, we know it.  ‘QR prides itself on ignorance and hate, and it would compromise itself six ways to Sunday if it tried for even a second to act like a responsible radio station.

What a sad, sad outfit. 

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