Recorded 28 May 1986
From WGS, 313–22, where it is transcribed by Robert D. Denham from the CBC tape with the present title. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. Interviewer Vince Carlin acknowledged the assistance of Grace Cirocco in preparing the interview, which was broadcast on the CBC’s Media File, 10 June 1986. Carlin was at that time chief correspondent for CBC Radio News; after a distinguished career in broadcasting he became chair of the Department of Journalism at Ryerson University, and then ombudsman for the CBC.
CARLIN: First of all, does the popular journalism of today have a real impact on our society and its culture? Or does it just flit on the surface of it?
FRYE: Oh, it’s bound to have an impact, and even if it’s superficial, nevertheless it has a cumulative effect day after day in the steady bombardment of events. A world in which an atomic energy plant springs a leak and you see the results in the air in Winnipeg is obviously a world in which there is a very considerable response to this bombardment of sense impressions.
CARLIN: Now I’m a bit hesitant to ask this, but I noticed you were taking notes while we were doing World Report [the news] a little while ago. I also recall that you’ve written that the vast majority of things we hear today are prejudices and clichés. I’m wondering whether your note-taking was relevant to that. Is what we hear on radio and television so pedestrian, so routine, as to not have meaning or to have a negative impact?
FRYE: Well, a great deal of it is, and a great deal of it is bound to be, with all of the deadlines that people have to meet. I think that all of these things are morally neutral, and the moral effect of them depends entirely on how they are used by the consumer. A consumer who understands that a great deal of improvised communication is bound to be full of prefabricated phrases and clichés and doesn’t worry about that but simply writes it off is still making the kind of use of it that a concerned and civilized citizen ought to make.
CARLIN: Well, let’s talk a bit about the use of clichés—the kind of language that so often finds its way into radio, television, and newspapers. Is that really a context-setting method? Is there something detrimental about that?
FRYE: There is something detrimental in the sense that it’s used to more or less block off a process of thought. We’ve become much more sensitive in the last thirty or forty years to the extent to which clichés really conceal prejudice. The women’s lib people, for example, have told us how full the language is of putdowns of women of which we’re totally unconscious. And yet because we use them, it doesn’t really matter that they’re on an unconscious level. The same thing is true when we talk about a police state, totalitarianism, and so forth. Even when those things are basically true, they’re still oversimplifications.
CARLIN: Is there a better way to do this—a better way to present the events of the day than by the use of formulas and clichés? I think you’ve said that there’s no thought behind the news. It’s just a reactive writing or communication. And what would be your advice to me? I have to go in there every day and write, as well as read, some of that information. How do we avoid the cliché?
FRYE: I’m not sure that it is possible to avoid it under the circumstances in which you work. If you had more time, you would instinctively try to cast your language into a direct expression of yourself. But when you know you have to go in there within ten seconds and you have nine-and-one-half-minutes to deliver the news, naturally you use what’s readiest at hand.
CARLIN: An American television journalist, Ted Koppel, said in a speech that almost everything that is publicly said these days is recorded and almost nothing of what is said is worth remembering. There’s also the idea that thoughts expressed by philosophers remain universal, and philosophers have endured without videotape and film. What about the constant recording of everything that’s said and done?
FRYE: Well, that merely brings out the fact that ninety-nine per cent of what is said and done is produced on a surface level and is largely secondhand in the ideas it uses and in the kind of expression it uses for those ideas. It may be true that practically nothing is worth remembering, but nevertheless there is a great deal that can still be said that is worth remembering only in slightly different departments of contemporary culture.
CARLIN: What do you mean by that? Are journalists capable of doing that on a daily basis? Or is that the province of the philosopher?
FRYE: I wouldn’t, if I were a journalist, want to give up entirely to philosophers the saying of memorable things. I would like to feel that my ambition would be to get into some kind of position where I could, say, write a column in a newspaper or host a program on radio in which I would have the chance to express things the way I would express them. My idiom would come through, and the sense of the impact of a personality has everything to do with whether it’s memorable or not.
CARLIN: Can you think of any examples in our current culture of things that are memorable in the popular media?
FRYE: We don’t have very many articulate people in politics now. Everybody remembers that Trudeau once said something about the universe unfolding as it should.1 That happened to be a personal remark, so it stands out from the great welter of babble in Canadian politics.
CARLIN: Why is that? Do you assume that there is a lower level of articulation or literacy among politicians? And if so, why is that? Why has it declined?
FRYE: I don’t know that it’s a lower level. It’s simply the entering into a world of very largely anonymous and impersonal communication. And the impersonal has no contact. Until it’s become personalized, it’s not really verbal expression at all.
CARLIN: So that their having to communicate with large numbers of people through microphones and cameras would produce this?
FRYE: Well, there’s that, and there’s also the fact that in a world dominated by advertising and propaganda nearly everything that’s said is ironic. That is, if the opposition asks questions in Parliament, their aim is to embarrass the government, not to get information. And the government’s response is not to give information but to defend themselves. Every rational citizen knows that and allows for it. But that makes for completely anonymous communication.
CARLIN: It’s interesting that language is becoming ironic or is being used in an ironic way in the language of public debate.
FRYE: It always was, in a sense, because so much language is designed to keep the ascendant class in the ascendancy, or vice versa.
CARLIN: I think you have also voiced the opinion at one time or another that perhaps newspapers shouldn’t be in the form they are now—that maybe they should be turned totally into journals of opinion and comment.
FRYE: Well, I was merely noting the fact that newspapers have an increasingly hard time competing with television as a popular medium, and that people read in the newspaper very frequently what they’ve heard on television the night before or earlier that morning. Consequently, the healthiest thing for the newspapers to do in that situation is to become more of a minority medium, more preoccupied with discussion and analysis than with headlines and deadlines. The same thing happened to radio when television came in.
CARLIN: There’s an interesting question here: As the literacy rate of society has increased over time, has the communications level decreased? Would there be an audience for those newspapers if they were turned into journals of comment and opinion? Or have people become so used to shorter, snappier, less communicative articles, less communicative means of gathering information?
FRYE: Again, that depends on the reader. The reader who is disinclined to make the effort certainly doesn’t want a journal given over to analysis and discussion, which requires him to think about the issue. But I think there are enough people who do to make a market for that.
CARLIN: I must say I wonder whether there are.
FRYE: I know it’s a difficult thing, but the great test of maturity is knowing when one is bored. I think that people are really bored out of their minds by what they get from the news media. What bores me is the expression of what is obviously hypocritical, as when a government official in Washington comes out with a statement on free trade or tariff or limiting the arms race and so on. Of course, he believes in God and he wants peace, but … It’s that kind of stuff—the excuses for thought and expression—that bores me.
CARLIN: What about things here in Canada? There’s another phrase that has struck me—“the tedium of the permanent identity crisis in Canada.” Does that creep into the daily media? Does that permeate what we do as Canadian journalists?
FRYE: I suppose it does, because the issue is usually something that has been thoroughly discussed already. To raise it again is to raise the practical certainty that there’ll be nothing new or original said about it.
CARLIN: That’s a rather daunting task for the journalist—trying to figure out something new to say about these subjects.
FRYE: But surely that’s what journalism is.
CARLIN: Well, one wonders sometimes, even given what you’re saying, whether what we’re doing is recasting information in understandable ways but perhaps in clichés, which, while understandable, become meaningless. You’ve talked about the Bible as the great code for European and Western literature and for our culture. Is journalism in a small way trying to use languages which recall that code? Or have they so misinterpreted that code as to become meaningless?
FRYE: They relate to that code at a very considerable distance, a distance of many centuries of the institutionalizing and accommodating of its language, again, to prefabricated forms of speech. The real reason why the Bible fascinates me as a literary critic is that its language comes out of direct experience. It’s not secondhand language. Naturally, when people are presented with that, their instinct is to blink and look away and turn to something which is more familiar and more reassuring.
CARLIN: Can we talk about that a little more—the difference between direct experience and secondhand language? Can you relate that to the way we work today? Are you saying that the writers were writing directly from things they saw, or just that it so infused their lives as to inspire their writing?
FRYE: Certainly the prophets were people who had suffered greatly in their own experience and had been persecuted for what they’d said, so that naturally they had nothing to waste on commonplace ideas or things that everybody knew. And the same thing happened to the Resistance press in France under the Nazis. There was no time to waste on chitchat. What you presented were the essential things that the people who picked up the journal had to know. That is really the function, I suppose, of our novelists and poets. They are dealing with the same kind of human experience that everybody else is going through, but they are straining it through an individual, distinctive, personalized utterance.
CARLIN: You seem to be suggesting almost that perhaps it wasn’t such a good thing that twentieth-century journalism moved away from the parti pris style of having various newspapers reflecting viewpoints. We’ve moved today into the so-called objective style, where the opinion is supposed to be relegated to one page of the newspaper, and the rest is supposed to be written in—I always put quotes around the words—“objective style.”
FRYE: Well, that is a difference in idiom or convention. For a time, of course, it produced a very considerable impact. I think that Time magazine got a reputation for being practically the voice of God in news simply because they cut out the editorial page. It established the convention, because what it said was the news.
CARLIN: Can we talk more about what’s important and what’s not important? We get a fair amount of mail on this program charging us and the media generally with missing the important stories. There’s one person who writes all the time and says we’re not talking enough about the U.S. conspiracy against various freedom-loving peoples of the world. Others who write say we’re missing other important stories. What do you think of the stories that are important that we haven’t been communicating?
FRYE: It’s difficult to give a coherent answer to that on all levels. When I pick up the morning paper, I find the correspondence column one of the things I turn to first simply because it records a lot of different ideas on what the newspaper should have been reporting. About the best we can do in that respect is to have a certain free play and to keep reminding ourselves that any act of selection, no matter who does it, is going to be conventionalized and is going to stress some things more than others.
CARLIN: When archaeologists or historians a couple of hundred years from now come back to try to find out what were the significant events of our day, are they going to find them in the archives of the CBC and on the front pages of the Globe and Mail?
FRYE: I doubt it very much. They will find out what is going on on the level of news, but actual history—what people will be interested in in the twenty-first century—is largely invisible to the news media. I remember looking at a retrospective television program on the Diefenbaker years in Parliament, and the television showed all the rowing in Parliament and all the seesawing back and forth. Finally a reporter got hold of that conscientious man Stanley Knowles and asked him what he thought of the Pearson regime, and he gave a list of the measures that had been put through.2 Well, with that answer you are in real history. But that’s what gets squeezed out. You have to remember that our lives are the history and that it’s what is very largely invisible to the news media that makes the history. What is going on here is made by the universities and by our writers and thinkers and so on. But that, again, doesn’t come in the idiom of news.
CARLIN: You say our lives are history. What does that imply? Are you talking about the lives of the thinkers of our society or just the lives of ordinary people?
FRYE: The lives of ordinary people. The whole process of living is a personalized process, naturally. And the rain of impressions of the news media conveys something impersonal, which, like your breakfast food, you have to eat and try to digest.
CARLIN: I guess we can’t avoid the subject—if we talk about culture, and I’ll have to put “culture” in quotation marks because the definitions would vary—of the CBC, which is always cited as either a cornerstone or a threat to Canadian culture, depending on your point of view. I’d be interested in hearing your reflections about the place of the CBC (this is the fiftieth anniversary, actually, of the CBC) and its relationship with the culture of Canada, particularly its relation to the thoughts you expressed earlier about culture springing from an individual location. Can a national organization like the CBC reflect that? Or does it tend to wash it down, to thin it out?
FRYE: Well, it could wash it down and thin it out, but I think the CBC people realize the importance of the regional in Canadian culture and are very well aware that what happens on Vancouver Island is a very different kind of culture from that in Cape Breton Island. I think that there are two extremes that we’re all aware of and want to keep away from. One extreme is total laissez-faire, where all the news media are simply the reflection of certain advertising pressures. The other extreme is the totalitarian handout of government propaganda that goes through all the media. In a democracy we want to have those two extremes fighting and knocking each other out so that we can get some kind of reality out of the middle ground. I think the combination of what are called private broadcasters and of nationally subsidized broadcasting is a rather healthy thing for a country. I was on the CRTC for some years and we had hearings for the CBC when its licence renewal came up.3 I was very deeply impressed by the way that people went to Ottawa from the Northwest Territories and British Columbia and Newfoundland in order to say, “Look, there are lots of things we don’t like about CBC Television”—it was mostly television—“but it’s ours and we want it.” It was simply a feeling that the CBC was something shared by people over a vast territory and that they were proud of the possession.
CARLIN: Perhaps we could talk in the few minutes we have left about you personally. I presume you’re in full flight on the second part of your work on the Bible. Perhaps you could tell us what you’re up to.
FRYE: I am, it’s true, trying to work out a book on the Bible and its relation to literature which will deal with the Bible as such and more with the way it infiltrated the imaginations of poets and dramatists and fiction writers in the Western world. That, of course, is a huge subject, one that I would never tackle if I were young and still had a reputation to make or break. The book has been considerably delayed partly through thinking of it as a sequel to another book. I have to start at square one and realize that whenever you begin a big project you begin with a reflection that you know nothing whatever and then go on from there, for everything you learn is bound to be new.
CARLIN: I’ve read that you’ve occasionally said—I’ve never been quite sure whether it was in jest or in seriousness—that if you had to do it all over again, maybe you wouldn’t want to be exactly the way you are. I’m wondering why that would be so.
FRYE: Well, I have heard people talk about what they would do if they had their lives to live over again, so naturally I’ve reflected on the samething. But I always come back to the fact that what I did was an expression of what I was. If I were going to do it over again, it would really be the same kind of thing because the same kind of person is behind it. But one can get bored with one’s personality after seventy or eighty years. And if I wanted to do it all over again, I would want to be somebody else to do it with.
CARLIN: You would want to be somebody else but to do the same kinds of things?
FRYE: Well, not somebody else, but someone with a different set of qualities and interests.
CARLIN: Like what?
FRYE: Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been very heavily specialized in the study of literature. Practically, I’m an absolute duffer. Anything mechanical comes apart in my hands at once. It would be nice to know what it would be like to live as a person who was a practical handyperson.
CARLIN: What’s beyond this “daunting”—I think that’s the word you use—this daunting prospect of the second book on the Bible? What do you see down the road?
FRYE: I haven’t any idea, because it’s blocking the view. Once I get through with it, then I will see what’s down the road.