After over seventy-five years of invading our eyes, ears and minds with national and international news and information, the CBC is ready to open its own mind to a larger dialogue.

Friends of Canadian Broadcasting (FRIENDS) hosted a public forum dubbed “The CBC We Want” Tuesday afternoon in Innovation Park. The goal of the event was to foster an open discussion between key Hamilton media personalities and any Hamiltonians who had a bone to pick with the national media organization.

This dialogue was spurred on by the upcoming CBC license renewal, an event that is the first of its kind, as the CRTC reviews the funding allocated to the non-profit media provider. This event promised the direction of major concerns and suggestions towards the CRTC in time for the review process, the deadline for which is this Friday, and facilitated the procedure through the use of an individual video booth where attendees could film one-minute proposals to the review board.

“For many years, the CBC has been an integral player in promoting discussion,” said McMaster President Patrick Deane, as he commenced the event and welcomed to the stage the moderator and former prima ballerina Veronica Tennant.

“Many of us are disappointed in the continued budget cuts to the CBC,” said Tennant as she introduced the six panelists responsible for responding to questions raised by the audience later in the event, each an expert in the field in their own right.

The event marks the penultimate stop in the eight-city tour that has already hit Victoria to Halifax and most of central Canada, ending in Kingston on Oct. 11.

After a brief recess to meet the panelists, the event resumed and the floor was open to questions from the audience.

An audience member asked the panel if the CBC would become irrelevant in the future due to subsequent budget cuts. Philip Savage, McMaster Associate Professor of Communication Studies answered, “Canada and the CBC is the most efficient by far [in their funding model], the problem is when you get to that point when CBC can no longer work from a [non-profit] basis.”

The CRTC review process will begin after the deadline for submission closes this Friday, Oct. 12. For the first time in 76 years citizens of Canada have a chance to either redefine or maintain the mandate of the CBC to educate, enlighten and inform.

By: Ronald Leung

What’s the first thought that pops into your mind when someone mentions “mental illness”? A balding creature cackling to himself about his precious, an eerily-calm psychiatrist with a cannibalistic streak, or leather-faced chainsaw-wielding inbreds?  These images come from the media that surrounds us and, as unfortunate as this result, is where we get most of our perceptions – quite often subconsciously. We see something on our screen or in our pages and it marinates in our mind before it becomes a part of what we see and how we think. It’s not surprising that media portrayals of mental illness are not only false but also excessively negative. It’s difficult not to whip up the drama and details of the most gruesome murder of the year – that’s how you get more viewership. What’s worse is that news stories rarely ever contain the opinion of a person with a mental illness. It’s often only law enforcement or a health professional speaking on behalf of them, which leads to the perception that people with mental illness are unable of developing opinions or speaking on their own behalf.

Mental illness is often used as a weapon in the entertainment industry. It’s quite sad that a true and devastating sickness can be battered and manipulated into becoming not only a social stigma, but a grotesque or villainous character. A recent study showed that 72.1% of adult characters on television who were depicted as mentally ill, injured or killed others. In general, characters that were mentally ill were 10 times more violent than their co-stars. It’s not surprising that the reality is completely different. The majority of crime, about 95-97%, is committed by people with no mental illness. This huge difference between fiction and fact is feeding the negative rap that mental illness receives.

Not only is the problem located in the frequency that mental illness is displayed in the media, but also the method of portrayal. The most common stereotypical depictions of people with mental illnesses are rebellious free spirit, violent seductress, narcissistic parasite, mad scientist, sly manipulator, helpless/depressed female and comedic relief. The problem here is that these characters often have no identity outside of their “crazy” behavior – their mental illness becomes their one and only label. It becomes the point where the mental illness is the character’s main personality traits and the illness is the only way that character can be possibly defined.

There is also the tendency to automatically associate mental illness with simple-mindedness. In prime-time TV drama, more than 43% of mentally ill characters did not understand everyday adult roles and were often portrayed as lost and confused. These characters also spoke in very simple terms and grammar, and were also often shown to be helpless and dishevelled. Almost always they were poor and homeless in addition to being held by police for crimes that had little understanding or remembrance about.

The reality is that mental illness can strike anywhere and anyone – whether you are a student, professional, or retiree. However, the media depicts mental illness as something separate from general society. People who are mentally ill are often shown to be unemployed without family, friends or unrelated personal history. Mental illness does not discriminate against class, age, or popularity. The continued depiction of people with mental illnesses as separate from general society is just a continuation in describing them as almost subhuman. The fact that homelessness is commonly associated with mental illness perpetuates the impression that people with mental illness are dependent on others or that mental illness causes homelessness, especially since a discussion of the broader systemic issues that lead to homelessness is lacking. This view contributes to the picture that individuals with a psychiatric diagnosis are incapable of being productive members of society.

Not only is the perception of individuals who are mentally ill warped and twisted but the depiction of treatments and patient facilities is also often untrue. How many movies have you seen with the cold empty asylums filled with screaming patients and nurses wearing white starch-stiff uniforms? The inaccurate and unflattering stereotypes of the psychiatric profession misinforms the public and undermines the credibility of mental health care practitioners. In the media, mental health professionals were often show to be neurotic, ineffectual, mentally ill themselves, comically inept, self-absorbed, drug-addicted, foolish or outright idiotic. These portrayals reinforce the idea that helping others requires little skill or expertise. It’s not surprising that less than 33% of mentally ill patients in Canada seek professional health – depictions of mentally health practitioners as exploitative and mentally unstable do irreparable harm to people who are already hesitant to seek treatment.

Mental illness is not a violent death sentence, nor is it an outlier that only occurs to the homeless and people on the fringe of society. It is a common occurrence that is nothing to be ashamed of – despite what the media thinks. Ignoring the elephant in the room will not make it go away. Only by admitting to it will any true change happen.

Farzeen Foda 

& Sam Cumerlato

Senior News Editor & Silhouette Intern

The past 20 to 25 years in advertising history have seen some of the most popular trademark slogans. Many such popular advertisements of the past few decades originated in Canada through the work of Pirate Toronto, who donated an archive of over 50,000 radio and television advertisements to McMaster University’s Libraries.

The donated collection is “the single largest archive that we’ve recieved yet,” said Wade Wyckoff, Associate University Librarian for Collections. The archive consists of over 700 boxes and includes material from iconic brands such as Coca Cola and Pepsi, as well as preperatory materials from commercials like Becel’s “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,” series. It also features celebrities such as Leslie Nelson, Bob Newhart, Ellen DeGeneres, John Cleese and Jay-Z.

The collection contains some “behind the scenes work,” of famous advertisements, said Wyckoff.

“The biggest reason we wanted to donate it, was that we wanted it to be used as a teaching tool and be preserved,” said Pirate Toronto co-founder Terry O’Reilly, who explained that he and his colleagues wanted to put their work toward the betterment of the next advertising generation.

“I would have killed to have something like this available when I was in university,” said O’Reilly.

Pirate Toronto was founded in 1990 and has since, undertaken numerous “milestone projects,” said O’Reilly, such as the first cell phone commercials in the late 80s as well as election campaigns and some of the first commercials that began addressing the AIDS epidemic which was silenced for sometime before public awareness on this issue surfaced in the mainstream media, he explained.

The donation of the archive to McMaster was put in place in 2011, after which, the University’s libraries have been working on organizing the archive for use by students and faculty. The collection is now ready for use, and is located on the lower level of Mills Library in the Division of Archives and Research Collections, explained Wyckoff. The first installment of the donation consisted of 50,000 radio and television commercials, followed by an additional 25,000, noted O’Reilly.  The collection contains television and radio advertisements from 1990 to 2007, but also includes some of O’Reilly’s earlier work dating as early as 1982.

The archive has been received with enthusiasm from McMaster faculty looking to integrate the resource into course work.

“This is exactly the kind of thing we need to be doing in our department,” said Communication Studies and Multimedia professor,  Philip Savage. “It’s a lovely sort of communications crossover resource,” he said.

While housing the enormous database of advertising history, McMaster students now have access to final commercials from the pivotal time period, as well as all of the component parts that comprise a final television or radio advertisement, including but not limited to original and edited scripts, auditions as well as all files and correspondence between those involved in the development of each commercial.

Upon his decision to donate the company’s historical collection, O’Reilly contacted numerous universities across the country. He was met with immense enthusiasm, but had three criteria for the donation: the university would have to express a strong desire for the collection, provide an explanation of how the archive would be used and a large enough space to house the collection. McMaster was able to demonstrate fulfillment of all three criteria.

“McMaster had a deep desire for the archive,” said O’Reilly, explaining that the University was clear in their goals to put these archives toward studies in Business, Psychology, Communication Studies and Multimedia, as well as English, among others.

The collection will allow students in a range of faculties and disciplines to “follow the development of commercials… and study how media and advertising has evolved,” said Wyckoff.

A next step for the archive is the digitalizing of the donation through an online project on behalf of The Canadian Advertising Museum, to build a web-based archive of the Canadian advertising industry.

“We wanted to preserve the works, rather than allow it to be lost in the sands of time,” said O’Reilly.

A formal reception was held at McMaster’s Ron Joyce Centre on Feb. 15, to celebrate the inauguration of the collection, where O’Reilly and his fellow colleagues discussed their thrilling experience creating what would become one of the greatest masterpieces in Canadian media history.