Memo to Susan Marjetti, station manager of CBC Radio One, Toronto. (Walt knows that -- as a toon always responds to shave-and-a-haircut -- you can't resist reading something with your name in it.)
Susan, you have not yet demonstrated to the Canadian Ministry of Enforced Diversity that you have done everything possible to make your station "sound like Toronto looks".
The problem is that it's radio, not TV. Some of the presenters and guests, especially on your execrable morning drive-time show, may well be members of oppressed minority groups, but we don't always know that. We can't see whether they're brown, black, white or striped.
It's pretty easy to pick out the Jamaicans, Colombians, Indians and gays by sound along. But some of the accents are indistinguishable, at least to Walt's Toronto-based agents. It's hard to tell the Congolese from the Haitians. And some of the less recently arrived vizmins have virtually no accent, so they sound pretty much "white-bread"...or white-bred.
There's a problem though with the LGBT crowd, not so much the hissing homos but the lesbians, who sometimes sound like, errr, female business executives. And let's not forget the disabled, "locomotion-challenged", "vision-impaired" or whatever the latest PC terms are. Unless they say something like "I'm blind", how are listeners supposed to know.
So, here's Walt's suggestion. At the start of each interview or commentary, could the host please say which box is being checked, like this: "The next speaker is a black, transgendered, homeless double amputee." Then we can keep score, kind of like listening to a baseball broadcast.
Yours for diversity... Walt
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