Fresh Air: The Private Thoughts of a Public Broadcaster

Julie Rekai Rickerd is a Toronto-based broadcaster and public-relations
consultant.

After 25 years as a CBC radio broadcaster and television host, Peter
Downie is angry with the media in general and the CBC in particular. He
is highly critical of the corporation’s “mismanagement” in
programming, expenditures, and downsizing. He abhors the “suits” and
the technology that “dehumanize” and “falsify” television
reporting. He numbers the “inspirational” interviews he did for Man
Alive on the fingers of one hand and dismisses the rest of his work as
disastrous or fraudulent.

The rawness and depth of Downie’s anger and regret clouds his
narrative and renders it repetitive. His personal problems and
insecurities follow him from New Brunswick to Toronto, Calgary, Sudbury,
Montreal, and back to Toronto. A catharsis of sorts takes place after
his interviews with people of “spirit,” such as Jean Vanier, the
Dalai Lama, Sir Laurens van der Post, and Roman Catholic Zen master
Sister Elaine MacInnes. But it is only when he is let go from the CBC
and exchanges life in the media for life in a remote area of Quebec that
he feels relief.

This memoir is unsettling and provokes impatience. Downie comes across
as a self-absorbed man who, during the course of an enviable 25-year
career in broadcasting, could not come to terms with reality; who could
not keep his professional and personal lives apart, who lacked the
maturity to work within a system that he claims, rightly or wrongly, was
impossible to change.