This column comes to you from London, England, a city amazed – though not entirely surprised – to have watched one of its most-lauded and highly paid TV hosts, Jeremy Clarkson, brought to his knees this week in an unexpected public beheading by the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Clarkson's firing is as astonishing as it is heartening, especially when public broadcasters the world over are struggling to keep standards high and costs low. Clarkson was a cash cow – not just with his hit motoring show, Top Gear, but the sheer force of his bombastic personality. He made buckets of cash for a broadcaster in desperate need of, well, buckets of cash. But here's the problem: He verbally ripped into and then punched someone on his staff. And as BBC chairman Tony Hall said in a statement released on Wednesday after an investigation, "For me, a line has been crossed. There cannot be one rule for one and one rule for another dictated by either rank or public relations and commercial considerations."
As a Canadian observer I can't help but contrast the method by which Clarkson was turfed – a fast, decisive and impressively transparent process – with CBC's epic bungling of the Jian Ghomeshi affair. While Ghomeshi's alleged workplace abuse was allowed to go unchecked and improperly investigated for years, Clarkson himself admitted in one his columns that BBC brass had put him on the naughty chair – one more strike and he was out.
When the inevitable strike happened (drunkenly, over a lack of hot meal at the end of a long day's shooting), the host was immediately put on hiatus, the show pulled from the air and an internal investigation commenced. There was none of CBC's internal faffing and finger-pointing. No self-protective victim-blaming (like CBC public affairs head Chuck Thompson, who tweeted several weeks back how glad he was 2014 "the year of the rat" was over – except that the year of the rat was in 2008). Clarkson was certainly never given the option to "go quietly" as Ghomeshi has insisted he was (though CBC denies this).
There are two major differences between these scandals that I think are instructive as far as comparisons go. The first is that Clarkson's offense is very much in keeping with his brand and, apart from getting him sacked, won't really hurt him. The guy has two national newspaper columns and a firm friendship with the prime minister – no harm will come to a hair on his whiskey-bloated face. Certainly it won't bother his global fan base, who love him precisely because he is the sort of bloke who'd resolve disputes with fisticuffs.
Ghomeshi, on the other hand, was accused of offenses that completely clashed with his diversity-loving, feminist, on-air persona. Ghomeshi was obsequiously polite where Clarkson is unapologetically rude. Ghomeshi made a great vegan meal of his sensitivity to issues of race, gender, disability, the environment – you name it, Jian was sensitive to it – while Clarkson made frat-boy jokes about non-white minorities, often in countries where they were not minorities at all.
If Clarkson and Ghomeshi were to get into the cozy confines of Studio Q and go head to head, I suspect it would not be pretty. Ghomeshi's velvet-voiced pseudo-tolerance might have made a jerk like Billy Bob Thornton look bad, but it wouldn't stand up to Clarkson's boarding school wit. Barbaric as he is, Clarkson can be genuinely funny. No one ever accused Ghomeshi of that. His preening self-regard didn't really lend itself to humour outside the occasional, state-approved, Margaret Atwood-joke (see every Moxy Fruvous lyric for details).
The second crucial difference between the two scandals is that while CBC is new to such spectacular falls from grace, the BBC is not. Whether it's stories of pedophile presenters such as Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris or the forced resignation of yet another Director General (there have been a few in recent years), BBC is accustomed to dealing with scandal within its ranks.
Unlike Canada, the U.K. is a heavily mediated society where famous people behave badly at their peril. The vociferousness of the press here results in intrusive behaviour like phone-hacking, but it also forces corrupt politicians to resign, hypocritical celebrities to be exposed and royal princes to explain the company they keep.
Like CBC, BBC has had its struggles. But it also understands the standard it holds itself to is more important than the personality cult of its biggest stars. By firing Clarkson swiftly and decisively, without engaging in any kind of cover up or hot-potato-passing, it has upheld the public trust at the expense of a viewership CBC could only dream of (350 million worldwide).
I won't miss Clarkson. As the British say, he had to go. But I'd take his cantankerous brutishness over the craven cowardice of someone like Ghomeshi any day.