Journalists will be admitted to the Bell Center on Tuesday evening to honor Karl Tremblay, but television cameras will not be on site.
A family decision that leaves me at a loss. To my knowledge, since television allowed live broadcasts, most people who have had a national or state funeral have had their funerals televised. I don’t know the reasons that motivated the singer’s family, but the fact that the 14,000 or 15,000 tickets that we were able to get for free for the ceremony were gone in less than 30 minutes clearly shows that the decision left thousands unhappy will leave admirers behind.
A broadcast of the ceremony would have eased their grief and made them forget that they had not received tickets. It would also have given hundreds of thousands of Quebecers the feeling of “following” their idol to the end. The 90,000 fans who attended the Plains of Abraham last summer are proof that Karl Tremblay and his group have captured the hearts of Quebecers.
A great frustration
Tuesday night’s ceremony will be broadcast on social media, but it’s not just social media that has built the reputation of the Cowboys Fringants here and throughout the French-speaking world. Her success is still no stranger to television. You don’t sell more than a million albums without a medium like television having something to do with it. As often as television has been present at a national funeral or ceremony of this magnitude, it has never turned it into a circus or a carnival.
- Listen to the interview Guy Fournier gave Richard Martineau in his column QUB radio :
It is too late to return to the matter, but Mathieu Lacombe, the Minister of Culture and Communications, who did not hide his tears or his sadness when he appeared on television on the day of Karl Tremblay’s death, was, in my opinion, the perfect one Mann to warn the family that such a decision would cause “national” frustration.
What a question from Masbourian!
After Pierre Karl Péladeau, Mirko Bibic, head of BCE (Bell and Bell Media), was on Monday on Tout un matin, the morning show of Radio-Canada, hosted by Patrick Masbourian. Like PKP last week, Bibic pleaded the cause of private broadcasters, demanding that their costly regulatory obligations be reduced and that foreign platforms be forced to participate in the production and broadcast of Canadian programming, as we demand of our cable operators and broadcasters. Ultimately, a certain percentage of the billions in revenue generated by foreign platforms in Canada should be paid to our news media, as fragile as television is.
Finally, Bibic reiterated, as PKP had done, that our television channels are in big trouble. Patrick Masbourian asked why private broadcasters continue to exist if their situation is so difficult. To ask such a question, you really have to work for a company that is protected from bankruptcy by public money. If no entrepreneur had had the courage in the early 1960s, there would still only be CBC/Radio-Canada and the National Film Board, but very few independent producers and far fewer creators. Before I had even finished phrasing his question, I thought Masbourian was already regretting it. Not without reason.
