Peter Gzowski's real contribution.

When CBC icon Peter Gzowski died in late January, the eulogies informed us something irreplaceable had been lost from Canadian journalism. Sadly, that is probably untrue. Gzowski's legacy will undoubtedly live on for years. Canadians will be poorer for it.

There is no question the long-time host of CBC Radio's Morningside was a truly gifted interviewer and shaper of stories. If he had passed on to future journalists only the standards he set for those critical elements of the craft, he would deserve every verb, noun and adjective of the lionizing that followed his death.

Gzowski also bequeathed, alas, a degree of media tunnel vision that imperils the very life of free-ranging democratic debate in this country. Peter Gzowski didn't invent the attitude that afflicts newsrooms nation-wide: the reflexive sneer at any idea deemed to lie beyond the barbed wire of entrenched liberal orthodoxy. He did, however, perfect it as a habit. He not only gave it his personal imprimatur, he used his immensely powerful podium to promote and protect it.

At his peak in the 1990s, Gzowski was CBC English-language radio. He dominated publicly-funded programming for three hours every morning, five days a week, then for a repeated hour in the evening. Four hours a day of one man's cultural and political preferences, on the most powerful broadcaster in the land, would be bad enough. When those preferences were as overtly crabbed and intolerant as Gzowski's, the situation was beyond bad. It was downright dangerous.

Nor is it sound to dismiss the danger because of the paucity of the CBC radio audience. The illuminati who form and feed Canadian opinion understood well Gzowski's powerful reach. It's why, figuratively speaking, they lined up daily at 3. a.m outside his office like pushy parents trying to get their offspring into a top-notch school. They begged face time with Mr. Morningside because they knew he could sell everything from their poetry to their politics.

Toward those he considered dogmatically correct, Gzowski was the archetypal avuncular uncle. On occasion, especially in the presence of certain Canadian demigods, he leapt so far beyond his normal bounds of microphone-friendly familiarity that listeners could envi-sion him prostrate on the studio floor engaged in something sycophantic with his guest's shoes.

Who can forget, for example, the infamous interview with Leonard Cohen when that great poetic fraud's addled answers were barely audible above the sounds of Gzowski's slurping tongue? I have always wondered, as well, whether the kissing sounds that dominated his last interview with Pierre Trudeau came from Gzowski's lips pressing against The Great Canadian Helmsman's hands- or some other part of his body.

Those who failed to pass ideological muster faced a fiercer radio fate. Their punishment took two basic forms: freezing or flailing. They were either frozen out of any chance to appear on the program, or they were invited into the studio as involuntary participants in a sadomasochistic ritual.

There may have been crueller bullying of a guest on Canadian airwaves than Gzowski inflicted on author William Gairdner when the latter published The War Against the Family in the mid-90s. I have yet to hear anything, though, exceeding that exercise in unrestrained, unwarranted and utterly outrageous verbal abuse. When not arrogantly belittling a man clearly his intellectual superior, Gzowski displayed ill-tempered impatience to get Gairdner off the air. Why? Because he considered Gairdner a social conservative and therefore unworthy of the most basic courtesy.

Ted Byfield, a truly great Canadian journalist, suffered similar indignities on those rare occasions when he was allowed to risk contaminating Morningside listeners with his socially conservative ideas. Byfield's mistreatment encapsulates the real damage Gzowski did to this country journalistically and democratically. Perhaps no Canadian aside from Preston Manning understands as intuitively or comprehensively the politics of both Western Canada and socially conservative Christians as does Ted Byfield. Certainly, no individual articulates them more effectively. Yet for a decade, even as the Reform Party was rising to official opposition status, Gzowski could not feign interest in listening. It's what makes it so sad that a generation of Canadians, including journalists, were so eager to listen to him.

Peter Stockland is the editor in chief for the Montreal Gazette. His column appears in every other issue.