André Arthur: the animator who liked to stir the cage


The death of former host André Arthur shakes the world of radio where he is remembered for his great talents as a communicator, despite a style that was not unanimous.

• Read also: Former radio host André Arthur has died

“It is a radio monument that is leaving. He was perhaps the greatest radio communicator, love him or dislike him, for or against his ideas. He forced discussion on several subjects. […] It’s as if we were listening to a Marvel film and that the main actor played the role of the good and the bad at the same time, ”reacted Bruno Perron, who collaborated for ten years with André Arthur on the airwaves. of CHRC in the 90s.

Working with the man nicknamed “the king of the airwaves” was both “demanding” and “enhancing” because “he knew how to highlight the work of others in an exceptional way”, he says.

Innate talent

If the ratings of the morningman were the envy of its competitors, its methods to achieve this did not leave anyone indifferent.

“He realized that if you solicited the animosity, the aggression, the resentment of the general population, you could make a tremendous fireworks display with that every morning that the Good Lord brings. That’s what he was doing and he was doing it well, some would say, since it generated big ratings for him, but the price to pay for that…”, evokes the analysis and former radio director , Claude Thibodeau.

“Mr. Arthur certainly brought what I would call a new model, new paradigms” he continues, speaking of a communicator with an “innate talent” whose processes could nevertheless be “the greatest intellectual dishonesty”, according to him.

Without compromise

“Arthur is one of the people who have transformed the profession, for better and for worse. We can clearly say that before Arthur, the radio was done in one way and after Arthur, it was done in a different way”, adds Alain Dufresne, director of the College radio television of Quebec.

“He was absolutely uncompromising in his vision of doing radio” even if there “are people scratched in the process”. “What he was basically saying was: ‘you don’t have the right to be flat on the radio,'” he says.

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Reference-www.journaldequebec.com

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