PHOTO ESSAY

Most Valuable Players

Hockey card summaries of this year’s GG Performing Arts Awards winners

By Alec Scott

November 4, 2005

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MOSES ZNAIMER
Television producer, station manager
Born: Kulab, Tajikistan, U.S.S.R., 1942
Claims to fame: A popularizer of the male ponytail, Moses founded a television station in Toronto in 1972 that would eventually grow into the CHUM-Citytv conglomerate (which includes the various Citytv franchises, the MuchMusic stations and Bravo). After boosting his channel’s ratings by programming soft porn late in the evenings, Moses soon established a distinctive style for his flagship station, Toronto’s Citytv, with informal newscasts (handheld cameras, staffers working behind the anchors) and multi-ethnic on-air personalities. By giving ostentatiously hip and good-looking hosts carte blanche to explore particular topics, Moses has succeeded in producing internationally saleable programs, including Fashion Television, Movie Television, Book Television, The New Music — and, lest we forget, Electric Circus. The idea behind his Speaker’s Corner — a street-level booth that allows average citizens to vent on camera — has also been widely exported.
Trivia: Moses and his family escaped from the Eastern Bloc after the Second World War by rowing across the Spree Canal in Berlin in the middle of the night.
Quotable quote: “TV is as much about the people bringing you the story as the story itself.”