During his 30 years in radio and television with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Mark Starowicz has produced a number of the more influential current affairs and documentary programs in Canadian broadcast history.

     After beginning his career in newspaper journalism, Starowicz assumed the role of producer within the current affairs division of CBC Radio at the age of 24. During the 1970s, Starowicz produced a total of five CBC Radio programs, including Radio Free Friday, Five Nights, and Commentary. He received particular critical acclaim  for  his  reworking  of  As  It  Happens (1973-76) and the creation of Sunday Morning ( 1976-80), a three-hour weekend review.

     CBC News programming chief Peter Hermdorf provided Starowicz's entry into television in 1979 by appointing him chair of a committee examining the corporation's news programming strategies. This resulted in the controversial move of The National news broadcast to 10:00 P.M. from its 11:00 P.M. slot and the creation of The Journal, a current affairs and documentary program with Starowicz as executive producer. These decisions sought to take advantage of the larger audience numbers available at 10:00 (10 million viewers) than at 11:00 (4.5 million) and were part of the CBC's strategy in the 1980s to invest its decreasing resources in its traditionally strong area of news and current affairs.

     Despite Starowicz's lack of experience in television journalism, The Journal was a great success, both critically and in terms of viewership, and served to establish him as Canadian television journalism's new star. The Journal achieved an average 1.6 million viewers in its first year and comparable numbers during its ten­ year run. Rather than decreasing the audience shares of its competitors, the hour-long combination of The National (22 minutes) and The Journal (38 minutes) actually increased  the number of  total  viewers during the 10:00 P.M. time slot.

     To deliver The Journal, Starowicz compiled a young staff, many of whom, like Starowicz, had previously worked only in radio. Hosts during the broad­ cast's life included Barbara Frum (formerly of As It Happens), Mary Lou Finlay. Peter Kent, and Bill Cameron. Under Starowicz's leadership. The Journal produced a total of 2.772 broadcasts between 1982 and 1992, consisting of 5,150 interviews and an amazing 2,200 documentaries. The Journal was notable for the depth with which it would develop stories, dedicating an entire broadcast to a single documentary if the subject required. For the interview segment of the show, Starowicz successfully reinvented the "double-ender" technique (originally employed during the 1960s on the Columbia Broadcasting System [CBS's] See It Now), wherein the anchor would interview guests who appeared to the viewing audience to be projected on an in-studio screen. The high quality and volume of material were made possible by factors such as a staff of more than 100, a budget of approximately $8 million per year (1980 Canadian dollars). and producer­ reporter teams with as much as one month of lead time for story preparation.

     On the cancellation of The Journal in 1992, Starowicz accepted the position of executive producer of documentaries at the CBC. Since 1990, Starowicz has overseen the weekly documentary prime-time series Witness, and he has served as senior producer for Life and Times. The one-hour Witness consists of acquired, co-produced. and in-house documentaries  dealing  with  a diverse array of often socially and politically charged issues. Although Starowicz's role as executive producer emphasizes his capacity to orchestrate talent, he also has produced and directed his own documentaries, including The Third Angel (1991) and Red Capitalism (1993). He sees his role at CBC Documentaries as an opportunity to continue the strong documentary tradition in Canada, started in the 1940s by John Grierson and the National Film Board. Significantly. Starowicz was able to get the CBC management to agree to the broadcasting of "point-of-view" documentaries, breaking free of the somewhat mythological pursuit of journalist "objectivity."

     Starowicz regularly writes and lectures on issues of Canadian identity, history, and culture. He cites the absence of Canadian content in its own mass media and the dangers posed by U.S. cultural industries as key threats to Canada, and he has proposed countermeasures, such as the introduction of a tax on U.S. media imports, and continued public support for the CBC, the development of a second public national network, and the extended financing of independent film and television production. However, some might argue that his greatest contribution to the health of Canadian identity has been the highly successful documentary series Canada: A People's History, which he created and executive produced for the CBC. This 17-part, award-winning exploration of Canadian history, first broadcast in 2001, provided audiences with an intimate and lyrical reading of the forces and individuals that shaped Canadian society. The success of this series led the CBC to appoint Starowicz in 2002 to serve as executive producer of a new production unit, CineNorth, dedicated to creating high-quality documentaries for domestic broadcast, video, and international sales.