How Government-Funded Media Create Ruination and Despair
Canada's CBC has very nearly destroyed the richest country in the world
Every public broadcaster in the world has one client, the government. As such it is never independent. Perhaps in a more ethical time, when the plurality was Christian and you had to go to church if you wanted to keep your job and standing in the community. On Sundays you were warned of iniquity, that the wages of sin were an entirely unpleasant death and subsequent condemnation in the afterlife. Even the full-on atheist was cautious, and often that was enough to keep civic peace. Lying, mis-representing, destroying and the imperative to love one’s neighbor, that’s gone now. Now it is winning by any means necessary and truth be damned.
And with that, the media, especially state media became the enemy of the people. Canada's “polis” if you like, is in full-on rebellion. Covid, the lockdowns, the preposterous carbon taxes, the horrors of vaccine damage which affects almost every family now, the flood of migrants, the disastrous miscalculations about legal street drugs, the skyrocketing price of energy, the shutdown of LNG, the homeless encampments in every city, and the debt ratio - the largest debt-to-GDP in the G7 - all these policies were viciously defended and aggressively promoted by the CBC, which eats up half the media dollars in the country.
The public broadcaster, once loved to excess by every Canadian is now widely hated, and last time I looked, its “news” is watched by fewer than 2% of the population. Admittedly, its morning drive-time radio news might take 10% of the market, but dollar for dollar more than 60% of us want it permanently shuttered.
The following is an analysis of just how that happened: This is an excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You, published on September 10th.
And when I say the richest country in the world, I mean in this way. We are the second largest in geographic terms, with a small albeit highly educated population, but we sit on the greatest natural riches in the world without parallel. No other country comes close. Per capita, every single Canadian could live like a Saudi prince, creating the most extraordinary culture the world has ever seen. Instead, we get by on 60% of the average American’s income, and we are, generally, depressed and fearful of the future. This is 100% the fault of our media, and to a lesser extent, government “art”.
The CBC: From Crown Jewel to Jacobins
By Elizabeth Nickson
The Beast
Renegade governmental organizations are virtually impossible to rein in, especially if they have careened off the rails into destructive action. Take, for the sake of argument, the FBI or Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S., or the World Health Organization and the United Nations internationally, or the plethora of sovereign and sub-sovereign health ministries that went AWOL during COVID-19. If threatened, a throng of defenders rise, vocal to the point of shrill, defending the original idea, refusing to look at the slavering beast all that public money hath wrought.
“Reform or die,” says prime minister after president after premier. Nodding subservience is followed by…nothing. Commissions are formed, recommendations are made. Cosmetic changes ensue. Like rogue elephants they continue to roam the heights of the culture, braying and stomping and breaking things. Power, once acquired, needs to be wrenched from bleeding hands.
In Canada, that raging elephant is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Founded in 1936, at last count, the CBC sprawls across the country in twenty-seven over-the-air TV stations, eighty-eight radio stations, a flotilla of websites, podcasts, streaming TV, and multiple satellite radio stations. Its mandate is high-flown, to connect the multiple city-states of the country, its frozen north and isolated rural communities via dozens of offices big and small. It broadcasts in English, French, and eight indigenous languages.
The CBC’s Toronto headquarters, finished in 1993, was a statement of extreme optimism at a time when the corporation was widely loved. Designed by Philip Johnson, its cost $381 million. It is de-constructivist in form, a symbol of the CBC’s purpose, which is to re-conceive Canada’s founding as racist and the country in need of radical reform led by itself. Its orthogonal grid is “interrupted by skewed elements,” its interior dominated by a green elevator shaft set at an angle to the building grid. Outside, a forbidding Soviet box, windows are outlined in CBC red. Inside, it’s confusing, echoing, and replete with empty studios. Despite effulgent funding, the aura of failure wears on those still employed. They don’t understand why they are no longer astride the culture.
A behemoth, it demands $1 billion and $240 million of direct subsidy from the government every year, and rakes in several hundred million more through licensing, advertising, and production subsidy. It eats up, say some analysts, half the media dollars spent in the country, yet is watched on its twenty-seven TV stations by fewer than 5 percent[RK1] of Canadians. Its news outlets perform worse. Only 1.75 percent watch CBC news on broadcast channels or cable. The National, its star suppertime news show in Toronto, is watched by fewer than half a million people, while private-sector competitors in the same city crest at 1 million or even 2 million.
In June 2023, the editorial board of Canada’s long-time national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, put its rather large bear paw down and suggested shuttering CBC TV entirely, and focusing on digital and radio, which are relatively successful. The editorial board (acting in its own institutional interest), pointed out that digital advertising for CBC should be halted because a subsidized CBC should not eat up ad dollars in a tight market. The editorial board also stated that more than 24 million CBC digital visitors a month is substantial. It is not. The media is undergoing explosive growth in every country; it is only legacy media that is not growing. Routinely in the U.S., popular digital sites host tens of millions of visitors a day, and more than a billion a year. Using that metric, the CBC reaches about 10 percent of the available digital audience.
Most Canadians agree with The Globe and Mail. In fact, in mid-2023, 62 percent of Canadians wanted it shut down, saying they would vote for conservatives if they promised to do so. Not reined in, not given less taxpayer money, not privatized, but shut down, its many buildings, its wealth of equipment sold, and its employees scattered to the winds. Among some 30 to 40 percent, the mother corporation (as it calls itself) is actively hated, loathed. When Pierre Poilievre, the popular conservative candidate leader, promised to shut down the CBC, his audience rose for a prolonged standing ovation.
How did this jewel of Canadian culture which, for sixty years was held in near reverence by every sentient Canadian, come to this?
The Original Purpose
Public broadcasters, in general, engage in state-building, in national and cultural integration. They “provide social cement,” they build bridges, “witness” and connect. Or are supposed to. They are meant to be free, in order to serve those without the funds for cable or streaming subscriptions. In Ireland, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTE) provides an alternative to the deluge of British programming, those in Nordic countries promote “equality, solidarity and belonging,” and in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) sets itself against the dominance of wicked corporatist freebooter Rupert Murdoch.
In Canada, the CBC is meant to provide a Canadian voice in a country where, as the old saw goes, Canadian culture is in a distinct minority. This purpose has been served well in French Canada, where Radio Canada (best said with a French accent) is widely loved and has managed to act as a beacon for Quebecois culture, an impressive amount of it created to flout, humiliate, and laugh at the maudit Anglais to the south, east, and west.
The digital and streaming explosion of the early aughts[RK2] left the CBC flailing to catch up, and this is typically given as the reason its audience numbers are so poor. However, this is not the case for the CBC’s radio stations which are the only division of the corporation that truly service small-city and rural Canada and can compete in an admitted fever of ever-expanding competition. Their drive-time shows can reach as many as 20 percent of the audience, and are often in first place in the ratings.
There are other rather more convincing arguments for its decline. CBC hosts on radio and TV have historically been beloved figures. Today, few Canadians could name one of them; personalities seemingly are not wanted at the CBC anymore but Canadians still love them. Canadian YouTubers routinely attract hundreds of thousands of viewers and, in Jordan Peterson’s case, tens of millions, trouncing the “mother corporation” by orders of magnitude. Podcasts are popular, but half of those listened to in Canada are[RK3] [EN4] by rightwing Americans. Which indicates that, even given its radio successes, the corporation has lost touch with Canadians. It simply does not have news or entertainment product strong enough to compete in the new marketplace. And, as the proliferation of new media in Canada proves, its editorial policy is so backward, almost every single digital opportunity has been missed.
In contrast to received opinion—which is that the culprit is the explosion in digital and streaming outlets—the answer to the corporation’s distress is far simpler, and far more reparable. A series of bad political decisions have been made by policy chiefs who craft the corporation’s editorial policy every year. Reputedly that secretive department costs taxpayer $180 million annually, but it is as closeted as the Kremlin and few even admit it exists. But it does, and it is those policy setters who have created the wholesale repudiation of the CBC via a rough-shod political brinksmanship that was meant entirely to remake Canada in a fresh, socialist image. And to destroy the one political party standing in the way.
Political Headwinds and Terrible Decisions
The Canadian public’s loss of affection for the CBC began with” [RK5] [EN6] their twenty-seven-year-long attack on Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, which started in the late 1980s with his election and ended only in 2011 with his exoneration by the Oliphant decision, a commission forced by [RK7] [EN8] the media after repeated failed attempts to destroy Mulroney. The goal, it appears in retrospect, was not only to ruin Mulroney, who saw Canada as a potential capitalist titan using its vast natural resources, but to salt the earth so that no such animal could rise again. Like the later “Russian collusion” hoax employed against Donald Trump in the U.S., the Mulroney attacks were based on hate via creating a storm of noise and accusations, falsified evidence, and an egregious waste of taxpayer money. Like the Russia hoax, nothing was found. That was not the point. The point was to ruin Mulroney, deflect criticism, and silence conservative voices.
Mulroney, a brash-to-the-point-of-vulgar Irishman from Montreal, rode in on Ronald Reagan’s coat tails with the North American Free Trade Agreement and the 1980s private-sector boom. Journalists in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle hated him, and as an exhaustive study done at the time demonstrated, more than 90 percent of journalists in Canada were liberal[RK9] [EN10] or, more likely, socialist. In fact, as Barry Cooper and Lydia Miljan found in their 1993 book Hidden Agendas: How Journalists Influence the News, it was almost impossible to work in Canada’s media as a conservative, unless you were tightly tied to the financial pages, and even then, if you had little to no profile as a columnist.
Immediately upon Mulroney’s election, the CBC and the national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, went on the attack. One investigative reporter, Stevie Cameron, who worked for both, grabbed the beat and did not let go. What happened was a thorough-going illustration of a political hit job disguised as journalism.
Mulroney, possessed, it was thought, of an egregiously ambitious wife, was accused of taking a $300,000 cash bribe for awarding a 1988 Airbus contract. He had over his ten years in office acquired a “friend,” Karlheinz Schreiber, a fixer/lobbyist who trolled capital cities for his clients. Schreiber, a native of Germany, was said to have promised Mulroney a job as a lobbyist when his ministership was over. In the end, this dubious choice in friends was the only charge that landed after twenty years of parallel investigations by the CBC and The Globe and Mail, a ten-year investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, several court cases, and finally a formal commission.
The CBC program The Fifth Estate produced nine documentaries trying to pin kickbacks on Mulroney, using as a principal source an accountant and friend of Schreiber who had spent time in Swiss, Italian, and American prisons. The newsmen were convinced by this man, Giorgio Pelossi, that Mulroney had a secret Swiss bank account in which he had allegedly stashed millions, and petitioned the Swiss government to release the evidence. Neither the millions nor the Swiss bank account were ever found.
Finally, Mulroney had had enough and sued the CBC for libel. He won and then won again on appeal. These two court cases and decades-long investigations cost the CBC $15 million. Publishers and editors—there were several books[RK11] [EN12] —allowed reporters to use dubious sources, contributing to the of one[RK13] of the publishers, Key Porter Books. Schreiber, who was under deportation orders, told a Fifth Estate host on air that he would do anything not to be deported. The CBC ran with his “evidence” anyway.
Despite losing twice in court, the CBC continued its crusade and in 2010, twenty-two years after the Airbus contract was awarded, conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was forced to empanel a commission that cost the Canadian taxpayer another $14 million. Justice Oliphant found that “nothing inappropriate occurred during the meetings that Mr. Schreiber had with Mr. Mulroney.”
The CBC even commissioned Mulroney: The Opera, a $3 million and $800,000 film supposed to be shown in theaters first and on the CBC second. According to columnist Brian Lilley, the film portrayed Mulroney as an “American wanna-be with no ethics and an unquenchable thirst for power.” It was so terrible that not only did it not air on CBC, the CBC took its name off the disaster. Naturally, it was praised by The Globe and Mail.
During Steven Harper’s prime ministership, the CBC led an attack on four nominally conservative senators who had claimed expenses in hometowns that they rarely visited. This was unfortunate, but a well-worn pattern. A few paid back those expenses—the largest bill was for $150,000—and three were criminally charged and acquitted, but not before their lives had been shredded. The “scandal” over relatively small sums was meant to counter the rising suspicion of Canadians that the CBC and the government had run amok with spending, and, in a masterful sleight of hand, proffered visible conservatives as punching bags. The “investigations” mirrored the attack on Mulroney and, as meant, affected the 2015 election, which was won by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party.
By then, Canadians, particularly those right of center, were sharply aware that Liberal scandals, far more egregious in terms of money misallocated, were ignored or glossed over. By 2011, after the CBC again lost with the Oliphant Commission it had forced, the organization had lost 30 to 40 percent of the country along with it.
In 2010, Prime Minister Stephen Harper commissioned a report from the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications to come up with ways to rescue the CBC. More ads, the cessation of in-house cultural programs, playing recordings, and selling off all its studios and buildings were among the recommendations. In response, the CBC spent the next three election seasons—2015, 2019, and 2021—attacking conservatives with its every breath. In Justin Trudeau, the ideal leftwing pretty boy willing to be puppeted for power, the CBC had finally found a politician to love.
On the campaign trail, Trudeau and his team promised to increase the CBC’s funding. The CBC in return mirrored Trudeau’s campaign of conservative-hatred, oil-sands hatred, and full-throated promotion of the “climate change” narrative. Harper, a stolid man married to reason, was subjected to daily character assassination, his every move portrayed as evil. When the CBC ran out of attacks on Harper, evangelical Christians, George W. Bush, most Americans, and “the extreme Right,” an almost psychotic hatred of Donald Trump and his “deplorables” poured from all 127 stations and their satellites all day, every day. There was simply no opposing view allowed, except those of nominal conservatives, tamed submissives brought on to bleat and cower.
Since Trudeau’s victories in 2015, 2019, and 2021, the CBC has enjoyed bumps in its annual budget by hundreds of millions of dollars, despite its basement-level ratings. And most conservatives who are not politicians are intimidated into silence. Many will not answer the phone if the CBC calls and dodge on-air invitations, effectively cancelling themselves. It is simply too dangerous to counter the force and fury of the CBC. In this, the policy chiefs won their battle and very nearly destroyed conservatism in Canada. While also managing to destroy a beloved institution and arguably, their own futures.
Why Don’t They Love Us Anymore?
It was the betrayal of the coronavirus pandemic that took the CBC from a rough 35 percent wanting reform to 62 percent wanting it shuttered in its entirety. During the spring of 2023, the citizen-funded National Citizens Inquiry travelled the country taking testimony from doctors, nurses, scientists, the vaccine-injured, morticians, and public health officials. Two former employees of the CBC, both veteran journalists with sterling careers, reported what had happened. One, Marianne Klowak, anguished by the betrayal of her profession, told the story from the inside. The other, Rodney Palmer, who had reported from Beijing during the SARS epidemic, closely tracked the breakdown of the journalism profession via its accommodation made with governments and NGOs, compromised Canada Research Chairs (a government-funded chain of research fellowships), and the vaccine industry.
Who were we to withhold information that the public needed to know and had a right to know in order to make an informed decision? It tore me apart. We failed our audience, we let them down. It was a crushing burden.
—Marianne Klowak
“We betrayed our audience, we betrayed their trust.” Klowak, an award-winning thirty-four-year veteran at CBC Manitoba was used to having her stories turned around in a day, aired on TV, radio, and the web without question.
We depended on our reputation for excellence over the years and used that reputation to effectively shut down one side of the truth. How were we doing that? We branded the doctors and experts we used as competent and trustworthy and those who challenged the government narrative, despite their reputations, as dangerous and spreading disinformation. It changed so fast it left me spinning. The rules changed overnight. It was a collapse of journalism. We changed from newsgathering to pushing propaganda.
People called, emailed, and stopped her on the street, asking her what was going on, why wasn’t the CBC reflecting their concerns? A province-wide study showed that over 60 percent were worried about the safety of the vaccine, but any story she proposed about safety concerns was shut down. Every story—about people who had lost jobs because of vaccine hesitancy, the vaccine injured, families broken, family members [RK14] ostracized, depressed university students, suicides from lost businesses and incomes—that countered the government’s narrative was refused.
By early 2021, she found that the language in story meetings had changed as well. Despite only 4 percent refusing the vaccine for religious reasons, anti-vaxxers were labeled as religious nuts, uneducated, rural. “We were laughing at them, ridiculing them, it was pejorative…the opposite of journalistic practice.” Klowak’s breaking point came after Israel was starting to report evidence of inflamed heart muscles among vaccinated teenagers and people were calling her, worried about vaccinating their children. At the same time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had noted on its website that there had been rare cases of myocarditis among young people.
Her story about these side effects was sent to Toronto where it languished for several months in the CBC’s own freshly created “public health unit” before it was returned with the instruction to use instead a group of experts chosen by CBC management, who claimed there was no risk from the vaccine. She refused and the story was killed. In the meantime, many parents had been forced to vaccinate their children.
After another story was spiked, this one about a young woman runner with irreversible heart disease after vaccination, Klowak took early retirement, but not before requesting extensive exit interviews with local and national editorial types. Her concerns were dismissed. Brodie Fenlon, the corporation’s editor-in-chief, stated that he thought the CBC had performed well.
The CBC is a public entity, we pay for it, it broadcasts on the public airwaves and we expect them to tell us the truth because they’ve done it for fifty years.
—Rodney Palmer
Rodney James Palmer had been a TV presenter, producer, reporter, and a ten-year veteran of the CBC, working in Israel and India as a bureau chief, and notably in Beijing during the SARS outbreak. Palmer had noticed a distinct difference in the response of the Chinese to COVID-19, especially by their quarantining Wuhan, and, his suspicion triggered, bent[RK15] [EN16] to studying the rollout of the pandemic.
He observed that a week into the pandemic, the CBC’s star reporter, Adrienne Arsenault, had run a story speculating how to respond if “your father” thought that China had created the virus. She went on to lecture her audience on how to counter such “misinformation” and to use “trusted sources” from “legitimate organizations.” Palmer pointed out that in the beginnings of any pandemic, all information is necessary for correct analysis. “What evidence did she have?”
He discovered that Arsenault had used as her source an organization called First Draft, which emerged in March 2020 to counter “vaccine misinformation” and recommend the use of only “trusted sources.” First Draft supported a pro-vaccine narrative, but Arsenault didn’t mention that. Further, Palmer pointed out that in the same month, both The Washington Post and Vanity Fair had published deeply researched pieces raising suspicions about the Wuhan lab, but the CBC was already telling Canadians not to trust their own family members.
A few weeks later, Brodie Fenlon announced on his blog that the CBC had joined four organizations—First Draft, Project Origin, the Journalism Trust Initiative, and the Global Task Force—whose focus was to counter “misinformation.” One, the Trust Project, was joined by several dozen newspapers and broadcasters all over the world with the same mandate: to assert “trust” against “misinformation.” Their purpose: “to develop a consensus and a single strong voice around the issues facing public media worldwide.” In public media, The Trust Project was joined by the BBC, ABC (Australia) France-TV, KBS (Korea), ZDF (Germany), and SVT (Sweden). Palmer wondered what possible congruence the CBC would have with the Korean Broadcasting System (and why the word “truth” was no longer in use). He observed that developing “a single strong voice” was in direct opposition to actual journalism.
Palmer pointed out that the CBC’s Marketplace program had reported eight hundred social media posts that it judged to be “misinformation” to the Center for Digital Hate, and complained when only 12 percent were taken down. “Who at the CBC was the arbiter of the truth, when Canadians prefer to determine truth for themselves?” asked Palmer. How dare “the CBC promote a new identifiable group of Canadians and foment hate against them?”
Many journalists, some former, some having resigned during the pandemic, have gone on record to protest the corporation’s extreme bias. Others have left because the editorial policy has shifted from news gathering to promotion of the other-sexed and marginalized people of color and disability, whereby every story has to include some element reflecting the persecution of the less-abled by white supremacists. And while this is yet another reason for the CBC’s audience shifting away, it does not explain the active dislike and distrust exhibited by the public at present. The betrayal of trust, ironically, was everything. Klowak, before she retired, called around to journalists in the CBC and at other newsrooms, asking if her experience was typical. It was, but many were, unlike her, in mid-career and afraid to lose their positions.
Then came the trucker protest.
During the trucker protest, Justin Trudeau’s behavior mirrored his father’s punitive actions against violent French-Canadian separatists in 1970. The FLQ (the Quebec Liberation Front) had kidnapped two public officials and killed one of them. Trudeau on the CBC and in other media, drew an equivalence. He was able to do this because on the second day of the massive protest in Ottawa, three photographs appeared of a Nazi flag, the American Tea Party flag, and the Confederate flag. These three photos were subsequently tracked down to timing, photographer, location, and lighting and are believed today to have come from the Prime Minister’s Office. Two photos were by photographers who had taken official portraits of Trudeau. A CBC journalist was the first to tweet the photos, refusing to reveal his source. Trudeau used these photographs as a pretext to refuse to meet with the protestors. The CBC aired the photographs repeatedly, skewing public opinion against the truckers. During the protest, the CBC aired one blatantly critical piece after another and at no time interviewed a protestor, despite the protestors being right outside the broadcaster’s Ottawa studios.
According to reporters on the ground and subsequent investigations, it took the government two weeks to bring in the numbers of police deemed necessary to shutter the protest. The morning the shut-down happened, the protesters were faced by a phalanx of black-clad, Kevlar-coated men in battle order. None of the uniforms carried insignia. What looked like a winter carnival of people who had been cruelly separated and isolated for two years, was swiftly shut down in a few brutal days, during which police rode a horse over an elderly woman, and organizers were jailed without charge for weeks. The CBC characterized protestors as rednecks, and as American-sympathizers, ignorant and anti-science, and claimed that money was coming in from American Republicans who wanted to take over Canada. Twenty million dollars were confiscated by Go Fund Me and Give Send Go[RK17] [EN18] , the money returned to the donors, on the order of Trudeau’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland. Freeland then froze the bank accounts of ordinary people, waitresses and clerks, who had donated as little as $50 to the truckers. Despite the fact that the protestors were, by all accounts, 20 percent people of color, all were dubbed racist. So much for knitting the country together.
The CBC has flagrantly betrayed the public trust and that fact is now reflected in its rampant unpopularity. Founded to “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences,” it has become a bully, a hysteric sowing division between every conceivable cohort, black against white, indigenous against settler, the other-sexed against “normals,” and especially creating hatred against conservatives. By every conceivable metric the CBC has failed.
Moreover, it has almost destroyed the country’s fiscal integrity by becoming a shrill advocate for destructive public policies such as aggressive “climate change” mitigation in the coldest, most treed country in the world, thereby gutting tehe one industry—oil and gas—upon which one-third of the nation’s economy depends. Canadians now rank first among the G7 for debt-to-income ratio, and it is the public broadcaster’s prejudice and ignorance, above any other cultural institution, that is responsible.
Welcome to Absurdistan is entirely reader supported. Frankly, I think the above demonstrates you can only trust independent media, based on your own judgment on the integrity and experience of the journalist. You can’t trust anything else. Please consider an inexpensive annual subscription. Below you will find citations and further reading.
Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. You can read in depth policy papers about various elements of the environmental junta here: https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethNickson
ihttps://www.westernstandard.news/alberta/cbc-slammed-for-misleading-funding-sources-graphic/article_cded1ac8-dec5-11ed-b921-23fbff72063b.html
iihttps://nationalpost.com/news/politics/liberals-move-to-modernize-cbc-making-public-broadcaster-less-reliant-on-advertising
iiiThe Canadian Television Fund and Local Programming Fund are also sources of income mounting to hundreds of millions annually, disproportionately claimed by the CBC, according to industry chiefs, one of whom, Jim Shaw of Shaw Communications said “he was tired of subsidizing the CBC and programs that no one watched. CBC Exposed, Brian Lilley, 2012
ivhttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-cbc-english-tv-has-lost-its-relevance-its-time-to-talk-about-that/
vhttps://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-cbc-english-tv-has-lost-its-relevance-its-time-to-talk-about-that/
viibid
viiCitizens Free Press, The Drudge Report, Rantingly, etc
viiihttps://tnc.news/2022/03/23/majority-of-canadians-support-defunding-the-cbc-poll/
;
xDavid Tara, Christopher Waddell, The End of the CBC?, University of Toronto Press, 2020
xiHypeauditor.com
xiihttps://www.cbc.ca/news/science/canadian-right-wing-extremism-online-1.5617710
xiiihttps://fcpp.org/2014/04/29/the-role-of-the-cbc/
xivhttps://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2009/02/26/mulroney_inquiry_to_cost_14m.html
xvhttps://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/rcmp-lay-fraud-related-charges-against-chretien-ally-over-sponsorship-scandal-1.1591329
xvihttps://nationalpost.com/news/politics/cbc-head-hubert-lacroix-faces-senate-grilling-over-broadcasters-future-and-his-own-expense-claims
https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca/
xviiihttps://rumble.com/v2pvxhx-former-canadian-broadcast-corporation-journalist-exposes-massive-lies-and-p.html
https://firstdraftnews.org/
First Draft has since been folded into the Information Futures Lab at Brown University. https://sites.brown.edu/informationfutures/. Their “fight” against vaccine information can be reached here:
https://firstdraftnews.org/?s=vaccine+misinformation
xxhttps://www.cbc.ca/news/editorsblog/editor-blog-trust-1.5936535
xxihttps://nypost.com/2022/01/05/canadian-journalist-tara-henley-quit-cbc-over-woke-agenda/
xxiihttps://www.rebelnews.com/whats_the_backstory_of_the_inappropriate_signs_spotted_during_the_first_days_of_the_freedom_convoy
xxiiihttps://nationalpost.com/news/canada/freedom-convoy-organizer-tamara-lich-on-what-comes-next-its-just-going-to-get-fun-now
xxivhttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-premier-heather-stefanson-condemns-hate-images-deplorable-1.6334461
[1] https://manitoba.ca/asset_library/en/proactive/20212022/vaccine-hesitancy-survey-report-pra.pdf
[1]
Growing up in the US I remember the local PBS station carried TASS evening news out of the Soviet Union immediately after the network evening news (CBS/NBC/ABC) ended.
They defended their decision to air it as a requirement of civic responsibility, to hear the words and ideas of our adversaries whether we agreed with them or not. That was democracy and freedom in action.
I took that as truth. And went so far as to find Radio Moscow on my AM dial (in Miami, was broadcast from Havana). And would read Pravda in my local library's periodical section. Not because I was an aspiring Marxist or USSR lover. But because I believed the idea of civic responsibility, hearing both sides was important for civic life.
This is no longer what PBS preaches. Or anyone in major media. They now say hearing both sides is dangerous. And it is democracy and freedom in action to censor and ban any speech that goes against the official narrative.
I heard the words of my nation's adversaries, in their own words. I wasn't persuaded by them. I was informed by them to know what official state propaganda sounded like. I could hear their words and compare them to my lived experience and know they were lying. And how they lied. Not about everything. There was enough truth in them to keep it from being a comedy routine or parody. But they'd use many truths to imply credibility to the few, more important lies.
It was educational. My civic responsibility. Prepared me for a lifetime of having to evaluate the media on its own merit, not face value.
And I'm constantly reminded of what TASS, Radio Moscow and Pravda was saying fifty years ago when I watch, listen and read the words of our media in the US (and Canada) today. Because they are EXACTLY what the Soviet Union said all those years ago about the US and west. Verbatim in many instances. If I time traveled from the 1970's to the 2020's I'd think the US lost the Cold War and the USSR had won.
At least my mind is prepared for it. Thanks to the old PBS concept of civic responsibility. Hopefully kids these days are as curious as I was and are actively seeking out the words and ideas of those of us considered adversaries of official state narratives. Which they can compare to their own lived experience. I'm confident the truth of what we are saying will prevail. And so are the officials censoring and criminalizing us; it's why they censor and criminalize us.
Great article that outlines the history of the propaganda machine. I remember listening to Peter Gzoski in the mornings. He was excellent. The last time I turned on CBC in the car, the discussion was about indigenous lesbians. Fascinating stuff so I switched to Sirius Classic Vinyl. Time to shutter the CBC.