CBC is Scavenging Vulnerable Canadian Media Landscape

Yesterday the CBC unveiled its website’s ground-breaking new opinion section. No, you were obviously wrong if you’ve mistook CBC’s daily hard news coverage as an op-ed factory of incredibly biased reporting from a state-funded, rose-coloured and -shaped lens. The CBC is unquestionably the last bastion of objectivity in this post-nationalist nation–our Ministry of Truth.

I know what you’re thinking, how can the CBC be in the game of buying hot takes when it’s already providing the one correct way of thinking and seeing the world? How can the CBC buy all these rogue freelancers’ radical ideas? Well, don’t fret progressives, the CBC has the Trudeau-loving leftist Managing News Editor Steve Ladurantaye as gatekeeper to stand guard against anti-PC hate speech and non-CBC values. Ladurantaye is claiming CBC is “committed to getting a wide range of columns onto our platforms.” However, looking into the window of Ladurantaye’s psyche–a.k.a. his tweets–one can establish that only a steady stream of stories reiterating the CBC’s unwritten but ceaselessly-expressed leftist manifesto. This means pro-Islam, pro-Trudeau, pro-Liberals, pro-refugees, pro-immigration, pro-tax increases, pro-carbon pricing, pro-feminism, pro-globalization, pro-native chiefs, pro-SJWs, pro-progressive leaders, as well as anti-nationalism, anti-masculinity, anti-tax cuts, anti-oil, anti-business, anti-America, anti-Catholic, etc. will all be welcome ideas for CBC’s open platform of opinions.

One of the articles in the first batch of columns may have some readers duped into believing the CBC is actually going to allow radically different viewpoints onto its new platform. The CBC published an article by Sheila Gunn Reid, a reporter from Ezra Levant’s right-wing Rebel Media, to the absolute horror of some intolerant progressives. Yet, Gunn’s article only touched upon free speech and the UN attempting to censor The Rebel from covering an upcoming climate conference. Progressives and SJWs can take solace in knowing that with Ladurantaye at the helm CBC will also do de facto censoring of articles containing Gunn and ilk’s actual subversive and toxic ideologies by filtering them into the rejection pile. The other four articles published thus far suggest Ladurantaye is going to keep the CBC mantra intact. A pro-Trudeau piece (advocating for the PM to get a new plane), a grievance culture piece (complaining that social media doesn’t cater to blacks), an anti-men piece (painting all men as sex-crazed assailants like Trump), and a pro-refugee piece (LIberals’ rushing in of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees was great, but more funding for integration is needed) all toe the CBC line.(I will closely monitor the upcoming articles published on the CBC’s new opinion section.)

Furthermore, the CBC’s Editor Blog announced the exciting news that Niel Macdonald is being freed from the shackles of reporting the news and will now be a regular columnist analyzing the news. Macdonald’s corporation has told him to “cease” his “reporting” on how terrible Israel, America, and conservatives are, and instead tell us in his own words how terrible Israel, America, and conservatives are. This line between reporters and columnists, CBC Editor in Chief Jennifer McGuire insists, will ensure the CBC  “preserve[s]” its “journalistic values of impartiality and independence.” (That’s right, the CBC has no dependence on the government or partiality to certain political beliefs whatsoever.)

Now for those wondering how a legacy media corporation is expanding in a time period when old media is headed the same way as the dinosaurs–repeatedly reporting enormous quarterly losses and endless job cuts–the $1.1-1.5 billion (depending on who you ask) annual government subsidy to the CBC courtesy of taxed-to-exhaustion Canadians is the broadcaster’s elixir of immortality. It was shrewd of the CBC to ostensibly campaign for the Liberals last election cycle (e.g. doting coverage, executives taking leave-of-absences to campaign for the LPC, CBC reporters’ union registering to campaign against the CPC, etc.) because of the de facto $150 million additional annual bribe Trudeau promised and delivered the “public” broadcaster. The CBC’s self-interested campaigning paid off.

With this new windfall, the CBC is now poaching dying dinosaur and new media’s talent and very existence. Of course that would be crass for the state-funded behemoth to admit, so Ladurantaye et al. deny they are hiring additional staff. After backlash from others within the industry at the announcement of the expansion of the op-ed section, the CBC did a press release–“Get the Facts: A public broadcaster belongs in the public space“–in which executive vice-president Heather Conway impudently admonished “opinion writers” for decrying the CBC budging its way into the online op-ed market.

“The facts, by now, are pretty clear. The challenges facing media in Canada are many but they are not being caused by the public broadcaster. No one has yet found a reliable way to make people pay for news content on the Internet. Large newspaper companies responded to their challenges by merging the content offered by their smaller papers. This has made CBC/Radio-Canada’s presence more important than ever,” wrote an audacious Conway.

“Limiting what public broadcasting can do only means fewer services for Canadians. It won’t help private companies be more profitable. It won’t increase news coverage or the diversity of views, especially in communities,” Conway baldfaced lied.

Does the CBC and Conway really think that people are that stupid that they don’t realize the news market in Canada is limited to roughly 36 million pairs of eyeballs and a certain amount of clicks in a day? The facts are that the CBC is the morbidly obese white elephant in the room squishing everyone else up against the wall as they suffocate from lack of room to breathe. As one publisher of new media put it to the Canadian Heritage Standing Committee, CBC is an “uber-predator”.

Conway’s claim that others haven’t found profitability online is also patently false. Canadaland, iPolitics, et al. have been successful at finding a successful business model. All that they have asked of the government is to stop unfairly subsidizing some players in the market, like the $1.5 billion annually given to the CBC that has made it into Goliath. CBC’s most recent and brazen move into the online market suggests the uber-predator has an insatiable hunger to eat up more and more of the Canadian media landscape and dominate the industry and shaping of the Canadian zeitgeist. It’s time the white elephant in the room got shot, or at the very least put on a regimented diet.

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