Politics at the CBC

You think the politicking is tough at Ottawa City Hall. Ha. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Politics is played at the highest level in the nosebleed executive ranks and in top journo echelons of the CBC.

And what’s at stake in those murky areas? Only the most prestigious spot in journalism.

Replacing the inimitable Peter Mansbridge on The National.

The spot on The National is mostly bingo-calling rather than real journalism. The poor grunts in print, the few who are left, are the real journalists. They write their stories on the ground, file them to the mother ship and Canadian Press sends them to other broadcast and print outlets. Then the great seer of The National deems which ones he will read to a waiting nation while the CBC’s reporters put film around the poor grunt’s story.

So no doubt the knives are out and the makeup is flying to be the most famous person in Canada. And all that reading gets you an Order of Canada and recognition in airports. Makes journalism look pretty petty doesn’t it.

Guess what? Sometimes it really is. But then that’s what happens when one lives in a newsroom where people are trained to listen to gossip. There’s lots of gossip and back-stabbing and jealousy. Often it’s not very nice.

Nowhere is it played at a higher level than at the CBC.

Read the full story here.

CBC strategies remain stuck in the twentieth century

Change doesn’t seem to come naturally to the cbc, whose strategies remain stuck in the twentieth century. For more than a decade, The National’s ratings have been stagnant, while Canadians’ trust in media has steadily declined. The ‘90s saw an attempt at restructuring the program: the format at the time was a twenty-two-minute-long news segment at the top of the hour and a current affairs program, The Journal, at the bottom. They combined it into an hour-long news and current affairs show, Primetime News. It was a complete failure. Mark Bulgutch, a former line-up editor for The National who was working on the program at the time, says he knew that the merger wasn’t going to work. “The cbc continues to try to find the right format; to find better formats; to find smarter formats,” Bulgutch says. “It turns its back on the audience at its own peril—when looking for new audiences you’ve got to be careful that you don’t turn off the one that you already have.” The National returned to its pre-merger version a year later, and has remained more or less the same ever since.

For better or worse, and according to the cbc’s 2017-2018 programming slate, a new version of The National will return this fall. The time has come for the public broadcaster to make the fundamental changes necessary to regain its viewers’ trust and to prove its worth—before its audience signs off for good.

Read the full story here.

Cutbacks at CBC Make Room For Digital Growth

For many Canadians, the CBC is more totem than mere media organization.

Decimated by repeated cuts to its government appropriation, the organization has shed a quarter of its workforce — 3,600 jobs — since 2008. Its core TV audience is also aging out, skewing mostly 55-plus. Possibly worst of all, in 2014 it lost the broadcast streaming rights to NHL games, and its 62-year-old institution, Hockey Night in Canada, was bereft of any actual hockey.

So in 2014, Hubert T. Lacroix, its president and CEO, announced the 2020 Initiative (“A Space For Us All”), a pledge to retool the institution by doubling its digital reach, ensuring its sustainability and personalizing its content for an audience whose media habits had markedly changed.

Lacroix’s vision was very top line — a shrinking of infrastructure, a shift away from a producer’s role to that of a multi-platform broadcaster, a mobile-first approach to news. For some critics, it seemed more a way of putting lipstick on an austerity pig than a bona fide strategic shift.

Read the full story here.

CBC TV bets on arts and culture

Just as the private Canadian networks launch schedules full of Muppets, superheroes and other new American series, CBC is wading in with arts and culture. Have they painted themselves into a corner?

Making a serious scheduling commitment to arts programming in prime-time in 2015, however, simply would not happen at a rival broadcaster — which is why Heather Conway is doing it.

Conway, CBC’s executive vice-president of English services, is in the second year of a five-year plan to steer the public broadcaster towards a digital future, and one that is — as she emphasized last May at the CBC season launch —”identifiably Canadian.”

Conway was the chief business officer at the Art Gallery of Ontario prior to joining CBC in 2013. She sees the arts strategy as one that will “make sure we have a distinctive voice, an offering that doesn’t look or feel like anything else on the dial.”

Selling art-related programming on TV has risks, agrees Conway.

Read the full story here.

PS - my question ... will this strategy resonate with average Canadians who are footing the Billion dollar tax bill to support the CBC?

The CBC wants its critics to go away

Canada’s state broadcaster has published an op-ed, not signed by anyone in particular, going after those that disagree with their latest move to expand their mandate well beyond anything contemplated in the Broadcasting Act.

Whether it’s an opinion pages section on their website, on-line music streaming services, producing web-only comedies and dramas or offering a Netflix-style service in Quebec, even mainstream media progressives are beginning to speak up.

 The CBC wants its critics to go away and never speak ill of them again.

Unfortunately, Trudeau’s Liberals are big CBC backers and it’s very unlikely they’ll turn around now and clip their wings after giving them even more taxpayer money.

Read the full story here.

CBC to pull away from television and radio

For the second time since the election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government last fall, you could hear all employees at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) breathing a big sigh of relief.

The struggling public broadcaster received a reprieve from the new federal government after plans were announced today to provide the network with a $675-million investment over five years. CBC will receive a $75 million boost this year, followed by a $150 million annual increase until 2021.

More than 2,800 positions have been eliminated at the CBC since 2008 due to the Conservative government and changes in the media landscape. The network has lost its once-proud sports department, which is no longer capable of broadcasting professional sports.

The latest plan indicated the CBC would pull away from television and radio and focus more of its resources on digital and mobile platforms.

Read the full story here.

The CBC is making all the right noises

Although they are talking of establishing a new five-year “accountability plan” for the CBC, the Liberals seem to think the logic of giving the broadcaster more money is self-evident. Because it’s the CBC, you can imagine them saying.

But given the revolutionary changes to the media landscape, wouldn’t this be a good time to revisit what we want from public broadcasting, and how best to achieve it, before simply writing a giant cheque?

The CBC is making all the right noises about investing much of the new cash in a digital strategy of some kind. That sounds necessarily futuristic and sensitive to the disruptive nature of today’s communications technology.

But as someone who works in privately owned media, as a writer, broadcaster and business owner, I find it hard to understand why the CBC uses taxpayers’ money to operate websites that compete directly with every newspaper, magazine and broadcaster in the country. Is the Internet so short on sources of information that we need another one, subsidized by the government?

Read the full story here.

CBC special status shields it from market turbulences.

In November, CBC proposed to withdraw from advertising in exchange for increased government funding. This is a significant move for the corporation because the broadcast-television advertising market, once lucrative, is fragmenting as advertisers shift to digital platforms on televisions, computers and smartphones. Both private broadcasters and the CBC are facing a huge challenge, but CBC’s special status as a taxpayer-subsidized Crown corporation substantially shields it from market turbulences. Private broadcasters don’t have the luxury of public funds to replace declining revenue. 

Both the CBC and private broadcasters are responding to this challenge by expanding their current affairs presence on new digital platforms, which adds to the competitive pressure on the financially hard-pressed newspapers, now investing heavily in digital editions and new business models in a frantic struggle to reverse advertising declines.

The traditional argument for taxpayers subsidizing public broadcasters is the challenge of creating television content in a relatively small Canadian market. But an important question remains: is the digital market where we fund public broadcasters? Do we want CBC competing for digital advertising dollars with the Winnipeg Free Press and other papers across the country? Is the CBC’s expansion into this sector a threat to Canadian newspapers adapting and surviving in the digital era?

Read the full story here.

CBC Internal Memo Short on Promises

Yesterday’s federal budget included investing $675 million over five years into the CBC. The broadcaster will receive the first, $75-million round of funding this year and $150 million every year following.

An internal memo obtained by CANADALAND sheds some light on how the CBC plans to spend the new dollars. Notable journalistic commitments are investing into digital bureous across the country and bettering international coverage with “pocket bureaus.”

Read the full memo here.

CBC seen as digital uber predator

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has a looming public-relations problem.

That's because in the eyes of other media, the public broadcaster is seen as an uber predator in an age of diminishing ad revenues.

In fact, iPolitics publisher James Baxter even used this term, "uber predator", in a recent presentation to the Commons Heritage committee.

The controversy has arisen over CBC's insistence on competing with other media companies for digital advertising. And it comes after the Trudeau government announced $675 million in new funding for CBC over the next five years.

Read the full story here.

CBC president Hubert Lacroix Embarrassed ...

From his 2008 appointment until he became the focus of an internal audit, CBC president Hubert Lacroix claimed nearly $30,000 in improper expenses ...

“We’ve been reporting a lot on ineligible expense claims by public officials, now we have a story in our own backyard,” CBC reporter Rosemary Barton announced ...

The CBC does not release the salaries of its top executives, but Mr. Lacroix is paid between $358,400 and $421,600 per year.

Read the full story here.

Is the CBC is a biased broadcasting institution?

This question was asked at this website (quora.com) and here is just one response ...

CBC has a reputation in Canada as being very progressive/left wing. Supporting left wing political parties may actually be self-serving for the public broadcaster. Liberal governments have consistently offered support for CBC, while Conservative governments have generally cut their budget. Supporting the CBC was in fact one of Justin Trudeau's campaign promises when he came to power with the Liberals during the last election.

For their part though, CBC has, like any good journalistic establishment should, done its best to remain unbiased, but they definitely have a reputation in Canada for being friendly with Liberals and harsh with Conservatives.

See many more responses here.

PS - what do YOU think?

CBC apologists scramble ...

CBC apologists scramble to fix Trudeau’s Freudian slip.

Canada’s Prime Minister rattled off all of the provinces and territories in his speech over the weekend, except Alberta.

He then awkwardly got back up on stage and offered a half apology, but was it really a mistake and are Albertans overreacting?

But over at the CBC, they seem to think it was just honest human error.

Let’s face it, the CBC just wishes this was a “mistake, but it took a Canadian-born celebrity living in Los Angeles, Sandra Oh, to first call Trudeau out for forgetting about Alberta.

Read the full story here.

Does Public Broadcasting have a future?

In an increasingly fractured, crowded and competitive media environment, what is the role of the public broadcaster when it comes to news? How to attract a new generation of audiences and retain existing ones? What innovations bode well for the future of news?

It seems the idea of public service journalism is under fire everywhere. So three major public broadcasters came together to talk about their collective future at a forum held in Toronto by the Canadian Journalism Foundation: Jennifer McGuire, General Manager and Editor-in-Chief of CBC News, James Harding, Director of News and Current Affairs of the BBC, and Michael Oreskes, Senior Vice-President of News and Editorial Director of NPR. The discussion was moderated by Simon Houpt of The Globe and Mail.

See more here.

CBC producers affirming their assumed superiority

CBC reporters and producers affirming their assumed superiority by churning out a constant stream of intellectual bigotry.

With the CBC’s TV ratings down 40% to a specialty channel-like 5% share of viewers even before it lost its NHL contract, according to Canadian Media Research, it’s worth asking again what has gone wrong with the Mother Corp and what should be done about it? The answer to the first question is that it no longer represents ordinary Canadians to themselves in a way they like or even recognize. So when its funding comes under scrutiny, it is not surprising that most Canadians collectively yawn while watching any of the myriad other channels available to them on various media platforms.

Read the full story here.

Peter Mansbridge on CBC retirement

Peter Mansbridge doesn’t want to make a fuss about leaving the anchor’s chair at CBC’s The National.

Nearly a year after telling viewers he planned to retire from the public broadcaster’s flagship program, the 68-year-old newsman who defined an era at CBC News plans to sign-off for the final time with little fanfare.

“Don’t expect much,” he said in a recent interview. “I’ve never wanted it to be about me, this program.”

Mansbridge isn’t leaving news entirely and has already spoken to the CBC about working on a “freelance” basis, although he remains cagey on exactly what that means.

Read the full story here.

CBC manager denies being asked to investigate complaints ...

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's director of network talk radio is contradicting comments made by Chris Boyce, head of CBC Radio, saying that she was never asked to investigate complaints about Jian Ghomeshi's behaviour within the Q unit.

In an email to Boyce, Linda Groen said, "I have to set the record straight on one particular point" regarding comments Boyce made on CBC's the fifth estate last Friday.

“At no point did you or any senior manager ever instruct me to conduct such an investigation, formally or otherwise,” Groen wrote. “To the contrary, I was assured and confident that you and HR were handling the matter and asking the appropriate people the necessary questions.

Read the full story here.

CBC’s Peter Mansbridge says goodbye to himself

Peter Mansbridge has made tens of millions of dollars from the CBC. (By which I mean, from you, the taxpayer, although we aren’t permitted to know exactly how much.)

His time on the air is now coming mercifully to an end, though we’ll be paying his pension for a while.

So what’s Peter Mansbridge like, in the bias department?

We don’t quite know, because he keeps a lot of secrets. Like his secret trip to Italy to preside over the wedding of Kate Purchase, who is now Justin Trudeau’s communications director.

At the CBC, it’s clearly a corporate decision to be politically biased.

Read the full story here.

CBC took the rare step of apologizing

The CBC attempted to cram 150 years of Canadian history into the 10-hour docu-drama "Canada: The Story of Us." By many accounts, it's not doing so well.

But this isn't the only series that has failed to capture our rich and varied past, celebrated historian Christopher Moore said Wednesday, lamenting a general "fear of historians" that has marked "almost every film project and television project" he's been involved with.

Moore, who was not a part of the CBC production, blamed the downfall of such shows on "producers and directors who essentially are determined to become instant experts."

The Toronto-based writer added his voice to a chorus of complaints plaguing "Canada: The Story of Us," which premiered March 26.

The CBC took the rare step of apologizing Tuesday, noting "we fully recognize that not everyone will agree with every perspective presented."

Read the full story here.

Canadians have no idea of CBC cost

The day Lisa LaFlamme debuted as Lloyd Robertson's successor anchoring the CTV National News, CBC bought full-page newspaper advertisements promoting its flagship newscast and anchor Peter Mansbridge.

Judging from a new poll, the public broadcaster might better have used the ad space to show Canadians how its money was being spent.

The Abacus Data poll commissioned by QMI Agency and published in the Toronto Sun, suggests taxpayers underestimate how much the CBC gets from the federal government while at the same time most think it's getting too much.

According to the poll, more than 80 per cent of the 1,003 people sampled in the online poll conducted in English Aug. 12-15 did not know the CBC will get $1.1 billion from Ottawa this year. About 25 per cent believe it gets only one-tenth of its actual grant and 21 per cent thought it was only $10 million.

Read the full story here.

CBC employees overpaid

News media is undergoing a rapid and beautiful process of creative destruction: digitalization means vastly lower costs, fewer barriers to entry, and a wider variety of competing options for consumers to enjoy. Amid this innovation and weeding out stands the too-big-to-fail albatross, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The truth is that the CBC has become a gravy train for elites, with the backing of government unions. These elites have managed to persuade people that they are desperate and hard done by, while the average salary at the broadcaster is $100,528 per year. That is well into the top 10 per cent of all Canadian earners and 23 per cent more than the average earnings of a private-sector TV employee, even before the CBC's luxurious benefits.

Not only are CBC employees overpaid, their performance has been questionable. Their advertising revenues have fallen 32 per cent in just the last year, and 12.2 per cent annually for the past five years. Those five years may have been difficult for the industry, but private broadcasters saw annual declines of just 1.7 per cent. On account of CBC's consistent decline, taxpayers provided 68.5 per cent of funding in 2015.

Read the full story here.

CBC board has new selection process

The federal Liberals have put together a star-studded cast to help choose new members of the public broadcaster's board of directors.

Long-time television news broadcaster Tom Clark will head the advisory committee that's designed to fulfil a Liberal campaign promise to overhaul the process for appointing board members at CBC/Radio-Canada.

Critics have for years complained that the process for choosing board members at the CBC left the public broadcaster open to political interference.

Under the Broadcasting Act, CBC/Radio-Canada must have 12 directors on its board, including a chair and a president. Each is expected to serve a five-year term.

The term of the current chair, Remi Racine, was to end Tuesday. Hubert Lacroix's term as president is set to expire in October.

Read the full story here.

Current CBC board boasts little outside broadcast industry experience

The Liberal government is overhauling the process by which members of the board of directors of CBC/Radio-Canada are selected, in hopes of ending decades of allegations of political interference in the public broadcaster’s operations.

The Globe and Mail has learned the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Mélanie Joly, will announce on Tuesday the creation of the Independent Advisory Committee for Appointments to the CBC/Radio-Canada Board of Directors.

It will likely please many who have called for non-partisan appointments to the board, including the Canadian Media Guild, the union that represents most English-language CBC staff.

Critics have noted that the current CBC board boasts little outside broadcast industry experience, and does not reflect Canada’s diversity.

The term of the current CBC chair, Rémi Racine, expires Tuesday; the term of the CBC’s president, Hubert Lacroix, expires at the end of the year. While each man may reapply for another term, the government source noted that both would need to submit to the same new Advisory Committee process as all other candidates who wish to be considered.

Read the full story here.

CBC is the Globe's largest competitor in the digital ad space

The publisher of the Globe and Mail newspaper, Philip Crawley, told members of Parliament who are examining Canada's beleaguered news industry that the Globe's ownership isn't seeking "handouts or subsidies — but we do like to play on a level playing field."

"It's not level if taxpayer dollars directed to the public broadcaster make the competition for digital ad dollars more difficult. The CBC is the Globe's largest competitor in the digital ad space amongst Canadian-based media."

Read the full story here.

3 Anchors to replace Peter Mansbridge

Three anchors will replace Peter Mansbridge at the new version of CBC's flagship national news program, "The National."

The incoming hosts will also report in the field, said Jennifer McGuire, general manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News. However, the people who will fill the high-profile positions are still being decided.

"As yet, no decisions have been made with respect to who will replace Peter and October 30th is the launch date, "said CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson in an email to HuffPost Canada on Thursday.

The newscast is currently being revamped to better reflect "the continuous digital news environment that we live in," McGuire said in May.

Read the full story here.

Report calls for CBC to stop selling digital ads

A public-policy group has issued 12 recommendations to revive the Canadian news industry, including cutting off digital revenue to the public broadcaster.

The report by the Public Policy Forum maintains that the decline of traditional media, audience fragmentation, and fake news are undermining faith in Canadian democracy.

"Free cbc.ca of the need to 'attract eyeballs' for digital advertising, which can run contrary to its civic-function mission and draw it into a 'clickbait' mentality," the report states.

As things stand now, the CBC generates about $25 million in annual digital revenue, according to the report.

Read the full story here.

CBC handling of complaints

When a formal complaint is made against information published or broadcast by CBC (whether an in-house production or a report or documentary produced by a third party), the executive producer responsible for the content in question undertakes to reply promptly.

If the complainant is not satisfied with the explanations given and applies to the Ombudsman for a review, CBC undertakes to make the Ombudsman’s opinion accessible by, among other means, posting a link on the program web page or on the page giving access to the content in question.

See the full procedure here.

CBC’s coverage of Six Day War unbalanced and unfair

Amazingly, in the CBC’s reporting on the impact of the Six Day War as we mark its 50th anniversary, nowhere did reports by Mideast correspondent Derek Stoffel mention that the war was waged by pan-Arab armies seeking the destruction of Israel.

Derek Stoffel’s June 5 article on the CBC’s website and his June 6 CBC Radio report on World at Six Stoffel failed to mention the cause of the Six Day War, where Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies tried to annihilate the State of Israel.

To focus only on the aftermath of the Six Day War and to completely ignore what started it, was most unbalanced and unfair.

Read the full story here.

CBC ombudsman slams CBC

The CBC's own watchdog has found reporting on Israel by the state broadcaster did not meet values of accuracy, balance, and impartiality. Eric Duhaime joined Krista Erickson to discuss.

See the video here.

CBC Announces 'The National' Revamp

CBC News has announced a new organizational structure, with a heavy emphasis on digital as well as changes to "The National."

In a memo distributed to staff on Tuesday, editor-in-chief Jennifer McGuire said digital will now be a part of everything CBC News does and "not a stand-alone pillar" of its service.

Journalist Steve Ladurantaye, who was Twitter Canada's head of news and government partnerships before joining the CBC last May, has been appointed the new managing editor of "The National," and tasked with "redefining 'The National' for the next generation."

Read the full story here.