Exposed - CBC by the numbers - sort of

Peter Mansbridge, the CBC’s chief anchor and one of the most recognizable faces in Canadian television news, apparently earns little more than a media librarian at the public broadcaster — a fact that is raising questions and collective eyebrows across the country.

CBC by the numbers:

$1.1B: Federal funding in 2012-13 fiscal year

$913M: Federal funding in 2014-15 fiscal year

$63,797.54 to $80,485.22: Salary scale for senior host Peter Mansbridge and retiring senior host Linden MacIntyre

$60,844.32 to $77,390.42: Salary scale for radio host Jian Ghomeshi and host Amanda Lang

$8.5M: Total bonuses paid to managers and executives in 2012-13 fiscal year

50%: Portion of their base salary executive vice-presidents can receive in bonuses annually

10%: Portion of base salary CBC managers are eligible to receive annually

Source: CBC

So why does it appear that the CBC is obfuscating and may be trying to low-ball the salaries of some of its employees? 

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CBC President Hubert Lacroix double-dipped for six years

Last summer, in the middle of a national uproar over the Senate expense scandal, CBC President Hubert Lacroix quietly paid back $29,678.11 in inappropriate expenses.

It seems that Lacroix was also double dipping when it came to having taxpayers foot the bill for his lifestyle.

“Neither the President’s office nor the people who process expense claims were aware of the appendix to the bylaws,” CBC’s statement says.

This is hardly believable. The rules on living expenses were updated and approved in March of 2006 and Lacroix accepted the post in October 2007. Are we really to believe that CBC forgot its rules just a year and a half later?

For more than a year, CBC reporters have been hounding senators over their expenses -- senators who said they thought they were following the rules. That excuse wasn’t deemed good enough for Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin or Patrick Brazeau and it shouldn’t be good enough for Lacroix.

This man double-dipped for six years. The public deserves more than simply being told “nothing to see here.”

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CBC to pay $30,000 for defamation

Bill Whatcott, Saskatchewan’s irrepressible crusader against homosexuality, has won his second court battle within the month as Judge R.W. Elson ordered the CBC to pay him $30,000 for defamation.

“It’s one thing to call me an a-hole,” said Whatcott. “Media outlets say that all the time though I don’t agree with them. But that’s not libellous. And if I say homosexuals are sinners, that’s free speech. But if I say all homosexuals want to sexually assault children, that’s libel. And when the CBC says I want to kill all homosexuals, that’s libel too.”

Read the full story.

PS - this website does not necessarily agree with any content but merely points out in this case another libel action of the CBC.

Heritage Minister concerned about accountability within CBC

In giving the federal cabinet the power (via the Treasury Board) to demand a place at the table in wage and salary negotiations for all CBC employees, including journalists, Friends insists that the bill threatens to turn the public broadcaster into a state mouthpiece, subservient to political authority.

 The Harper government defends the new rules as necessary to ensure the CBC is more “accountable” in spending its $1-billion taxpayer-funded annual subsidy. Shelly Glover, the newly appointed heritage minister, whose responsibilities include the CBC, seems to be on board with that. In a post-appointment interview with the Globe and Mail she had this to say: “

Although I am a big supporter of a strong, national, public broadcaster, I am concerned about accountability within the CBC and I continue to monitor that situation with great interest.”

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CBC News Halifax Violates Policy

The complainant, Robert Harrison, thought CBC was remiss in its coverage of the one dental student who came forward in the Dalhousie scandal. He said the student was not shown proper respect because CBC published erroneous information about him. The error was corrected within a half hour of publication.

CBC News in Halifax did violate policy because it published wrong information. Accuracy is the cornerstone of all journalistic endeavours.

There was another violation of policy. The Journalistic Standards and Practices policy on corrections says:

• Any changes to the original material will be noted to preserve the transparency of the process.

This was more than an update. There should have been a corrections box.

Read the full CBC complaint here.

If CBC was a corporation Hubert Lacroix would be voted out

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Thursday announced it was “out of the business” of competing with private broadcasters for professional sports, and cutting 657 positions in the face of a $130-million revenue shortfall projected for the 2014-15 broadcast year. It is a truly pivotal moment for the national broadcaster. So The Globe reached out to creative and cultural thinkers across the country and asked them, how would you re-imagine the CBC?

• I’d put a nominal tax on all new televisions sold in the country and eliminate advertising on CBC television. I’d cull television to one channel – a 24 hour resource dedicated to news, sports, documentaries, children’s programming, comedy, mini-series and specialty programming.
• CBC should not duplicate the work of the private sector. There is no point spending public money on things that are already being well done without it.
• Under Herbert Lacroix, CBC has lost over 2,000 jobs since 2009, lost public support and, most importantly, ceased to be an icon of idealism. Lacroix has failed to win allies on Parliament Hill and as the hockey debacle clearly shows, he does not have the skill set to negotiate the exploitation of CBC’s considerable commercial value. If CBC were a listed corporation the shareholders would vote him out. He should do the honourable thing and resign.
• A new commercial-free CBC needs to be radically reinvented to thrive in this new era. In the absence of any direction from Parliament, the CBC needs to initiate this process itself. A reinvented CBC requires a dramatic narrowing of what its mandate is. It needs to ditch those activities that are secondary to its core mission. And it needs a totally new funding formula.

Read the full story.

PS - what would YOU like to see?

Why The CBC Should Be Transparent

The thing is, you don’t have to be an enemy of the CBC to want them to comply with the law and open up their books. Many of us who listen to the CBC and support the mission of public broadcasting would also like some transparency on how they spend the public’s money.

As a former employee and occasional contributor to CBC Radio, I know how much these cancelled programs cost to produce (one radio show might have a staff of just three producers). What I don’t know is how much the network spent on episodes of Little Mosque on The Prairie, while it was simultaneously closing foreign news bureaus. And why do the salaries of on-air hosts matter? Because the CBC has chosen to pay them while sacrificing crucial journalistic resources. That might make sense when a famous host pulls in huge audiences. But when these “celeb” hosted TV shows play to smaller audiences than cancelled radio programs, there are questions that need to be answered.

Revealing the numbers behind these decisions won’t change the past, but a new era of CBC transparency will certainly affect the future.

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CBC Gives No Voice To Conservative Canadians

The Canadian Broadcasting Company is partly supported by the tax dollars of Conservative Canadians, but they have absolutely no voice on the network and that just isn’t fair. The CBC has been literally taken over by an element fixated on rejecting anything “right”.

Their programming is so slanted to the left it’s downright perverted and it’s gotten to the point where something has to be done to literally wrestle it away from the current regime that allows Canada’s network to speak for only part of the country.

I also have a problem with the excessive spending habits at the Corp, I’ve never worked in private broadcasting, however I have friends who do. It has been mentioned where it takes seven people to produce a radio show at the CBC, a quality product could easily be achieved with half that many or less.

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Exposed - CBC Thrives On Contradictions

The CBC thrives on the contradictions embedded in its corporate mandate, which is to make its services available “throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means and as resources become available for the purpose.” Over the years, the government broadcaster has been able to parlay its public and private funding regimes into a hybrid dual-engine machine fuelled by billions in direct subsidy from federal taxpayers and billions more in advertising dollars out of the private broadcasting industry.

So skilled is the CBC at this great game that its absurd grand pronouncements about broadcast policy go unchallenged. CBC President Hubert Lacroix, appearing before the CRTC’s Let’s Talk TV hearings last week, declared that “in our view” the new Canadian policy for broadcasting “must support” what he called “market-based solutions to issues rather than regulatory intervention.”

With $1.2-billion in direct government subsidies (2013) and $330-million in declining advertising revenue, the CBC is as far from being a “market-based” enterprise as an enterprise can get. As the corporation’s annual report makes clear, the CBC’s self-described “business model” is “not profit oriented and all sources of funds are used to fulfill its public broadcasting mandate.”

But the great non-profit shell game is coming to an end. Even CBC executives concede there’s trouble ahead.

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Exposed - CBC scandal is serious breach of ethics

Add to the list another blemish on the CBC. This one, while mild compared to Ghomeshi-gate, has been loud enough to get someone fired and has the nation looking to the Crown corporation with another critical eye.

Evan Soloman, host of television's Power and Politics and radio's The House, was fired this week following allegations he collected about $300,000 in commissions for helping sell high-priced art to people he dealt with as a journalist.

The union which represents the vast majority of CBC journalists decided to raise a few concerns: "As a union, we are concerned that there may have been a rush to judgment here and a disproportionate response to what at worst may have been an unintentional breach of corporate policy that had no impact whatsoever on how Evan conducted himself as a host and journalist," said the Canadian Media Guild.

The argument over appropriate response will play out over the coming days, sure. But let's be clear about one major point here: This is not just a breach of corporate policy. This is a serious slap in the face of ethics, which are unfortunately vastly misunderstood by the public, and evidently misunderstood by the union representing the journalists who breathe those ethics each and every day.

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CBC president Hubert Lacroix attacks ‘outrageous’ sexual harassment story

CBC president Hubert Lacroix unleashed a ferocious retort against Sun News in front of a government committee Tuesday, saying the newspaper chain and TV network has mislead Canadians in their “outrageous” accusations that the public broadcaster is a hotbed for sexual harassment.

While Sun News reported that were 1,450 documents related to sexual harassment at the CBC since 2010, Lacroix said there had only been three complaints across the entire CBC network and all of them have been addressed.

Read the full story.

30 invoices were submitted to the CBC for harassment claims

Canadians paid out to settle workplace harassment lawsuits at the CBC but the state broadcaster is refusing to say how much money taxpayers spent to settle the claims.

An access to information request filed on behalf of QMI Agency shows that at least 30 invoices were submitted to the CBC for harassment claims in the fiscal year that ended last March. While the original request was for “records indicating the amounts paid by CBC/SRC to investigate and settle complaints of harassment,” all details on settlement fees, legal fees and outside investigative fees have been removed.

All that can be learned from the invoices is that CBC paid lawyers and investigators at firms in Toronto, Montreal and Halifax to deal with the matters. Details on amounts paid to each firm and whether the bill was for workplace harassment, sexual harassment or another matter have also been removed.

Read the full story.

CBC Competes Unfairly With Tax Dollars

Stephen Maher, columnist for Postmedia, noted that CBC was moving into his line of work, paying for columnists to pontificate on national affairs.

CBC is required by Parliament to provide television and radio services across Canada. Somehow along the way they have veered off of that mandate into many different areas. Political columns, one of the real draws for media websites fighting in a sea of headlines, don’t belong on the CBC website, but then again neither does the massive collection of news stories, purchased from Canadian Press and other wire services with your money and given away for free on CBC.ca.

Speaking of giving things away for free, why is CBC paying huge royalty fees to operate a series of online radio stations that compete with streaming services from Google, Apple, Rdio or Songify?

Private radio stations playing commercial music are having to deal with the threat of online streaming services coming at them from around the world, they shouldn’t also have to deal with one that is paid for with their own tax dollars.

Newspapers, soon to be a thing of the past, relegated to web only content, also shouldn’t have to compete with CBC and their vast web offerings.

Read the full story.

Exposed - CBC Ottawa in Shock

CBC’s Ottawa bureau is in shock and trying to understand what happened after last week’s swift firing of Evan Solomon and the loss of one of the biggest names in Canadian journalism.

The bureau is now headed toward a fall election while “missing one of our biggest players,” one CBC employee said. Given recent controversy faced by CBC, the employee added: “It’s been a brutal year, absolutely brutal.”

Late last week, the bureau was still struggling to understand how the host of two top political shows—CBC News Network’s Power & Politics and CBC Radio’s The House—was fired so quickly as The Toronto Star reported that Mr. Solomon moonlighted as a broker for fine art, using at least one political contact to earn big commissions.

Read the full story.

Canadian taxpayers settle harassment lawsuits at the CBC

Canadians paid out to settle workplace harassment lawsuits at the CBC but the state broadcaster is refusing to say how much money taxpayers spent to settle the claims.

All that can be learned from the invoices is that CBC paid lawyers and investigators at firms in Toronto, Montreal and Halifax to deal with the matters. Details on amounts paid to each firm and whether the bill was for workplace harassment, sexual harassment or another matter have also been removed.

Read the full story.

Ethical Red Flags at CBC

Journalism is not a profession that lends itself to moonlighting. A reporter might get away with selling maple syrup from his hobby farm, but monetizing your access to the rich and powerful people you cover or interview is about the most egregious ethical sin a journalist can make.

Like so many other journalists in the tiny Ottawa bubble, Mr. Solomon seems to have confused what is ultimately a transactional relationship with friendship. But only a naive or egotistical reporter could think “people of great power” want to be their friend for their intellect or sense of humour.

How could Mr. Solomon not recognize the ethical red flags those relationships raised? And wouldn’t the CBC be the first to take down a politician in a similar conflict?

Read the full story.

Exposed - CBC host taking secret payments

CBC has fired marquee host Evan Solomon after the Toronto Star reported that he was taking secret commission payments related to art sales involving people he dealt with as a host.

The CBC code of ethics states that employees "must not use their positions to further their personal interests."

CBC spokesperson Thompson initially said Solomon had disclosed his involvement with an art business sometime in the past two years and that CBC had no concerns.

After the Star provided the CBC with detailed allegations, including a copy of the draft contract between Solomon and the art collector, Thompson told the Star the CBC would look into the matter.

Solomon issued a statement Tuesday night in which he said he "formed a private business partnership with a friend to broker Canadian art," in 2013 and disclosed it to CBC earlier this year.

"This month, following a difficult dispute with my partner, I took steps to end our business relationship. I did not view the art business as a conflict with my political journalism at the CBC and never intentionally used my position at the CBC to promote the business."

Read the full story.

CBC failure to meet aboriginal mandate

“Media and Reconciliation” starts with a brief description of the role the CBC has played in promoting aboriginal language and culture. It could be meta-summarized in one word: “Feh.” The Broadcasting Act requires the Corporation to “create programming that reflects the aboriginal cultures of Canada” ...

We have an independent aboriginal-run public broadcast apparatus — the Aboriginal People’s Television Network. Which was basically founded to make up for the failure of the CBC to meet its half-hearted afterthought of an aboriginal mandate.

APTN could start assembling multiple bodies more ambitiously, if it had a CBC-style grant, and wasn’t required to get by on what it makes from selling Beachcombers reruns.

Euro-Canadians don’t really need to be spending a billion dollars a year staring vapidly at their own self-image, especially since so many of us do not particularly recognize ourselves in the CBC mirror. Even Québécois French isn’t going to disappear in three generations if they shut down Radio-Canada tomorrow. Swap the budgets. Or explain to me why we shouldn’t.

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CBC will drift and decline for years to come

Everyone agrees the CBC can’t go on like this. The CBC agrees it can’t go on like this. Announcing the latest round of layoffs and budget cuts, the corporation’s president, Hubert Lacroix, talked of “making choices and doing fewer things better,” of “accelerating the process of reinventing” itself in the face of a “media landscape [that] is transforming at an astounding speed.”

It isn’t just the CBC, in its present form, that no longer makes sense. The whole thing doesn’t make sense: CanCon, the CRTC, the subsidies and protections for private networks, any of it.

If the CBC’s woes have excited less than the usual sympathies from other media, it is perhaps because there’s a lot of it going around: declining revenues, job cuts, it’s pretty much the same story everywhere. Increasingly, the CBC’s dilemma is indistinguishable from that facing the private networks, themselves suffering from a fragmented audience and a decline in television viewing.

So the likelihood is that the CBC will go on like this, drifting and declining for years to come. Like Canada Post, like Via Rail and the other stranded assets that litter the public sector, it will limp on, purposelessly, through successive “action plans” and “reinventions,” for no reason other than that no one can be bothered to do anything else — and because no one expects them to.

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Exposed - How To Remake The CBC

Canadians seem to want some kind of public broadcaster around. They don’t mind CBC radio so much, because it’s inexpensive, it’s not fancy and it tends to focus on stories and programs that commercial broadcasters can’t be bothered with. If CBC TV has a future, it’s probably along that line: an all-Canada news, talk and entertainment station that doesn’t try to match anything on commercial TV, and attracts a small but devoted audience, willing to pay a moderate sum to keep it running. A single 24-hour channel should do it, which you could buy on your local cable package, like Animal World or Out TV.

You don’t need 6,000 employees and a billion-dollar budget to produce a decent daily diet of Canadian fare. You just need the nerve to admit it.

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4 CBC Employees earn more than $300,000 a year

Four employees involved in CBC broadcasts earn more than $300,000 a year, taking home on average about $485,667 annually in total compensation. But the public broadcaster won’t identify who they are.

The numbers are contained in a document sent to a Senate committee that is studying the challenges facing the CBC.

The documents do not attach names to earnings despite the fact the Senate committee is keen for this information. It’s believed that CBC chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge is in the top salary range, but he has declined to provide his salary when asked.

“What we’re trying to find out as a parliamentary committee is exactly how the CBC is using taxpayers’ money,” said Sen. Leo Housakos, the committee’s deputy chairman.

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CBC President Hubert Lacroix Warns Of Legal Showdown

CBC Vs. Harper Government: Hubert Lacroix Warns Of Legal Showdown With Tories

The CBC is warning the federal government that its efforts to control salary negotiations at the Crown agency could be at odds with the Broadcasting Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, leading to litigation.

Canadian Broadcasting Corp. chief executive Hubert Lacroix sent a letter to the Commons finance committee today, pleading for an amendment to the budget implementation bill to ensure the broadcaster's independence.

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CBC.ca Ignores Israel’s Security Concerns

CBC.ca Ignores Israel’s Security Concerns in Palestinian-Initiated Football Flap.

HRC (Honest Reporting Canada) was deeply troubled by a May 28 CBC.ca article by Mdieast Bureau Chief Derek Stoffel entitled: “Palestinian Football Association wants Israel booted from world soccer” which altogether failed to provide necessary context about Israel’s legitimate security concerns.

We found it very regrettable that this CBC.ca report failed to mention that Israel has legitimate security concerns wherein its armed forces and intelligence agencies have to take measures it deems necessary to do security checks, detentions, arrests, etc. to ensure that terrorists don’t enter Israel proper to carry out attacks and/or to ensure that those inclined to facilitate support for terror (whether logistically, through materials, money or otherwise) are not successful.

CBC has a duty to contextualize Israel’s security concerns, especially when faced with allegations of discrimination against Palestinians.

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CBC to reap $100 million windfall under NDP

The NDP is promising to restore $115 million to the CBC.

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair made the election commitment in Montreal on Thursday.

Mulcair said the public broadcaster has been cut by both Liberal and Conservative governments and that an NDP government would commit to restoring the recent cuts made by the Conservatives in the 2012 budget.

The Prime Minister's Office said the CBC faces "challenges in this rapidly changing media environment to which no mainstream broadcaster is immune."

"The CBC's viewership has declined, despite getting more than $1 billion in direct subsidies every year from taxpayers. CBC is responsible for its own operations, and it is up to the CBC to provide programming that Canadians actually want to watch and listen to," a PMO spokesperson wrote in email to CBC News.

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CBC President Hubert Lacroix Strategy is Survival At Any Cost

Since CBC President Hubert Lacroix announced plans to "ensure the sustainability" of the public broadcaster by radically reducing staff and shifting its focus from television and radio to various forms of Internet delivery over the next five years, there has been a rising chorus of voices calling on him to resign.

 That list of recent amputations includes the CBC Symphony Orchestra, the CBC's international radio service, Newsworld International, BOLD, radio drama, the television documentary unit, arts programming, overseas news bureaus, local news operations, and in-house production of all kinds. 

There are many who see this strategy of continuing to cut expenditures and sell off capital assets to match declining revenues -- survival at any cost -- as antithetical to the continuing existence of what is arguably the nation's most important cultural institution. Hence the calls for Lacroix's resignation, on grounds that he has effectively become a participant in the destruction of the CBC.

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