Exposed - CBC Executive Big Fat Expense File

Fret not, media consumers of Canada’s national broadcaster, we at Frank have discovered the source of that odd sucking sound that seems tied to the ever-lowering levels of lucre available to the Mother Corpse. It’s none other than the personal expense claims of CBC’s head of strategy for CBC News and Centres (English division) and former managing director of Atlantic Canada, Andrew Cochran.

Over 900 pages long, and covering between March 10, 2008 and June 6, 2015, and accounting for over $457,000 in expenses (over $72,000 of which was literally eaten in the form of claimed meals) from travel to food, to more travel, the combined Cochran expense reports paint what seems to be a shocking disregard for the oft-lamentably shrinking budget of the CBC, with tens of thousands of dollars spent personally by the big guy each year.

For most media outlets these days, caught as they are in the torrent of chaotic change that is the internet, the prevailing financial theory is “pinch every penny until it screams.”

The result has been, even in the halls of the great and powerful CBC, a distinct defunding of costly and complicated investigative reporting (or even quality content creation) in favour of cheap-to-produce and easy-to-promote panel programs, celebrity gossip reports, click-bait, promoting (whether overtly or covertly) consumer goods as reviews, and endlessly reheated press releases, give or take a comma or two.

Not quite so when you’re a big-wig at the Mother Corpse, it seems. Despite the last few years being tight/tense/downright heart-attack-inducing times, Cochran, and presumably those in equal or higher positions, seem to have made no effort to cut back on the costs.

The full article can be found here.

CBC CEO Hubert Lacroix has no legitimacy

The two unions representing the vast majority of CBC and Radio-Canada employees across the country are calling for president and CEO Hubert Lacroix and the board of directors to step down, citing a lack of confidence in their leadership.

“We concluded that they no longer have legitimacy,” Isabelle Montpetit, president of Syndicat des communications de Radio-Canada, told the Star. That union represents most of Radio-Canada’s employees in Quebec and New Brunswick.

Lacroix, who was reappointed to a second five-year term in 2012, was not made available for an interview. Rémi Racine, chair of the 12-member board, did not return a request for comment.

Read the full story.

Claim of CBC TV Bias

In the August issue of Policy Options, Dr. Conrad Winn claimed that CBC television news is biased in favour of the left. It is imperative that we discuss this alleged bias because the media, and CBC in particular, play an increasing- ly important role in the Canadian political debate. The claim was based on the results of a recent COMPAS survey (see www.compas.ca for the complete report). Among other issues, the study investigated the relationship between the probability of viewing a given network (e.g., CBC, CTV) and self-described politi- cal affiliation: left-wingers, right- wingers, and in the middle of the political spectrum. Regarding CBC, it was found that the left-wingers were 1.3 times as likely as self-labelled right-wingers to choose CBC televi- sion: 44 percent vs. 34 percent.

Based on this presumed CBC bias, it’s been argued that the network be prevented from collecting taxpayers money through annual budgets. The proposal is to restructure CBC along the lines of PBS in the United States, which is funded by viewers and corporate sponsorship. Undoubtedly, this would decrease the influence of CBC and leave the open field to private networks.

Read the full article and make up your own mind!

Are the Liberals CBC Friendly?

Unsealed memos show Chretien's Liberals were no friends of the CBC.

Liberals who love to bash the Harper Conservatives for not giving CBC more money won't like some documents that have been made public after 20 years.

Documents from Jean Chretien's Cabinet circa 1994 show the Liberal PM's desire to freeze CBC funding.

There's more -- all of this information busts the myths that the Liberal Party are the best friend the state broadcaster could possibly have.

See the full video here.

Exposed - CBC is a hybrid broadcaster

There are probably at least 30 public broadcasters around the world, of which 18 are the most recognized. State broadcasters are arms of the government, propagandists for the party in power, such as Radio Moscow. Public broadcasters, by contrast, are funded, in whole or in part, by public money, but not public money as dispensed by the state, but through a variety of non-political mechanisms such as licence fees, small taxes on radio and television purchases and in much of Europe and in Japan, fees paid to sub-national governments such as provinces and states.

While Canada is one of a very few where the public money comes directly from the government, the Broadcast Act has given CBC some insulation from political interference by guaranteeing CBC’s editorial independence.

But last year, for the first time in its near 90-year history, the CBC was pushed into state broadcaster territory. The Harper Government’s 2013 Omnibus Budget Implementation Legislation placed the CBC under the purview of the Financial Administration Act. Now, Treasury Board is authorized to supervise, manage and actually sit in on CBC’s labour relations and negotiations, moving it along the grid from public to state broadcaster.

As it now stands, the CBC is a hybrid broadcaster– half public and half state. It is not a propaganda arm of the state, but neither is it totally free from political interference, as becomes clear in a review of its relationship with a succession of Canadian prime ministers.

In the last 24 years from 1990 to 2014, therefore, the CBC has lost $1,674.9 billion dollars in annual funding and is in a virtual frenzy of staff downsizing.

Last April, it cut 657 positions, about 10 per cent of CBC’s staff. Three months later, last summer, the corporation announced further cuts of 2,000 employees to be implemented over the next few years.

Read the full story.

CBC president Hubert Lacroix refuses to resign

A defiant CBC/Radio-Canada president Hubert Lacroix on Thursday refused to resign in the face of heated calls to do so at an earlier employee town hall meeting.

“In the context of what we’re doing, and what you heard at the town hall, we tried to put things in perspective,” Lacroix told journalists during an afternoon conference call.

What he and Heather Conway, EVP of English Services, who was also on the call, are trying to do includes shifting the CBC from conventional TV to digital and mobile content and spaces, reduce in-house production and cut supper-hour newscasts to a baseline 30 minutes and in some cases 60 minutes or 90 minutes, and cut up to 1500 staff by 2020 on top of those identified in April.

Lacroix was eager to insist the CBC’s current woes were not self-inflicted, but shared across the industry, and globally, saying that the Canadian financing model for traditional conventional TV is endangered by a fast-changing digital landscape.

Read the full story.

CBC President Hubert Lacroix performance disingenuous and depressing

CBC’s leaders bring it to the brink of an existential crisis.

If there was any doubt that Canada’s public broadcaster is confronting an unprecedented existential crisis, it vanished Thursday. CBC President Hubert Lacroix unveiled the corporation’s latest five-year plan at a “town hall” meeting of staff in a performance that was as disingenuous as it was depressing.

The CBC’s enemies are not only circling their prey from the outside, including the Conservative government with its unrelenting budget cuts. Its enemies are also working from within. The CBC has a compliant board of directors overwhelmingly stacked with Conservative party donors and a president, also conservative, who appears ready to implement any budget cut in virtual silence. 

According to the new CBC plan, priorities will be shifted from television and radio to digital and mobile services. This will reduce staff and affect a variety of programs, including local TV newscasts in many regions.

Read the full story here.

CBC story was not accurate and clear in its reporting

The complainant, Robert Tuomi, said CBC Windsor didn’t know one kind of auditor from another, and that distorted its coverage of the proposal for a new position of auditor general in Windsor. He thought a story was deliberately misleading in order to support the position of the mayor.

Overall, you thought the story lacked depth and context. You said CBC Windsor news staff did not understand the difference between an internal auditor and an auditor general. Because the distinction was not made, you said the story was inaccurate.

The original story did not fulfill the CBC Journalistic Standards and Practices requirement to be accurate and clear in its reporting.

CBC Journalistic policy states that in matters of controversy “we ensure that divergent views are reflected respectfully, taking into account their relevance to the debate and how widely held these views are.”

This story did not fulfill policy in its first iteration because it had an error of fact in describing a previous auditor and audit offices.

Read the full complaint and review here.

Exposed - Is CBC News Biased?

Published on Apr 12, 2015

Is CBC News Biased? Should Canadian Taxpayers Fund the CBC with $1 Billion Every Year?

The CBC should be accountable directly to all Canadians. But it is not. Instead, it is accountable to the Prime Minister. He controls CBC funding, and appoints the Board of Directors and President (through the Governor General). Consequently, most current CBC Board members are Conservative Party supporters. Also troubling is that every English-language CBC ombudsman to date has been a former CBC employee -- and therefore potentially biased in favor of the CBC. Given that this unconscionable risk of bias has been allowed, how much confidence can we have in the integrity of CBC management? Has the CBC ever voluntarily admitted to a scandal before being caught?

To ensure that CBC News is unbiased, and accountable to all Canadians, our T1 income tax forms should provide a box allowing anonymous, tax-deductible donations to the CBC. That should be the sole source of CBC funding. All other government funding should cease. Furthermore, the CBC Board of Directors should be elected by an independent body, such as Canada's university professors.

See more here.

Biased reporting from CBC

It is one thing to compete with your opponents in an election, but when you have to fight your so-called national broadcaster, i.e. the CBC, it gets pretty disgusting.

The Conservatives cut the state broadcaster's budget to $1 billion a year, so I have to assume that’s the reason they have thrown away their journalistic integrity and deliver biased and sanitized news. If governments are to be held hostage by the CBC if they don't give them what they want, we are in big trouble as a nation. This is one more reason why no network should be financed by the taxpayers. All networks should compete on a level playing field.

When we have to listen to CBC pundits, call people names, make snide remarks, speak rudely and interrupt them and they still consider themselves professionals, they have sunk as low as they can go.

Read the full letter in the Sarnia Observer here.

Exposed - CBC Headline Blatant Error

Check out the tweet above from @jimmydubyyc’s Twitter account three days ago on August 7th at 9:06 in the morning. My thanks to him for the screenshot. If ever you needed concrete proof that Canada’s national news service has an anti-Conservative bias, then the headline across that image says it all.

“Canada Loses 6,600 jobs. Unemployment rate remains at 6.8%. ”

The problem is that the truth is the exact opposite. Canada gained 6,600 jobs in July, 2015.

Now, take a look at this Google search page confirming that job growth. At the bottom of the first Google page, there are even a couple of CBC News items that say “modest job growth in July.”

So, what happened? A simple error? An employee who was out of line? Or, was the corporation that taxpayers fund to the tune of $1 billion dollars a year deliberately trying to make the Conservative Government’s economic record look bad? Whatever the reason, the onscreen message was a blatant error and nothing short of yellow journalism. And, those responsible should be fired!

Read the full story.

CBC allegedly violated U.S. copyright law

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is facing a lawsuit in the United States over the alleged use of a YouTube video without the owner’s permission.

In the suit filed Aug. 11 to the Western District court of New York state, Alfonzo Cutaia of Buffalo, N.Y., alleges that the CBC violated U.S. copyright law by using a video of a winter storm he filmed and uploaded to YouTube last year without his permission.

CNN is also named in the suit which claims CBC obtained the video — called Buffalo Lake Effect — from that organization.

The statement of claim, obtained by The Canadian Press, alleges CBC posted the video on the broadcaster’s website — cbc.ca — with the CBC logo as an overlay, and uploaded the video to Yahoo Screens’ website.

Read the full story.

CBC Fifth Estate needs to answer questions

One million people saw the program, which was subsequently rebroadcast on CBC's Newsworld. Six weeks after it aired, Myers and Leenen sued for libel. Folks at the fifth estate were caught off guard. The show's producer, Regush, and host Wood, stood by their story. Myers asked for an apology plus $25,000. Leenen asked for an apology plus $10,000. The CBC turned them down. Three years later, the Myers case went to trial.

In November, 1999, Justice Bellamy concluded that no "fair-minded person, nor indeed any reasonable person, could have come to hold the views about Dr. Myers which were conveyed in the program, given all the facts (reported and unreported) available to the defendants.

The judge awarded Myers $200,000 in damages, saying: "Nick Regush, before any research began, hypothesized that the program 'would tell the story of Canada's drug disaster.' In my view, the defendants had this thesis or angle in mind right from the start, and were unable to waiver from it, even as the research unfolded."

Next up was the trial on Leenen's lawsuit. If the first trial judge's written decree had caused consternation in the CBC's corridiors of power, the Leenen decision, six months later, was a knockout blow.

Justice Cunningham awarded Leenen general, aggravated and punitive damages totalling $950,000, together with costs, and ruled that the journalists twisted the facts and acted with malice. In a highly unusual measure, he slapped the host, producer, researcher and executive producer with hefty punitive and aggravated damages.

A long-time CBC employee says it's "flabbergasting and disgusting to a lot of people inside the CBC that management is considering appealing. It's costing 'real' money. There could still be some heads rolling because of this legal debacle. But many people I work with are stunned no one's been fired, that no one at the CBC seems to have been held accountable."

He adds: "It's quite an astonishing story. It's the biggest libel award in Canadian history and everybody at the CBC has their head in the sand. No one wants to touch this with a barge pole. It's classic CBC culture: If you stick your head in the sand, and don't see your critics, then they won't see you. Someone has to be accountable here. We're talking about $3-million worth of taxpayer's money. People are entitled to ask some questions and get some straight answers."

Read the full story.

CBC President Hubert Lacroix Kept Violation From Public

A day after Sun News host Brian Lilley reported that CBC President Hubert Lacroix repaid almost $30,000 in bogus travel claims, Lacroix admitted the claims were "clearly out of bounds."

Lacroix also said he didn't feel he needed to make the repayment public until Friday.

"There was an error inside our shop," he said. "Everybody that had to know knew."

Lacroix's claims violated CBC bylaws, and came on top of Lacroix's $1,500 monthly living allowance, car allowance, club memberships and annual salary between $350,000 and $421,000.

Read the full story.

CBC Fifth Estate loses appeal of million dollar defamation case

The CBC must pay one of the largest defamation penalties ever imposed on a Canadian media outlet after being denied its final avenue of appeal.

The Supreme Court of Canada announced Thursday that it will not hear the case. The top justices never give reasons for refusing to hear appeals.

Two years ago, the CBC was ordered to pay close to $1 million in damages to medical scientist Dr. Frans Leenen of the University of Ottawa because of a story that ran on the investigative program the fifth estate.

It was also told to pay another $200,000 in damages to a Toronto cardiologist, Dr. Martin Myers.

The two doctors had sued the CBC over a story about the safety of heart medication that had been broadcast in 1996.

They accused the investigative report of being malicious, unfair, defamatory and sensationalized.

It's not clear how much the CBC will have to pay in the end, because the corporation is still adding up court-ordered damages, legal fees, and other costs. The total is expected to be several million dollars.

Read the full story.

CBCs Fifth Estate Vendetta Against Brian Mulroney

Statement by former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney:

"For almost 15 years, the CBC's Fifth Estate program has carried on a vendetta against former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, designed to suggest illegal behavior by him in relation to the Airbus matter. Despite its failure to establish such behavior and despite the RCMP having stated - after a lengthy investigation at home and abroad - that it had no evidence to substantiate such suggestions, the Fifth Estate persists in continuing its efforts to tarnish Mr. Mulroney's name."

Read the full statement and see the whole story here.

CBC misreads the law

While disagreement over CBC funding is as old as the broadcaster itself, the more uncomfortable discussion for the CBC is its coverage of the current election campaign – particularly its approach to national debates and political party advertising – which raises troubling questions about its relevance in the current media environment.

The most puzzling decision has been its refusal to broadcast debates hosted by other organizations. The CBC may be disappointed with the debate approach adopted by the political parties in this campaign, but that does not change the sense that if the national public broadcaster does not air programs in the national public interest, it calls into question the very need for a public broadcaster. Indeed, the CBC seems to have cut off its nose to spite its face by doing its best to prove its critics right.

The CBC’s odd coverage choices are not limited to the missing debates. Its use of video clips from the debates has also been unnecessarily restrictive. For example, before analyzing the recent Munk debates on the “At Issue” panel, host Peter Mansbridge warned viewers that “we are limited with the excerpts with the amount we are allowed to show.” A similar warning preceded the discussion at other debates.

Yet the reality is that there was no need to be restrictive in the use of video clips. Canadian copyright law permits the use of copyrighted works without permission as part of the fair dealing clause. News reporting is one of the enumerated purposes and even expanded clips would easily qualify under a fair dealing analysis. All news organizations are free to use as much of the video from debates as necessary to highlight key moments and positions of each leader. To suggest that the law creates significant limits on the ability to show debate clips is inaccurate.

In fact, the CBC’s misreading of the law is not limited to the use of clips within its news broadcasts.

Read the full story.

Time to opt out of CBC

It is time to scrap the CBC and sell off its assets to the highest bidder.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation STILL receives more than $1billion dollars of government funding each and every year.

That's right - more than $1 billion public dollars a year goes to supporting a broadcasting corporation whose market share continues to decline. This is not value for taxpayers, and we want to put an end to it.

At the NCC we are currently producing radio commercials to spread the word about this campaign and to build support for our petition, which you can find below.

Please support us with a donation today to help fund these ads!

There is simply no reason for our government to be in the television broadcast business any longer. The CBC unfairly competes with private sector broadcasters for advertising revenue and programming content - and these private broadcasters are already subject to effective Canadian content regulations.

Sigh the petition here!

CBC Billion Dollar Funding

The following chart shows total parliamentary funding of CBC each year over the last decade, including one-time grants. One-time grants are announced in government budgets or decided over the course of the budget year. These funds apply only in the year they are granted and do not form part of CBC's stable, long-term funding.

The chart below has been stated in 2011 dollars to reflect the impact of inflation on purchasing power and provide a consistent basis for comparison over time.

See the full report here.

Exposed - real change at CBC starts with you

What case can be made for the Government to be in the public broadcasting business competing unfairly with the private sector in 2016?

The CBC receives advertising and cable/satellite fees-fees greater than CTV and Global but this is not enough for the greedy CBC who also receive more than a billion dollars of your tax money. And now the new Trudeau Government has promised at least an additional $150 million dollars a year to this biased, wasteful government broadcaster.

As is, Taxpayers continue to be hosed to the tune of about $100,000,000 (yes, 100 MILLION) of our taxes every 30 days with no CBC accountability to taxpayers as they continue with their biased news service serving only the extreme socialists and anti-Semitics.

What does it take for real change at the CBC? You!  Our blog now contains a link to the Politicians contact info for you to make your voice heard. Act now and contact your MP, the Cabinet and Prime Minister ... tell them to stop wasting your money, and ... sell the CBC.