CBC BOD's get $2000 a day to attend meetings ...

What is the compensation for CBC/Radio-Canada’s Board members?

The remuneration of the Chair of the Board and the President and CEO are in accordance with the terms of the Order-in-Council appointing them. The President and CEO receives his annual salary, while the Chair of the Board receives an annual retainer (from $14,500 to $17,100) and per diem fee (from $565 to $665) for meetings, travel time, and special executive, analytical or representational responsibilities.

The current remuneration scheme for the other members of the Board of Directors is:

Meetings		Board of Directors	Audit Committee	Other Committees
Regular (in person) Meetings	Attendance in person	For the first 6 regular meeting days: $2,000/day	For the first 6 regular meeting days: $1,300/day for members $1,550 for the Chair	For the first 4 regular meeting days: $1,000/day for members $1,250 for the Chair
		Thereafter: $625/day	Thereafter: $625/day	Thereafter: $625/day
	Participation by telephone	$625/day or $312.50/half-day	$250/day	$250/day

Conference Call Meetings

$250/day

$250/day

$250/day

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Hubert Lacroix thinks the CBC's business model is broken ...

Carol Off: Mr. Lacroix, you say that that the business model and policy framework of CBC is profoundly and irrevocably broken. What exactly is broken?

Hubert Lacroix: Broken means that even if the current federal government has reinvested $75 million for the first year and $150 million for the next four, those dollars do not allow us, over time, to actually fix the issues that are about ensuring that we can continue giving services to Canadians, as Canadians expect. We're not the only ones to feel that way. Every other conventional broadcaster feels the difficulty of ad revenues moving and of the digital transformation that we're all coping with.

Read the full interview here.

CBC behaves like a ruthless media company

Over the last few years, declining subscriptions, the Internet and lower advertising revenue have hit the nation’s newspapers hard. They might soon only afford a small staff of interns to yell the news in your local town square.

The heads of the newspaper business have told Parliament’s heritage committee that the CBC is to blame.

The CBC has made a number of changes, from running digital ads to launching an opinion section that has diversified the range of white people paid to have opinions.

Our public broadcaster behaved like a ruthless media company, which other media companies apparently did not realize was an option.These changes, they say, have hampered the ability of newspapers to sell advertising. It hasn’t come up that the websites of many major newspapers look like a scanned pdf. And the existence of adblockers seems to have escaped their attention.

Up against this finger-pointing, the CBC has responded that they’re only too happy to get out of the advertising game. For $418 million, they’ll go ad-free like their BBC counterparts. Not only is it a clever bit of ransoming, it’s an excellent response to every criticism levelled at them.

Read the full story here.

Fifth Estate’s obsession with Kennedy fantasies

The CBC’s venerable Fifth Estate has done a lot of good work on important stories over many decades. But its record has been marred by repeatedly peddling fantastical stories about the 1963 murder of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The most recent came on November 17, with “The JFK Files: The Murder of a President.”

The broadcast was produced by Brian McKenna, a veteran CBC documentary filmmaker who has authored no less than six on the topic for the Fifth Estate. The highly-decorated newsman’s many awards include a 2010 Pioneer Award from JFK Lancer, a Texas-based organization that conducts research and hold conferences in support of its fervent belief that the U.S. government has conspired for over half a century to hide the truth from the world. McKenna was honoured for his “lifetime of searching for the truth” about who killed JFK.

The Fifth Estate’s November 17th broadcast recycles footage from an earlier documentary they broadcast – also a McKenna effort – from 1983. That production, titled “Who Killed JFK?” revived several well-debunked conspiracy theories including: Lee Harvey Oswald was a poor marksman; there were only 5.6 seconds between the shots fired; no single gunman could achieve such a feat; the bullet found to have struck both Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connally traversed an impossible trajectory; and the fatal head shot came from the front.

None of these claims were true then, or now.

It might be tempting to shrug off McKenna and the Fifth Estate’s obsession with Kennedy fantasies as just the eccentricities of a rogue operation within the giant CBC bureaucracy. But somebody higher up the food chain approves their budgets and their programs.

Read the full story here.

Discussing CBC’s new strategic plan

In an editorial for Newspapers Canada, Canadian Newspaper Association chair Bob Cox argues that it’s pointless—and maybe even a little corrupt—for the CBC to be reorienting itself toward online services, precisely because doing so is a business-savvy move—so business-savvy, in fact, that privately owned newspapers are already doing it of their own accord. “There’s no need to pour tax dollars into something the the private sector is already doing without a subsidy, unless the goal is propaganda,” he writes.

Journalist Jesse Brown managed to get his hands on some of the internal documents the CBC to sell the change to its employees. Brown calls the contents of those documents “a smokescreen of digital futurism bafflegab” full of “mendacious, obfuscatory doublespeak,” all of which, he says, has caused CBC’s work atmosphere to “hit a new low.”

Read the full story here.

The CBC was grossly inaccurate

"Pure," the new CBC Television drama about drug-smuggling Mennonites that premièred this week, is a little bit like the cocaine that is at the centre of the story: It's seductively thrilling, and it's bad for you.

Toronto-based critics have raved about the gorgeous cinematography and fine acting. All true.

But the show — which is seen as a Mennonite version of the American hit series "Breaking Bad" — has also profoundly upset people who actually know something about this small, distinctive and vulnerable subculture.

They say the CBC was grossly inaccurate in its portrayal, and has engaged in hurtful stereotyping.

"There's a lot of misrepresentation," said Marlene Epp, who teaches Mennonite history and is also dean at Conrad Grebel University College at University of Waterloo.

Read the full story here.

CBC Bet $80 Million and Lost

CBC TV has struggled ever since it lost NHL hockey to Rogers in 2013. Sports, especially hockey, have always been the CBC's fallback programming strategy and when Rogers swooped in and paid billions for the NHL, the dazed CBC responded like a concussed defenceman. To compensate, CBC acquired the rights to the 2014 Sochi and 2016 Rio Olympics and even before the 2016 games were in the books, the public broadcaster agreed to pay the IOC until 2024.

CBC management said that the Olympics would "break even" or "make a small profit" and that the decision was "fiscally responsible."

Did CBC make a good business decision for taxpayers, its 'shareholders'? Did the games break even or make a profit? CRTC data on CBC ad revenues show that the Olympics had a relatively modest impact on revenues in 2016. CBC English increased revenues by some $45 million in 2016 and the French network had basically no increase. So, overall, in 2016 the Olympics cost the CBC $80 million and generated incremental revenues of only about $45 million, creating a net loss of some $35 million.

Read the full story here.

CBC faces a storm of criticism

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has submitted a proposal to the federal government requesting $318 million in additional funding in order to allow the public broadcaster to move to an ad-free model.

The CBC says the $318 million figure it is requesting will act as a “replacement” if the broadcaster were to eliminate advertising, noting it would require $253 million to make up for ad revenue and $105 million to produce content to fill the gaps in air time left open free of ads. Going ad-free would also save $40 million that would otherwise be spent selling ads.

The public broadcaster has faced a storm of criticism in recent months from executives of private newspaper companies testifying before a panel of MPs studying the future of media in Canada. Those critics have argued that, while the CBC is the the recipient of a five-year, $675 million increase in funding from the federal government in addition to its annual $1 billion largesse, its digital operations have taken away potential ad revenue from struggling private competitors.

Read the full story here.

CBC Radio’s flagship arts and culture show q is getting a reboot

The public broadcaster is replacing Shad (aka Shadrach Kabango) 16 months after the Juno-winning rapper joined the program. He will sign off on Tuesday, August 16 and be succeeded by CBC Radio 2 morning host Tom Power in October.

Shad took over at q after the CBC fired former host Jian Ghomeshi amidst a sexual assault scandal in 2014.

The rapper had no broadcasting experience when he joined the q and was criticized in the press as a bland interviewer. According to the CBC, the show’s ratings have dropped from a high point of 282,000 listeners in 2014 to 168,000 in June 2016.

Read the full story here.

CBC’s innovative enterprise in question

The succession to the Peter Mansbridge era on CBC’s The National gambles on a multi-host show of far fewer stories and far more discussion with reporters. It is far too early to pronounce, but nothing about Monday night was sufficiently inventive to enhance the brand or attract a much-needed audience.

Much is at stake: not so much its public appropriation of $1.1 billion (at least under this government) as much as its place in the public sphere as a television network transforming to digital.

Where radio forms its backbone and truest connection to the country, with few exceptions the TV network largely struggles with ratings. The nightly newscast – while considered the journalistic standard-bearer in Canada – has for nearly two decades now finished well behind CTV’s.

Mansbridge announced his departure a year ago, the network has had at least that time to research and implement a more innovative format to regenerate its audience, but there was nothing Monday to demonstrate a dramatic rethink.

It begs the question: Is the format no longer adaptable? Or even worse: Is CBC no longer adaptable?

Read the full story here.

CBC's new baking show missing ingredients

It's getting fierce wintry in this neck of the woods. Overcoats are being worn in the streets. The trees resemble Canadian cultural policy – pretty colours to look at, then lifeless. Soon, the clocks will go back and people will be, you know, "SAD."

We ask, with good reason I think, what our national broadcaster is doing to help.

The Great Canadian Baking Show (Wednesday, CBC, 8 p.m. ET) is what it's doing. It's the much-hyped local version of The Great British Bake Off, obviously.

The CBC version is very much a literal, copycat iteration.

There is a lot to mock in this overconceptualized, overly imitative show but, of course, the entire concoction rests upon the amateur bakers who compete.

Read the full story here.

CBC’s flagship newscast sat dead last

For most of its life, the CBC has operated on a bloated budget, hovering just under or just over, a billion-dollar yearly grant from Canadian taxpayers. Now Lacroix is whining for $400 million more if the CBC is not allowed to sell ads.

Now with the CBC’s umpteenth “makeover”, unveiled this week with the usual cringe-worthy narcissism, another thing is becoming crystal-clear: this moribund bureaucracy will never re-invent itself, no matter how many self-congratulatory infomercials it airs about its “edgy” new format.

For the week of July 10, the CBC’s flagship newscast sat dead last in the Big Three TV Ratings behind CTV National News (976,000) and Global National (686,000). The National had 621,000 viewers.

My take on this latest iteration? It looks to be four times as boring as the Mansbridge mumble-hour. Canada’s communications star chamber merely shuffled the deck chairs on the Titanic. The shop is as closed as ever.

Read the full story here.

CBC managers close to deceitful about audience performance

CBC is like a crazy, old aunt, unwilling to accept the reality of her circumstances. In CBC's case it is the reality that its radio audience is comprised mostly of older Canadians. CBC senior managers have recently boasted about the record high audiences of CBC Radio. They gush over CBC Radio's audience share in speeches and public appearances, such as last month's appearance before a Senate Committee, but never acknowledge that loyal, senior citizen listeners are responsible for creating a mathematical illusion. Mark Twain would say there are lies, damn lies.

While CBC Radio is undoubtedly the jewel in CBC's crown and virtually a necessity for a large number of Canadians, managers have been close to deceitful about its audience performance. Why?

Read the full story here.

Why four new anchors to replace Peter Mansbridge?

Peter Mansbridge's long goodbye has finally ended with the Crown-owned broadcaster replacing him with four, count 'em, four new anchors.

Four hosts addresses one of McGuire's major challenges: how do you bring a sense of renewal without risking the credibility of the brand.

In the past, CBC has invested big sums in making stars out of certain broadcasters—such as Jian Ghomeshi, Solomon, Rex Murphy, and Amanda Lang—who subsequently became the source of controversy over their off-air activities.

"I didn't want four different versions of the same person," Jennifer McGuire, editor in chief for CBC News, says on the CBC website.

By appointing four anchors, McGuire can easily dump any one of them should they find themselves the subject of unflattering stories in other media outlets. And the show will still go on.

Read the full story here.

CBC Restructuring Attempt Complete Failure

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.

As Bulgutch points out, it’s not necessarily the structure of the program that needs updating; The National’s competitors have succeeded in spite of, or perhaps because of, their staid format. “ctv has done the same newscast for sixty years,” he says. “They have an average audience bigger than The National’s audience every night and they don’t do anything different than they did in 1965.”

Read the full story here.

CBC urged to present a balanced argument

B’nai Brith Canada is urging ICI Radio-Canada Première (the French-language counterpart of CBC/Radio-Canada) to present a balanced argument on the Arab-Israeli conflict after historian Shlomo Sand promoted falsehoods about the Jewish state that went unchallenged during its morning radio show Dessine-moi un dimanche.

In the segment, which aired on June 4, 2017 and focuses on the Six-Day War between Israel and the neighbouring armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, Sand presents his interpretation as what happened during the war. Rather than offering a multifaceted view on the controversial subject, at no time does radio host Franco Nuovo refer to Sand’s synopsis of the conflict as opinion.

Immediately following the broadcast, B’nai Brith received numerous complaints concerning the biased nature of the program. In a letter to CBC President Hubert Lacroix, Allan Adel, National Chair of B’nai Brith’s League for Human Rights, expresses B’nai Brith’s concern that CBC “is abusing Canadian taxpayers by producing segments which do not fairly represent a diversity of opinion.” Adel also sent a letter of complaint to the ICI Radio-Canada Première Ombudsman.

Read the full story here.

CBC President Gives Himself Passing Grade

‘I think I passed’: CBC’s Hubert Lacroix reflects on his time as president.

Every president of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation faces challenges, but Lacroix's tenure was unusually crisis-filled, from a series of budget and staff cuts (in 2009, 2012 and 2014, totalling about 1,900 jobs); the loss of the NHL broadcasting contract; the Ghomeshi scandal and the ensuing revelations of a toxic workplace culture designed to placate hosts; and a conflagration within the human-resources department which sparked a series of lawsuits by former employees.

Read the full story here.

Sue the CBC for constructive dismissal

There is nothing improper in news organizations promoting their editorial opinions or endorsing the party of their choice come election time. It is also fair game for publications to hire writers reflecting their editorial mandate and think tanks to hire those who share their vision.

But it is another matter to discipline or fire writers, editors or think-tank directors for merely expressing politically incorrect opinions or, even more worrying, for standing up for free speech and open debate, as we’ve seen recently at Write magazine, the CBC and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

If I were Steve Ladurantaye’s lawyer, I’d advise him to sue the CBC for constructive dismissal.

Steve Ladurantaye, until recently the managing editor at CBC’s The National, was removed from his position — demoted really — for tweeting. He had made it clear on Twitter that he thought it was unjust that Hal Niedzviecki, the editor of Write, the publication of the Writers’ Union of Canada, had to resign for defending “cultural appropriation.” If I were Ladurantaye’s lawyer, I’d advise him to sue for constructive dismissal.

Read the full story here.

CBC is supposed to fill the gaps

The CBC is a broadcaster with resources the likes of which most can only dream. It has bureaus in every province and territory. It has correspondents in virtually every Canadian ethnic and linguistic community. It has $1 billion in stable government funding and an extra $150 million per year to come.

In the right hands, this kind of wealth could be wielded in awesome, history-changing ways.

The whole point of giving taxpayer money to a broadcaster is so they're able to perform a service that wouldn't exist without government support.

This was the reason the proto-CBC Canadian Royal Broadcasting Commission was founded in the first place.

Private capital wasn't up to the task of sending radio into all corners of the world's second-largest landmass, so a government agency was struck to do it instead.

CBC is supposed to fill the gaps that regular broadcasters can't: getting news coverage to remote areas, backing years-long investigative projects, taking risks that just aren't possible for a programming director who has to answer to investors at the end of a quarter.

Instead, CBC acts as if it's just another fish in the Canadian media pool - albeit one that doesn't need to worry about ratings, debt or subscriber numbers.

This isn't just uncreative, it's predatory - and has the predictable effect of kneecapping CBC's non-subsidized competitors.

Read the full story here.

The CBC is so dysfunctional ...

With the blockbuster news that Richard Stursberg has allegedly been fired from the CBC, a lot of people are trying to explain what, precisely, was his career’s mortal sin. Not that Stursberg suffered from having too few enemies inside the Corp., but nobody, as yet, has explained why he left now. David Akin of Sun Media has a theory: the CBC is so dysfunctional that it fired a man who made it more popular.

According to Akin, Stursberg is a casualty in the never-ending war between people who want the CBC to be a public-minded, non-commercial medium and the people who want CBC to actually have an audience.

Read the full story here.

CBC lost respect of veteran broadcaster

Broadcast veteran Tim Knight talks about how he lost respect for CBC's flagship news program The National on July 7, 2011. After 30 years of watching, some years of working there, and pages and pages of notes, Knight asks: Has The National lost its journalistic soul?

Broadcast veteran Tim Knight talks about how he lost respect for CBC's flagship news program The National on July 7, 2011. After 30 years of watching, some years of working there, and pages and pages of notes, Knight asks: Has The National lost its journalistic soul?

The date was July 7, 2011 — the day Canada pulled its troops out of Afghanistan after nine years of brutal war ending without even a truce. One hundred and sixty-one Canadian soldiers and civilians died in that war. At a financial cost of some $18-billion. By the close of this day we’d lost more troops per capita in Afghanistan than any of the 21 other coalition nations — including the United States which started it.

July 7, 2011 was the end of Canada’s longest-ever war. An historic, momentous day for our nation. A day to remember. A day to show respect. A day to mourn. A day to celebrate, perhaps.

Yet you wouldn’t have had a clue about this day’s significance if you watched the CBC’s flagship news program on the evening of July 7, 2011.

Read the rest of the story here.

Is CBC President Hubert Lacroix in or out?

According to the CBC story here, the term of the current chair, Remi Racine, was to end Tuesday (June 2017). Hubert Lacroix's term as president is set to expire in October.  It was also announced in this story that "The federal Liberals have put together a star-studded cast to help choose new members of the public broadcaster's board of directors."

YET ...

If you go to the main CBC website here, both are still listed in their jobs.

Things that make you go hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

What happened?

CBC 'comfortable' with ratings despite dip

The CBC says it's "comfortable" with the early buzz for its revamped "The National," even though the debut newscast's ratings were only on par with the kind of numbers Peter Mansbridge used to draw.

And they've slipped since last Monday's first broadcast.

On a randomly chosen Monday night in January, when Mansbridge was still anchor, "The National" on the main network had an estimated audience of 734,000 viewers during the first half hour of the show, dropping to 584,000 viewers in the second half.

For the debut of the new "The National" — now hosted by Ian Hanomansing, Adrienne Arsenault, Rosemary Barton and Andrew Chang — 739,000 viewers were tuned in for the first 30 minutes on CBC, while 601,000 were still watching for the second half.

But subsequent nights saw ratings peak between the high-300,000 to low-600,000 range.

Read the full story here.

CBC payback: how Mansbridge’s people tried to kill Linden MacIntyre’s last story

In walking back its ban last week of retiring journalist Linden MacIntyre, the CBC presented the public with an official version of events which describe the decision to punish MacIntyre as a "heat of the moment" mistake by one CBC manager, Jennifer Harwood. CANADALAND has learned that this is not true.

The night Jennifer Harwood sent her email memo, titled “Standing up for Peter Mansbridge” to her CBCNN staffers, her husband Mark Harrison, the Executive Producer of The National, also tried to exact vengeance on Linden MacIntyre for his comments about Peter Mansbridge.

CBC sources reveal that Harrison contacted fifth estate boss Jim Williamson on Wednesday night. Harrison angrily demanded that Williamson pull Linden MacIntyre’s upcoming investigative documentary – his last piece of journalism for the CBC – from the fifth estate completely, in retribution for MacIntyre’s comments about Mansbridge.

MacIntyre further clarified that he stands by the gist of his statements about Mansbridge. His error, he says, was to carelessly juxtapoze Mansbridge and Gzowski with Ghomeshi, whose alleged crimes are extreme. “There was no intention to tie (Mansbridge) to a criminal,” says MacIntyre.

However, the main thrust of his statements: that CBC fuels a culture of celebrity, that this leaves temporary and contract workers vulnerable, and that Mansbridge is known to have acted abusively to his subordinates, MacIntyre does not apologize for.

Read the full story here.

CBC overrules editor's decision

Linden MacIntyre has not been barred from appearing on CBC News Network this week despite an internal public broadcaster memo to the contrary.

Jennifer Harwood, managing editor of CBC News Network, sent a memo late Wednesday stating that any interviews with MacIntyre on the network this week have been cancelled.

The memo said the move came about because of MacIntyre’s recent comments to the Globe and Mail comparing the workplace behaviour of Peter Mansbridge to that of ousted “Q” host Jian Ghomeshi.

Read the full story here.

No one at CBC held accountable

The story starts in 1995, when a freelance journalist, Nicholas Regush, came to the fifth estate pitching what he said was a sensational story about corruption in the drug regulatory business.

Regush and his team had four-and-a-half months to pull the piece together.

CBC insiders say there were times that the team disagreed on the script, the tone, and what was cut from the story.

When the piece was complete, it was vetted by Studer, the rest of the production team, and CBC lawyer Michael Hughes.

Two doctors, Dr. Frans Leenen, a respected medical researcher and director of the Hypertension Unit of Ottawa's famous Heart Institute, and Dr. Martin Myers, a cardiologist at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital, were not portrayed in the best light.

The program aired Feb. 27, 1996. The CBC devoted its entire one-hour program to this issue, something it does only about 25 per cent of the time.

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.

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."

It's the biggest libel award in Canadian history and everybody at the CBC has their head in the sand. 

Read the full story here.

Interesting facts on CBC.ca

This information was obtained from Alexa ... click here to see full report.

Audience Geography

Where are this site's visitors located?

Country	Percent of Visitors	Rank in Country
Canada	70.5%	24
United States	16.0%	1,545

How engaged are visitors to cbc.ca?

NOTE - Your website's bounce rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of people who land on one of your web pages and then leave without clicking to anywhere else on your website -- in other words, single-page visitors

Bounce Rate

64.10% 3.00%

Daily Pageviews per Visitor

2.01 4.74%

Daily Time on Site

3:28 4.00%

Search Traffic

What percentage of visits to this site come from a search engine?

Search Visits

23.70% 18.00%

Audience Demographics

How similar is this site's audience to the general internet population?

Gender

Internet Average

Male

  

Female

  

BelowAbove

Education

Internet Average

No College

  

Some College

  

Graduate School

  

College

  

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Internet Average

Home

  

School

  

Work

  

BelowAbove

Upstream Sites

Which sites did people visit immediately before this site?

Site	Percent of Unique Visits
1.  google.ca	25.8%
2.  google.com	9.6%
3.  reddit.com	9.4%
4.  facebook.com	7.7%
5.  youtube.com	1.8%

CTV News Trumps CBC News

Including airings on both CBC and CBC News Network, “The National's" average minute audience between Aug. 29, 2016 to April 9, 2017 was 866,000 viewers, according to data supplied by ratings agency Numeris.

Including all CTV and CTV News Channel broadcasts, the average audience of “CTV National News” during the same period was 1.3 million.

Read the full story here.

CBC is the 800 pound news media gorilla

We all act out of some degree of self-interest, but the arguments put forward recently by CBC executives are something to behold.

First, CBC President Hubert Lacroix put forward a position paper proposing the public broadcaster move to an ad-free model, with $400 million in additional funding from the federal government. Then Jennifer McGuire and Michel Cormier, the heads of the English and French news services, argued that moving away from advertising on all platforms would help other Canadian media transition to the digital environment. How? The CBC would replace its current ad revenues with guaranteed money from the federal government, and private media would scramble to get some of those dollars from advertisers.

McGuire and Cormier’s comments are part of the ongoing public discussion over what can be done as traditional news media are weakened in their ability to do public interest journalism. The answer, according to CBC executives, is: Let’s have more CBC! But the solution to the disrupted news media scene in Canada is not for taxpayers to shell out more to a public provider of news, no matter how high-quality or how high-minded.

The CBC has rapidly become the 800-pound gorilla in news media in many communities across Canada, not just because of its own increased resources but also because of reduced revenues at private media outlets. The result is a distortion of the marketplace that undermines the ability of private firms to transition and to continue to report the very same news and information that CBC executives say it should be publicly funded to provide.

Read the full story here.

Quebecor media attacked by CBC

It is with bewilderment that Quebecor Media Inc. today learned of misleading and unfounded information published in its regard by CBC/Radio-Canada, a federal crown corporation.

Quebecor Media requests that CBC/Radio-Canada immediately retract itself and remove without delay the false and malicious information contained in its communication. Quebecor Media will not tolerate that an institution of the federal government attempt to sully its reputation in this matter. In the mean time, it imperatively wishes to make the following corrections:

Read the full story here.

CBC has become a gravy train for elites

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.

Already costing taxpayers $1.04 billion in 2015 and facing rising competition, the CBC's fiscal burden is set to jump by $75 million in 2016 and $150 million in 2017. Regarding the higher price tag of the state broadcaster, Finance Minister Bill Morneau has deflected by saying that “believing in innovation is also believing in the talent and in the creativity of Canadians.” Apologists further contend this is necessary to save the CBC from "extinction."

That begs the question: if the CBC is growing obsolete and people favour other sources, ones that do not cost the taxpayer, how is that a bad thing?

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.

Read the full story here.

CBC wants to go ad free

When a panel of Canada’s top media executives gathered Thursday to discuss industry issues, the conversation inevitably turned to the changing world of online and TV advertising, and the role new players have in the system.

While OTT platforms certainly present serious competition for eyeballs and are forcing traditional broadcasters to invest more in content, Heather Conway, EVP of English Services at CBC added SVODs are also conditioning audiences to be “adlergic.”

“We are training the audience through the OTT experience to have a low tolerance for advertising,” she said.

She added that the issue facing broadcasters isn’t TV dollars being replaced by “digital dimes,” it’s that there are so many competitors in the digital space.

Conway added that by going ad-free, the CBC could focus on its cultural mandate and at the same time give a boost to private broadcasters.

“The study that we commissioned from Nordicity does show that two-thirds of our ad revenue would migrate to two companies,” she said. “It would be helpful, I think, to have those funds, as we are all are struggling with the transitions that we’ve talked about. The public broadcaster doesn’t have to be in that space.”

Read the full story here.

PS - how many more millions of taxpayer dollars would this cost Canadians?  Worth it?

CBC's The National is a harebrained muddle

Here's an odd and ironic thing. When I recorded CBC's The National this week on my PVR, the on-screen icon for the recording was a photo of Peter Mansbridge.

Somebody at CBC should do something about that. This is not Mansbridge's The National. In fact I don't know what it is. Nor does CBC, one suspects. The revamped newscast is not a newscast as a newscast is known to you and me. It's a chatty, visually bewildering assessment of some news stories of the day. That's not the news, per se. It's a not even a summary of what happened. It's a lot of "sharing" and a lot of "voices" being heard and it is chatty, chatty, chatty.

Some of them, those voices, are off the wall, literally. With four hosts, Adrienne Arsenault, Rosemary Barton, Andrew Chang and Ian Hanomansing, and not all in the same studio, their faces loom on the wall and talk at us.

In all seriousness, the revamped The National, in its first few outings, is disjointed, surreal and sadly lacking in coherence. It makes no sense.

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Is the CBC really biased?

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. At first approximation, this result seems to confirm the biased left-wing nature of CBC.

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 policy paper here.

CTV is number one

CTV is the most-watched Canadian television network in primetime for an unprecedented 16 years in a row, ending the core 2016/17 season once again as the most consistent television network in North America. Number 1 across the board in daytime and primetime, CTV’s overall average audience is 35% larger than its next closest competitor for A25-54 and total viewers, increasing its lead to 39% for A18-49 and to an impressive 48% with millennials aged 18-34.

In revealing the most-watched programs of the year in Canada, CTV lays claim to six or more of the Top 10 programs in total viewers and all key demos, including an incredible eight of the Top 10 series among A18-34. CTV has more Top 20 programs in key demos than all other competitors combined, with 12/20 in the A18-34 demo alone.

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Why does the CBC compete with newspapers?

Would Netflix want to get into the newspaper business? I doubt it. Then, why is CBC so keen on competing with the print media with its online offerings? Is it breaking the law in doing so?

For more than 20 years CBC has offered an Internet website, cbc.ca, but in the past few years this effort has been accelerated. In its recently released strategic plan, called “A Space for Us All,” CBC was coy about its plans to compete with print media. When it was pointed out on Twitter that the strategy said the CBC wanted to turn into a “public media company,” the CBC first denied that this phrase was in the document and then tried to rationalize it.

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CBC Report Implies Israel Has No Right to Exist

In a CBC TV report broadcast on November 2 marking the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration (the historic document written by Lord Arthur Balfour which expressed Britain’s support for a Jewish national homeland in historic Palestine) CBC Mideast journalist Derek Stoffel’s report implicitly cast doubt on Israel’s right to exist by supposedly referencing Palestinian claims stating that the Balfour Declaration “led to the military occupation of the Palestinian people by the Israelis.”

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CBC operats on a bloated budget

CBC president Hubert Lacroix hit the nail on the head, though his eyes were probably tightly closed at the time: Public broadcasters, he said in a 2015 presentation, “risk being boiled to death.”

Correct. For their greed, mismanagement, badly outdated mandate, second-rate products and terminal arrogance.

Sadly, it didn’t take Hubert long to get back into whine mode. Speaking at an international public broadcaster’s convention in Munich, Lacroix belly-ached that budget cuts could threaten the continued existence of outfits like the CBC.

For most of its life, the CBC has operated on a bloated budget, hovering just under or just over, a billion-dollar yearly grant from Canadian taxpayers. Now Lacroix is whining for $400 million more if the CBC is not allowed to sell ads.

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CBC has looming public-relations problem

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.

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.

It might not be such of a concern if CBC programming was radically different from what's available from private media outlets. But in the 21st century, those lines have become increasingly blurred.

Read the full editorial here.

How long until the CBC is the only game in town?

Local TV began moving out of small Ontario cities years ago.

It is, as far as the eye can survey, a media universe ruled by Google, Facebook, Twitter — and in Canada, the CBC.

The first has an effective monopoly on Internet searches, capturing the associated ad revenue. The second has an effective monopoly on community engagement, endearing photos of our children and, increasingly, display advertising in markets large and small. The third has an effective monopoly on political chatter and breaking news. The fourth announced last week it is setting up an op-ed division.

The Mother Corp. receives $1 billion annually in federal subsidy. Its funding is waxing, courtesy of the Trudeau government. It aggressively sells advertising – indeed, stomps with gigantic feet all over the national ad market, in competition with industry.

How long, given these enormous structural advantages, until the CBC is the only game in town? And how healthy will that be for Canadian democracy, and taxpayers?

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CBC using taxpayer money to kill competition

CBC is mandated by Parliament to run radio and television services across Canada. With the advent of the digital age they’ve used the excuse that they need to promote and showcase their content online but anyone paying attention knows that CBC’s online offerings long ago stopped being about promoting radio or TV shows and became all about being the biggest media empire in Canada; a digital powerhouse taking on all comers and using tax dollars to compete.

CBC’s latest expansions whether into a columnist and opinion section, into digital only newsrooms in places like Hamilton, Kelowna or London are nothing but the government owned enterprise using their billion dollar plus per year subsidy to compete against the private sector.

CBC as uber-predator, stealing talent, expanding into new areas and killing off the competition using money that comes from the taxes those very same competitors pay.

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Many reasons the CBC could be defunded ...

In private sector broadcasting, where we are paid by great advertisers who we must attract and keep, many of us look askance at the CBC, and why not?

The state-funded broadcaster starts the race every year coming out of the blocks $1.2 billion ahead, thanks to a taxpayer subsidy.

As a one-time “Ceeb” aficionado decades ago, I can attest that no political party in Canada will ever have the courage to cut the CBC’s lucrative lifeline.

There are many reasons the CBC could be defunded, not the least of which is its policy origins; a nation defining and building enterprise, both culturally — staving off the intrusive influence of America — and technically, by providing a pan-national network of transmitters bringing news, sports and entertainment to every corner of a vast Canada.

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CBC has strayed a long way from its original purpose

The online success of the CBC should be laudable. Its website received an average of 6.2-million unique visitors last year, making it the most popular Canadian website.

In doing so, the CBC has strayed a long way from its original purpose: to sustain Canadian culture when and where the market cannot. The problem is, the CBC’s traditional funding model now allows it to build its digital empire unfettered by economic reality. In its last quarter, 60% of the company’s expenses were paid by government subsidies while just 21% of its revenue comes from advertising. All media companies are struggling to adapt to shifting consumer and advertising patterns brought about by the digital age; only the CBC had $1.2 billion in government cash to fund its experiments and ease the transition.

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CBC's Downward Spiral

Looking back, it really began in 1992 when CBC TV took a gamble that ignored its most important asset, the public. Then-president Gerard Veilleux and his board of directors moved the flagship national news program from 10 .p.m to 9 p.m. The president claimed preposterously that people were going to bed earlier; research showed that was untrue, and managers thought there were enough internal checks and balances to stop the move to 9 p.m. They were wrong. The change was made and the audience plummeted to new lows.

Flash forward to this century. Government-appointed CBC presidents, the latest being Hubert Lacroix and his CBC board of directors, have made or been induced by managers into: making massive cuts to the CBC Radio budget, ignoring basic radio programming strategy; introducing ads on Radio 2 only to have the CRTC order them to stop; cutting local TV news programs, then expanding them, then cutting them again; turning off TV transmitters in cities smaller than 200,000 people; bidding for unprofitable Olympic rights; launching radio "stations" only available on the Internet; launching a streaming music service with zero revenue in five years; competing for newspaper readers, ignoring it is the Canadian "Broadcasting" Corporation; announcing that CBC will double revenues from digital services, which were almost zero to begin with; watching TV ad revenues in 2015 plummet to their lowest level in history; setting a goal to double the monthly audience reach of CBC Internet services (CBC.ca), ignoring the fact that CBC TV already had a daily reach exceeding CBC.ca.

The past decade has seen a cornucopia of management incompetence.

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