Why you shouldn't believe CBC's latest claims

An op-ed published by CBC today states that the legalization of cannabis is based on "highly dubious claims and grossly optimistic expectations", and that the Liberal government should not proceed with the bill as planned.

In fact, the opinion piece in question has a series of its own issues, including a reference to a study that was debunked by a leading cannabis researcher in 2016.

The first indication that the piece should be taken with a grain (read: teaspoon) of salt is hidden in the author's description near the bottom of the story.

Read the full story here.

How to define a CBC President stereotype

CBC has a new president and she couldn’t fit the stereotypical mold better. Not that you would have heard of any of what I will tell you from the MSM coverage of her appointment.

The headlines mostly focused on one thing, CBC’s new president Catherine Tait, is a woman.

It does her long career in media a disservice to be frank. Tait has worked for decades in various aspects of the media in Canada and the United States, she has vital experience and that should have been the focus for people that care about the state broadcaster.

For me, what stands out about Tait the more I read about her is that she is a stereotype of what you would expect of a CBC head honcho.

From reports and public information we know that Tait supports left wing political causes and projects, is a Liberal donor and, as a producer, has made a bunch of stuff I’ve never heard of.

Isn’t that what you would expect of a CBC boss?

Read the full story here.

Has CBC sold off editorial control of news program

Has the cash-strapped CBC SOLD OFF editorial control of their flagship news program The National to the federal NDP? Or have they just GIVEN it to them?

Something has gone terrible awry with Canada’s public broadcaster, whose Journalistic Standards state:

“We are committed to reflecting accurately the range of experiences and points of view of all citizens. All Canadians, of whatever origins, perspectives and beliefs, should feel that our news and current affairs coverage is relevant to them and lives up to our Values.”

Not from what I’ve observed!

Read the full story here.

CBC accused of using children to indoctrinate Canadian kids in liberal ideology

Kids as young as 10 years old are the stars of what is being billed as a news show covering Ontario's sex-ed curriculum, transgenderism, and recreational marijuana on Canada's taxpayer-funded public broadcaster.

Say hello to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's CBC Kids News program.

The program's hosts are 15-year-old "entrepreneur and video producer" Campbell Baron, 14-year-old stage and voice actress Saara Chaudry, 10-year-old child actor Ari Resnick, and 11-year-old "budding entrepreneur" and clarinetist Isabelle MacNeil.

Ezra Levant, co-founder and host of the conservative news outlet The Rebel Media, has looked over many of the young hosts' reports and accuses CBC Kids News of using children to indoctrinate Canadian kids in liberal ideology.

"That's propaganda. That's super-gross," says Levant.

In a report for The Rebel, he pulls no punches in attacking the show, calling it little more than very thinly disguised propaganda for Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Levant goes so far as to describe these CBC Kids News hosts as little more than puppets for the adult journalists and producers he maintains feed them their lines.

Read the full story here.

CBC Radio plans to have program appeal to American as opposed to Canadian listeners

When CBC management announced following the dismissal of Jian Ghomeshi last October that the radio program Q would be re-launched, I hoped that we might see a revival of true Canadian arts and culture programming in radio’s morning time slot.

The hiring of Shad was a clear signal that Q will not attempt to return to radio’s past. Thirty-two-year old Shad, who was born in Kenya and raised in Canada, is a heart-throb rapper with a Juno award and two university degrees to his credit. His music and youth orientation will suit him well in hosting the kind of program CBC management wants.

Some of the reasons behind the CBC’s decision to put out a mainly entertainment program in this time slot are rather disgraceful.

First of all, the CBC wants greater exposure on social media and as that’s a youth-oriented domain where they are trying to build audience. Okay, except that largely pop Internet programming will fly right over the heads of most folks over 35.

The bigger problem for me is that the CBC plans to have Q appeal to many thousands of young American listeners as opposed to a general Canadian audience.

Read the full story here.

CBC News has lost its objectivity

A few years ago, I would have never believed that I would be having this conversation. The SNC-Lavalin faux scandal has hammered home the realization that CBC News has lost its objectivity. Somewhere along the way, the politicization of the news division has eroded its standards and it has almost reached a tipping point.

How about balanced reporting? How about unbiased reporting? I expect news out of CBC, not editorial opinion and spin masquerading as news. CBC has turned into a beehive news organization, looking for the same honey as the other organizations. I expect better from the journalists of CBC News, not click-bait headlines and provocative tweets for the sake of driving controversy. I am not looking for news reading drones, but anchors and journalists who report the news and provide context without speculation, spin, or sensationalism bordering on gossip. I do not want manufactured outrage, I want the news.

Read the full story here.

CBC Comedy has grown stale

The CBC—once the home of world-class comedy—now struggles to land its jokes. And with more competition than ever before, it’s losing its place in the cultural firmament

As it currently exists, the CBC gives talented creators little incentive to write anything better and smarter. It’s time to stop coasting off of legacy work, establish a clear direction, recognize comedians as artists, and properly promote those artists through social media and streaming services. Until they do, Canadians will rightfully continue to ignore CBC Comedy in favour of the many superior alternatives.

Read the full story here.

CBC rating drop further despite massive injection of taxpayer money

Canadian Broadcast Corporation(CBC) has received a massive injection of taxpayer money under the the government of Justin Trudeau. Despite already being well-funded previously, Trudeau upped their budget to the point at which CBC now gets around $1.5 BILLION per year.

Yet despite this huge built in advantage, CBC is unable to convince people to watch their biggest news show – The National.As noted by Graeme Gordon in the Toronto Sun, The National lost 10% of their views following the show being rebooted, with the audience dropping to 460,000 Now, the audience has fallen again:

“More than a year has passed and the show’s average ratings dropped another 59,000 or 13%, according to a CBC spokesman.”

Read more here.

Is CBC the problem? Or is it Facebook and Google?

Thinking of the CBC as strictly a government-funded institution isn’t exactly the whole picture, says the president and CEO of the public broadcaster.

“CBC is a business,” Catherine Tait said during an interview Monday at CBC’s Halifax headquarters.

The notion of CBC not being allowed to pursue advertising is occasionally floated, especially by small digital publishers of news. Tait argues that the real enemies are much bigger.

“Who is the problem? The CBC, or Google and Facebook?

In September, Tait announced a new CBC streaming service, Gem, but she has been criticized for comparing the influence of Netflix to colonial imperialism, raking in profits and not providing enough localized content.

Read the full story here.

OPEN for debate ...what do YOU think?  YOUR tax dollars!

CBC was never intended to compete with newspapers

From its inception nearly a century ago, the CBC has been the object of animosity among private for-profit broadcasters, who resent competition in the market for audiences and advertisers from a publicly-subsidized service.

These days the complaints of unfair competition extend to newspaper publishers, who are desperately trying to reinvent themselves as digital services, scrambling to catch up with the migration of their advertisers to the internet. But the CBC has a powerful presence online, too, far exceeding its closest media rivals in Alexa rankings. And, as it does on television, the public broadcaster sells advertising online at CBC.ca, which puts it in direct competition with newspaper websites. The publishers protest that the publicly-funded CBC was never intended to compete with newspapers.

Read the full story here.

CBC subscription fees should replace public subsidy

CBC's idea of a ‘level playing field’ — subsidies for us, taxes for others.

Good news! The CBC has discovered the internet.

Bad news! While its online boffins may have embraced the open, unregulated, consumer-driven world of the internet, the CBC’s management is still wedded to the same old closed, regulatory, subsidy-driven model as before.

Though proposed as an antidote to advertising, public funding suffers from much the same basic problem: in either case, the broadcaster is accountable not to its viewers, but to someone else — advertisers or the government, whoever is paying the bills. The larger goal, then, should be for subscription fees to replace, not just advertising, but also the CBC’s public subsidy.

Read the full story here.

CBC News analysis is highly misleading

A CBC News analysis making the rounds online shows that an increasing number of upper-income Canadians are getting away without paying any income tax. The analysis is highly misleading and fuels misplaced concerns about the distribution of income taxes in Canada.

The main claim is that “between 2011 and 2014, a growing number of Canadians earning a six-figure income or more didn't pay a cent in income tax.” On the surface, this sounds problematic. But don’t ring the alarm bells just yet.

Read the full story here.

CBC’s annual book competition bad for literature

Reads, the CBC’s annual book competition. This is frequently among people who publicly say what a great boon this promotion is for literature and literacy and how happy they are for the winners.

What could possibly be wrong with Canada Reads? 

It’s a lighthearted debate show among five prominent and diverse Canadians about their favourite books. It takes the form of a Survivor-style competition in which a book is eliminated every day.

Reads aims to kill two birds – it wants to promote Canadian writing and perpetuate the consensual hallucination that we have media stars at the same time. Let’s celebrate Canadian cultural heroes by inventing some!

The celebrity panellists are already making appearances on CBC Radio announcing why they are supporting the books they have been assigned. Each one makes a point about why the book is important – because it “teaches us” something about difference or healing. Each book is chosen because of its lesson.

The national broadcaster’s ubiquitous hype about books we “should” read perpetuates ideas that most non-readers already have about literature – that literature is essentially a sermon, a sermon on suffering and loss delivered through the narrative of a good person coming to terms with the past. As a writer, I find this to be bad advertising. This why people don’t read.

Read the full story here.

CBC News claims are wrong

On the June 3 broadcast of the flagship CBC Radio news program The World at Six, the CBC’s anchor wrongly claimed that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told American Jewish leaders recently that he “admits” that the American Middle East peace plan is “titled in Israel’s favour.”

CBC based its reporting on an alleged recording obtained by the Washington Post of a private meeting between Pompeo and American Jewish leaders. In truth, Pompeo made no such admission.

Read the full story here.

What would CBC cover?

I wonder what would happen if something not related to identity politics, climate change or the propping up of Trudeau or this kind of drivel actually happened in Canada. 

Would CBC cover it?

Read the responses here.

CBC sued by former director of HR

A former human resources executive for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has filed a wrongful dismissal suit against the broadcaster, alleging that senior HR staff conspired to fire her while she was on medical leave and that CEO Hubert Lacroix breached his duties in refusing to review the matter, according to court documents.

The suit is one of at least four pending cases against the CBC alleging wrongful dismissal, in the fallout of public accusations against former CBC star Jian Ghomeshi.

Read the full story here.

Could CBC stand for Capitalism Bashing Corporation

The most arresting video in a story on “ghost kitchens” on CBC’s The National Tuesday night was of a bank of maybe 30 iPads that form the control centre of one of Canada’s premiere ghost kitchens, owned by George Kottos, founder and CEO of (not surprisingly) Ghost Kitchens Canada.

Is this news? To the extent we in the media should be keeping up with what’s going on in society, sure it’s news. In fact, it’s news in the literal sense of the word, in that it’s a new way people are living their lives.

Unfortunately, our citizen-funded broadcaster’s concept of the marketplace apparently comes from Marketplace, the corporation’s self-styled “consumer watchdog,” whose stories The National often runs.

In the interest of journalistic transparency, the show should really call itself Anti-marketplace. As currently constituted, it trusts virtually nothing that goes on in any marketplace. We economists may be “dismal,” but at least we’re not constantly paranoid.

Capitalism is actually pretty good news, but on the CBC it’s a tiny silver lining hidden deep within a dark, forbidding cloud.

Read the full story here.

CBC advertising revenues fell 3.4 per cent

The CBC has no business chasing ad dollars with low-brow game shows.

The CBC is launching a Canadian version of Family Feud in a bid to boost its advertising revenues. The game show is set to occupy the prime 7:30 p.m. time slot on four weekday evenings this fall.

The public broadcaster’s advertising revenues fell 3.4 per cent in the first nine months of its 2018-19 fiscal year, to $181-million, with English-language conventional and digital advertising taking the biggest hit. The percentage drop on the English network was 8.2 per cent during the period ending Dec. 31, while advertising revenue at Radio-Canada rose 1.1 per cent.

Read more here.

CBC misses mark with flagship show

Well he hit the nail on the head with all the coverage of the US bs. For awhile there EVERY lead story was about Trump and the Russia this and the Russia that. 

I was literally yelling at the screen about "which country does the CBC report on" and then I just gave up watching them at all. Between that and all the identity politics they cover they have rapidly sunk into irrelevance. 

We need a PUBLIC broadcaster, an unbiased news source like NPR in the US. The CBC has lost its way.

Read more here.

CBC Headline Depicted Israel as Aggressor

On May 27, CBC Online published an article which cast Israel as an aggressor by firing into Syria, killing one soldier.

While the article and its sub-headline did mention that “Israel says it was responding to anti-aircraft fire from Syria on 1 of its combat planes,” but the main headline only told half of the story and depicted Israel as an aggressor. CBC failed to note in its main headline that Israel’s attack, it claims, was done in response to a provocation (it was responding to Syrian anti-aircraft fire directed at an Israeli jet). By not mentioning this, readers could wrongly conclude that Israel was an aggressor who carried out an attack without provocation. 

Read more here.