CBC’s The National very narrow ideological spectrum

I hope that, like me, you’re enjoying the brilliant self-parody CBC’s The National has been running as the holidays approach.

The New York Times claims it provides “all the news that’s fit to print.” The National produces “all the news that fits in the very narrow ideological spectrum of downtown-urban wokeness.”

There are four essential components to The National these days: something climate, something anti-Trump, something Lefty-heroic, and something Indigenous. Other news is allowed but these seem obligatory.

We all pay for CBC. Far from all of us see our concerns reflected on it. And based on what the ratings show us, not many are watching, at least not The National.

Read the full story here.

CBC commits journalistic malpractice

Journalistic malpractice: CBC omits refugee claimant surge in Toronto homeless crisis stories.

Two weeks ago CBC’s The National aired a report on the homeless crisis in Toronto, where the shelter system is currently overwhelmed with people needing a place to stay during the harsh winter nights, with many being turned away because of lack of beds at many locations. The CBC story failed to include any mention of the thousands of refugee claimants who have illegally entered Canada from the U.S. border and sought shelter in Toronto over the past few years that is the major factor in the system being overloaded.

The story with the major omission became the most popular story on CBC’s website by Thursday afternoon, misinforming the public.

Read the full story here.

CBC edits out President Trump

According to conservative activist Ryan Fournier, the CBC, the state-funded broadcaster of Canada, has edited out President Trump’s iconic cameo from their broadcast of the Christmas movie Home Alone 2: Lost In New York.

The claim has been verified by American news outlet PJ Media, which reports, “CBC edited out Donald Trump’s cameo from the 1992 movie. And people watching it were quick to report the suspicious omission on social media. Some were outraged, and the snowflakes were thrilled.”

Many commentators on social media have expressed that this particular edit was political. CBC coverage is highly critical of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Read the full story here.

CBC program described as “government-funded bullies,”

The CBC’s comedy show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes appears to have rubbed some social media users the wrong way, after posting a tweet which fat-shamed Ontario Premier Doug Ford.

On Tuesday, the Twitter account for the CBC comedy posted “Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he will not run for leader of the Conservative Party. But he will run for a hot dog dangling from a string.”

Within moments, a significant number of Twitter users, including prominent Conservatives, attacked the comments for shameless making fun of the Premier’s weight.

Former Saskatchewan Premier posted in response that the joke was lame and an unfunny gratuitous personal insult, while also pointing out the fact that 22 Minutes is funded through Canadian tax dollars.

Some even described the program as “government-funded bullies,” for their willingness to attack the Premier for his body size.

Read the full story here.

CBC employees overpaid and performance has been questionable

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.

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.

Not only are CBC employees overpaid, their performance has been questionable.

Read the full story here.

CBC article misled Canadians

A CBC article on a survey of how many Canadians experience racism originally misled Canadians by overstating the results by 400%.

The article which was originally titled “It’s a constant battle’: Nearly 40% of Canadians experience racism in the workplace” inflated the survey’s results by five times the actual 8% of Canadians who experienced racial discrimination while at work.

Statistics in the piece come from the Environics Institute’s 2019 Race Relations in Canada report.

In reality, the survey points to several positive attitudes about race in Canada, despite CBC’s reporting.

Read the full story here.

CBC claims contradicted by memo

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation once claimed the loss of licensing rights to Hockey Night in Canada only cost the network a “few dollars.”

That’s apparently not the case, according to an Access to Information memo obtained by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

The memo reportedly confirmed a steady decline in ad revenue for the CBC ever since the network lost the rights to Hockey Night in Canada (HNIC), which they held from 1952 to 2014.

The memo stated the CBC lost $260 million in ad revenue within two years of losing HNIC.

Ex-CBC executive Richard Stursberg told the Senate communications committee that the “loss of hockey is going to have serious financial consequences.”

Read the full story here.

CBC using public slush fund to grab more advertising dollars

The new CBC plan, a complete reversal of the corporation’s much ballyhooed proposed strategy of less than three years ago, is to go all out for a bigger piece of the Canadian advertising pie, including skimming bigger shares of the online digital ad market.

In late 2016, under former CBC/Radio Canada chief Hubert Lacroix, the corporation proposed “removing advertising from CBC/Radio-Canada.” The strategy, said the CBC report, would “free up advertising revenue to help… private media companies transition to a digital environment.”

Now, under the CBC’s new president, Catherine Tait, the public broadcaster — which received $1.1 billion in federal cash last year — aims to do the opposite. It plans to continue to use that billion-a-year public slush fund to grab more advertising dollars and build a digital machine that will make it even more difficult for its private media competitors to transition to a digital environment.

The CBC has failed to reveal the amount of money it is now diverting into building a media machine that directly competes with private media, including other TV networks, newspapers and countless digital sources of news and information.

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.

Is CBC the blame for news media decline?

A new report this week from Winnipeg media consultant Ken Goldstein’s Communications Management Inc. contains a series of statistical graphs that plot the astounding collapse of the Canadian newspaper industry’s business model. While there’s nothing really new here, the visual scale of the decline as plotted by Goldstein is stunning. Every component of newspaper industry metrics — circulation, ad revenues, market penetration — shows declines of 50 per cent or more over the last decade. In 2000, 45 per cent of Canadian households paid for newspapers. Today, fewer than 15 per cent get the paper.

Goldstein also draws attention to another issue: The role of the CBC as a market disruptor that is undermining the evolution of the newspaper industry. Goldstein says the CBC’s online news operation — which employed between 750 and 1,000 journalist and is separate from its billion-dollar broadcast operations — receives at least $100-million a year in annual subsidy. That same online news operation also collected $42.6 million last year in advertising revenue.

Projected over five years, the numbers suggest CBC online will have $750 million in government-sanctioned funding to directly compete with the private media companies that are struggling to survive. There is no policy justification for turning the national public broadcaster into a public online news organization.

Read the full story here.

CBC groveling is coming

Our CBC has perverted the motives of its nationalist founders. The CBC was founded in the 1920’s. to counteract the cultural influence of large American radio stations which were broadcasting their programming into Canada. The CBC’s founders believed that Canada had to fight back against the culturally-colonizing influence of the U.S. In the founders view, if Canada did not fight back, Canada would be overwhelmed and its heritage from its French and UK founders would be erased and replaced by that of the U.S. 

Today, Canada faces re-colonization and being culturally overwhelmed by recent immigrant groups such as the Sikhs, Chinese and Muslims. However, instead of resisting, our CBC has sided with the interests of these ethnic groups– even when those ethnic interests are dramatically opposed to the interests of Canada’s majority population. 

Many CBC programs are preceded by theme music. To most Canadians, the appropriate sounds that should precede all immigration-related CBC interviews should be the sound of CBC tongues on the boots of Canada’s immigration lobby (IMMIGRATION LOBBY = Canada’s ethnic groups who want to increase their numbers, corrupt immigration lawyers, sleazy immigration consultants and immigration advocate hacks). This sound would help immeasurably to warn Canadians that CBC groveling is coming.

Read the full article here.

CBC Ad Revenue Plunging

The Toronto Sun noted that CBC’s ad revenue went from $192.2 million in the first two quarters of 2014, and has now fallen to $92.8 million in the first six months of 2019.

A key reason for the loss of ad revenue is because CBC’s viewership is plunging.

Unfortunately, CBC will continue to hobble along due to federal government funding, money forcibly extracted from taxpayers. And this endless amount of taxpayer money means CBC is never forced to actually adapt or realize that their content isn’t resonating.

For example, CBC’s endless focus on US politics means that their coverage is often identical to what Canadians can find on any of the many US networks that are shown in our country.

It seems no matter how badly CBC fails, their only ‘solution’ is to just take more and more of our money.

Read the full story here.

What if there was NO CBC?

How would the Canadian broadcasting system look if there were no CBC? 

What would be the programming mix? Would it be deficient, leading to market failure? Digitization, convergence, and the development of the Internet are transforming broadcasting. 

If there were no CBC, would we create such a public service broadcaster now in a broadcast system where numerous choices, including 64 specialty channels, are available by cable and direct broadcast satellite? Would the benefits of creating a CBC be greater than the costs? 

If we invented a CBC today, what would be its focus? How does this compare to CBC's current operations and to the vision of its President? Our examination of these questions will concentrate on CBC English television.

Read the full discussion here.

Editors note - dated, but this is a very interesting read!

CBC's new format is failing

The CBC has continually seen its audiences and ad revenues retract over the past five years, according to Ottawa news outlet Blacklock’s Reporter.

The public broadcaster’s shrinking audience and relevancy has led to ad revenues dropping 53 percent from 2014 to that of 2019.

Almost two years ago the CBC relaunched its flagship show The National with a new format, replacing anchor Peter Mansbridge with four anchors. Despite The National‘s audience dropping 10 percent (from 525,000 to 460,000) by April of 2018. By June 2019 the audience had dropped off another 59,000, or 13 percent. Even though the new format is failing, a distant third for ratings compared to CTV and Global, the CBC has continued on with the new format and four hosts.

Read the full story here.

CBC and Immigration

Immigration Watch Canada has justifiably lost patience with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). The CBC has shamelessly appointed itself as the propaganda arm of Canada’s immigration lobby (immigration lawyers, “mass immigration” advocates, and ethnic groups. Every day, it betrays Canada and its majority population. It is a quisling organization and it deserves our contempt.

For the record, we provide below an earlier description of our case against the clear bias in the CBC. That description continues to apply, but the CBC’s behaviour has become much worse.

Read the full report here.

CBC deep pockets prohibit entrepreneurs

As advertising has disappeared, the audience must become the main source of funding for any news organization’s long-term survival.

Public opinion research in recent years has consistently shown that only about 9 percent of Canadians are prepared to pay for news online. That’s because they see news available for free everywhere online and they have limited or no ability to differentiate between quality and commodity.

What about the public broadcaster? What role does the federal government see for CBC/Radio-Canada in all this? CBC/Radio-Canada has already moved aggressively into the digital world, competing with newspapers online for news, opinion and — most important to the private sector — online advertising dollars.

Does the prospect of competing against the relatively deep pockets of the CBC prevent entrepreneurs from launching news startups in communities across the country? Should government place fences around the activities of the broadcaster it owns?

Read the full story here.

CBC's idea of a ‘level playing field’

Good news! The CBC has discovered the internet. With an eye to the tens of thousands of “cord-cutters” who have been abandoning cable and satellite providers for online video, the corporation has begun streaming all of its live television services via an upgraded mobile and Apple TV app. More remarkably, it will offer a paid “premium” version: for $4.99 a month, subscribers will receive all of the regular app’s content ad-free, plus the CBC News Network feed in the bargain.

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.

Read the full story here.

CBC mostly produces dreadful, dull, preachy, biased or unfunny television

If there were a truth-in-advertising law for campaign signs, the “We Vote CBC” signs would have to read “We Vote to Have Everyone Else Subsidize our Ideological and Cultural Preferences.” Because even if you agree with the CBC, its supporters and unions that Mother Corp is “woefully underfunded,” it is still the only broadcaster in the country that gets nearly a billion tax dollars a year.

The Sports Network (TSN) doesn’t get a billion a year from Ottawa. Indeed, TSN’s total annual revenues are only in the range of $400 million. Nor does the CBC’s main competitor, CTV, get a billion-dollar leg-up.

And for that money, Mother Corp mostly produces dreadful, dull, preachy, biased or unfunny television that almost no one watches.

Read the full story here.

CBC report allegedly misrepresenting science

The Insurance Bureau of Canada’s decades-long campaign to raise alarms about the ravages of floods continued last week with an appearance by Blair Feltmate, a favourite star climate-change witness for the biggest insurers, at the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority’s annual meeting. Feltmate heads the industry-funded Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation at Waterloo University, which claims climate change has triggered a surge in flood events in recent years. As Feltmate put it during his comments at the meeting: “The elephant in the room, from a climate-change perspective, is… too much water in the wrong places.”

Not quite. The real elephant sharing the room with Feltmate turned out to be a detailed report from Guy Gendron, a CBC/Radio Canada International ombudsman, outlining how such distorted flood claims led the news network to publish stories last fall that contained “inaccurate and irrelevant” information.

Robert Muir, an Ontario municipal engineer and member of the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, complained to the CBC ombudsman, pointing to flaws in Feltmate’s and the insurance lobby group’s claims. He alleged that the CBC report was misrepresenting science and insurance risks.

Read the full story here.