5 ms·

I am curious what Canadians think of this argument. Does it seem true? It's hard for me, a USA resident who doesn't follow the CBC, to really evaluate.

by adamc 5y ago

MarcelOlsz 5y ago
I'm Canadian. I don't know anyone in any age group who watches CBC or even TV for that matter. Not saying there aren't, but that's for my circle.
goalieca 5y ago
The CBC has fallen short on challenging the government on matters of public policy. They read like state media and this should not surprise given their funding situation. They also do focus on matters that aren’t of broad and general interest. The journalist hit the nail on the head. But cbc isn’t the only troubled media as of late.
briga 5y ago
CBC is widely criticized here for its distinctly liberal bias, usually from the nation's conservatives. Which is fair enough--you pay for it in taxes regardless of which side of the political spectrum you're on, so you'd at least expect it to have a balanced coverage of issues. That's not to say that CBC does no good journalism, but like the author of this article mentions they are a bit lacking in journalistic integrity sometimes.
- notatoad 5y ago
  CBC's bias is Liberal with a capital-L, not liberal. They're centrist and corporatist, which aligns them pretty well with the Liberal Party of Canada.
  - briga 5y ago
    Yes, which leads to all sorts of griping about CBC just being a mouthpiece for the Liberal government. But to be fair their bias was the same even when the Harper government was in power.
smnrchrds 5y ago
I cannot speak about the alleged wokeness, as I don't consume enough CBC content to make an informed judgment. What I can say is that CBC is the only major Canadian media company that is not capital C Conservative, at least among English-language media. Toronto Star used to fit this description too, but they got sold to what I think is a private equity firm who has been selling off their assets, so I don't expect them to be around much longer. Toronto Star is/soon-to-be was leftist. CBC is supposed to be neutral. All other major media companies are Conservative. See party endorsements for federal elections for example. Note that all non-Conservative endorsements come from the late TorStar corporation. https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/ https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/ So maybe the issue is not that CBC is too Liberal, but that every other publication is Conservative, so even a neutral publication will look far left by comparison. Again, I don't consume enough CBC content to comment how their leanings are. I just know a bit about Canadian media atmosphere in general.
- gruez 5y ago
  >What I can say is that CBC is the only major Canadian media company that is not capital C Conservative, at least among English-language media. [...] >https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/ https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/ But the source you cited seems to only include newspapers? Media companies tend to pander to their readers, and newspapers attracts... a certain type of readers. It's not surprising that most newspapers are conservative.
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    These days their websites are much more prominent than their print editions, and it's what people read online and link to on Facebook and social media. They are not stuck in the past. The Globe and Mail is widely regarded as Canada's newspaper of record, and even they endorse Conservatives.
- frabbit 5y ago
  I generally do not read/watch/listen to the CBC. I got tired of their NPR-ish comofortable liberalism which always drifted into conservatism a long time ago. Sure, there were occasional nods to the idea that not all was happy in our settler colonial land, but in general it was smug "we're all nice" and "aren't Americans crazy?!". Our local outpost plays hideous CanCon music in the mornings and repeats the same low-information density press releases disguised as news. There is little that is combative or thought provoking and lot of self-congratulation. I have been especially un-impressed with their lack of willingness to address the abuse of power by the RCMP at the Fairy Creek protests including the detention of one of their own videographers; their supine acceptance of the insane tar sands projects; their lack of aggression in pursuing the Trudeau administrations failure to address the horrendous mistreatment of autochthonous people people and communities. These days I mostly read The Tyee¹ and listen to Canadaland² 1. https://thetyee.ca/ https://thetyee.ca/ 2. https://www.canadaland.com/ https://www.canadaland.com/ That said, the author of the original article lost me when she trotted out the silly line about transgender Filipinos.
kache_ 5y ago
The only reason CBC is still around is because of public funding.
Ensorceled 5y ago
I regularly consume news and other content from the CBC (radio and news app). I haven't noticed a "hard left" turn at all. The CBC has ALWAYS interviewed pretty progressively. I'm assuming what has happened is that, since MeToo/BLM/Trans issues and protests have become front and centre, people are talking about that more. But really, COVID is dominating the airways at the CBC too. I can't speak for internal newsroom politics of course. Another comment made the observation that the CBC is really the last news source that is left of centre-right with all of our other traditional media sources centre-right and slowly drifting right. Our most popular "left" newspaper, The Toronto Star, was usually taking centrist position with pro-business leanings, but it's been moving right too. Full disclosure, I get a most of my news from the Economist or the CBC.
KLK2019 5y ago
Most people consume CBC very differently. I mostly listen to the radio and the content is pretty good and has great local news coverage. I don't think I know anyone else who follows CBC closely but I do think its overall seen as a trusted source of news. Personally, when I think of the recent content from CBC I remmeber reading more about climate change and reconcilation with our native history. Both of Which I think are fairly important to be informed of. But I do wish they do more investigative work.
motohagiography 5y ago
The basic issue is that to be news, there has to be a conflict to tell the story about. Even if the conflict is fabricated expectations vs. some mundane reality, that conflict is the necessary condition for a story to be news. The lens of victim/oppressor theory can apply to literally anything, and so with that tool for manufacturing the necessary ingredient of universal conflict, the news becomes anything they want it to be. It's stupid, but it works. Most of the people who use that technique even believe it, and the one rule they're taught is if you protect the narrative, the narrative protects you. I've heard reporters ask what all this concern about fake news was because they have all these objective facts, and it never landed for them that it's fake because the necessary conflict that drives the story was wholely fabricated by ideology. I worked in print media as a freelancer just over a decade ago and knew a lot of other writers and editors, and even then CBC was seen as the partisan state organ. You have to remember that the mandate of the CBC is to create a federal narrative to hold a vast and sparsely populated country together with a coherent national identity. News is only one of its myriad projects, and it's not engaged in a mission of discovery. What changed is milennials graduated from campuses that had been compromised by what is objectively a mass hysteria created by their professors - who themselves had previously graduated in the 90s during the first wave of what they called "political correctness," at the time, and who in turn were taught by radical boomer professors who had been indoctrinated with standard revolutionary playbooks, mesmerized by French postmodernists like Foucault and Baudrillard, and you can trace a lot of its intellectual roots back to things like the SCUM Manifesto, Weathermen, Black Panther Party, Situationists, and other cold war era soviet political projects. No single thing happened so much as the state of the CBC is the effect of milennials being educated by two generations of carefully trained marxists to become a revolutionary corps of true believers. The rest of government is rotted through with that stuff as well. The center won't hold, and I really don't see the country intact in 15-20 years because the people running it are to weak and insincere to provide legitimacy.
moistly 5y ago
I think CBC needs to return to gritty journalism, local, provincial, federal, and global. There’s no money in real journalism any more; it’s far more profitable to provide “news” entertainment, aka exaggerate and fabricate. I think the most important thing a government could do is pay a percentage of the budget strings unattached to independent, credentialed, public journalism. It helps keep a government honest.
dirtyid 5y ago
>This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change. CBC does lean liberal. There's idpol drama, but it predates her timeline. Honestly looks like she's manufacturing a story to push her book / substack / fishing for conservative media eyeballs, which is basically most of private Canadian media that still has money. But being privy to too much CBC goss in my social circle, I just want to say she's full of shit simply because CBC has had drama/tensions over idpol for years. Well over 18 months ago. There is almost zero chance she's even in the realm of being "furthest left" in the newsroom hearing shit I've heard from before her first published article on her CBC profile. And given her body of work at CBC is consisted almost entirely of mediocre listicles, I can understand the desire to attention merchant over more profitable cultural wars.
brailsafe 5y ago
It doesn't really seem authentic. To an extent, yes there is an increased focus on some of the things mentioned. But for it to be entirely true, I'd kind of expect them to be inarguably soft on left-leaning politicians, especially the prime minister. But I don't see that at all, if anything, they've become more critical of particularly specious policy moves and bills being proposed. A more suspicious person would claim it's a smokescreen, but it seems to me to a reasonable source of news, at least more so than Global, The Gaurdian a lot of the time, and certainly any of The Sun variants out there.

I am curious what Canadians think of this argument. Does it seem true? It's hard for me, a USA resident who doesn't follow the CBC, to really evaluate.

by adamc 5y ago

I am curious what Canadians think of this argument. Does it seem true? It's hard for me, a USA resident who doesn't follow the CBC, to really evaluate.

MarcelOlsz 5y ago

I'm Canadian. I don't know anyone in any age group who watches CBC or even TV for that matter. Not saying there aren't, but that's for my circle.

goalieca 5y ago

The CBC has fallen short on challenging the government on matters of public policy. They read like state media and this should not surprise given their funding situation. They also do focus on matters that aren’t of broad and general interest. The journalist hit the nail on the head. But cbc isn’t the only troubled media as of late.

briga 5y ago

CBC is widely criticized here for its distinctly liberal bias, usually from the nation's conservatives. Which is fair enough--you pay for it in taxes regardless of which side of the political spectrum you're on, so you'd at least expect it to have a balanced coverage of issues. That's not to say that CBC does no good journalism, but like the author of this article mentions they are a bit lacking in journalistic integrity sometimes.

notatoad 5y ago
CBC's bias is Liberal with a capital-L, not liberal. They're centrist and corporatist, which aligns them pretty well with the Liberal Party of Canada.
- briga 5y ago
  Yes, which leads to all sorts of griping about CBC just being a mouthpiece for the Liberal government. But to be fair their bias was the same even when the Harper government was in power.

smnrchrds 5y ago

I cannot speak about the alleged wokeness, as I don't consume enough CBC content to make an informed judgment. What I can say is that CBC is the only major Canadian media company that is not capital C Conservative, at least among English-language media. Toronto Star used to fit this description too, but they got sold to what I think is a private equity firm who has been selling off their assets, so I don't expect them to be around much longer. Toronto Star is/soon-to-be was leftist. CBC is supposed to be neutral. All other major media companies are Conservative. See party endorsements for federal elections for example. Note that all non-Conservative endorsements come from the late TorStar corporation. https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/ https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/ So maybe the issue is not that CBC is too Liberal, but that every other publication is Conservative, so even a neutral publication will look far left by comparison. Again, I don't consume enough CBC content to comment how their leanings are. I just know a bit about Canadian media atmosphere in general.

gruez 5y ago
>What I can say is that CBC is the only major Canadian media company that is not capital C Conservative, at least among English-language media. [...] >https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/ https://readpassage.com/election-endorsements/ But the source you cited seems to only include newspapers? Media companies tend to pander to their readers, and newspapers attracts... a certain type of readers. It's not surprising that most newspapers are conservative.
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  These days their websites are much more prominent than their print editions, and it's what people read online and link to on Facebook and social media. They are not stuck in the past. The Globe and Mail is widely regarded as Canada's newspaper of record, and even they endorse Conservatives.
frabbit 5y ago
I generally do not read/watch/listen to the CBC. I got tired of their NPR-ish comofortable liberalism which always drifted into conservatism a long time ago. Sure, there were occasional nods to the idea that not all was happy in our settler colonial land, but in general it was smug "we're all nice" and "aren't Americans crazy?!". Our local outpost plays hideous CanCon music in the mornings and repeats the same low-information density press releases disguised as news. There is little that is combative or thought provoking and lot of self-congratulation. I have been especially un-impressed with their lack of willingness to address the abuse of power by the RCMP at the Fairy Creek protests including the detention of one of their own videographers; their supine acceptance of the insane tar sands projects; their lack of aggression in pursuing the Trudeau administrations failure to address the horrendous mistreatment of autochthonous people people and communities. These days I mostly read The Tyee¹ and listen to Canadaland² 1. https://thetyee.ca/ https://thetyee.ca/ 2. https://www.canadaland.com/ https://www.canadaland.com/ That said, the author of the original article lost me when she trotted out the silly line about transgender Filipinos.

kache_ 5y ago

The only reason CBC is still around is because of public funding.

Ensorceled 5y ago

I regularly consume news and other content from the CBC (radio and news app). I haven't noticed a "hard left" turn at all. The CBC has ALWAYS interviewed pretty progressively. I'm assuming what has happened is that, since MeToo/BLM/Trans issues and protests have become front and centre, people are talking about that more. But really, COVID is dominating the airways at the CBC too. I can't speak for internal newsroom politics of course. Another comment made the observation that the CBC is really the last news source that is left of centre-right with all of our other traditional media sources centre-right and slowly drifting right. Our most popular "left" newspaper, The Toronto Star, was usually taking centrist position with pro-business leanings, but it's been moving right too. Full disclosure, I get a most of my news from the Economist or the CBC.

KLK2019 5y ago

Most people consume CBC very differently. I mostly listen to the radio and the content is pretty good and has great local news coverage. I don't think I know anyone else who follows CBC closely but I do think its overall seen as a trusted source of news. Personally, when I think of the recent content from CBC I remmeber reading more about climate change and reconcilation with our native history. Both of Which I think are fairly important to be informed of. But I do wish they do more investigative work.

motohagiography 5y ago

The basic issue is that to be news, there has to be a conflict to tell the story about. Even if the conflict is fabricated expectations vs. some mundane reality, that conflict is the necessary condition for a story to be news. The lens of victim/oppressor theory can apply to literally anything, and so with that tool for manufacturing the necessary ingredient of universal conflict, the news becomes anything they want it to be. It's stupid, but it works. Most of the people who use that technique even believe it, and the one rule they're taught is if you protect the narrative, the narrative protects you. I've heard reporters ask what all this concern about fake news was because they have all these objective facts, and it never landed for them that it's fake because the necessary conflict that drives the story was wholely fabricated by ideology. I worked in print media as a freelancer just over a decade ago and knew a lot of other writers and editors, and even then CBC was seen as the partisan state organ. You have to remember that the mandate of the CBC is to create a federal narrative to hold a vast and sparsely populated country together with a coherent national identity. News is only one of its myriad projects, and it's not engaged in a mission of discovery. What changed is milennials graduated from campuses that had been compromised by what is objectively a mass hysteria created by their professors - who themselves had previously graduated in the 90s during the first wave of what they called "political correctness," at the time, and who in turn were taught by radical boomer professors who had been indoctrinated with standard revolutionary playbooks, mesmerized by French postmodernists like Foucault and Baudrillard, and you can trace a lot of its intellectual roots back to things like the SCUM Manifesto, Weathermen, Black Panther Party, Situationists, and other cold war era soviet political projects. No single thing happened so much as the state of the CBC is the effect of milennials being educated by two generations of carefully trained marxists to become a revolutionary corps of true believers. The rest of government is rotted through with that stuff as well. The center won't hold, and I really don't see the country intact in 15-20 years because the people running it are to weak and insincere to provide legitimacy.

moistly 5y ago

I think CBC needs to return to gritty journalism, local, provincial, federal, and global. There’s no money in real journalism any more; it’s far more profitable to provide “news” entertainment, aka exaggerate and fabricate. I think the most important thing a government could do is pay a percentage of the budget strings unattached to independent, credentialed, public journalism. It helps keep a government honest.

dirtyid 5y ago

>This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change. CBC does lean liberal. There's idpol drama, but it predates her timeline. Honestly looks like she's manufacturing a story to push her book / substack / fishing for conservative media eyeballs, which is basically most of private Canadian media that still has money. But being privy to too much CBC goss in my social circle, I just want to say she's full of shit simply because CBC has had drama/tensions over idpol for years. Well over 18 months ago. There is almost zero chance she's even in the realm of being "furthest left" in the newsroom hearing shit I've heard from before her first published article on her CBC profile. And given her body of work at CBC is consisted almost entirely of mediocre listicles, I can understand the desire to attention merchant over more profitable cultural wars.

brailsafe 5y ago

It doesn't really seem authentic. To an extent, yes there is an increased focus on some of the things mentioned. But for it to be entirely true, I'd kind of expect them to be inarguably soft on left-leaning politicians, especially the prime minister. But I don't see that at all, if anything, they've become more critical of particularly specious policy moves and bills being proposed. A more suspicious person would claim it's a smokescreen, but it seems to me to a reasonable source of news, at least more so than Global, The Gaurdian a lot of the time, and certainly any of The Sun variants out there.