Every public broadcaster in the world has one client, the government. As such it is never independent. Perhaps in a more ethical time, when the plurality was Christian and you had to go to church if you wanted to keep your job and standing in the community. On Sundays you were warned of iniquity, that the wages of sin were an entirely unpleasant death and subsequent condemnation in the afterlife. Even the full-on atheist was cautious, and often that was enough to keep civic peace. Lying, mis-representing, destroying and the imperative to love one’s neighbor, that’s gone now. Now it is winning by any means necessary and truth be damned.
And with that, the media, especially state media became the enemy of the people. Canada’s “polis” if you like, is in full-on rebellion. Covid, the lockdowns, the preposterous carbon taxes, the horrors of vaccine damage which affects almost every family now, the flood of migrants, the disastrous miscalculations about legal street drugs, the skyrocketing price of energy, the shutdown of LNG, the homeless encampments in every city, and the debt ratio – the largest debt-to-GDP in the G7 – all these policies were viciously defended and aggressively promoted by the CBC, which eats up half the media dollars in the country.
The public broadcaster, once loved to excess by every Canadian is now widely hated, and last time I looked, its “news” is watched by fewer than 2% of the population. Admittedly, its morning drive-time radio news might take 10% of the market, but dollar for dollar more than 60% of us want it permanently shuttered.
The following is an analysis of just how that happened: This is an excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You, published on September 10th.
And when I say the richest country in the world, I mean in this way. We are the second largest in geographic terms, with a small albeit highly educated population, but we sit on the greatest natural riches in the world without parallel. No other country comes close. Per capita, every single Canadian could like like a Saudi prince, creating the most extraordinary culture the world has ever seen. Instead, we get by on 60% of the average American’s income, and we are, generally, depressed and fearful of the future. This is 100% the fault of our media, and to a lesser extent, government “art”.
The CBC: From Crown Jewel to Jacobins
The Beast
Renegade governmental organizations are virtually impossible to rein in, especially if they have careened off the rails into destructive action. Take, for the sake of argument, the FBI or Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S., or the World Health Organization and the United Nations internationally, or the plethora of sovereign and sub-sovereign health ministries that went AWOL during COVID-19. If threatened, a throng of defenders rise, vocal to the point of shrill, defending the original idea, refusing to look at the slavering beast all that public money hath wrought.
“Reform or die,” says prime minister after president after premier. Nodding subservience is followed by…nothing. Commissions are formed, recommendations are made. Cosmetic changes ensue. Like rogue elephants they continue to roam the heights of the culture, braying and stomping and breaking things. Power, once acquired, needs to be wrenched from bleeding hands.
In Canada, that raging elephant is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Founded in 1936, at last count, the CBC sprawls across the country in twenty-seven over-the-air TV stations, eighty-eight radio stations, a flotilla of websites, podcasts, streaming TV, and multiple satellite radio stations. Its mandate is high-flown, to connect the multiple city-states of the country, its frozen north and isolated rural communities via dozens of offices big and small. It broadcasts in English, French, and eight indigenous languages.
The CBC’s Toronto headquarters, finished in 1993, was a statement of extreme optimism at a time when the corporation was widely loved. Designed by Philip Johnson, its cost $381 million. It is de-constructivist in form, a symbol of the CBC’s purpose, which is to re-conceive Canada’s founding as racist and the country in need of radical reform led by itself. Its orthogonal grid is “interrupted by skewed elements,” its interior dominated by a green elevator shaft set at an angle to the building grid. Outside, a forbidding Soviet box, windows are outlined in CBC red. Inside, it’s confusing, echoing, and replete with empty studios. Despite effulgent funding, the aura of failure wears on those still employed. They don’t understand why they are no longer astride the culture.
A behemoth, it demands $1 billion and $240 million of direct subsidy from the government every year, and rakes in several hundred million more through licensing, advertising, and production subsidy. It eats up, say some analysts, half the media dollars spent in the country, yet is watched on its twenty-seven TV stations by fewer than 5 percent[RK1] of Canadians. Its news outlets perform worse. Only 1.75 percent watch CBC news on broadcast channels or cable. The National, its star suppertime news show in Toronto, is watched by fewer than half a million people, while private-sector competitors in the same city crest at 1 million or even 2 million.
In June 2023, the editorial board of Canada’s long-time national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, put its rather large bear paw down and suggested shuttering CBC TV entirely, and focusing on digital and radio, which are relatively successful. The editorial board (acting in its own institutional interest), pointed out that digital advertising for CBC should be halted because a subsidized CBC should not eat up ad dollars in a tight market. The editorial board also stated that more than 24 million CBC digital visitors a month is substantial. It is not. The media is undergoing explosive growth in every country; it is only legacy media that is not growing. Routinely in the U.S., popular digital sites host tens of millions of visitors a day, and more than a billion a year. Using that metric, the CBC reaches about 10 percent of the available digital audience.
Most Canadians agree with The Globe and Mail. In fact, in mid-2023, 62 percent of Canadians wanted it shut down, saying they would vote for conservatives if they promised to do so. Not reined in, not given less taxpayer money, not privatized, but shut down, its many buildings, its wealth of equipment sold, and its employees scattered to the winds. Among some 30 to 40 percent, the mother corporation (as it calls itself) is actively hated, loathed. When Pierre Poilievre, the popular conservative candidate leader, promised to shut down the CBC, his audience rose for a prolonged standing ovation.
How did this jewel of Canadian culture which, for sixty years was held in near reverence by every sentient Canadian, come to this?
Public broadcasters, in general, engage in state-building, in national and cultural integration. They “provide social cement,” they build bridges, “witness” and connect. Or are supposed to. They are meant to be free, in order to serve those without the funds for cable or streaming subscriptions. In Ireland, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTE) provides an alternative to the deluge of British programming, those in Nordic countries promote “equality, solidarity and belonging,” and in Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) sets itself against the dominance of wicked corporatist freebooter Rupert Murdoch.
In Canada, the CBC is meant to provide a Canadian voice in a country where, as the old saw goes, Canadian culture is in a distinct minority. This purpose has been served well in French Canada, where Radio Canada (best said with a French accent) is widely loved and has managed to act as a beacon for Quebecois culture, an impressive amount of it created to flout, humiliate, and laugh at the maudit Anglais to the south, east, and west.
The digital and streaming explosion of the early aughts[RK2] left the CBC flailing to catch up, and this is typically given as the reason its audience numbers are so poor. However, this is not the case for the CBC’s radio stations which are the only division of the corporation that truly service small-city and rural Canada and can compete in an admitted fever of ever-expanding competition. Their drive-time shows can reach as many as 20 percent of the audience, and are often in first place in the ratings.
There are other rather more convincing arguments for its decline. CBC hosts on radio and TV have historically been beloved figures. Today, few Canadians could name one of them; personalities seemingly are not wanted at the CBC anymore but Canadians still love them. Canadian YouTubers routinely attract hundreds of thousands of viewers and, in Jordan Peterson’s case, tens of millions, trouncing the “mother corporation” by orders of magnitude. Podcasts are popular, but half of those listened to in Canada are[RK3] [EN4] by rightwing Americans. Which indicates that, even given its radio successes, the corporation has lost touch with Canadians. It simply does not have news or entertainment product strong enough to compete in the new marketplace. And, as the proliferation of new media in Canada proves, its editorial policy is so backward, almost every single digital opportunity has been missed.
In contrast to received opinion—which is that the culprit is the explosion in digital and streaming outlets—the answer to the corporation’s distress is far simpler, and far more reparable. A series of bad political decisions have been made by policy chiefs who craft the corporation’s editorial policy every year. Reputedly that secretive department costs taxpayer $180 million annually, but it is as closeted as the Kremlin and few even admit it exists. But it does, and it is those policy setters who have created the wholesale repudiation of the CBC via a rough-shod political brinksmanship that was meant entirely to remake Canada in a fresh, socialist image. And to destroy the one political party standing in the way.
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