Every so often, our revered public broadcaster, the CBC, is criticized, for one reason or another, and Canadians lose their minds.
The recent debate seems to crystalize around whether the CBC is controlled by government.
Of course, there is no evidence the CBC is controlled by politicians, as countless CBC journalists can attest.
Nor is there a problem with being publicly funded. Both publicly and privately owned media get money from government. If nobody is paying for news anymore, I’d rather we the people pay for our news as opposed to private interests.
The problem is that the CBC, despite being largely publicly funded, doesn’t seem to want to fight for the little guy. It fights for the establishment.
If you pay close attention, the CBC doesn’t take on the bureaucratic machinery and neoliberal culture that anchors political power and which stays in place regardless of whom we elect, machinery that time and time again prioritizes big money, neoliberal capitalism, and megacorp economics over the public interest.
To the contrary, it’s a lot of feel-good stories that seem aimed at reaffirming the public’s faith in our institutions and glossing over stories that would undermine them.
Take the CBC’s coverage of John Horgan getting a job at a coal company a couple weeks back. Unless I missed it, there was no suggestion this was a possible quid pro quo, a financial payback for the BC government fighting federal pollution regulations on coal mines under Horgan’s leadership. Instead, the coverage was spent splitting hairs of coal varieties and whether a coal company with a history of environmental degradation was the best choice for Horgan.
The coverage completely ignored the deeper issue of corruption of our executive branch.
Or take how the CBC covers Jim Pattison. Mostly the interviews are fawning. There are few tough questions for B.C.’s favourite billionaire, not even when the CBC is alerted to Canfor’s disproportionate role in forestry herbicide spraying, mill shutdowns, and devastated rural communities across BC.
You hear the CBC has some kind of leftist, liberal agenda, but that’s not what I see.
Martin Lukacs, of Breach Media, made this point last week on Twitter. A major empirical study from back in 2010 found that the CBC covered the Conservatives more positively than Global News and CTV.
The CBC isn’t the arm of the Liberals, or the NDP. It might, in fact, lean Conservative.
But whatever party it favours, its support for the monied interests of the establishment and its hold over the bureaucratic machinery and our society never seems to waver.
Being a PR agent for our institutions, whether corporate-captured university departments, rotten government, or even the CBC itself, isn’t the point of journalism.
And for this failure, some criticism is neither unfair nor undue.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
