Seven years ago, I wrote an editorial with this headline and my view hasn’t changed one bit.
The current “defund the CBC” cry is as ridiculous to me as calls to “defund the police.” In both cases, it’s not the funding that’s the issue, it’s the job and how it’s being done that’s the real problem.
In recent years, the CBC has done a fantastic job of diversifying both its workforce and its stories. BIPOC representation (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) is much better than it was in the past and the major private-sector national networks – Global and CTV – have matched the CBC at both the national and local urban market levels. All three networks have also done much-improved work on LGBTQ representation and coverage.
What the CBC has failed to do, however, is to diversify where its workforce is and where its stories are coming from. CBC News operates just like Global and CTV, with national headquarters in Toronto and major bureaus in urban centres across the country. Reporters from all three networks are parachuted into rural communities for floods, wildfires and other major events but they cover these stories from an urban perspective and head back to the big city ASAP.
There has been an increasing amount of concern and study of “news deserts” and “news poverty” in Canada and the U.S. There are far fewer reporters and far less news being produced in rural towns and regional centres like Prince George in both countries than there was 10 years ago, leaving some communities with much less or no local news at all, hence the news poverty and news desert descriptions.
When all three networks claim to report on what matters to Canadians, what they really mean is they cover what matters to Canadians who live in the metropolitan areas that have NHL hockey teams. Global and CTV should get a pass on that criticism. They are for-profit media outlets dependent on advertising dollars. The vast majority of those dollars and the people who decide how they will be spent are in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver.
While the CBC does have bureaus in places like Prince George and regional centres across the Prairies, Northern Ontario and the Maritimes, they are minimally staffed outlets forced to cover massive geographical areas under direction from head office in Toronto and regional bureau chiefs in the big cities. I have great respect and admiration for the job Carolina de Ryk, Catherine Hansen, Andrew Kurjata and their colleagues are doing with a fraction of the resources and support enjoyed by their counterparts down south.
With all of this in mind, my solutions from seven years ago to fix the CBC by destroying how it currently operates and rebuilding it still apply.
CBC News needs to completely reverse its urban and rural staffing levels. Keep small bureaus in the big cities and spread most of its reporters across rural Canada. Sell the valuable national and corporate headquarters in downtown Toronto and relocate to the geographic centre of Canada - Brandon or Thunder Bay, take your pick. In Central and Northern B.C., open bureaus staffed with TV and radio reporters in Williams Lake, Fort St. John, Fort Nelson, Burns Lake, Smithers and Prince Rupert. Repeat across the rest of Canada.
Those reporters would still cover important social issues (racism, climate change, homelessness, the toxic drug crisis, mental health, income inequality and so on) but from a rural perspective, rather than through the big city lens. Furthermore, those reporters would now be part of these communities, meaning their interest in covering mining, forestry, the oil and gas sector, farming, and fisheries – where their fellow residents work, in other words – would be much greater. That coverage could then extend to artists, as well.
The result would be rural Canadians would see themselves, their politics and their perspectives broadcast back to them by journalists who are their neighbours, rather than from reporters and news directors who have never been to these communities and think their definition of what’s news in Vancouver equally applies in central and northern B.C.
“The CBC needs to think small, not big. It needs to be more rural and less urban. It needs to far less Toronto and far more Brandon in its outlook,” I wrote in 2015. “It needs to be less coast to coast to coast and more regional. It needs to reject huge, national audiences in favour of small, devoted pockets of viewers and listeners listening to their stories, not Toronto's.”
More than ever, that sounds like a worthy mission for a government-funded broadcaster operating in the 21st century.
