The public broadcaster is a sticky wicket, admittedly. If every privately held media outlet in the land wound up business there would still be CBC News, providing some very serviceable-to-excellent coverage of cities, provinces, territories and their governments across this land. It reduces the private organs’ leverage. But Britain’s private media competes just fine against the BBC, and ours compete just fine against CBC today in the world of television and online news — and well they might.
CBC’s television and online news departments are a haunted museum of bloat, larding tons of valuable content with tiresome victim-mongering; endless why-didn’t-the-government-prevent-this stories; Trudeau propaganda snaps beamed straight in from the Prime Minister’s Office; a dumb, tawdry nightly newscast; an opinion section that pays writers way over market (though, ahem, nothing more than what’s fair!); Canadian Press wire copy of which a lavishly resourced public broadcaster has no earthly need; and an entire clickbait department that’s stealing digital advertising revenue from private-sector outlets. It has no clear mandate to do much of this in the first place — indeed, the Heritage Committee recommended getting CBC out of digital revenue altogether — and unlike CBC Radio and SRC, I’m not aware of a single human being who supports the TV/online status quo.
Chris Selley, “Federal government should stop trying to help private media and fix the CBC”, National Post, 2017-06-20.
July 15, 2019
QotD: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
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