{"id":20556,"date":"2013-06-06T08:22:11","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T13:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20556"},"modified":"2013-06-06T08:22:11","modified_gmt":"2013-06-06T13:22:11","slug":"qotd-the-cbc-is-nothing-but-a-zombie-slowly-sucking-up-a-dwindling-fund-of-goodwill-and-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/06\/qotd-the-cbc-is-nothing-but-a-zombie-slowly-sucking-up-a-dwindling-fund-of-goodwill-and-nostalgia\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The CBC is “nothing but a zombie, slowly sucking up a dwindling fund of goodwill and nostalgia”"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Postmedia and other newspaper empires pull paywalls down over their digital incarnations, CBC minions on Twitter have been caught crowing about their \u201cno paywall\u201d status, purchased by the taxpayer at the sensational bargain price of $1.2 billion a year.<\/p>\n

It may be hard for readers to feel bad for the cartelizing Paywall Gang, but it is surely a tactical error for the CBC to call attention to its incredibly expensive \u201cfree\u201d nature. The Broadcasting Act says the Corporation shall operate \u201cradio and television\u201d services; it doesn\u2019t say anything about a website, much less a website that functions as a telegraphic gazette. Of course, times change and new media paradigms develop and blah blah blah, but the distinction here is crucial: The original pretext for the creation of the CBC was the limited, theoretically public nature of broadcast spectrum. To the degree that the CBC is now just one digital content provider among many, with a hypothetized mandate that puts it in a position to compete with newspapers, it can rightly be privatized, or destroyed, or handed over to its own employees, in order to unburden the public treasury.<\/p>\n

Polls always demonstrate high levels of purported political support for the CBC. The public subsidy to the CBC is a forced transfer of wealth from people who don\u2019t like it to people who do, and the \u201cdos,\u201d unsurprisingly, like the set-up just fine. In the U.S., donor-funded, non-profit \u201cpublic\u201d radio is equally adored by fans; the only difference is that they\u2019re asked to chip in for their preferred electronic smarm or go without. No social or economic arguments against privatization of the CBC are possible. It\u2019s nothing but a zombie, slowly sucking up a dwindling fund of goodwill and nostalgia. Mr. Dressup is dead, folks.<\/p>\n

Colby Cosh, “Why the CBC has outlived its usefulness”, Maclean’s<\/em><\/a>, 2013-06-06<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As Postmedia and other newspaper empires pull paywalls down over their digital incarnations, CBC minions on Twitter have been caught crowing about their \u201cno paywall\u201d status, purchased by the taxpayer at the sensational bargain price of $1.2 billion a year. It may be hard for readers to feel bad for the cartelizing Paywall Gang, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,6,28,41],"tags":[416,58,795,101],"class_list":["post-20556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cancon","category-media","category-quotations","tag-cbc","tag-internet","tag-radio","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5ly","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20557,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20556\/revisions\/20557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}