CBC TV struggling to keep advertising dollars from falling

In the unctuous style of the four-anchor team at the CBC’s flagship evening news report, The National, two of the anchors — Adrienne Arsenault and Andrew Chang — for some time have been promoting their program on CBC radio with a short promotional commercial.

One expects a commercial to be self-promoting, but this one gets a little too enthusiastic when Chang tells listeners that The National’s role is “to assure that you always know the truth.” Catherine Tait, the public broadcaster’s CEO, said last year that the CBC “will be a beacon for truth and trust in the face of an information disorder cacophony that puts our democracy and the respect for different perspectives at risk.”

The truth? Respect for different perspectives? Not to get too deep into philosophy, but the concept of truth is not something that most philosophers would associate with daily television news or any other form of journalism. As Aristotle put it (384-322 BC): “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” Or, to rewrite Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), “daily journalism is said to be true when it conforms to the external reality.” But since scores of journalists present half a dozen versions of external reality in different media on a daily basis, there is, ipso facto, no truth to be observed.

There was no truth in the official Soviet Union newspaper Pravda, which means truth in Russian, before it stopped publishing in 1996.

This is not to suggest that the CBC is totally beholden, Soviet style, to the government of Canada or the Liberal party or any other power centre, although its leftist leanings and statist biases are well documented.

What else but CBC Radio would dedicate 35 minutes to an uninterrupted interview — as The Sunday Edition did last weekend — with Linda McQuaig, the Toronto leftist author of a new book titled The Sport and Prey of Capitalists. The book’s title says it all, and the host of the show, Michael Enright, lapped it all up — as is his predilection. As William Watson wrote on this page not too long ago, the CBC’s Sunday Edition is Canada’s “official portal into utopian-socialist ideas from around the world” and Enright is the host “for whom all social change since the Paris Commune of 1870 has been downhill.”

But the CBC’s role as national enforcer of truth — diversity, inclusion, statism, anti-capitalism, climatism, etc. — is not the problem.

The idea that the CBC is an essential Canadian disseminator of some higher truth is the starting point for what has become a national campaign for more government funding of journalism in all its forms.

As the CBC’s licence comes up for renewal later this year, the corporation’s $1 billion in annual government funding, its spending on digital media and its self-appointed role as guardian of journalistic truth will be seized as a rationale for expanded government involvement in all journalism, not just CBC journalism.

The arguments have already been used to support the government’s $600-million bailout of newspapers and other media caught in the digital industrial revolution. The reasoning is this: Technology is upsetting the media industry, and since CBC is getting government money to fight the tech giants, then other media players should get the same kind of support.

Far too many media corporations, citing the CBC as both a model and a threat, have joined the campaign to support state involvement in the media business. One reason is that the CBC is almost certainly using parts of its government broadcasting grants to enter the digital industry in competition with private sector. A CRTC release last June reported that the CBC will not disclose its spending of government money on digital activities in competition with private companies. In all, 19 private media companies reported total spending of $233 million in 2018. The CBC did not report a number, although it alone may be spending $100 million or more annually to compete with the 19.

Ottawa’s creeping entry into journalism is already underway. On Dec. 20 — virtually Christmas Eve —News Media Canada (an industry association that includes Postmedia Network, publisher of the National Post) announced government-paid funding of 105 journalists working in 94 news organizations. The funding is part of a $10-million-a-year Local Journalism Initiative set up by the Liberals in 2018 to support “civic journalism.” A few days later, News Media Canada called for a second round of applicants for government subsidies.

This is just the beginning. The private commercial media/journalism calls for government backing, using the CBC and Big Tech as the rationale, continue to increase in volume.

The idea of government-funded journalism, including newspapers, is not new in Canada. It was an active concept in 2003 when the threat of the internet had not yet materialized. As I said then and since, Canada “should be removing government control over other media, not expanding it to newspapers … There is no justification for government involvement” in any element of journalism.

Others who believe in CBC “truth” say Ottawa should merely reform the public broadcaster, maintain public funding but remove its ability to accept private advertising. David Skok, the editor-in-chief of The Logic, an online news site, said recently that “The CBC is no longer simply a broadcaster. It is a platform for truth in journalism.” In a letter this week to his subscribers, Skok referred to the CBC’s importance to Canada’s “collective truth.”

There is no such thing as Canada’s collective truth. A ban on advertising on CBC does not change the principle. The government has no business in the newsrooms of the nation.
​