LILLEY: CBC’s real mistake wasn’t cutting Trump, it was wasting our money
Brian Lilley
Published:
December 27, 2019
Updated:
December 27, 2019 4:58 PM EST
The Toronto headquarters of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is photographed on April 4, 2012.Aaron Lynett / Postmedia Network / Files
The question I have in the bizarre controversy of Donald Trump being edited out of CBC’s showing of Home Alone 2 is why on earth is CBC spending tax dollars to buy the broadcast rights to this movie in the first place?
If you haven’t heard, a bit of a controversy erupted over Christmas when someone noticed the famous scene in the 1992 film where Macaulay Culkin stops Trump to ask him for directions in the lobby of The Plaza Hotel had been cut.
Supporters of Trump denounced the move and CBC as silly politics while Trump detractors praised the move.
As the Twitter brouhaha festered and the story started appearing in news reports, Trump himself jumped in on the action retweeting a story from the Tampa Fox affiliate.
“I guess Justin T doesn’t much like my making him pay up on NATO or Trade!” Trump tweeted.
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Of course, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doesn’t make movie edits at CBC, and the network itself denied the edit was done for political reasons.
“As is often the case with feature films adapted for television, Home Alone 2 was edited for time,” CBC spokesman Chuck Thompson said in a statement.
He went on to explain that the Trump scene was one of several not integral to the plat that were removed to make the movie shorter.
It might not be integral to the plot, but I always thought it was a cute scene and made for a fun bit of trivia.
“These edits were done in 2014, when we first acquired the film and before Mr. Trump was elected president,” Thompson said.
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It’s that part of the statement that makes me wonder about the real question — why did CBC ever acquire the rights to Home Alone 2?
CBC is unique among Canadian broadcasters in that it receives major funding from the government and special treatment from the federal broadcast regulator.
Their mission is supposed to be the telling of Canadian stories — not recycling old American movies.
CBC’s mandate in the broadcasting act is to “be predominantly and distinctly Canadian, reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions.”
I’m not sure Home Alone 2 fits that mandate.
Then again, much of what CBC does falls well outside their mandate.
They run a free music streaming service to compete with private sector offerings like Spotify.
Why are tax dollars being used to let Canadians stream artists like Elton John or Taylor Swift?
For that matter, why did CBC start an online section for opinion columns and build up their online news to compete with every newspaper in the country?
The state broadcaster get $1.1 billion a year for their base funding to tell Canadian stories. They get millions more each year from production funds to do the same.
Whether they are cutting Trump out of a cute cameo scene or not, CBC should be using the taxpayer dollars we give them for actually telling Canadian stories not buying up the rights to an American movie we can see in its entirety in plenty of other places.
http://torontosun.com/opinion/colum...-wasnt-cutting-trump-it-was-wasting-our-money
