The CBC Is The New Catholic Church

By Stephen Pate – The unfolding sick and dehumanizing Jian Ghomeshi scandal gives me the creepy feeling we are watching another Canadian institution self destruct over a sex scandal.

We know Ghomeshi is the tip of the iceberg. CBC management are whitewashing and minimizing the scandal but people within the CBC know human rights abuse and sexual harassment run deep.

I started writing this story a month ago but hesitated until Linden MacIntyre came to the same conclusions in Huffington Post. Why I Left The CBC And Its Toxic Atmosphere.

MacIntyre,  the veteran CBC muckraker, said abuse was ingrained in the CBC culture and drew the comparison with the Catholic Church.  CBC immediately banned MacIntrye for speaking his mind. Then realizing their bigotry was now on display in social media, CBC brass recanted.

“The history of the Catholic Church offers the most tragic evidence of what can happen when the hierarchy in an institution abandon personal moral standards to protect the institution from the stain of scandal and, collaterally of course, protect their own entitlements and jobs.”  Huffington Post

My experience with abuse is disability discrimination.  The CBC ganged up on me and took away my PEI Legislature Press Pass.  It cut me off from being a political journalist on PEI and hurt my income.

Donna Allen, a CBC News executive, said I was not an unbiased journalist since I volunteered to help people with disabilities. However, it was acceptable for star CBC journalist Peter Mansbridge to earn $200,000 in fees from lobbyists like the oil industry, lobbyists that he was reporting about. Linden MacIntyre names the CBC for hypocrisy on Mansbridge which is one reason they tried to censor him.

Sexual harassment, essentially a human rights abuse, at the CBC is widespread and tolerated by management. CBC President Hubert Lacroix as damage control appointed someone to investigate only Ghomeshi while other cases sexual harassment cases percolate into public view .

This is classic containment strategy used by the Roman Catholic Church for decades when the priest child abuse and sexual scandals went public.

The Catholic Church hid the truth, moved priests around, made secret deals to settle the worst claims of child abuse, and blamed it on “local” problems like Mt. Cashels in Newfoundland. The Catholic Church did everything but admit the problem until forced by the courts.

Faithful Catholics tried to rationalize how the church of Christ could act so evil. It’s just a certain priest, or a school, we said. Some of the faithful fell away in disgust. Other Catholics went into denial and accepted the official lies. We were all lying to ourselves, hoping to get our kids had passed through their age of altar service without being abused, worrying that maybe they had been.

I can remember rationalizing our priest as a “good” priest because he had affairs with married women. The priest is just a regular bloke like us not some perv.  This same priest was having affairs with married women in Eastern Kings 35 years ago.

Like the church, the CBC has millions of faithful supporters who want the CBC to remain their broadcaster, their media religion, only to have the biggest stars fall from grace.

Like the church, I see the CBC as corrupted by the desire to maintain organizational integrity at all costs. As the Executive Director of the PEI Human Rights Commission said” They want to be seen as the good guys riding in on the white horse saving people.”

MacIntyre demurred from calling the CBC the Catholic Church. “The CBC is not the Catholic Church. The church hierarchy covered up a scandalous situation for many centuries until isolated cases of perversion and abuse became a plague that eventually threatened to consume the very institution that the systemic cover-up was intended to protect. At the CBC a few managers may have dithered about Jian Ghomeshi, even after they knew some of the gory details of his alleged abusiveness, for a few months. And then they canned him.”

It is only a matter of degree. The Catholic Church had absolute power so their corruption ran deeper. The CBC, albeit less powerful, still exercised the same corruption.

MacIntyre wrote,  “Whatever will be revealed as fact in the Ghomeshi scandal, there are important lessons to be learned about the nature of workplace abuse and the consequences of ignoring it, even at the low end of commonplace bad manners. Instead of tolerating bad behaviour by people who are recognized as “stars,” they should be held to a higher standard of professionalism and collegiality. And the standard has to be enforced by managers with the guts to act anytime the standards of collegiality and civility are violated — no matter how important the abusive person has become.”

“As in the case of the abusive priests — when scandalous abuse is known to have crossed over into criminal behaviour, the appropriate response is obvious: Prosecution.”

“The harder part is coming to terms with the individual and institutional blindness that let “normal” obnoxiousness proceed along the abuse continuum to a place where it became a peril to both individuals and the institution itself… And it must include a serious attempt to understand what the Ghomeshi scandal has revealed about the toxicity of celebrity, egotism, narcissism and abuse and their effect on good people working in an institution that’s in the middle of a breakdown.”

“It will now fall to managers not to simply attribute blame for what caused the Ghomeshi scandal — but to create a workplace environment in which there is zero tolerance for abuse of any kind — and that for victims of abuse, or even those who know about it second-hand, blowing the whistle on an abuser isn’t just a right, but a responsibility.”

I don’t see the transformative change happening unless the CBC is forced. In my case, they will not admit they discriminated against me. Five years later, the CBC is still threatening me.  CBC threatens it will bury disabled journalist

Featured image – cartoon of Michael Ramirez LA Times. Follow me on Twitter at @sdpate or on Facebook at NJN Network, OyeTimes and IMA News Buzz. You can also subscribe and automatically receive notifications of new stories by email. We do not share your email with advertisers. The subscription form is on this page in the left and right columns.

By Stephen Pate, NJN Network