This article was last updated on May 25, 2022
Canada: 
Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…
USA: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…
CBC’s endless self-promotion is not about Canada – it’s about Toronto elites and their intellectual bigotry
By Phillip Cross – National Post – With the CBC’s TV ratings down 40% to a specialty channel-like 5% share of viewers even before it lost its NHL contract, according to Canadian Media Research, it’s worth asking again what has gone wrong with the Mother Corp and what should be done about it?
The answer to the first question is that it no longer represents ordinary Canadians to themselves in a way they like or even recognize.
So when its funding comes under scrutiny, it is not surprising that most Canadians collectively yawn while watching any of the myriad other channels available to them on various media platforms.
The CBC is not about Canadian programming but programming Canadians to its enlightened view of how the world should work.
Look at the litany of in-house CBC stars and ask if any are representative of ordinary Canadians and their values?
Carol Off lets As It Happens serve as a platform for endless cries for social justice here and around the world.
Recent events revealed the sulphurous Jian Ghomeshi as a sexual wolf dressed in progressive clothing (his photo still graces Q’s Podcast, a thoughtless oversight by the CBC bureaucracy).
Peter Mansbridge championed Naomi Klein’s latest rants about the evils of capitalism as the book of the year; try and imagine the host of CTV News taking such a position.
Michael Enright on Sunday Morning took a break from advocating tax increases to question why no bankers had been jailed after the financial crisis. The answer is easy — here they did nothing but manage their affairs in a quintessentially prudent Canadian manner.
Canada’s inherent conservatism constantly mystifies the CBC’s elite.
The common thread tying together all these people is a Toronto elite’s disdain for everything outside its avant-garde view of Canada.
As noted by the Hoover Institute’s Thomas Sowell in The Vision of the Anointed, elites are contemptuous of ordinary people, especially businesspeople with their single-minded focus on delivering the best possible product to their market.
The contempt for ordinary people extends to ordinary sex, as demonstrated by Ghomeshi’s self-confessed fondness for rough sex or DNTO’s Sook-Yin Lee’s engaging in explicit sex for the film Bus Stop. Such trailblazing practices help separate the elite from the prudish and unwashed masses.
The result is a chorus of CBC reporters and producers affirming their assumed superiority by churning out a constant stream of intellectual bigotry that alienates its listeners. The latter are migrating in droves to the proliferation of media available on the Internet, beyond the captive audience that used to be delivered to the CBC by CRTC regulations.
Ultimately, the bias in CBC programming has only hurt itself. It has not slowed the growing influence of conservative ideas, as shown by the Harper government’s 10 years in power, the re-election of Christy Clark over the NDP in BC, the continuing conservative hegemony in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and the dominance in Quebec of parties that want to address its fundamental economic problems instead of separatism.
The response to the CBC’s problems is clear enough, given its inability to acknowledge let alone correct its ideological bias. End its $1-billion of government subsidies.
If the loyal band of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting wants to contribute enough money to keep it going, fine. People are free to support causes they deeply believe in. They should not be free to compel other people to spend their money supporting causes or views they don’t support or identify with. The CBC does not present an accurate face of Canada to Canadians. The two don’t recognize each other anymore.
There are lessons from the CBC’s downfall for other national institutions that rely on government funding. Serve all Canadians equally, instead of allowing yourself to be captured by a strongly-motivated ideological minority.
Philip Cross is a former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada.
Text and photo montage is copyright the National Post allowed use as Fair Dealing under the Canada Copyright Act, Section “29.2 Fair dealing for the purpose of news reporting does not infringe copyright if the following are mentioned: (a) the source; and (b) if given in the source, the name of the (i) author, in the case of a work, (ii) performer, in the case of a performer’s performance, (iii) maker, in the case of a sound recording, or (iv) broadcaster, in the case of a communication signal.”
By Stephen Pate, NJN Network
Be the first to comment