ELIMINATING THE CBC
Elly Alboim
Aside from the harshly partisan and somewhat adolescent interaction between Pierre Poilievre, Twitter and Elon Musk in regard to labelling the CBC/Radio Canada, there are underlying questions of public policy as we collectively approach the next Canadian electoral cycle. There is also an important question about political attitudes towards the role of journalism.
Most strong democracies share some common foundational characteristics that operate despite political and ideological divisions. There is a sense of nation, a broad consensus on core values and common culture, the rule of law, a support for some core central institutions, and national information systems that convey the news and information required by citizens to navigate their social and governmental systems. Many of those are under significant strain and stress as some political leaders challenge them in their quest to carve out supportive constituencies.
In the current world of politics, the unfortunate by-product of hyper polarization, the current political strategic approach of catering to a hardening and minoritarian political base and the propensity to outline policy in cartoonishly simple pronouncements is often political policy design by aphorism without detail or thought to outcome or consequence.
Ruthless and cynical politicians find it possible and rewarding to exploit fears, ideological division and grievance. That exploitation often involves a casual or non-existent relation to truth, let alone nuance. It also often leads to wrenching policy change detached from the common good and aimed at pandering to minority electoral constituencies without an overriding public policy rationale. This is not a very original observation; the examples are many and obvious.
No current political party is immune to this as its leaders try to catch the attention of a distracted and often alienated public about complex public policy. The problem seems to be accelerating in a number of democratic societies in a curious irony where the multiplicity of information sources creates a cacophony that works against the development of a common agenda of importance and relevance, a common understanding of the issues at play and even the ability to be heard.
Which brings me to Pierre Poilievre and the CBC.
The CBC’s historical role in the development of the country can’t be denied. Nor can its current diminishing presence on the English television side, including its news and information vehicles, as it continues to struggle in the ruthlessly competitive world of broadcast — over the air, cable, satellite and streaming. This is the point at which the contrary arguments are normally put into play about CBC Radio’s local presence and its predominance in the information wasteland that is Canadian private radio, the popularity and cultural value of Radio Canada, and the dominance of CBC digital journalism. I’ll get to those later.
CBC TV’s entertainment programs have generally struggled for audience although there have been some strong and highly watched programming with fiercely loyal viewers. Ironically perhaps, CBC TV international sales have always been significant.
But it is journalism — regardless of the medium in which it appears — that has for decades been the face of the CBC. It is by far the largest journalistic organization in Canada with the broadest set of community touchpoints including Indigenous and northern broadcasting. Its journalism is governed by clearly articulated mainstream journalistic ethics and standards, as rigorous and likely more so than those of most other journalistic organizations in Canada.
Its journalism is its most controversial activity. It has infuriated federal governments of both major parties as it exercises accountability journalism and operates tacitly as a counterweight to the largely conservative leaning other major national journalistic organizations. Its journalistic culture leans towards an urban progressivism that focuses in part on inclusion and diversity. It is that counterweight journalistic culture and agenda, not the viewer cost/benefit ratio of CBC entertainment, that has provoked Conservatives and put the CBC squarely in the sights of Mr. Poilievre. He uses it as a foil politically and leverages anger towards it to raise funds. Most importantly, he has promised to “defund” the CBC and highlights that pledge repeatedly to the delight of his partisan audiences although he excludes Radio Canada from the policy and is ambiguously silent on CBC radio (which is of significant importance in the rural and remote areas of the country where many of his voters live.)
Mr. Poilievre’s policy on the CBC is consistent with his generally contemptuous approach towards mainstream journalism and both will have consequences he likely neither understands nor cares much about. He has focused on the CBC as a symbol of the broader so-called liberal (and in his mind, Liberal) press. He has mounted an aggressive continuing bid to delegitimize mainstream political journalism. He avoids encounters with journalists as best he can, often belittles reporters or questions their motivations, and regularly implies they represent an enemy opposition force with a predetermined hostile agenda. On the face of it, his approach to journalism is similar to the playbooks of several authoritarian populist politicians around the world. Trust in major mainstream media has fallen steadily over recent years as populist politicians undercut the credibility of journalism and journalistic organizations. The populists prefer and have fostered closed loops of like-minded journalists speaking to like-minded partisans. There is no reason to believe that Canada is immune to these trends and Mr. Poilievre is the most aggressive and outspoken national party leader we’ve seen in Canada to pursue this approach towards media.
Canada’s journalistic ecosystem is fragile. It is facing a brutal battle for survival in a digital world where competition from social media platforms is rendering business cases increasingly tenuous. The audience for news and information has fragmented and splintered. There are few national journalistic voices and most of them struggle financially and have retrenched. The number of journalists employed in Canada has plummeted over time. The Postmedia chain publishes one national quasi-daily and a number of local newspapers most of which are hollow shells of limited reporting resources and strident commentary. Bell Media has savaged its local television news operations. Global television has a threadbare national reporting staff and few local stations other than Potemkin village constructions. The Toronto Star has national pretensions but has cut back staff and capability quite dramatically. By most reasonable criteria, that leaves CTV national television news, the Globe and Mail and the CBC as the only truly national journalistic organizations. The consequences of eliminating the CBC from that list would be dramatic.
Democracies thrive on shared information, priorities and experiences. They do best when their citizenry is informed by a common set of facts and by a common agenda that outlines problems and proffers solutions for debate and implementation. There are very few ways to provide those to a citizenry other than through the efforts of journalists who are delegated by their busy and often overwhelmed consumers to select, distil and package the information they require.
In a world of diminishing trust, determined efforts to undermine the credibility of journalism, and a bewildering and paralytic array of information providers, national journalistic organizations serve to “certify” the information they provide by leveraging their resources, editorial standards and reputations. Destabilizing and delegitimizing national mainstream media robs citizenry of an ability to sort through whom and what to trust.
Additionally, it is important to recognize that Canada is the most decentralized federation in the world. Its governance and politics reflect that reality and often emphasize regional divisions as do the journalistic organizations that cover the provinces and their municipalities. It is national media that reports on the news, information and narratives of the country as a whole and distributes them through the regions. National media help to establish the national agenda and hierarchy of issue importance. They look over each other’s shoulders and tend to triangulate to roughly similar places, presenting the consuming public with a relatively consistent menu of material.
National media aggregate national information in a way that local, and specialized media do not. They provide one stop aggregated access in a way that individual web sites, podcasts, blogs and online commentary collectives do not. Online sources – save the ones maintained by national organizations – do not have pools of reporters producing diverse pools of content. In fact, they depend on the national organizations to provide content to link to in order to supplement the content they can generate themselves with their limited resources.
Appropriate public policy would try to strengthen national journalistic organizations rather than work to delegitimize and weaken them. Eliminating the CBC in English Canada (the net result of “defunding”) would weaken the national journalistic ecosystem and have many negative consequences.
The CBC is a competitive national journalistic voice which provides both additional and diverse content and, because of its high level of resources and standards, forces others to compete on quality and reach.
The CBC provides training and employment to the largest pool of journalists in the country, few of whom could be absorbed after it disappeared.
The CBC provides local television news and information in major markets. An end to CBC local television news would decrease competition and increase community dependence on diminished private sector offerings operating largely under CRTC fiat (providing minimal programming) and managing significant cost pressures that continue to lead to staff reductions.
If CBC radio were eliminated, there is virtually no private sector information radio to replace it anywhere beyond sporadic 60 second news and weather updates and even then, private sector stations providing those are the exception not the rule. CBC radio stations all carry comprehensive local and regional information packages which are generally top of their markets and national public affairs and entertainment programs which have no private sector equivalents.
The CBC employs national correspondents in various parts of Canada and harnesses local reporters as well to provide regional coverage nationally to its network information programs, its all-news television network and its regional syndication services. CBC News Network could not exist without that infrastructure and reporter pool and English Canada would be left with only one all-news television network operating on a smaller resource base. The mandate of CTV All News television would have to be revised from its current CRTC-mandated confines of being a headline news service.
The CBC serves northern and Indigenous communities with comprehensive services that those communities cannot fully duplicate.
The CBC maintains more international bureaus and correspondents than virtually any other Canadian journalistic organization, providing Canadian perspectives.
The CBC provides the national infrastructure that supports Radio Canada journalists outside Quebec, allowing it to cover the rest of Canada. Private broadcasters in Quebec are resolutely regionally focused and see no imperative to cover the rest of Canada. CBC also pools international infrastructure with Radio Canada to share the costs of global coverage.
In summary, there are significant national and public policy consequences that flow from Mr. Poilievre’s ill-thought through and politically driven promise to defund the CBC and the adversarial approach to political journalism that underpins it. Evaluating his policies should involve more than assessing its partisan motivations and benefits in the blood sport that is politics and involve a serious and thoughtful analysis of the outcomes it is likely to produce.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Elly Alboim - Elly worked as a journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from September 1970 to September 1993, having acted as the Parliamentary Bureau Chief for CBC Television News and the National Political Editor for the network. He won one Gemini and was nominated for four others for his work in Special Events coverage. Elly is also a tenured Associate Professor of Journalism at Carleton University, having taught there since 1980, as well as having taught at Concordia University’s Graduate Studies Program in the mid-eighties. He also teaches government communications at the Queen’s University School of Policy Studies. He has been a Member of the Board of the Canadian Journalism Foundation and a member of the CJF’s Executive Committee. He has also been a member of the Board of the Institute on Governance. He was a member of the Journal Oversight Committee of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Elly has provided advice on some of the most important issues in recent Canadian history to federal cabinet ministers, departments and agencies, including Environment, Finance, Health, Human Resources Development, Indian and Northern Affairs, Industry, Justice, Heritage (Multiculturalism), Natural Resources and Treasury Board. He provided communications and public opinion research advice for 9 federal and two Ontario budgets and was a senior advisor to Paul Martin during his tenures as Finance Minister and Prime Minister. Over the years, he has also provided communications and media advice to 24 federal government departments and agencies. Currently, Elly is a Principal at Earnscliffe Strategies.
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