Rex Murphy: The CBC is boring and preachy and that is why there is ‘CBC bashing’

“There’s a lot of CBC bashing going on – somewhat stoked by the Leader of the Opposition.” 
-Catherine Tait, President of the Crown Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Company. On tour.

It has to be the top unabbreviable qualification of the [resident of the nation’s largest, publicly funded communications instrument — CBC — that she has some understanding of … communications.

That she knows how to communicate with the public her organization is subsidized to communicate with.

This is plainly, painfully, not the case.

Catherine Tait has suggested in public that one of the reasons the CBC is in decline is because it is being attacked by Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre. “There’s a lot of CBC bashing going on — somewhat stoked by the Leader of the Opposition,” she told the Globe and Mail, frustrated over the party’s “defund the CBC” campaign. “I think they feel that CBC is a mouthpiece for the Liberal government.”

Does Catherine Tait not recall or does she even know that the CBC and its erstwhile national anchor sued the Conservative party during a federal election?

During. A federal election.

A government-funded news organization and one of its brand faces Rosie Barton, sued the opposing political party during a federal election. That surely did wonders for its neutralist, objective reputation. And now the President of CBC wandering the country to select venues speaks to what she calls “CBC bashing” — it may be just criticism born of annoyance and frustration at CBC’s performance and programming — hits at Pierre Poilievre as its “stoking” source. With the clear implication that the dismal ranking of CBC in the public mind these days comes only from its critics, and the Conservative party – the one CBC sued — in particular.

That’s not stepping on a rake and getting it in the mug with the hardwood handle.

That’s searching for a moving bulldozer before you lie down for a nap.

Will someone please tell the CBC president that heading the CBC does not make her, ex officio, the leader of the opposition to the real leader of the opposition. The communication skills on display here are abysmal.

There are many, many reasons why CBC is devastatingly low in ratings, why its audiences have drifted off, why its prime newscasts do not outscore some pitiful private blogs or podcasts — and among those many, many reasons I suggest Pierre Poilievre, leader of the opposition, and whatever he has said, swims at the very, very bottom of the pool.

In fact he may be in another body of water altogether.

The principal reason CBC is not watched is because those running it don’t know what a public news service and public programmer actually is.

I can speak to this as I was there when the proclamation was made. Their first priority, the mother of all priorities is the hallowed Diversity. Capital D. All bends and stands in line behind Diversity.

Well, here’s a press release. The purpose of a public news service is to PROVIDE NEWS. It may have all the social justice goals it wants. It’s employees may embrace every cause on the wide so-called woke agenda. In their own time. On their own dime.

But it is not the CBC’s business to instruct the population on its “goals and values.” Nor is it the business of its programmers or reporters to infuse all their work with social uplift, to highlight items that follow a “progressive” narrative, to smother or ignore those which do not; to assume that the eco hysteria of the global warmists is holy doctrine, and to bar, pass over, and deny reportage from the host of serious authorities, major scientists, and solid arguments that challenge that doctrine.

The CBC newsroom is not a synod for ratifying dogmas and ruling implicitly or explicitly, on what is policy truth.

If people want missionaries — and the appetite has greatly declined — they may go to churches, synagogues, mosques and revival tents.

CBC has become a parody of what falls under the generous umbrella of social justice activism, and sees itself, not as a ruthlessly objective, wide-ranging, fearless gatherer of the happenings of this country; but as a desperately moralistic hectoring monolith out to better the millions and millions of Canadians who happen (ital) not (end ital) to be interested in every latest bulletin on every downtown faddish cause and protest from the woke agenda.

You may travel vast swathes of this country, and I have, and the number of people you will meet who will utter this same sentence — I never watch it now — (now, is a key word there) or, “It’s been ages since I looked at CBC news.”

The second huge reason is that its missionary compulsion doesn’t stop at news. Every comedy (I use the term very carelessly) on CBC is a message bag first and laughter, in most cases, an almost hopeless extra. Great bulks of people actively — actively — work, not to watch these self-celebrations of the CBC’s pious posturing. And this second reason comes with the greatest penalty of all: the shows are boring.

The third, perhaps I’m wrong here, maybe it is the real first reason. CBC has forgotten, doesn’t know, or care about most of its own audience, and almost always, addresses its non-audience in the most patronizing, condescending tones. The vast reaches of urban Canada could lie in outer Siberia for all the connection CBC has with them.

Ms. Tait, you may have captured portions of Queen Street in Toronto, blocks on Robson in Vancouver, and the hearts of any protesters who have every blocked traffic, tried to stop a pipeline, or glued their hairy limbs on to some painting or pavement — but these are NOT the whole country. That is niche broadcasting carried to its ultimate folly.

Your audiences have shrunk and fallen because you ignore, greatly ignore, so much of the country and so many of the much wider, deeper issues of a wider, much deeper population.

As far as your tour goes, university panels, and interviews conducted by your own employees, with somnolent panels — none of which, none of which, as far as I have seen have taken place on farms, in small towns, in the north or out east in the villages and outports.

The universe of values and priority concerns within the headquarters building on 100 Front Street, Toronto is narrow, bounded and specialized.

To equate them with those of those of this whole, broad genuinely diverse country is a delusionary folly, product of a hothouse culture.

Diversity is much more than faces, identity or sexual inclination — it also includes minds and opinions and individuals, individuals who are always far more than blank templates for whatever group they issue from. CBC’s “diversity” is one-dimensional and superficial and most of all annoyingly preachy.

And news is news. It is not a subtle form of extended anti-bias lecture to be paid for with a 1.4 billion dollar subsidy.

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