Why CBC is Now Garbage
The Quality of State Supported Media is generally the Quality of the State that Supports it.
As Canada sinks into dystopia along with the western world, public institutions which had formerly been at least functional have been sinking with it. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has become a prime example of this.
CBC is Canada’s state broadcaster. It was formed during the 1930s to fulfill a very clear need. It was modeled after the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a once revered institution which was once held up as the definitive authority on what was true in the world but which is no longer taken seriously. CBC has been following its model into deterioration and irrelevance.
I rarely watch CBC anymore. I believe it is almost unwatchable to anyone with any critical ability and exposure to better sources. I have watched its deterioration over a long period of time.
There were some salient moments for me; when some investment hustler was allowed to act as a cohost on a ’talk show’. A very well respected American ‘left/progressive’ academic was invited to discuss some topic. The cheap hustler began heckling him on air, using the usual neoliberal and libertarian tropes.
The guest said in disgust; “So this is CBC now?” and terminated the interview. Canada’s reputation as the “brains of the North American continent” was chipped away a little more.
More recently, the prime minister was being interviewed about pandemic measures, including the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB). An ass of a CBC reporter began shouting at him, questioning how he was going to “pay for” these programs. Poor little Prince Justin was left speechless by this.
As the pandemic developed, CBC failed to carry out what should be the main mandate of state broadcaster; to give us correct information and to rigorously counter disinformation. It could be said that the federal government was itself guilty of this. However, if we really have a democracy it would at times be the state broadcaster’s job to interrogate the official narrative, or lack of it.
In the above mentioned incident, CBC was not hesitant to challenge the country’s head of government. Yet it has been unwilling to question the government’s severe messaging problems during the pandemic. Even lower level public broadcasters like TVOntario have had less difficulty in questioning government officials in a fair and non ideological way.
What has triggered my final disgust with CBC has been its willingness to recycle malicious disinformation about the pandemic. Most of this has been cycled through the “second opinion” column put out on the CBC’s website and electronic news letter. No refutation of these ‘second opinions’ is being allowed; I tried it.
You can read my effort here. This was December last. It was the standard corporate control narrative that trying to eradicate covid is futile and an interference with ‘civil liberties’.
I made the fairly obvious point that the people sponsoring this nonsense are the ones making it impossible to suppress and eradicate covid. They are also the last people to be concerned about anyone’s ‘civil liberties’. Eradicating covid should not be so difficult and would ultimately interfere least with everyone’s freedoms.
Recently CBC’s ‘second opinion’ laid another one. This one ran the old, ugly, and massively refuted trope that getting covid will give you immunity to it. This ignores facts and the excellent educational materials being put out by legitimate organizations such as World Health Network.
People are being repeatedly infected with the different sars/covid2 strains. The organism works much like the aids virus, damaging the t-cells. Your immune system will be further weakened every time you get covid. This has been known for some time.
The scum who produced this also wrote as though there is no such thing as ‘long covid.’ This is, as everyone on the planet should be fully aware of by now, the long term syndrome which effects a proportion of people who are infected with covid. This is the main cause of the labor shortages in many sectors.
Many of the people afflicted with it will never be well again. It is becoming clear that long covid will have a huge effect on productivity and health costs far into the future. This information is being frantically suppressed.
Next week, CBC ‘second opinion’ did it again. This time the disinformation task was the mystification of the liver ailments which unvaccinated children have been getting after covid infection. It is very clear that this syndrome is caused by covid, despite the efforts to suppress the patient’s serology; the blood tests which would show they have all been infected with covid.
An attempt is being made to blame this on the adenovirus, which has nothing at all to do with it. It gets really bizarre when they start running the idea that the cause is the weakening of the children’s immune systems by not attending school and having their immune systems primed by other infections.
Spreading around malevolent disinformation is not made legitimate by slapping a ‘second opinion’ label on it. CBC is not clearly refuting these pieces and is blocking anyone from directly refuting them. This is not because they do not know better; this is the national broadcaster with great resources and said to employ some of the country’s best reporters and researchers.
CBC, like most of the so called ‘mainstream media’, has completely failed to report on the pandemic. It has screened out all the salient issues; government’s failure to use its powers, failure to protect health workers, the weird refusal to acknowledge that covid is an airborne disease. It has even failed in what should have been a basic mission of a public broadcaster; to educate people on how to use masks properly.
CBC does not only retail disinformation about covid. It laid out the template for the propaganda attack on China. It created confusion and justification about forcing the Chinese electronics company Hauwei out of Canada, including the false arrest of one of its executives.
Since the start of the Ukraine war it has set the standard in Canada for antiRussian propaganda. It retails the standard narrative of the Atlantic empire Canada is subordinated to; that Russia is the ‘bad’ in the whole mess, which is not the result of the Atlanticist’s “hybrid war” on Russia. In recent weeks it has started backing off the trope that Ukraine is winning; it is getting too embarrassing to continue that.
I have one fond memory of listening to a CBC presenter give the standard philosophical liberal line that even if it is admitted that Russia was provoked into attacking, it is unjustified in doing so under any circumstances. This was done with a particularly offensive sanctimony. The victim, or in fact the party with the perceived inferior status, is always wrong for not taking whatever is dished out.
However, CBC is not merely the mouthpiece for the Canadian Liberal establishment. There is also a right wing conservative establishment with real clout, even if it has limited support among the public. Whenever they have got into office, they have sharply curtailed CBC.
So the CBC bureaucracy does what governmental bureaucracies generally do; focus on its long term survival. To do this it needs to balance between the really pretty weak liberal establishment and the very aggressive conservative establishment. Thus the game of retailing the Liberal globalist narrative but of also giving the right wing some air time.
So CBC has little interest anymore in carrying out its proper function as a public broadcaster. Its original intent was that it be politically independent and neutral, so that we could get the news. That is, to create a credible information ecology which could enable the questioning of official narratives and of the perception management of private media.
A sign that a society is under the sway of an elite which is losing contact with reality is the perversion of language. Everyday words and phrases start to be banned because they convey hidden meanings apparent only to the people wanting to ban them. Toward this, CBC’s staff now have a list of such words which they must not use, such as ‘brainstorm’, ‘tone deaf’, and ‘blind spot.’
Most countries have created their own state media so as to develop their particular domestic agendas and to present their point of view abroad. Some of these media are quite good. They actually act as substitutes for the absence of credible media in other countries, including in Canada.
This is why countries such as Canada, where self deluded elites are trying to create their own reality, do not appreciate ‘state supported media’ from other countries. They try to make it hard for us to receive them. They call them ‘propaganda machines’, and so on.
All media is somebody’s propaganda machine. The quality of the information they produce is the quality of those sponsoring it, and the resources available to it. Modern information technology makes it easier to get an alternative media to the public of a given country.
However, the same technology makes it hard to make any money from creating media. Good quality media increasingly needs a sponsor which does not need to make money at it. Thus we have intensifying conflict between state media and private interest media.
The best state media is now very good and very credible. Their quality comes from the quality of the governments supporting them. Countries which are truly independent and based on providing for the common good, not for crushing the commons to enrich an elite, produce pretty good media, at home and for foreign consumption.
A good example has been ‘RT’ or “Russia Today”. For some time in Canada it was the ‘go to’ to learn anything about international affairs. Its coverage about the domestic situation in the USA and other countries was very good.
At the start of the Ukraine war it was kicked off cable TV nets in almost all Atlanticist countries, including Canada. Its domestic coverage of these countries terminated, but we can still get its international news over the net.
RT’s quality had been declining. I was unimpressed that, during the right libertarian attack on the Canadian government last spring, it started sympathizing with the Honkies. I am still baffled about that foible.
RT’s coverage of the Ukraine war is often inept. There are other media on the net with the “Russian State Affiliated Media” brand laid upon them, who do a better job in this area. Some of these even express annoyance with RT.
Two other very good ‘state sponsored media’ operations are still on cable in Canada, although the establishment is increasingly annoyed with them, too. These are Al Jazeera from Qatar and China Global Television. Both have had to walk a tightrope in their coverage of the Ukraine conflict, to avoid the treatment RT got.
Nonetheless, their coverage of the conflict has been excellent. They have let the facts speak for themselves, and the facts strongly debunk all the fake atrocity stories put out by the Ukraine puppet regime and its western handlers. They put CBC to shame.
As for domestic and local news, we still lack the kind of reporting we really need. There are some media with the right idea, but they lack adequate resources and are subject to intense efforts to marginalize them. Some provinces have public broadcasters, but they are afflicted, to various degrees, with the CBC’s syndrome.
The same principles described above also hold true with local news; for the public to be able to actually get the news, there needs to be one main public media, and it has to be really independent. There are no multiple realities. The middle point between two falsehoods is not the truth.
In Canada, as in most of the Atlantic world, we are in a closed downward loop. Public discussion is degenerating because there is no credible source of good information and analysis. This is because the competence and coherence of our government is deteriorating.
The deterioration of CBC is both a cause and an effect of this condition.