Media Bias [Merged]

[a_majoor]

Dear Thucydides

I write to acknowledge receipt of your e-mail.  It is the customary practice of CBC’s Office of the Ombudsman to share complaints with the relevant programmers, who have the right to respond first to criticism of their work.  I have therefore shared your e-mail with Jennifer McGuire, General Manager and Editor in Chief of CBC News.  If you are not satisfied with the response you receive you may ask me to review the matter.

Sincerely,

Vince Carlin
CBC Ombudsman

We'll see....

 

[a_majoor]

Another good reason to pull the plug on the CBC. If these "media professionals" were worth their salt, then perhaps a few more than 1 in 12 Canadians would be watching and listening. A bonus would be all those radio and television studios would be available for low costs for real local and regional broadcasters willing to attract a real audience:

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1393657&p=1

State of the CBC: Tear it all down

Lorne Gunter,  National Post

http://a123.g.akamai.net/f/123/12465/1d/www.nationalpost.com/0316_cbc.jpg Tyler Anderson/National Post

The CBC will never be able to exorcize its left-wing missionary zeal -- for global warming, for Islam, for big government, Barack Obama, multiculturalism, public health care, human rights commissions and so on. And it could never survive on private donations or ad revenues. So the only thing to do with Mother Corp is to pull down its office buildings and stations and pour salt in their foundations.

And I mean radio as well as television.

There is no moral or philosophical justification for using one billion of taxpayers' dollars to subsidize the viewing and listening tastes of a shrinking percentage of the population and the ideological hobby horses of CBC executives and editors.

Would you favour hundreds of millions of your hard-earned dollars going to subsidize Crossroads Television System (CTS), the Christian service with stations in Ontario and Alberta? Or how about al-Jazeera, the English-language Arab station that now has a place in Canada's channel line-up? Neither is anymore overtly biased than the CBC is to the advancement and defence of its causes. So where is the justification in denying those stations subsidies while lavishing nearly one-third of Ottawa's cultural budget on a service that captures less than 8% of Canadian television viewers and just about the same number of radio listeners?

But that is looking at the question from the wrong end. Rather, I should have asked the following: If the proselytizing on CTS and al-Jazeera TV can survive without largesse from the public treasury, why shouldn't the CBC have to do the same?

Every time I write about the left-leaning bias at the Ceeb, I get letters and e-mails from the corporation's passionate fans saying that they hear and see alternative opinions on their favourite shows all the time. I don't doubt that they do hear other voices.

The problem is that it is human nature to recognize the opinions that anger you faster than the ones that comfort you. We at the National Post can, say, run 10 or more opinion pieces expressing right-of-centre views. But let us run one dissenting, leftist view and many faithful readers will accuse us of backsliding.

Moreover, since Post readers have to survive in a predominately left-of-centre media culture, they are probably less sensitive to left-wing bias in our pages than CBC supporters are to even the tiniest expression of right-wing bias. If the left-right "balance" at the CBC were as close as 10-1, I would be surprised.

Remember last fall when CBC.cacolumnist Heather Mallick called Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin "a toned-down version" of a porn actress, whose looks would appeal to the "white trash vote" and the sort of "sexual inadequates" who, Ms. Mallick claimed, comprised the majority of men in the Republican Party? She said the governor and her supporters were largely "rural," "unlettered" "hillbillies." She even attacked the intelligence and character of Ms. Palin's children. At the time, CBC publisher John Cruickshank admitted the piece was "viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan," and "should not have appeared" on the CBC site. He promised a new, balanced CBC site would emerge, with plenty of new voices representing all bands of the ideological spectrum.

That was six months ago and the CBC Web site no better represents a diversity of opinion than the workers' central committee at Karl Marx Widget Factory #6.

For a long time the CBC has justified its huge annual federal gift because it sees itself as the vehicle through which Canadians tell one another their stories. If this pompous self-image were ever true (and I'm doubtful), it cannot possibly be true now with only one in 12 Canadians actually watching.

CBC TV no longer carries the two most distinctly Canadian sports events of the year -- the Grey Cup and the Brier -- and the world has not ended, the country's identity has not eroded. Its hockey coverage, arts programming and original drama and comedy could all be picked up by cable and digital services and no one would notice.

There is simply no way to argue that it is worth $1-billion to all Canadians to keep the CBC alive. The few people who like its programming may insist it is worth it, but why should their preferences be kept afloat by taxing the 11 of 12 Canadians whose viewing and listening habits aren't being subsidized?

[email protected]

 

[a_majoor]

WTF?

http://freedomnation.blogspot.com/

CBC reporter attacks CTF for owning a car

Chris Rand at the CBC wanted to take a shot at the Canadian Taxpayer Federation. He really did, you can sense a certain desperation to find something to take them to task with. The CTF was submitting a petition calling for an end to pensions for convicted criminals. Mr. Rand did not want to talk about the issue or take a stand on it. He wanted to talk about Derek Feldebrant’s car.

Mr. Feldebrant is the Research Director for the CTF and he owns a 1997 BMW. This car, according to the update in Mr. Rand’s post, was salvaged for $500 and has 250 000 km on it. For Mr Rand this represents “a certain cachet of new wealth and privilege in Canada.”

At first I thought that Mr. Rand should send an apology to Mr. Feldebrant but then I realized that this was the highest compliment. If the best that the opponents of the CTF can do is complain about a 13 year old BMW, doesn’t that say something good about the CTF?

If a $500 salvaged car is the cahet of new wealth and privilege, then my used $13,000 Dodge Caravan must make me the new Bill Gates  :

 

[Rifleman62]

Via Small Dead Animals:

http://www.theteamakers.com/2010/04/21/why-we-leak/#comment-12069

See all the weekly stats and the blog that started this at link.

Anonymous says:

April 25, 2010 • 6:16 pm

Read ‘em and weep…the CBC News story
- Medium Close Up

We have been hearing an amazing amount of self congratulations from CBC management about how the new National is doing well or it’s on the right track. There has been a series of hero-grams sent to staff pushing them to keep up the good work. The bosses maintain that the changes in the newscast are a work in progress and that staff is busting their butts.

All this blather in spite of the fact that I have never met a single viewer who thinks the changes in the newscast were anything other than awful. In fact many media friends, including some who still work for The National tell me they have stopped watching the program. Non media friends complain about the set, Peter’s walks, the dumb reporter interviews that add nothing to show, but really, would they notice any of this if the quality of the stories and storytelling was high enough to keep them interested in the content? I suspect not.

It has been too easy to blame criticism on unhappy former employees who are disgruntled because they were pushed out. It has been too easy to point fingers at older viewers who don’t like change. It has been too easy to fall back on “it’s a work in progress” excuses. The truth is, and the numbers are all too clear, the new National is an abject failure that has not resonated with the viewing audience and worse, has turned many loyal news junkies away.

With the help of a mathematically inclined friend who has access to the ratings I put together a table that clearly shows how poorly The National is doing. But first an executive summary of our findings:

We used 70 programs (Monday-Friday) in 2009 from the beginning of January to the second week of April. The National average was about 804 thousand, while CTV News got 993 thousand.

This year, 2010, we looked at 59 programs during the same period. (The Olympics made 11 weekdays not applicable.) This time the National averaged 644 thousand, CTV News — 1257 thousand. That’s almost exactly double. Using last year’s system — if you reasonably assume CTV News didn’t gain viewers, their ratings jump can be attributed to the new people meters — that would mean that The National has averaged less than 500 thousand in 2010 using the pre-people meter numbers, a ratings fall of almost 40%! Incredible and embarrassing…

Two other small observations. Last year, there were 9 days when The National actually got higher numbers than CTV. This season, it never got close. The other thing is that we picked a period when The National‘s ratings were actually UP! If you were to look at the September-December stretch, CTV’s numbers were regularly more than double, sometimes, even triple those of CBC’s flagship news program… The numbers are even more startling than we expected.

A few more facts to ponder. During the study period in 2009 the lowest rating at CBC was 615 thousand. In 2010 the lowest rating was 451 thousand. In fact the CBC failed to reach 500 thousand viewers four times. During that same period CTV News had four nights with over 1.5 million viewers.

Here’s the actual numbers for you to ponder:

2009 2010 (see link)

It is pretty obvious from the numbers, The National is getting killed since the new format kicked in. Only five times in three months did the newscast have higher ratings than one year earlier, this even though the people meters have buoyed the numbers of all the big networks. Only once did the rating approach the million mark, this was after the second night of the Don Cherry movie. All in all, a most dismal showing. At this point it is fair to question the changes made at The National and the people responsible for those changes. Anywhere else in the real world the people behind this sort of failure would be looking for new jobs

 

[Dennis Ruhl]

. A bonus would be all those radio and television studios would be available for low costs for real local and regional broadcasters willing to attract a real audience:

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1393657&p=1

If you continued operating the studios as studios you would inherit the CBC union. Need I say more?

 

[a_majoor]

Not necessarily.

The studios and other property would be auctioned off to the highest bidder with the dissolution of Mothercorp. The staff would have been let go.

The new owners could do whatever they wanted, of course, but the ones who are interested in setting up their own stations using the salvaged studio and equipment would then be putting out hiring notices. Any ex union employee who demands union wages will discover lots of talented applicants fresh from community college (or even college and high school co-op students) looking for the same job but not demanding union wages. Many people might even have the talent to learn how to run these things themselves, saving lots of labour costs...

 

[a_majoor]

Well, for what it is worth:

[email protected]

Dear Thucydides,

Thank you for taking the time to share your views on Ekos Research and the complaint about it we recently received from the Conservative Party of Canada. The explanation we can offer you on this matter is consistent with that which I, as CBC News general manager and editor in chief, offered to Mr. John Walsh, president of the Conservative Party of Canada, who wrote to our Ombudsman on April 22, 2010 concerning Ekos Research and its president, Mr. Frank Graves.

It is our understanding that Frank Graves, president of Ekos Research, has also addressed this matter publicly, stating that he has no client relationship with the Liberal Party and that his remarks (which he has since indicated were inappropriate) represented hypothetical advice offered in conversations with Globe columnist Lawrence Martin (published April 21, 2010) and The Hill Times reporter Harris Macleod (published Mar. 1, 2010).

However, to the extent that you or other Canadians may feel this constitutes evidence of bias or impropriety on the part of CBC News, I would like to clarify our relationship with Ekos and Mr. Graves in particular.

Ekos is one of four national polling firms which provide data to CBC News. According to our policies on poll reporting, the data we receive are reviewed and evaluated by our own research department to ensure the methodology is sound and by our senior editorial leaders to ensure accuracy, fairness and balance, consistent with our published journalistic standards and practices
(which are available for your review at:  http://cbc-radio-canada.ca/docs/policies/journalistic/).

To meet our qualification and selection process (through a formal Request For Proposals), all of our polling firms were required to make a specific declaration that they were not affiliated with any political party, as this would have disqualified them. We have reviewed this important point with Mr. Graves and confirmed that no client relationship with the Liberal Party of Canada exists. While we assume that individuals do cast ballots in elections, we do not require firms or individuals to report on their voting history or donations to political organizations.

To the extent that Mr. Graves, like our other pollsters, is invited to offer his interpretation of data and its political context on CBC News programs like Power and Politics, we believe that his commentary - on our programs and subject to our editorial policies - is within the bounds of normal political analysis and discourse. We would require it to remain so. Frank Graves is not paid for appearing on Power and Politics.

At the same time, we would point out that our pollsters serve a different role from our political commentators (such as Kory Teneycke, former spokesperson for Prime Minister Harper, Liberal Party advisor Scott Reid, former NDP press secretary Ian Capstick and others), who are invited to offer analyses from their own particular and often explicitly partisan perspectives. We believe it is important to encourage a wide ranging discourse on the issues of the day. But as with all our content, it too is guided by our journalistic policy and guidelines.

I can assure you that CBC News is and will remain politically neutral and scrupulously fair as it provides Canadians with a lively and current platform for the broad range of political opinion and perspective in this country. As I hope you will appreciate, this is one of our key brand attributes and one we work hard every day to exemplify.

Further, I would like to confirm some other important points which were raised in Mr. Walsh's letter, in the media and on various blogsites recently:

    * We are not sharing resources with the Liberal Party of Canada.

    * We do not share our polling data with any political or other parties before they are presented publicly as news, after which time they are available to everyone.

    * We do not "share Mr. Graves' call for a "culture war' that pits Canadian against Canadian." We will however, like other news organizations, continue to report on the sometimes heated debate on this and other topics that occur throughout Canada's political landscape.

I hope this information addresses your concerns.

It is also my responsibility to inform you that if you are not satisfied with this response, you may wish to submit the matter for review by the CBC Ombudsman. The Office of the Ombudsman, an independent and impartial body reporting directly to the President, is responsible for evaluating program compliance with the CBC's journalistic policies. The Ombudsman may be reached by mail at the address shown below, or by fax at 416 205 2825 or by email at [email protected]

Yours very truly,

Jennifer McGuire
General manager and editor in chief, CBC News
Box 500 - Station A
Toronto, ON
M5W 1E6

I would think the relationship between Mr Graves contributions to the Liberal party and the value  of the contracts EKOS got while they were in power should raise some eyebrows over the idea no relationships exist between the two, but maybe getting $6000 for every one you contribute is a coincidence?

 

[Rifleman62]

From Small Dead Animals: http://smalldeadanimals.com/

May 1, 2010
Mansbridgio de' Medici: the declining years
On the Sunday, April 18th edition of The National, the teaser for an upcoming story consisted entirely of these twelve words:

At the end of the day: Rahim Jaffer, Ms. Guergis - Cocaine? Hookers?
I'm not a fan of the CBC, obviously, but that is a good one. They've taken the sort of blithe, craven, entitled, almost joyous unaccountability that we associate with the Liberal remora of the Adscam years and applied it to journalism, and they've maintained this approach even as it all slowly unravels. Anyone who got all his news from The National could be forgiven for thinking that Canada had been on the right track under the Liberals, but that our government has been plagued by a series of mini-scandals and outrages ever since the Conservatives took power. The truth - that a solid, scandal-free government has taken us through an unprecedented international financial storm and left us in the best shape of any country in the world - would be supplanted by the CBC's hammering, partisan narrative that the Conservatives' reign has amounted to a tireless litany of fabricated scandals, of "damning evidence" and "new and explosive allegations" and "political firestorms."

Defenders of the CBC continue to say there's no bias; what's unsettling is that they always say it with a straight face. Anyone who has actually watched the National over the last fifteen years - as opposed to just talking nonstop about how unbiased it is, or saying "naw, I don't watch it, there's too much Liberal bias" - knows full well that if a Shawinigate were to occur tomorrow, but with Stephen Harper in Jean Chretien's role, it would be a top-of-the-hour outrage for months, if not years. If you doubt it, ask yourself this: if the actions of a blowhard former Conservative MP, turfed years ago by his own party, who bragged about his ability to access government money in an attempt to make himself appear important, but in the end *received no money whatsoever* from the government, warrants speculative, innuendo-driven, top-of-the-hour, five-alarm, government-scandal coverage for weeks on end, how would The National even begin to cover a Conservative version of Shawinigate or Adscam? It's hard to even imagine. They'd surely need three new channels, twenty new reporters, an eighty-trailer mobile war room, and nightly special reports - "A nation in crisis! How did we get to this point?"

Now that the Conservatives are belatedly taking on the CBC, by focusing, as a start, on the CBC's presentation of EKOS pollster Frank Graves as a putatively unbiased, non-partisan expert on the Canadian political scene, the straight-faced crowd who defend the CBC are pretending - because that's what it is, pretending - that the Conservatives are only unhappy with Frank Graves' CBC appearances because he's a partisan:

"As for Conservatives being victims of CBC bias, Teneycke has a paying gig defending the Harper world view -- a task the former PMO communications director carries out with aplomb. Another former Harperite, Tom Flanagan, is also a frequent CBC guest...
It's a purposeful misdirection of the real issue. Cabinet ministers, MPs, Prime Ministers, and PMO spokesmen - partisans all - have appeared on The National for years without anyone saying "Hey! No fair! Finance Minister Ralph Goodale is talking there on the CBC, and he's a Liberal!" No, the real problem is that for years now the CBC has been trotting out anti-conservative partisans - including reporters and anchors - without identifying them as such. CBC defenders like Susan Riley (the source of the above quote) and Jane Taber -

"Kory Teneycke, meanwhile, who most recently served as Stephen Harper’s communications director, is paid for his appearances on CBC in which he repeats Tory talking points and touts the Conservative line..."
- must surely be aware that every single time Teyneke and Flanagan appear on the CBC they are identified at the outset by their relationships with the Conservatives, just as they know that whenever someone from the Fraser Institute makes an appearance on the CBC, or is quoted by the CBC, the words right-wing think tank are inevitably tacked on, as if to warn viewers that what they're hearing is not the truth, but a purely partisan viewpoint.

I'm sure they're also fully aware that, in stark contrast, those who promote the Lib/prog viewpoint are described as merely "experts" or "human rights lawyers" or "environmentalists" or an "analysts" or "U of T (X)ists." When, during the CBC's "war crimes!" spree, Michael Ignatieff's Harvard friend Amir Attaran - a highly partisan Liberal who, not two weeks before his appearance on CBC described Stephen Harper as a "dangerous ideologue" - was used by the CBC as the centerpiece for a top of the hour attack on the Conservatives - an attack that was all allegation and no fact - the CBC introduced him to the country as merely "a law professor who's been digging deep into the Afghan file" - a description that's true only in the sense that it would be true to say that "Attila the Hun, who enjoys horseback riding, travel and barbecuing, is an avid collector of Sofian knick-knacks..."

It's doubtful that even one CBC defender in this country honestly believes that the CBC would ever use a close buddy of Stephen Harper, without identifying him as such, as the centerpiece of a factless, innuendo-driven attack on the Liberals, and yet when the CBC uses anti-conservatives like Graves or Attaran in such a manner the CBC's defenders put on sunglasses, turn the other way, and whistle, all while claiming the moral high ground. That cheek, that unconscionable, unfathomable, entitled arrogance, will be the CBC's downfall. You'd think that the CBC workers who value the institution and who appreciate the network's historic role place in this country would have at least some sense of the enormous damage being caused to the institution by the minority of connected, entitled, unaccountable, shortsighted, arrogant OPG types, but apparently they don't.

Too bad for the CBC, because the issue of The National's fraudulent, in-your-face, partisan journalism is not going away. The increasing anger over the sheer extent of the bias of the CBC's political coverage isn't driven by conservatives' animosity to Liberals but by the arrogant unaccountability of the producers and reporters at the CBC's news division, who continue to insult, on a daily basis, the millions of non-Liberal Canadian taxpayers who pay their salaries.

 

[Kirkhill]

Rifleman:

The problem is that everybody perceives themselves as reasonable, not to say rational, beings.  That is the sine qua non of being human.

I know where I stand.  And I am a reasonable individual.... therefore all those that disagree with me a radical, argumentative, b*****ds that should never have been allowed to draw their first breath. 'Course now that they're here its probably just as well to corral the bu**ers and keep them isolated at places like the CBC and the Globe and Mail where they can talk amongst themselves.

Case in point?  I give you Lawrence Martin

 

[Rifleman62]

Via Small Sead Animals: http://smalldeadanimals.com/

That's not a cookie jar. This isn't my hand. You're not standing there...

Several weeks ago the Conservatives complained to CBC Ombudsman Vince Carlin about the CBC's use of pollster Frank Graves as a putative non-partisan: "Why," the letter asked, "is a pollster who conducts polling for Canada's national broadcaster...also giving partisan advice to the Liberal Party of Canada?"

The usual suspects shrugged off the charge. The network's editor-in-chief insisted that the CBC "is 'politically neutral' and 'scrupulously fair.'" EKOS denied that any of the data from any of the CBC-commissioned polls had been shared with the Liberals (notwithstanding, apparently, that fact that the results of one such CBC-commissioned poll induced Frank Graves to announce on air that the Liberals would do well to point out to Canadians that the choice between the the Liberals and the Conservatives was one of “cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy.")

In the aftermath of all the hoo-ha Graves dropped out of sight, only to reappear last Thursday on Power & Politics to discuss the results of a recent "viewer-inspired" poll "conducted for exclusive release by the CBC program Power & Politics." Seems a citizen viewer had come up with a thought-provoking suggestion for an EKOS poll: "It would be interesting to find out what issues are most important to women. What qualities they look for in a leader and conversely what issues/characteristics negatively affect their vote." Host Evan Solomon gushed "Frank, this is a fascinating poll, because it came based on a viewer question...a fascinating question, and very timely."

Why yes, yes, and what makes the poll even timelier and more fascinating is that the viewer who suggested the subject matter of the poll, a woman named Mary Pynenburg, just happens to be a former two-time candidate for the federal Liberals.

The reactions from the usual suspects show a Liberal-headed entitlement to passive-aggressive redirection. Jane Taber, for example, elevates apoplexy-inducing non-accountability into a perfected art form: she acknowledges that yes, Mary Pynenburg is a former Liberal candidate, and yes, Mary Pynenburg submitted the question that Frank Graves conducted a poll on, but she still manages to type out that "the Tories allege" that the poll "was inspired by a Liberal Party candidate."

CBC/EKOS pollster Frank Graves:

"I had no idea whatsoever who submitted the viewer-inspired question."
CBC spokesman Jeff Keay:

"The question sent to us was reasonable, timely and relevant."
To sum up: a two-time Liberal candidate who the CBC describes as just a "viewer" - a concerned regular-Jane citizen, in effect - submits, to the CBC and EKOS, a poll question that just happens to be on a matter that the Liberals and the CBC have been attacking the Conservatives on (as evidenced by the fake "Abortion" issue as it pertains to foreign aid), and then the poll's results are announced coast-to-coast on the taxpayer-funded CBC, including the "finding" that "Conservative supporters had a higher than average propensity to say that women leaders would have a negative effect."

"Timely and relevant" indeed.

 

[a_majoor]

Remember the assurances the CBC sent me that they are non partisan and unbiased?

http://canadaconservative.blogspot.com/2010/05/more-liberal-cbc-connections-exposed.html

More Liberal CBC connections EXPOSED

And the plot thickens... will the folks at the CBC just finally admit that they goofed BIG TIME on this one?

h/t to National Newswatch on this one.

    On CBC/Pynenburg and her official Liberal ties...

    Last week, we pointed out that CBC and Frank Graves (significant Liberal Party donor as well as someone who has been offering "Culture War" political advice to the Liberals) commissioned a poll for CBC based on a supposedly neutral "viewer-inspired" question.

    However, the "viewer" in question was one Mary Pynenburg, former two-time federal Liberal Party candidate in British Columbia.

    It has now come to our attention that Mrs. Pynenburg is the Vice-President of the National Women's Liberal Commission, and a proud member of Canadians Rallying to Unseat Stephen Harper (CRUSH), a radical anti-Stephen Harper group.

    She is also a major donor to the Liberal Party, having donated over $14,000 to the Liberals since 2004.

    It is beyond the pale that CBC consistently engages in political information and analysis from a Liberal-backing pollster in response to a Liberal-inspired question with no disclosure and certainly no apologies afterwards.

    It would almost be comical if CBC was not the recipient of over one billion dollars per year from Canadian taxpayers.

 

[GAP]

So.....score a hit by Mansbridge with his interview with a wide-eyed, tearful Guergis pleading her innocence, not knowing why she was turfed.....Does anyone really believe her, or is this just her being disingenious?....

Guergis insists Jaffer didn't lobby
Article Link
Daniel Leblanc

Ottawa — Globe and Mail Update Published on Monday, May. 10, 2010 5:37PM EDT Last updated on Monday, May. 10, 2010 10:36PM EDT

Former Conservative minister Helena Guergis insists her husband and former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer did not act as an unregistered lobbyist in his contacts with federal officials in the Harper government.

Speaking out in a CBC interview on Monday night, Ms. Guergis said she is “hurt” by the way that she has been treated by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the past few weeks, adding it might be related to his dislike for her husband.

“I'm hurt by the Prime Minister. I am hurt because I did consider him to be a friend as well, so I find that very hard to deal with,” she said.

Ms. Guergis said she received assurances from Mr. Jaffer that he did not conduct business out of her parliamentary office, and that he did not lobby his former government colleagues since he lost his seat in the 2008 election.

“He promised that he would never do that and cause a conflict for me,” she said.


More on link

 

[Rifleman62]

Helena Guergis is a victim of wife abuse. Tt takes other forms besides physical.

The media switched roles last week, starting to defend her against the evil, woman hater Harper. This falls in line with the Liberal tactics.

We need FOX. Thank gravy the National Post was not sold to Torstar Corporation.

 

[a_majoor]

The CBC will investigate itself "again".  :

http://ezralevant.com/2010/05/the-cbcs-leftwing-bias.html

The CBC's left-wing bias
By Ezra Levant on May 13, 2010 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I see that the CBC is going to investigate itself to determine whether it has a left-wing bias.

My favourite line in the news story is this:

    CBC refused to comment on the study’s methodology...

So you've got the CBC investigating the CBC about the CBC's own fairness. But the CBC won't or can't demonstrate that the bias investigation isn't biased.

So maybe we need a bias study of the bias study.

This all sounds about as reliable as shipping lettuce by rabbit.

I wonder if the CBC's crack team would accept that sort of self-investigation by, oh, say, a politician or a business leader who had been caught acting unethically.

Maybe reliable, neutral CBC personalities like David Suzuki and Judy Rebick will lead the investigation into the CBC's balance.

But I actually have a little story to tell about this myself.

After the 2006 election, I was invited by the CBC's chairman to attend their board of directors' retreat in New Brunswick, to give advice on what to make of the new Conservative government.

I took the task seriously, canvassing several cabinet ministers and even the Prime Minister's Office before my visit. It won't surprise you to know that my report was not well received by the president of the CBC at the time, Robert Rabinovitch (I'm not kidding, he physically fell out of his chair). But it might surprise you to learn that a number of board members were very sympathetic to my assessment. (It was clear to me from Rabinovitch's interactions with the board, though, that they were not a true board of directors with actual authority. Rather, they seemed more like a politically correct, demographically correct focus group, and that Rabinovitch was humouring them, not being directed by them). There has since been a complete turnover in directors, and I do not know if they are still treated as window-dressing. But they were then.

I'm not going to disclose my advice to the CBC, but I do feel at liberty to disclose one of the messages that I was asked to convey to the CBC by a cabinet minister.

In the wake of the 2006 federal election, the CBC had been accused of anti-Conservative bias and then, like now, the CBC launched an investigation into itself.

The CBC promised to give this study to the cabinet minister when it was complete. But they didn't. The cabinet minister had asked for it, but it was not sent (nor made public), even months after the election. That minister asked me to request it again.

When I put the minister's request for that study to Rabinovitch, he was clearly uncomfortable, and at least one director pressed him on the subject. (That may have been when he fell out of his chair, I can't recall.)

I do not know if the CBC ever gave that study to the cabinet minister; I did a cursory search of the CBC's own website today and didn't find it published (please correct me if I'm wrong).

What can we learn from this?

Well, a few things.

1. The CBC holds itself to a lower standard than it holds the subjects of its reporting. It would never accept the laughable bias of a politician investigating himself, or an oil company investigating itself. Example: while the CBC is bleating for complete disclosure of unredacted, uncensored national security documents from Afghanistan, they censor comments on their own website critical of their Liberal pollster, Frank Graves.

2. The CBC has a long history of bias -- and they have become expert at explaining it away, shooing away criticism and digging in defiantly. They live by the maxim: never admit anything, never apologize. They have a bunker mentality on the subject of bias, as was evidenced during the Frank Graves fiasco. They are as partisan as any political party, and in fact act like a political party during election campaigns.

3. One of the CBC's favourite tactics when called on their bias is to announce their own review to pre-empt an independent review. They did this in 2006 and they're doing it again now. I'd be surprised if they haven't done it before, too.

4. Once the media interest in their bias dies down, they bury their internal report -- if they ever even conducted it in the first place.

5. You'd think that the CBC's own investigation of itself in 2006 would have been a whitewash, and thus something they would have published, or at least given to the cabinet minister in question. The fact that they had refused to release it suggests that things might have been so bad, even the CBC's own hand-picked investigator couldn't cover it up. Either that, or it was such a complete whitewash it had no credibility. There really isn't a good explanation for not handing it over, is there?

6. The CBC, unlike other media, operates with impunity when it comes to bias. Other media across the world are dying off like dinosaurs. The nominal reason for that is lack of ad revenues, but ad revenues follow eyeballs -- just ask Rupert Murdoch, owner of the biggest newspaper in America (The Wall Street Journal) and the biggest cable news channel in America (Fox News). He doesn't get a billion dollars a year from the government -- but he doesn't need to, since he can attract readers and viewers on his own.

Not the CBC: they can continue to be a hard-left group of activists, participating in a culture war against the West, the North, conservatives, rural Canadians, Christians, etc., etc., and be immune from the desertion of viewers that would be the market's punishment if a private broadcaster conducted itself in the same way.

I really wouldn't care if the CBC was biased, if I wasn't forced to pay for it. The National Post has its biases to the Jewish right, and the Toronto Star has its biases to the anti-Christian left. The more the merrier. But no-one is forced to support either of those newspapers if they don't want to.

If only the same could be said about the billion-dollar Liberal campaign machine called the CBC.

 

[GAP]

One news site underscored the title of the CBC bias with

Up next, Col Sanders to study if chicken bad to eat
http://www.bourque.com/

 

[The Bread Guy]

I await details about how people who've been aggrieved by CBC coverage might have public input...  Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

 

[a_majoor]

Check who the speaker is and what year this took place...

http://chasingapplepie.blogspot.com/2010/05/cbc-bias-goes-waaay-back.html

CBC Bias Goes Waaay Back!

Surprise,surprise!  CBC bias goes way back, back to the time of  Former Tory Prime Minister, Arthur Meighen.

    Both "unrevised" and "unrepented," the speaker approached the microphone. The party he had twice served as prime minister was gathered in convention before him. Considered by friend and foe alike to be one of the finest parliamentarians in Canadian history -- on par with only the great Sir Wilfrid Laurier himself -- his address was eagerly awaited.

    It was to be his final fare-well to Canadian politics. He had planned a speech to address an urgent national crisis. Shortly before his address, however, he was forced to change his topic. Quite understandably, he was angry. And, like most proud partisans, a slight like this would not be easy to forget. If it ever could be.

    "You will observe that the instrument on my left is a loud speaker; it is not a radio," he thundered. "This convention, recognized universally by all classes of the Canadian people as of definite and outstanding significance, has been denied by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ... coverage over their lines -- denied the right to carry its speeches, its arguments and decisions, or any of them, into the homes of our country. It has been forbidden access to millions of Canadian listeners, by an authoritarian Commission appointed by a Government constituted from a single party. ...

    "(Our party) were not only refused free use of this radio, which is granted to every cabinet minister on demand, but, after offering to pay regular charges for time, they were again repulsed."
 
You could be forgiven for thinking this speaker sounds like Preston Manning or Stephen Harper at an early Reform Party convention in the early 1990s. Or Brian Mulroney, Joe Clark, John Diefenbaker, Bob Stanfield or George Drew before that.

  In this case, the words came from Tory Arthur Meighen. He later included this address in his famous published collection of debating speeches, Unrevised and Unrepented, which came out to great acclaim -- even from many Liberals -- in 1949. The title of the address to the Conservative Convention of 1942 held in Winnipeg? "The CBC -- A Party Instrument."

    Meighen continued, exposing a CBC policy back then that gave unfettered access to its airwaves to wartime Liberal ministers, but denied it to representatives of other parties.

So if the CBC is now going to investigate it's self for bias, they need to go back decades because it seems like it's been biased in favor of the Liberals for  donkey's years.  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation does not speak for all Canadians.  It's supposed to, as a public broadcaster and is payed for by all Canadian taxpayers.
 
I don't see the Corp changing  course anytime soon so let's just shut it down and sell the assets to help with deficit reduction.

 

[Rifleman62]

Add a comment: http://www.insidethecbc.com/is-the-cbc-biased/#respond

 

[OldSolduer]

Add a comment: http://www.insidethecbc.com/is-the-cbc-biased/#respond

I did. This is it:

You only have to watch a Montreal Canadiens playoff game to know CBC is biased.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I read through about the first five pages of comments. If any were in defence of the CBC, I missed it.

The most used comment, in one form or another, to the question "Is the CBC Biased?" seems to be 'does a bear shyte in the woods?' followed by 'Is the Pope catholic?

It will be interesting to see what kind of spin the CBC puts on these comments to it's own poll, if indead it even considerers them, as a true commentary on their existence or whether they see it as an organized, right wing Harper\CPC led misuse of data.

Sell them off and quit using my tax money to support them.