Democracy may need the CBC

The CBC is a unique Canadian cliffhanger. It’s unclear why it’s there and why it survives, but the thought of its demise provokes anxiety. This anxiety, which is part of the national identity, gained new vigour once a probable assassin was identified: Pierre Poilievre, who’s promised to defund the poor dear and finish it off once in power. The CBC has responded by “Marketplace-ing” much of its news, i.e. focusing on inoffensive consumer stories.

Yet in true melodramatic fashion, now that it’s on the brink, it may’ve become indispensable to our very survival.

Let me pause to take a historical breath. CBC was created in the 1930s by a Conservative government, under prodding from a national grassroots body called the Canadian Radio League whose slogan was, The State or the States.

That is, unless a publicly funded network was stood up, U.S. networks would fill every Canadian media need and Canadians would functionally, and then literally, become American. Unlike its model the BBC, which had various justifications, the CBC was created as an existential necessity for Canada.

That argument long since ran out of steam. Canada even survived free trade with the U.S., my personal candidate for a coup de grace. But there’s now another concern: survival democratically.

Decent news and information are a necessity for that, but most news outlets are writhing in agony today. This applies to virtually all private news operations, which are dependent on advertising to pay for newsgathering. It’s always been a stupid business model since there’s no inherent connection between ads and news, but it worked.

Till now. The ads still exist but have migrated to the gargantuan platforms — Meta, Google, Amazon — on which news is now mainly delivered. In response, the effectively defunded news orgs cut and cut again. CTV recently cancelled most noon and weekend news.

In the U.S., a third of newspapers and two-thirds of journalists have vanished since 2005. The financially healthy news ops are mainly those publicly funded and not dependent on ads, like BBC, CBC or Al Jazeera.

In fact Al Jazeera, funded by the oil revenues of Qatar, is probably the best, healthiest news outlet in the world. You might want to be wary when it reports directly about Qatar but on everything else it’s pretty good. (Its vast English network was set up by CBC news vet Tony Burman over a decade ago.)

And CBC is probably Canada’s strongest and most reliable news source, crappy as it is and has always been. (Excuse me while I shut the window to dim the howls of indignation wafting uptown from the Globe and Mail.)

I’m aware of dangers in governments exerting influence on news sources dependent on them, though I’ve never understood why that’s worse than the influence corporate advertisers exert in the private ads model. In either case you can erect “walls” between sectors that will succeed only partly, at best.

Nor do I see how citizen journalists or feisty, somewhat smug outlets like The Line, can fill the gap left by big news orgs. They sometimes seem oblivious to how dependent they are on actual, very costly news to opine about. Without that, they’ll grow ever more implausible and self-absorbed.

So you need big news ops and today these are adequately funded chiefly by public sources. Ergo, the CBC. Love it or loathe it, democracy may need it, at least for now.

I’d say the positive effects are enhanced by the fact that news consumers on the internet often don’t know where their news comes from — depriving the mainstream media (MSM) of their hitherto automatic gravitas. Viewers just judge it all by their own lights, which seems to me democratic.

Gaza may be a sample of this healthy and fluid new mix, where the MSM have been less able to impose their prejudices than in previous invasions there. Fifty-five per cent of Americans now disapprove of Israel’s actions for the first time, and 74 per cent are following the situation closely. Somehow the people are making do.