CBC staffers revolt, call for federal intervention
Branded content plan questioned over trust issue
OTTAWA • CBC and RadioCanada staff said there was a “strong feeling of betrayal” in a recent online town hall with top executives over plans to launch a branded content division.
Staffed questioned how they could “trust” management and told of their fears that it would tarnish the CBC as a “fake news” organization.
Now, influential former employees and Canadian public broadcasting advocates are asking Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault to make the federal broadcasting regulator “investigate” the Crown corporation's new branded content arm, Tandem.
“Faced with the CBC's revenue-obsessed determination to sell its integrity to the highest bidders and the (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's) deafening silence when asked to address this important issue, we respectfully ask that you intervene,” reads a letter sent to the minister Monday and obtained by National Post.
Over 30 former CBC/ Radio- Canada employees, including former governor general Adrienne Clarkson, who was an executive producer at the network, and past CBC News editor-in-chief Tony Burman and former CBC ombudsman Esther Enkin, signed it.
In a September press release announcing Tandem, CBC promised the new ad service would be an “integrated, turnkey solution to create quality content and leverage the credibility of our network” that would help brands “shape and share inspiring stories across our platforms and across the country.”
A CBC spokesperson declined to comment on the internal meeting. “We heard the concerns raised by our journalists and then took the time to carefully review our guidelines for branded content. These revised guidelines will now go even further to ensure we protect the integrity our journalism,” Chuck Thompson wrote in an email.
Branded content, or paid content, is an advertisement that is designed to look, sound or read similarly to regular journalistic content produced by a media outlet.
The new arm of CBC's advertising department would be responsible for creating paid advertising content as well as promotional podcasts on both the broadcasters English and French platforms, reads the release.
That announcement was met with a significant uproar from employees and public broadcasting advocates, pushing the Crown corporation to suspend its plans temporarily.
Then last week, CBC announced it would go forward with Tandem while outlining nine new “guidelines” that would “strengthen and clarify the boundaries between our journalistic content and advertising,” according to a statement.
For example, the broadcaster says the branded content will be limited to digital platforms only, that no journalists or hosts will ever be involved in its creation or publication, and that all such advertisement will be clearly labelled and visually distinct from regular CBC/Radio-Canada
content.
But those moves didn't satisfy both current and former employees, who are strengthening their push to have the public broadcaster drop out of the branded content space.
Many current employees also voiced their profound displeasure during a townhall meeting with CBC and Radio-Canada management last Thursday. National Post obtained a recording of the event.
“Why should we trust you on this? With respect, there is a strong feeling of betrayal among CBC people right now,” one unnamed employee asked CBC/ Radio- Canada CEO Catherine Tait.
“Since you did not have a problem with anything to do with Tandem before it was brought to our attention. How can we believe that you'll get it right now?”
At another point, an employee asked CBC top brass how they should justify this decision to Canadians in the era of fake news.
“What are journalists supposed to say to our readers when we're challenged and asked why we have sponsored content on our website. I fear this will only fuel the `CBC is fake news movement' even more,” the employee asked.
In both cases, Tait and other managers insisted that “it's not fake news, it's advertising,” that the new guidelines are “better” than those of other news organizations, and that such content has existed without issue on CBC/ Radio-Canada platforms for a while.
“We've actually had branded content around for a couple of years now. We've had many successful executions of it without backlash from confused audience members,” remarked CBC executive vice-president Barbara Williams.
But Tait and Williams also argued that a pivot to branded content was necessary at a time when advertising revenue throughout the media industry was plummeting, particularly since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We're under huge financial pressures, to be able to continue to deliver the great service that we do to Canadians and that we very much want to continue to provide. And in order to do that, we need to keep our revenue stream strong,” Williams told staff during the town hall.
Branded content has become relatively commonplace in private media across the world, appearing in outlets such as The New York Times, the BBC, National Post and The Globe & Mail. In most cases, the medium establishes robust guidelines to distinguish paid content from independent news produced by journalists.
But public broadcasting advocates argue that such promotional content has no place within CBC and Radio-Canada, which receive over $1 billion in public funding from the federal government each year.
“Commercialization is a corrupting force. It changes the character of programming, it changes the character of resource allocation decisions, and it will make the CBC more and more like a commercial broadcaster, and less and less distinct,” said Daniel Bernhard, president of public broadcasting advocacy group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting.
“This focus on commercialization is really alarming. And what was said during the town hall just demonstrated yet again that Catherine Tait does not seem to appreciate the public part of public broadcasting.”
Jeffrey Dvorkin, former managing editor of CBC Radio with decades of experience in public broadcasting in both Canada and the U.S., said that CBC/Radio-Canada's decision is “deeply offensive” to its reporters and an “insult” to Canadians.
“Why is the CBC taking money out of the mouths of commercial broadcasters and newspapers? I think the CBC needs to find a better fit inside the struggling Canadian media landscape than it is now. For the CBC to take its parliamentary budget and use that to run ads is not what it was set up to do,” he said.