JUST UNFUND THE CBC.
In a series of tweets Sunday, Maxime Bernier, leader of the newly launched People’s Party, said he had been a victim of an “astonishing lack of professionalism.” It occurred at the hands of two stars of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s celestial team of personalities: Rosemary Barton and Wendy Mesley. Their performances were so abominable, said Bernier, that they should be “fired or sanctioned.”
They should not. Bernier’s aggravation is understandable given the attack he endured Sunday on the season premiere of the CBC’s The Weekly with Wendy Mesley.
During the episode, Mesley smiled as she lobbed ideologically-loaded grenades at the libertarian/conservative Bernier, the main gist of which could be condensed to: “Are you or are you not a member of the vast rightwing international Ezra Levant-Koch Brothers-Atlas Foundation billionaire conspiracy to impose libertarian racist-Tea Party values on Canada? Come on, Mad Max. Admit it!”
The whole thing can be viewed on the website for Mesley’s new show. It was also nicely condensed by former National Post editor Ken Whyte, who tweeted out a blow-by-blow summary (see sidebar).
The National Post’s Stuart Thomson also offered a terrific analysis of it. In style, Mesley comes across as a blend of Fox News’s Sean Hannity and CNN’s Don Lemon — two masters of rabidly partisan broadcasting. But that’s no reason to fire or sanction her.
Nor is there reason to fire or sanction Barton, one of the four hosts of CBC’s The National. A few weeks ago, Barton suggested that Bernier had timed his criticisms of Canadian multiculturalism to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the race riots in Charlottesville, Va. Barton defended her implication by arguing Bernier was not available for an interview to confirm or deny whether her deliberate-timing theory was correct.
As intellectually warped as the Mesley/Barton smears on Bernier were — and warped is the right word — talk of firing and sanctions is misplaced. The problem certainly demands radical reform, but you can’t fire journalists for doing the very job the CBC hired them to do: to front for a state-funded corporate news organization that has become, by design, a purveyor of social activism.
Reform must come at the top, and the only way that happens is by stopping the flow of government money that provides CBC executives with the power to shape the corporation’s ideological agenda. There is just one solution: Unfund the CBC.
It doesn’t stop at Mesley and Barton after all. On public radio, it’s Carol Off and Anna Maria Tremonti and in Toronto, Matt Galloway, who are paid to be the audio advocates of CBC liberalism.
Just last week, during an episode of The Current, Tremonti unleashed her own Mesley-esque attack on the editor of Harper’s magazine over his decision to publish a 7,000-word article by a man accused of #MeToo misconduct. After Tremonti was criticized for her one-sided hounding, the CBC’s producers made sure to book her as a guest on another CBC show, Day Six, to give her a national platform to justify her treatment of the Harper’s editor.
But journalists are not the problem. The corporation is the problem: an enterprise that collects $1 billion a year from the federal government to promote a specific set of ideas. From the top down, the CBC has become a government-funded organization that has specific ideological objectives that are on display daily.
Mesley’s executive producer, for instance, is a man named Zev Shalev, who has been writing on a blog called narativ.org. On Twitter, he describes his work as “blogging about the ties between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. I soon realized these men were working with co-conspirators using money, influence and data to … take over the world.”
But even he’s not the real problem. After all: Who thought hiring a global-conspiracy theorist as the executive producer overseeing a popular CBC personality was a good idea in the first place? And who up the chain of command — up to former CBC president Hubert Lacroix and current president Catherine Tait — happens to think it’s a good idea for a publicly funded national news organization to focus on promoting left-wing propaganda?
If they all believe in these ideas (and why would they take these jobs if they didn’t?) then the only thing to do is to take away their government funding. Let the CBC’s in-house radicals go off and run their own private media enterprise.
Canada already has plenty of like-minded left-wing media. There’s rabble.ca and The National Observer online. There’s the Toronto Star. There are magazines like Adbusters, think tanks and more. In fact, the main themes of Mesley’s Bernier rant about a billionaire libertarian takeover of the world had already been ventilated weeks ago — in July, in The Tyee, the Vancouver-based leftist news site, in a piece by veteran union activist David Climenhaga.
When he ran for Conservative leader, Bernier had offered some reasonable suggestions for reining in the CBC’s runaway mandate — keeping it focused on news and culture (not game shows and cooking shows) and ending its unfair advantage in sucking ad dollars away from private media. But it isn’t the ad money that’s at the heart of the problem: it’s the guarantee of government funding. The only sensible thing to do is unfund the CBC.
At a minimum, the objective should be to cut off the taxpayer-funded lifelines that support the major Toronto/Montreal/Ottawa/ Vancouver strongholds of CBC leftism.
How to do it? That should be one of the big national debates in the next election. But it’s past time to let these managers and executives go off into the private market and find their own funding for their ideological advocacy.
They can keep their jobs — so long as taxpayers do not fund them.
LET THE RADICALS GO OFF AND RUN THEIR OWN PRIVATE MEDIA ENTERPRISE, ALREADY.