The CBC Ombudsman reported a record number of complaints in April, as the federal election wrapped up. Many of the complaints targeted CBC pundits maligning independent media at the leaders’ debates and accused the public broadcaster of having an anti-conservative bias.
Although in her May 6 blog post, CBC Ombudsman Maxime Bertrand acknowledged the complaints, Bertrand brushed the effort off as an “orchestrated campaign.”
“In April, my office received a record number of complaints,” wrote Bertrand, who heads the CBC’s Ombudsman — whose role is to serve as an “independent third-party reviewer of complaints about CBC/Radio-Canada news content.”
In reviewing the complaints, Bertrand noted the organization received more complaints in April alone than they had in the previous three months combined.
While Bertrand said many of the complaints were “personal” in nature — largely centred around a distaste for broadcast personality Rosemarie Barton’s comments targetting independent media — the Ombudsman added that another major source of complaints surrounded the controversy around the media scrum following the leaders’ debates.
After the French leaders’ debate, CBC personalities Rosemary Barton, Adrienne Arseneault, and David Cochrane made statements about the post-debate media scrum, which several complainants took issue with.
“There’s three right-wing, very right-wing media, you can call them media, websites that are present in there,” Barton said.
Cochrane was criticized for saying, “I think the debate commission is going to need to be accountable for what’s kind of happening here.”
Those comments led to several complaints and accusations of CBC bias, according to the complaints fielded by the Ombudsman.
One viewer said the comments were “discriminatory, puerile, and unprofessional” and said they were concerned that tax dollars were going to pay for “diatribe and discriminatory journalism.”
“It’s not the first time that this kind of denigration of other journalists has happened on CBC and it needs to stop now,” wrote the complainant.
“Instead of doing your job – reporting the news – you turned into a whining, gatekeeping toddler, railing against Rebel News’ presence as if they’d stormed the Bastille,” wrote yet another complainant on the perceived overreaction of the CBC broadcast personalities.
Bertrand appeared to sympathize with some of the complaints, particularly around the notion CBC’s coverage was overly self-involved:
“For a media organization, reporting on oneself, even when motivated by the best intentions — in this case, to help the public understand — is tricky business and can appear self-serving.”
Bertrand came short of fully endorsing or validating the complaints, however.
“This is not to say it should never be done; indeed, sometimes it’s unavoidable. I am merely observing that it can backfire,” she qualified.
The complaints further bring into question the Carney Liberal plan to increase funding to the CBC and to news media subsidies more broadly.
A recent report estimates that the federal government will spend $325 million on top of the roughly $1.4 billion yearly taxpayer subsidy to the CBC. This means that between the various media support programs and CBC funding, Canadian taxpayers are spending over $1.7 billion annually subsidising the public broadcaster.
That’s more than the $1.4 billion Canadians spend annually on the Canada Disability Benefit—and more than five years’ worth of National Pharmacare Plan coverage combined. Prime Minister Mark Carney has also promised to increase that by an additional $150 million.