As a former CBC employee, I get where Travis Dhanraj is coming from with his resignation over “editorial imbalance” and “spin over substance.” I’ve seen the CBC’s culture of ideological conformity and censorship up close, and it would shock most Canadians.
From my experience working for the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster in Yellowknife and then Ottawa, I quickly understood that job security depended on adhering to the official narrative at the cost of truth-seeking.
When I tried to bring in voices skeptical of the predominant narratives on climate change or Indigenous issues, my CBC bosses shut me down. Same deal in Ottawa — overbearing woke managers in our editorial meetings squashed any opposing views, so we ended up with the same old predictable, one-sided stories.
In 2008, I was asked to join CBC North in Yellowknife, NWT, for a three-week casual term. Casual terms, which can be extended or converted into permanent employment, are the CBC’s way of vetting staff more for conformity than journalistic acumen.
The best way to remain at the CBC — either casually or otherwise — is to toe the ideological line. Employees toe it because the pay and benefits are fantastic. Then there are the true believers at the CBC, who are also in abundance.
One of the CBC’s sacraments I ran afoul of in my first week on the job was human-induced climate change. I interviewed a geologist who presented findings at a Yellowknife conference contradicting the prevailing gospel that global warming is a result of industrialization increasing atmospheric CO2.
Based on core samples for an unrelated aquatic study drilled from glacial lakebeds in British Columbia, CO2 traces in the ancient sediment didn’t correlate with historic warming periods.
As CBC North ignored this professor’s geoscience lecture, when the boss learned the newbie interviewed him, she made a beeline from her office. Her eyes were wild with incredulity that anyone would take this scientist seriously, suggesting he was a crank. Given attitudes like this, it’s little wonder that during the COVID panic, the CBC cherry-picked health protocol supporters for interviews while outright dismissing dissenters, even from the scientific community.
“It’s interesting research offering a different take on climate change,” I replied. “What’s wrong with letting him talk about it?”
In the end, my interview was spiked because I declined to search for someone to “debunk” him. Keep in mind that David Suzuki had a permanent pulpit on CBC to say whatever he wanted, unchallenged. Regardless, after my three weeks at CBC North were up, my contract was not renewed.
My second chance with the public broadcaster came four years later in the fall of 2012, when a friend got me a casual term as a web editor for CBC Ottawa. With my newspaper experience, editing CBC’s local Ottawa news portal was akin to laying out newspaper pages in real time as the day’s stories unfolded, and I quite enjoyed the work. I also got to sit in on editorial meetings.
If you think CBC News has a predictably banal sameness to it, Ottawa’s editorial team provides some insight. Imagine a bunch of woke women controlling the content. Apart from myself and the weather guy, no male editors were ever at the meetings. Another odd aspect was the consistent agreement. This varied wildly from my newspaper experience, where arguments were commonplace at story meetings, some of them nasty.
Another explanation for the banality of coverage was that reporters constantly went to the same NIMBYs and activists for their stories. This was lazy news gathering, and a decision-making accord effectively made editorial meetings perfunctory.
I didn’t say much at these confabs, but one occasion particularly raised my hackles. At issue was the Algonquin land claim in northeastern Ontario and its threat to non-Indigenous hunting rights. The reporters who produced a print story about it were there and bullish that then-MPP Randy Hillier — a staunch land claim critic — be invited on the radio to expound on an evolving story.
“We can’t have Randy Hillier on,” declared one of the women.
“Why not?” I asked. “He is the elected MPP for an affected riding.”
“Because he’s crazy,” was the answer.
No other reasons were given, to which I remarked that Indigenous academic and activist Pam Palmater appeared regularly on CBC to offer her version of “crazy.”
Again, I disturbed a CBC sacrament, this time, Indigenous rights. But not Indigenous rights and how they could improve dire economic conditions for rank-and-file Indigenous people, or how their rights could coexist with wider society. No. CBC’s idea of Indigenous rights lay somewhere between the pre-contact noble savage, uncorrupted by civilization, and whatever activist chiefs, their lawyers and radical academics believed.
Three weeks before, then-Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence had ended her phoney 32-day “hunger strike” in Ottawa so sympathy for her cause and the wider struggle still lingered. Keep in mind that CBC had avoided reporting any hard truths about Spence, such as where $100 million in government funding to her impoverished reserve went or that she wasn’t on a hunger strike at all.
About 10 days into purportedly refraining from food, a web editor colleague told me his newspaper reporter wife had interviewed Spence in her teepee.
“This guy, Spence’s media handler, sat beside them munching on a ham sandwich the whole time,” he said. “Seems weird to do that in front of someone who hasn’t eaten for days.”
I agreed it was suspect and suggested he pass this along to reporters covering the story, to which my colleague rolled his eyes and said it was a waste of time. His ambition was to report on pro sports for CBC, so he wasn’t about to rock the boat.
As Spence’s protest continued, it was learned she was drinking fish broth to sustain herself, yet CBC continued to report it as a hunger strike. Every 30 minutes, the local radio announcer would stand in the reporter pit and repeat the false claim over the airwaves.
After one such radio hit, a senior TV reporter stood up from his chair, threw a stack of papers into the air and as they fluttered to the floor, shouted, “Spence is not on a god-damned hunger strike. She’s drinking fish broth. Stop reporting it’s a hunger strike!”
While few paid attention to the outburst, CBC Ottawa’s spin over substance was not going unnoticed. But nothing changed. No introspection or consideration about accuracy occurred then, and I doubt very much that Dhanraj’s exit and promised lawsuit will bring about any substantive changes now.