Weekend reads: The race to save the CBC

A crossroads for the national public broadcaster: Do you keep blaming external forces, or do you take your critics seriously?

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With Justin Trudeau’s days in office numbered, and the Conservatives poised to win the next election, those inside the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation must be losing a lot of sleep. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is likely to be our next prime minister and he has repeatedly promised to defund the CBC, often to massive applause at rallies. The chances are good that he’ll follow through, barring a major public outcry, which seems unlikely at this point. All told, the government-appointed advisory committee conducting a review of CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate — set to announce its findings any day now — may prove too little, too late.

Both CBC’s leadership and its rank and file have got to be pretty worried. As am I, frankly. I have been critical of the CBC, but I nevertheless believe it is an important institution and I want to see it preserved for future generations.

If there’s any hope to be found here, it is that recent polling from Angus Reid shows that just 30 percent of Canadians want to defund and dismantle the CBC. Meanwhile, Spark Advocacy polling from earlier this year demonstrated a strong preference for reform, with three out of four Canadians favouring significant change over defunding. Add to that, the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy’s new national survey, Do We Need the CBC?, shows 78 percent of Canadians want to see CBC/Radio-Canada survive, as long as it addresses its major criticisms.

This tells us that action could still be taken to tip the issue in CBC’s favour. But the clock is ticking — time is of the essence. And if CBC wants to survive, it is crucial that the national broadcaster chooses its strategy wisely.

Let’s take a look at the organization’s current approach, and contrast that with an approach that might prove more constructive, and ultimately more successful.

Current strategy: Blame external factors

Given the urgency I’ve just described, nobody could fault CBC’s leadership for getting out there and making its case, trying to persuade Canadians that the 88-year-old national public broadcaster is worth saving. Unfortunately, the approach that CBC has taken to date is to blame external forces for diminishing audiences and lost public trust: Big Tech, social media, a polluted information environment, hostile politicians, news avoidance, atomized attention, and political polarization. This strategy resurfaced again recently, in an opinion essay in The Toronto Star by outgoing CEO Catherine Tait, “This is why you need the CBC.”

The essay opens by warning about the dangers of misinformation, and pointing to vaccine hesitancy as a case in point. But it’s unclear how framing a Hail Mary argument for saving the CBC around one of the most explosive and polarizing issues in recent Canadian history benefits the organization. Is this really the best way to frame a last-ditch effort to win over the public?

The piece then moves on to paint a grim picture about the state of our citizenry: “This year, Policy Horizons Canada warned that people not being able to tell what is true and what is not is at the top of the list of the most significant threats facing our society.” The essay then champions CBC’s membership in the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, and its certification with the Journalism Trust Initiative. “We don’t have to live in a world where people can’t tell what is real and what is not,” it concludes.

Tait and her team might have chosen to outline a positive vision for the value that CBC could add to life in Canada, including: Local news in areas that are remote and/or commercially unviable; service in other languages; resource-heavy investigative reporting and foreign reporting; reporting aimed at government and corporate accountability, which is often adversarial and litigious and requires institutional weight; intellectually stimulating current affairs radio shows with a good mix of content for all interests and perspectives, providing a forum for lively debate on the nation’s most pressing issues; local morning radio shows that help people access the richness of their communities, and help newcomers in particular to acclimatize to Canadian news and culture and politics; cultural programming that builds social cohesion and national identity (think: the Tragically Hip’s last concert, which attracted an audience of 11.7 million); the celebration of Canadian art and music and theatre and comedy and literature — not to mention the veritable treasure trove of Canadian history that the CBC has to draw on, in the form of invaluable archives.

Instead of stoking fears around the dangers of misinformation, a more fruitful approach would be to appeal to nostalgia for a time when CBC did these things well. A great many of us, myself included, have fond memories of the public broadcaster, stretching decades back. Judging from interactions I’ve had in my own life, this is true, at least to some extent, across the political spectrum. Tapping into this sentiment might buy the CBC the time it needs to reform itself, to actually live up to the vision I outlined above.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that the CBC seems unaware that the perspective it advances in the Star — that the public essentially is not savvy enough to tell the difference between fact and fiction, and a group of coordinated international bodies should be vested with the power to decide what is true and what is not — is exactly the sort of thing that alarms CBC’s detractors. This thinking is all the rage in elite discourse, but it tends to be met with profound skepticism in other circles.

Not for nothing, it is also a perspective that aligns perfectly with our current government’s agenda and its controversial online harms legislation. Taking this stance, then, is hardly going to reassure CBC’s critics, many of whom feel that the organization is biased in favour of the Liberal Party. The argument also ignores the reality that what is labelled “misinformation” one day is not infrequently deemed to be a reasonable subject of inquiry months or years later. (The lab leak theory is a classic example.) And that governments themselves are often significant sources of misinformation.

Proposed strategy: Listen to your critics

To save itself, the CBC is going to have to bite the bullet and listen to its critics. In this endeavor, incoming CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard would be wise to take a page out of Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s book. To his credit, the host of Commotion did something remarkable this past week: He invited three of our country’s smartest CBC critics on the show to make the case for defunding the public broadcaster. The Hub’s managing editor Harrison Lowman (a former producer of the Lean Out podcast), Free Press writer Rupa Subramanya (a former guest on Lean Out) and freelance writer Sabrina Maddeaux joined Abdelmahmoud for 45 minutes of spirited, good faith debate. It was a relief to hear arguments that I frequently encounter in daily life articulated on the broadcaster’s own airwaves.

Lowman landed a number of excellent points. He stressed that the CBC is on borrowed time, and took the broadcaster to task for its tone, its coverage, and its inability to reflect the country back to itself. “I increasingly think you are speaking to a very small slice of Canada — an educated, more progressive, urban elite,” Lowman said. “Who are you not reflecting? There’s a cast of characters here. People who are from rural Canada, people who are right-of-centre, people who are non-university educated, who work in the skilled trades, non-progressives folks, religious folks, or centre-left folks who might criticize … the excesses of identity politics. They might also say you are covering America too much; you’re not focussing on our country.” Lowman described CBC’s tone as a “we-know-best, preachy, patronizing, talk-down-to.” And as for coverage, yes social justice stories should be a slice of the pie, he said, “but they should not be almost the whole pie.” Lowman emphasized throughout that he wanted the CBC to survive and thrive. It’s very easy to tear down institutions, he said, but it’s very hard to build them up.

Subramanya picked up on a part of the CBC’s mandate that Abdelmahmoud read aloud — “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions” — and questioned how that should be interpreted. “What does that look like?” Subramanya said. “Is it a reflection of your skin colour? Is it ethnic diversity? Is it religion? Is it country of origin?” Hopefully it is all of the above, Abdelmahmoud replied. “No!” she said. “No, my problem is that I crave diversity of opinion. That’s what I am looking for.” She added: “Basically, many Canadians, I think, feel disenfranchised by the CBC. And our tax dollars are paying for this progressive, elite view which is coming out of our big cities — Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal. But there is a lot of the country, and Harrison mentioned this earlier, they don’t relate to this. Including yours truly.”

Maddeaux similarly argued that many Canadians do not see their values reflected in the CBC’s output: “There is a real feeling that there is so much bias in one direction on the CBC, and so much of one certain type of viewpoint.” The people at Poilievre’s rallies, she explained, “feel like the CBC is actively antagonistic towards them and their worldview and actively working against them.” Maddeaux was careful to say that she didn’t think journalists were intentionally biased, or that there were orders coming from on high to support the Liberal Party. But, instead, she pointed to “systemic issues within the CBC, including the fact that it has become so centralized in downtown Toronto.” With a sizable part of the workforce located there, she said, “you are going to have a certain type of viewpoint that aligns with the sort of views that are common in downtown Toronto.”

The CBC, Maddeaux maintained, has lost its way. “It’s mandate has become so broad, and so large, and so unfocused,” she said, pointing out that taxpayer funds are being spent developing game shows, and comedies, and podcasts that “when you look at the actual audience reported numbers, aren’t necessarily being listened to by a large majority of Canadians, or even developing their own very strong niche audiences.” She maintained, too, that the need for online opinion commentary could easily be filled in the private sector. And that CBC should not be allowed to compete with the private sector for advertising, given its enormous, 1.4 billion-dollar advantage in annual government funding. “It’s actually hurting the broader private media sector, and stifling competition and innovation,” she said. “Which a public broadcaster should not be doing. It should be supporting the ecosystem, not taking away from it.”

On the arts and entertainment side, Maddeaux also argued that content meant to elevate Canadian culture is not necessarily landing with the public. “People have to actually want that content,” she said. “But right now, it seems like Canadians aren’t finding it, or watching it — I think the numbers play that out — and they are not finding the value in it.” There’s been a reluctance by the CBC, she stressed, to “really ask itself those tough questions.”

Indeed, the time has come for the CBC to do some serious soul-searching. CBC is now at a crossroads, and it must choose between two paths: Blame external factors and cling to the status quo, thereby committing institutional suicide — or do the very difficult work of listening to the public, and taking its concerns seriously. And then remake itself to better serve Canadians.

I implore the CBC to take the second path.