Former CBC reporter says 'rot runs too deep' for state broadcaster
'We are entitled to expect more from the state broadcaster,' said Jennifer Dundas, a former CBC reporter. 'The CBC should serve all Canadians, not the adherents of favoured political ideologies.'
A former CBC reporter condemned her former employer Wednesday as "warped beyond repair."
"We are entitled to expect more from the state broadcaster," said Jennifer Dundas. "The CBC should serve all Canadians, not the adherents of favoured political ideologies."
Efforts to privatize and defund the broadcaster failed to gain traction at Parliament but remain quite popular among Conservative circles.
In a Dissenting Report from the Conservative Party, calls to defund the Crown corporation remain top of mind for officials. "Canadian taxpayer dollars are being abused," it said.
Records show all 46 top network executives without exception received bonuses worth $3,020,021 this year. Another 1,140 managers shared $11,883,734 in bonuses.
"This disgraceful abuse of taxpayer dollars when Canadians are struggling for financial survival has contributed to the ‘defund the CBC’ movement," said Conservative MP Kevin Waugh, who sits on the heritage committee. Meanwhile, the broadcaster cut 346 jobs.
"There’s no fixing this. The mindset is warped beyond repair," Dundas said.
Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre has several times proposed to cut CBC subsidies. Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge ignored those calls, later stacking an advisory panel with seven beneficiaries of federal funding.
Dundas, who worked nearly 18 years for the state broadcaster, believed until recently that it needed serious reform. "Now, I think the rot runs too deep."
"The CBC frankly is a biased propaganda arm of the Liberal Party," Poilievre told reporters last year. He pledged to support a free press as prime minister. "We need a neutral and free media."
A 2017 Conservative bill to privatize the state broadcaster three years later failed in a 260-6 vote. Though the majority of Conservative MPs rejected the motion, its tenets became Conservative policy in 2020.
"Sell subscriptions and advertising, get sponsorships and do what media have done for, I don’t know, 3,000 years," he told The Lake Report, a subsidized weekly.
"How has the media funded itself for 3,000 years?" asked the publication. "Subscriptions, advertising, sponsorships," replied Poilievre.
In a February 29 Main Estimates, Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge raised CBC subsidies by $96.1 million to a record $1.38 billion. Outgoing CBC CEO Catherine Tait called for another $500 million in taxpayer handouts.
The Forum for Research and Policy in Communications (FRPC) conducted an analysis of the broadcaster’s annual reports from 1937 to 2019, uncovering significant difficulties tracking the broadcaster's funding and performance outcomes.
The annual reports provide "little objective information" about the fulfillment of its mandate and "so little consistent historical financial information" that Parliament's support for its operations "cannot be easily assessed."
The FRPC estimates that CBC has cost taxpayers roughly $80 billion since 1937.
During last year's National Citizen’s Inquiry, several former CBC employees bashed the broadcaster for disseminating "misinformation" and for alleged abuse of vaccine mandates.
Rodney Palmer, a journalist with decades of experience, including years with the broadcaster, said it functions as a propagandistic tool of the Trudeau government.
Marianne Klowak, a CBC reporter of over 30 years, commented that the degree of editorial control over her work was aggressively magnified during the COVID pandemic.
"It's like the rules have changed overnight, and it changed so quickly that it left me just dizzy and in disbelief," she remarked on the self-censorship of her story proposals.
"We betrayed the public. We broke their trust… We were, in fact, pushing propaganda."
Alex Dhaliwal
Calgary Based Journalist
Alex Dhaliwal is a Political Science graduate from the University of Calgary. He has actively written on relevant Canadian issues with several prominent interviews under his belt.
COMMENTS
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Bruce Atchison commented 2024-12-19 23:34:29 -0500The CBC has long outlived its mandate to present Canada to Canadians. It’s now Trudeau’s propaganda mouthpiece. It’s time we got rid of that dinosaur.
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Bernhard Jatzeck commented 2024-12-19 22:45:31 -0500If the CBC was to disappear overnight, I wouldn’t miss it. I don’t remember the last time I watched CBC TV and I stopped listening to it on radio several years ago.
