The Roots of CBC Bias: Its Founding Mandate
May 15, 2005 · By Max West
The original vision upon which the CBC was founded can be easily summarized: “One Big Nation, One Big Government, One Big Broadcaster.” Back in the pre-WWII era when this ideal seemed like the wave of the future, the CBC was created to embody it.
From the very beginning, the mandate of the CBC was to help unite everyone into an idealized vision of One Big Nation. Back in those heady days, the CBC was founded as a tool to promote the goal of Big Nationalism in Canada.
Today, fewer people still hold fast to the old Big Nation-Big Government ideology. But some still do, and many or them work in organizations that still promote it – places like the CBC. Nowadays the ideal of “One Big Broadcaster” has been relabeled “Public Broadcasting” but the foundational ideal remains the same.
That’s why the CBC and its defenders usually don’t even bother to protest against charges of political bias. They believe deeply in the superiority of their vision. In their minds, they’re just doing their job.
After all, if the CBC weren’t biased in favour of its own founding mandate, its defenders wouldn’t care for it as they do. They get upset only when the CBC seems to move away from its foundational biases.
(Incidentally, that’s why the CBC is always able to say it gets criticized for bias from both sides. There really are two sides: those who think it’s too biased, and those who think it isn’t biased enough.)
In Canadian journalism, many of those who still believe in the ideals of One Bigness work at the CBC. Among the CBC workforce, many still yearn for the old labour model of One Big Union. It’s in their ideological bloodlines, part of their political identity. It’s why they got into the business.
Their only problem is that we live in a pluralistic world, politically speaking. Political pluralism means that there are many political ideals competing for the attention of voters. Democracy at its best is a contest of these ideals. The ideal of One Big Everything is among the older ones, but there are others.
In a politically pluralistic world, the job of news journalists (as distinct from editorialists) is to strive to be fair and balanced to the various ideals competing for voters’ allegiance. They ought not promote one ideal over the others, covertly or otherwise. And if they are paid by the taxpayers, their obligation to be fair is especially strong.
There’s the bottom-line problem for CBC staffers: They can’t be true to their founding mission and be fair and balanced at the same time. The two ideas – the founding ideal of the CBC and the basic ideal of journalistic fairness – are in fundamental contradiction to each other.
Some CBC journalists may try to be fair and some of them may even manage to do so sometimes. But the influence of the CBC’s foundational ideology will always be there, pulling them away from the journalistic duty of fairness.
After all, if they weren’t biased in favour of the ideal of “Public Broadcasting” and the ideology upon which it is based, they wouldn’t be working at the CBC.
talk radio and Fox News to thrive in the information vacuum they created and to bully other media into echoing their talking points. It falls upon upon those of us who value diversity and non-corporate-controlled media to come to the Mother Corp’s aidwhen the zombies come seeking nourishment. (Thanks to My Blahg for several of the links in this post.)
I’ve been listening to CBC Radio coverage of the election campaigns all along, and the worldview of their reporters and announcers are, from the newsroom to their current affairs show “As it Happens,” blatantlypro-socialist/anti-conservative. /anti-conservative. I don’t object to their having a point of view. That’s human nature. It’s their pretense of objectivity, and the fact that they actually appear to believe they’re being fair and balanced that irks me.
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