Everyone hates the CBC’s new strategic plan

Three ways to complain:

1. “It’s bad for newspapers.”

This is a counterintuitive one, but bear with us. In an editorial for Newspapers Canada, Canadian Newspaper Association chair Bob Cox argues that it’s pointless—and maybe even a little corrupt—for the CBC to be reorienting itself toward online services, precisely because doing so is a business-savvy move—so business-savvy, in fact, that privately owned newspapers are already doing it of their own accord. “There’s no need to pour tax dollars into something the the private sector is already doing without a subsidy, unless the goal is propaganda,” he writes. There’s a certain logic to this. Much of what the government does is aimed at serving the public good in ways private enterprise can’t. Why should the CBC be any different?

2. “It’s bad for employees.”

3. “It’s bad for Canada.”

Read the full story here.

CBC described as disruptor of media landscape

Private media companies are decrying the CBC’s growing presence on the Internet and in the digital advertising market, calling on Ottawa to rein in the Crown corporation in order to salvage the production of local news and investigative journalism across the country.

At hearings of the Canadian Heritage committee of the House of Commons, the CBC is increasingly described as a great disruptor of the media landscape, with its recent budget increase of $675-million over five years coming as losses are growing and newsrooms are closing in the private sector.

The attacks place the public broadcaster in the same category as foreign Internet giants such as Google and Facebook, which many say are eating into advertising budgets of publishers and broadcasters in Canada while contributing little to the creation of Canadian content.

The CBC is specifically facing criticism over the expansion of its presence on the Internet, including the recent creation of an opinion section on its website with columns and op-eds that are in direct competition with several newspapers.

Read the full story here.

CBC Reporter Draws Moral Equivalence Between Palestinian Terror Camps and Israeli Self Defence Camps

CBC Reporter Draws Moral Equivalence Between Palestinian Terror Camps and Israeli Self Defence Camps.

In an “analysis” report published on the CBC’s website today, Mideast correspondent Derek Stoffel implicitly drew a moral equivalence between Palestinian terror training camps that indoctrinate children to hate and murder Israelis, and Israeli boot camps which teach tourists and Israeli security guards how to defend themselves against terror attacks.

Stoffel visited a counterterrorism boot camp in Gush Etzion operated by an Israeli security company called Caliber 3, which teaches 22,000 individuals annually how to defend themselves from a terror attack.

Read the full story here.

CBC's answer to its privileged status

Here’s how thinking works in the upper echelons of the CBC.

Canada’s public broadcasting network has been under fire for months over its efforts to build a digital presence in direct competition with private newspapers and other media, which are struggling to survive in the face of remorseless technological change. The private operators maintain it’s unfair that the CBC gets generous subsidies to steal business from them. In a world of shifting readership habits and murderous competition, every penny of revenue is vital. The CBC, they note, already enjoys a federal subsidy of more than $1 billion a year, including a $150 million annual boost introduced by the Trudeau Liberals. Private operators, meanwhile, are hemorrhaging money as the strive to keep the wolf from the door.

The CBC’s response: Ask for even more money from the public purse.

Read the full story here.

CBC’s The National needed a shakeup — but ...

CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge, with his preternaturally calm voice, was the epitome of the omniscient presenter when he stepped down July 1 from the Canadian public broadcaster after three decades.

So it wasn’t a surprise that, in its highly anticipated announcement of a reboot, the CBC decided to cover their bets with more than one anchor for their flagship show The National. But four?

Whether this will be groundbreaking broadcasting or a hot mess will be seen in early November when the new format launches. So far it seems like a logistical nightmare.

Read the full story here.

CBC editors agreed that it was “inappropriate” ...

Honest Reporting Canada - SUCCESS! CBC Retracts Claim that Mahmoud Abbas is a “Staunch Opponent of Violence”.

As we noted in our recent critical analysis of Canadian media coverage of the tensions and terror attacks on the Temple Mount, on July 22, CBCNews.ca had featured Associated Press coverage claiming that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is “… a staunch opponent of violence…”

In making this statement, both AP and CBC News inserted their personal opinions into their coverage as this claim is subjective in nature and was not in attribution.

HonestReporting Canada brought these concerns to the attention of CBC editors who agreed that it was “inappropriate” to describe Abbas as a “staunch opponent of violence”. CBC editors retracted this claim and removed it from their news article.

While we appreciate that CBC removed this reference from their news article and that a clarification was issued, regrettably, the CBC did not acknowledge in writing that the language that was removed (not amended) from this article, was their previously describing Abbas as a “staunch opponent of violence”.

Read the full story here.

One anchor to replace CBC’s Mansbridge is enough

Letter to the editor:

Re: Preparing for life after Mansbridge, Aug. 8

I don’t like the idea of four rotating anchors for CBC’s The National news broadcast. Ian Hanomansing is the logical replacement for longstanding host Peter Mansbridge. Adrienne Arsenault ought to continue focusing on her excellent international field work. Rosemary Barton should stick to her expertise, Canadian federal issues and politics. As for Andrew Chang, he was doing fine heading Vancouver’s newsroom. I’m afraid this new format will just further reduce the quality and depth of news reporting in Canada.

Read the full story here.

Why does the CBC compete with newspapers?

Would Netflix want to get into the newspaper business? I doubt it. Then, why is CBC so keen on competing with the print media with its online offerings? Is it breaking the law in doing so?

CBC claimed in its strategy that advertisers are migrating from TV to digital, i.e., Internet services, and declared that is where the (advertising) revenue is. Except the CBC analysis did not reveal that TV as a whole is still ranked number one in revenues. And CBC did not reveal that it is newspapers, not TV, that have truly lost ground to the Internet, the same newspapers CBC wants to compete with.

The reason cbc.ca gets any audience is that CBC viewers and listeners are invited hundreds of times daily to go to CBC’s website; it is a promotional tool that newspapers would die for.

But it is unclear whether the Broadcasting Act permits CBC to operate such unlicensed services and whether CBC should use taxpayers’ money to compete with newspapers.

Read the full story here.

CBC has operated on a bloated budget ...

CBC president Hubert Lacroix hit the nail on the head, though his eyes were probably tightly closed at the time: Public broadcasters, he said in a 2015 presentation, “risk being boiled to death.”

Correct. For their greed, mismanagement, badly outdated mandate, second-rate products and terminal arrogance.

Sadly, it didn’t take Hubert long to get back into whine mode. Speaking at an international public broadcaster’s convention in Munich, Lacroix belly-ached that budget cuts could threaten the continued existence of outfits like the CBC.

For most of its life, the CBC has operated on a bloated budget, hovering just under or just over, a billion-dollar yearly grant from Canadian taxpayers. Now Lacroix is whining for $400 million more if the CBC is not allowed to sell ads.

For starters, Lacroix should check out the BBC. The British public broadcaster doesn’t subject its home-grown viewers to advertisements or sponsorships.

Lacroix should also have a chat with Paula Kerger, CEO of PBS south of the border. Real public broadcasters don’t sell ads, Hubert. They sell subscriptions and fundraise. That way they don’t put other, unsubsidized media platforms at a huge disadvantage. That way they don’t skew the market. That way they don’t kill competition.

Read the full story here.

Solution for CBC TV is to get cheap and cool

After the numbers are crunched, the layoffs decided and the cuts are cinched, it’s CBC’s main network English TV channel that is in the most need of reimagining.

The situation is dire. CBC TV is at a critical juncture, post-hockey and post-cuts.

In this new reality the perception is that there is no substitute for the high of huge ratings that live sports deliver.

And what CBC TV needs most of all, and soon, is a dose of the cool factor. And it doesn’t necessarily cost a ton of money to become cool.

Hard to imagine now, but it isn’t so long since some of CBC TV’s content seemed different, dashing and chic.

In its new and reduced circumstances, CBC TV has to do more with less. And while it sometimes seems that the best of TV is enormously expensive to develop and produce, that isn’t necessarily the case.

A single chic, must-see show can change everything for a TV channel. And in the new TV landscape, CBC’s main network must, increasingly, be perceived as a quasi-specialty channel.

Read the full story here.

Will CBC President Hubert Lacroix Get Third term?

Long-time television news broadcaster Tom Clark will head the advisory committee that’s designed to fulfil a Liberal campaign promise to overhaul the process for appointing board members at CBC/Radio-Canada.

The panel will provide Heritage Minister Melanie Joly with a list of qualified candidates for each vacant position, as well as the names of supplementary qualified candidates the government can consider to fill posts in the future.

Critics have for years complained that the process for choosing board members at the CBC left the public broadcaster open to political interference.

Under the Broadcasting Act, CBC/Radio-Canada must have 12 directors on its board, including a chair and a president. Each is expected to serve a five-year term.

Hubert Lacroix’s term as president is set to expire in October.

Read the full story here.

CBC pulls advertising due to competition

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has pulled an advertising campaign that promoted Postmedia Network Canada Corp.’s rollout of a paid content model for its newspaper websites on the basis that it competes with the national broadcaster’s own digital news site.

Postmedia — which owns Canada’s largest chain of English-language daily newspapers including the National Post — said it planned to spend about $15,000 advertising with CBC television stations in Windsor, Regina and Edmonton.

In an email exchange with Postmedia on Monday, CBC’s media sales team said the ads ran for a period of time before an employee from the digital department at one of the stations complained that they seemed to be advertising a product that competes with CBC’s own digital news site, CBC.ca.

CBC accepts advertising for newspaper and magazine ads because it does not operate those types of media, it said and it informed Postmedia the campaign could continue if the ads were changed to focus on the chain’s print newspaper products rather than its digital products.

Read the full story here.

Another concern with CBC reporting

The complainant, Luanne Roth, had concerns about a bar graph in an article explaining how to follow election results on the CBC news site on B.C. election day. It showed the Green Party ahead of the NDP. Her concern was this graph, pictured on a cellphone, would unduly influence strategic voters who would think the Greens were stronger than the polls indicated. There is no mention of party standing anywhere in this piece, and the context is quite clear. It’s a reminder that copy editing covers pictures too. 

Wayne Williams, the News Director in British Columbia, responded to your complaint.

Mr. Williams acknowledged they should have caught the misrepresentation of the Green support. Dedication to accuracy is a core CBC value. He told me he has discussed this with the team involved, and the fact that you drew this to their attention will make them more vigilant going forward. This was a copy editing error and a reminder that images, as well as text, need close attention.

Read the full report here.

CBC Caves to Pressure

According to a review published on July 26 by CBC Ombudsman Esther Enkin, CBC News has acknowledged that it deleted mentioning in a headline of a March 8 article that a Palestinian terrorist killed by Israeli forces in an arrest raid shootout was a “gunman”.

CBC admits that its editors removed the word “gunman” from their headline after receiving a complaint on the basis that the terrorist’s family had cast doubt that he was an attacker and that the claim was not in attribution.

Read the full story here.

Does CBC Ad Violate Human Rights, Labour Laws?

Wanted: Male, 23-35, Any race except Caucasion, Non-union. Send photo and audition tape to the CBC.

So, employment law students, how many violations of the law do you see in that ad?

We are dealing with a job advertisement, so the first place to look is Section 23(1) of the Human Rights Code. That section regulates the content of job ads, and it says this:

The right under section 5 to equal treatment with respect to employment is infringed where an invitation to apply for employment or an advertisement in connection with employment is published or displayed that directly or indirectly classifies or indicates qualifications by a prohibited ground of discrimination

Section 5 says that it’s unlawful to discriminate in employment on the basis of, among other grounds: age, sex, race, ethnicity, and colour. So Section 23(1) prohibits employers from advertising positions that “directly or indirectly” indicate qualifications by age, race, ethnicity, and colour.

Can an Employer require Applicants to be Nonunion?

Read the full story here.

CBC misjudged demand

CBC/Radio-Canada’s poor numbers from its experiment with paid commercials on Radio 2 and Espace Musique show that the public broadcaster “clearly” misjudged the market for national advertising on its music-focused radio channels, one industry watcher says.

The CBC raised $1.1 million in revenue from ad sales on the two music-focused networks in the 2014 broadcast year, according to the CRTC’s annual report on the financial results of Canadian commercial radio stations.

That’s well below the $10 million the CBC hoped for when the CRTC approved its plan to air ads on the two channels.

Read the full story here.

Is CBC News Biased?

Is CBC News Biased? Should Canadian Taxpayers Fund the CBC with $1 Billion Every Year?
 
The CBC should be accountable directly to all Canadians. But it is not. Instead, it is accountable to the Prime Minister. He controls CBC funding, and appoints the Board of Directors and President (through the Governor General). Also troubling is that every English-language CBC ombudsman to date has been a former CBC employee -- and therefore potentially biased in favor of the CBC. Given that this unconscionable risk of bias has been allowed, how much confidence can we have in the integrity of CBC management? Has the CBC ever voluntarily admitted to a scandal before being caught?

Read more here.

Another CBC On Air Correction

Following HRC’s intervention, several times today, CBC News TV and Radio aired on-air corrections to remedy its wrongly reporting on July 14 that Israeli forces killed three Arab terrorists inside the Al Aqsa Mosque.

As we noted in our recent analysis of Canadian media coverage of the terror attack, two Druze Israeli officers were murdered by Arab-Israeli terrorists on the Temple Mount. CBC freelancer Irris Makler had erroneously claimed that Israeli forces killed the three terrorists inside the mosque, which is a very sensitive and revered Muslim holy site, and not outside in the Temple Mount compound.

Read the full story here.

MP files complaint with CBC

An MP has lodged a formal complaint against the CBC for what he considers “shockingly offensive remarks” made in an opinion article featured on their website.

Garnett Genuis, the Conservative MP for Sherwood Park – Fort Saskatchewan, submitted a letter to CBC ombudsman Esther Enkin to raise concerns about an opinion piece by journalist Neil Macdonald headlined “Simple truth is Canada’s mass shooters are usually white and Canadian-born.”

Genuis takes issue with several of the assertions in Macdonald’s column, including a line that the alleged shooter in the Quebec City mosque attack was “Probably a Christian, judging from his name.”

“This is an entirely false and deeply offensive statement that, were it to mention any other religious community, would be recognized immediately as plain bigotry,” the complaint reads in reference to a tweet by CBC’s The National regarding the column.

Read the full story here.

Politics at the CBC

You think the politicking is tough at Ottawa City Hall. Ha. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

Politics is played at the highest level in the nosebleed executive ranks and in top journo echelons of the CBC.

And what’s at stake in those murky areas? Only the most prestigious spot in journalism.

Replacing the inimitable Peter Mansbridge on The National.

The spot on The National is mostly bingo-calling rather than real journalism. The poor grunts in print, the few who are left, are the real journalists. They write their stories on the ground, file them to the mother ship and Canadian Press sends them to other broadcast and print outlets. Then the great seer of The National deems which ones he will read to a waiting nation while the CBC’s reporters put film around the poor grunt’s story.

So no doubt the knives are out and the makeup is flying to be the most famous person in Canada. And all that reading gets you an Order of Canada and recognition in airports. Makes journalism look pretty petty doesn’t it.

Guess what? Sometimes it really is. But then that’s what happens when one lives in a newsroom where people are trained to listen to gossip. There’s lots of gossip and back-stabbing and jealousy. Often it’s not very nice.

Nowhere is it played at a higher level than at the CBC.

Read the full story here.

CBC strategies remain stuck in the twentieth century

Change doesn’t seem to come naturally to the cbc, whose strategies remain stuck in the twentieth century. For more than a decade, The National’s ratings have been stagnant, while Canadians’ trust in media has steadily declined. The ‘90s saw an attempt at restructuring the program: the format at the time was a twenty-two-minute-long news segment at the top of the hour and a current affairs program, The Journal, at the bottom. They combined it into an hour-long news and current affairs show, Primetime News. It was a complete failure. Mark Bulgutch, a former line-up editor for The National who was working on the program at the time, says he knew that the merger wasn’t going to work. “The cbc continues to try to find the right format; to find better formats; to find smarter formats,” Bulgutch says. “It turns its back on the audience at its own peril—when looking for new audiences you’ve got to be careful that you don’t turn off the one that you already have.” The National returned to its pre-merger version a year later, and has remained more or less the same ever since.

For better or worse, and according to the cbc’s 2017-2018 programming slate, a new version of The National will return this fall. The time has come for the public broadcaster to make the fundamental changes necessary to regain its viewers’ trust and to prove its worth—before its audience signs off for good.

Read the full story here.

Cutbacks at CBC Make Room For Digital Growth

For many Canadians, the CBC is more totem than mere media organization.

Decimated by repeated cuts to its government appropriation, the organization has shed a quarter of its workforce — 3,600 jobs — since 2008. Its core TV audience is also aging out, skewing mostly 55-plus. Possibly worst of all, in 2014 it lost the broadcast streaming rights to NHL games, and its 62-year-old institution, Hockey Night in Canada, was bereft of any actual hockey.

So in 2014, Hubert T. Lacroix, its president and CEO, announced the 2020 Initiative (“A Space For Us All”), a pledge to retool the institution by doubling its digital reach, ensuring its sustainability and personalizing its content for an audience whose media habits had markedly changed.

Lacroix’s vision was very top line — a shrinking of infrastructure, a shift away from a producer’s role to that of a multi-platform broadcaster, a mobile-first approach to news. For some critics, it seemed more a way of putting lipstick on an austerity pig than a bona fide strategic shift.

Read the full story here.

CBC TV bets on arts and culture

Just as the private Canadian networks launch schedules full of Muppets, superheroes and other new American series, CBC is wading in with arts and culture. Have they painted themselves into a corner?

Making a serious scheduling commitment to arts programming in prime-time in 2015, however, simply would not happen at a rival broadcaster — which is why Heather Conway is doing it.

Conway, CBC’s executive vice-president of English services, is in the second year of a five-year plan to steer the public broadcaster towards a digital future, and one that is — as she emphasized last May at the CBC season launch —”identifiably Canadian.”

Conway was the chief business officer at the Art Gallery of Ontario prior to joining CBC in 2013. She sees the arts strategy as one that will “make sure we have a distinctive voice, an offering that doesn’t look or feel like anything else on the dial.”

Selling art-related programming on TV has risks, agrees Conway.

Read the full story here.

PS - my question ... will this strategy resonate with average Canadians who are footing the Billion dollar tax bill to support the CBC?

The CBC wants its critics to go away

Canada’s state broadcaster has published an op-ed, not signed by anyone in particular, going after those that disagree with their latest move to expand their mandate well beyond anything contemplated in the Broadcasting Act.

Whether it’s an opinion pages section on their website, on-line music streaming services, producing web-only comedies and dramas or offering a Netflix-style service in Quebec, even mainstream media progressives are beginning to speak up.

 The CBC wants its critics to go away and never speak ill of them again.

Unfortunately, Trudeau’s Liberals are big CBC backers and it’s very unlikely they’ll turn around now and clip their wings after giving them even more taxpayer money.

Read the full story here.

CBC to pull away from television and radio

For the second time since the election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government last fall, you could hear all employees at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) breathing a big sigh of relief.

The struggling public broadcaster received a reprieve from the new federal government after plans were announced today to provide the network with a $675-million investment over five years. CBC will receive a $75 million boost this year, followed by a $150 million annual increase until 2021.

More than 2,800 positions have been eliminated at the CBC since 2008 due to the Conservative government and changes in the media landscape. The network has lost its once-proud sports department, which is no longer capable of broadcasting professional sports.

The latest plan indicated the CBC would pull away from television and radio and focus more of its resources on digital and mobile platforms.

Read the full story here.

The CBC is making all the right noises

Although they are talking of establishing a new five-year “accountability plan” for the CBC, the Liberals seem to think the logic of giving the broadcaster more money is self-evident. Because it’s the CBC, you can imagine them saying.

But given the revolutionary changes to the media landscape, wouldn’t this be a good time to revisit what we want from public broadcasting, and how best to achieve it, before simply writing a giant cheque?

The CBC is making all the right noises about investing much of the new cash in a digital strategy of some kind. That sounds necessarily futuristic and sensitive to the disruptive nature of today’s communications technology.

But as someone who works in privately owned media, as a writer, broadcaster and business owner, I find it hard to understand why the CBC uses taxpayers’ money to operate websites that compete directly with every newspaper, magazine and broadcaster in the country. Is the Internet so short on sources of information that we need another one, subsidized by the government?

Read the full story here.

CBC special status shields it from market turbulences.

In November, CBC proposed to withdraw from advertising in exchange for increased government funding. This is a significant move for the corporation because the broadcast-television advertising market, once lucrative, is fragmenting as advertisers shift to digital platforms on televisions, computers and smartphones. Both private broadcasters and the CBC are facing a huge challenge, but CBC’s special status as a taxpayer-subsidized Crown corporation substantially shields it from market turbulences. Private broadcasters don’t have the luxury of public funds to replace declining revenue. 

Both the CBC and private broadcasters are responding to this challenge by expanding their current affairs presence on new digital platforms, which adds to the competitive pressure on the financially hard-pressed newspapers, now investing heavily in digital editions and new business models in a frantic struggle to reverse advertising declines.

The traditional argument for taxpayers subsidizing public broadcasters is the challenge of creating television content in a relatively small Canadian market. But an important question remains: is the digital market where we fund public broadcasters? Do we want CBC competing for digital advertising dollars with the Winnipeg Free Press and other papers across the country? Is the CBC’s expansion into this sector a threat to Canadian newspapers adapting and surviving in the digital era?

Read the full story here.

CBC Internal Memo Short on Promises

Yesterday’s federal budget included investing $675 million over five years into the CBC. The broadcaster will receive the first, $75-million round of funding this year and $150 million every year following.

An internal memo obtained by CANADALAND sheds some light on how the CBC plans to spend the new dollars. Notable journalistic commitments are investing into digital bureous across the country and bettering international coverage with “pocket bureaus.”

Read the full memo here.

CBC seen as digital uber predator

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has a looming public-relations problem.

That's because in the eyes of other media, the public broadcaster is seen as an uber predator in an age of diminishing ad revenues.

In fact, iPolitics publisher James Baxter even used this term, "uber predator", in a recent presentation to the Commons Heritage committee.

The controversy has arisen over CBC's insistence on competing with other media companies for digital advertising. And it comes after the Trudeau government announced $675 million in new funding for CBC over the next five years.

Read the full story here.

CBC president Hubert Lacroix Embarrassed ...

From his 2008 appointment until he became the focus of an internal audit, CBC president Hubert Lacroix claimed nearly $30,000 in improper expenses ...

“We’ve been reporting a lot on ineligible expense claims by public officials, now we have a story in our own backyard,” CBC reporter Rosemary Barton announced ...

The CBC does not release the salaries of its top executives, but Mr. Lacroix is paid between $358,400 and $421,600 per year.

Read the full story here.