News

Monday May 17, 2010


CBC Commissions Study of its own Bias amidst “Culture War” Controversy

By Thaddeus M. Baklinski

OTTAWA, May 17, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The president of Canada’s public broadcaster told the Senate finance committee that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), which has gained a firm reputation in Canada for its heavy liberal slant, has commissioned a study on itself to determine whether its news is biased.

Hubert Lacroix said, “We commissioned, with a panel of external experts on the French side and on the English side, an independent review of the way we do news. Those studies, what we call the bias studies, will be made public, we hope, at the beginning of the fall.

“We engaged outside experts, a really top-notch panel. They have looked at hours and hours of our stuff. They are all outsiders from CBC/Radio-Canada. We did the same thing on the French side.”

According to the Toronto Sun, Lacroix made the remarks after being confronted by Conservative senators who had demanded proof that the CBC wasn’t sharing polling data with the Liberal party.

Controversy erupted late last month over the relationship between the CBC and pollster Frank Graves, president of a polling company called Ekos Research, which does polling work for the CBC, and who is also closely associated with the Liberal Party of Canada.

Graves is reported to have told the Liberals last month that they should incite a “culture war” in order to divide Canadians and benefit the Liberal party by making Conservatives appear to be racist and moralistic.

Graves was quoted by columnist Lawrence Martin in The Globe & Mail as saying, “I told them [Ignatieff’s Liberals] that they should invoke a culture war. Cosmopolitanism versus parochialism, secularism versus moralism, Obama versus Palin, tolerance versus racism and homophobia, democracy versus autocracy. If the cranky old men in Alberta don’t like it, too bad. Go south and vote for Palin.”

Subsequently the president of the Conservative Party, John Walsh, filed a complaint with CBC’s Ombudsman.

“The fact that our national public broadcaster is using a pollster that is also advising the Liberal Party of Canada raises serious questions about the impartiality of Canada’s publicly funded national broadcaster,” Walsh wrote.

The controversy was further inflamed last week when the CBC aired a “major news” story – a full eight minutes in length – that featured an attack on the religious affiliation of some Conservative government members and supporters.

“Apparently the CBC thinks it newsworthy that some Conservative Ministers and MPs practice their faith. Even more scandalous, some members of the Prime Minister’s Office go to church,” a press release from the Conservative Party stated.

“Perhaps Canada’s tax-funded broadcaster needs a lesson in freedom of religion. Under the Charter of Rights, neither religious affiliation nor lack of religious affiliation is grounds to deny participation in the democratic life of the country.”

Hubert Lacroix insisted, however, that, “Our job — and we take it seriously — is to ensure that the information that we put out is fair and unbiased in everything that we do.”

But Conservative Party spokesman Fred DeLorey said, in the words of the Toronto Sun, that “if CBC needs a study to determine the appropriateness of using a Liberal Party donor as a pollster, it demonstrates how ‘deeply out-of-touch the network has become.’”

Well-known conservative commentator Ezra Levant wrote on his blog (https://ezralevant.com/2010/05/the-cbcs-leftwing-bias.html) that the CBC has self-examined itself in the past with no apparent results.

“In the wake of the 2006 federal election, the CBC had been accused of anti-Conservative bias and then, like now, the CBC launched an investigation into itself,” Levant writes. “The CBC promised to give this study to a cabinet minister when it was complete. But they didn’t. The cabinet minister had asked for it, but it was not sent (nor made public), even months after the election.”

Levant observes that the “billion-dollar Liberal campaign machine called the CBC” is, unlike other media, operating “with impunity when it comes to bias.”

“Other media across the world are dying off like dinosaurs. Not the CBC: they can continue to be a hard-left group of activists, participating in a culture war against the West, the North, conservatives, rural Canadians, Christians, etc., etc., and be immune from the desertion of viewers that would be the market’s punishment if a private broadcaster conducted itself in the same way.”

“I really wouldn’t care if the CBC was biased, if I wasn’t forced to pay for it,” Levant said.


Read related LSN articles:

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https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jan/08012206.html

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https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/sep/08093001.html

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