TORONTO, Ontario (LifeSiteNews) – A producer and journalist exposed the “radical political agenda” and increasingly “woke” culture of Canada’s state broadcaster the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in a scathing letter explaining why she recently quit working there.
“In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press. Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted,” Tara Henley wrote in a column dated January 3 posted to Substack.
Henley’s column was titled, “Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.”
She worked for the CBC from 2013 until 2021 as a TV and radio producer and has been a journalist for 20 years. Henley wasted no time in laying out why she left, writing bluntly, “Everyone asks the same thing: What is going on at the CBC?”
“To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity,” Henley wrote.
“It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions. It is to pretend that the ‘woke’ worldview is near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read.”
Henley stated that when she started working for the CBC in 2013, it produced “some of the best journalism in the country,” noting that she used to be “the one furthest to the left in any newsroom occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis.”
“I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change,” she wrote.
According to Henley, working at the CBC today means to the accept the “idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others.”
“It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others,” penned Henley.
Henley’s claim that guests on CBC shows were being vetted to ensure that they were properly racially profiled was met with a non-answer from CBC’s Head of Public Affairs Chuck Thompson, in a response he gave to True North News.
“To be clear, there are no racial quotas with our news content. Simply stated, as the public broadcaster, CBC News covers the stories that need to be told in an ever changing Canada,” said Thompson.
Henley also wrote about the CBC’s increasing obsession with using the proper “LGBT terms”: “People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported.”
Henley continued, “Or why our pop culture radio show’s coverage of the Dave Chappelle Netflix special failed to include any of the legions of fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive.”
CBC allows government to go unchecked as it enacts ‘sweeping societal changes’ like vaccine mandates and lockdowns
Henley added that to work at the CBC is to “submit to job interviews that are not about qualifications or experience — but instead demand the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma.”
She warned that in addition to this, working at CBC is to “become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like.”
“It is to endlessly document microaggressions but pay little attention to evictions; to spotlight company’s political platitudes but have little interest in wages or working conditions. It is to allow sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures to roll out — with little debate,” she wrote.
The CBC has allowed billionaires to amass “extraordinary wealth and bureaucrats amass enormous power — with little scrutiny,” Henley continued. “And to watch the most vulnerable among us die of drug overdoses — with little comment.”
She blasted how working for the CBC is to “consent” to accepting that certain “subjects are off the table,” and to “keep one’s mouth shut, to not ask questions, to not rock the boat.”
“How could good journalism possibly be done under such conditions? How could any of this possibly be healthy for society,” wrote Henley.
“These questions keep me up at night. I can no longer push them down. I will no longer hold them back. This Substack is an attempt to find some answers.”
CBC viewership ratings have been steadily declining for years, with some estimates putting the average national viewership rate at less than 3.9 percent of the Canadian market.
This is despite the Canadian federal government funding the CBC to the tune of some $1.5 billion annually.
Popular Canadian psychologist and cultural analyst Jordan Peterson recently said Canadian legacy media, which includes the CBC, are in an “unrecoverable death spiral, spinning ever more uncontrollably.”
“The CBC has become a mewling, meandering, self-righteous, slogan-spewing narcissistic near-corpse,” tweeted Peterson on December 23, 2021.
The CBC has in recent months come under fire for questionable conduct.
On October 12, 2021 Toronto Public Health (TPH) noted the CBC’s main headquarters in Toronto as having a COVID outbreak, according to a Counter Signal report. Despite this, the CBC failed to report this outbreak on its own media channels.
In October 2021 as well, CBC Edmonton had to admit it used COVID hospital training footage of a mannequin in an ICU on a ventilator in a video news segment to highlight the COVID situation in Alberta hospitals.
In 2020, the CBC admitted that a recent episode of its Kids News show that promoted transgenderism and attacked Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for saying biological sex is “real” did not meet its “standards.”
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