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OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) — A former producer who last year left her job with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) because of its “radical political agenda,” said the future of Canadian journalism lies with independent media outlets that don’t have a liberal bias.

Speaking at the Canada Strong and Free Network (CSFN) National Conference last Thursday in Ottawa, Tara Henley said that independent media is successfully reaching Canadians by offering a different viewpoint on stories.

The legacy media “numbers” are not “great” right now and “independent media is booming,” Henley said.

“At some point, questions end up having to be asked about what the independent media is offering and how does the legacy media cope with the fact so many people are voting with their dollars and their attention for a different model,” Henley noted.

Independent media acts as an “important counterweight to the legacy press right now,” she said, because it covers stories that the legacy press won’t touch.

Notably, Henley said the mainstream press got COVID wrong and did not present more neutral and unbiased facts.

Henley noted how journalism changed after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.

She said that journalism had been about fact-collecting and offering differing viewpoints, but after Trump was elected, the media turned to a form of political activism, which was spurred on by Twitter being used as a “watering hole for liberal opinion.”

Henley worked for the state-funded CBC from 2013 until 2021 as a TV and radio producer and has been a journalist for over 20 years.

In early 2022, Henley wrote in a column, “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.”

She wrote about leaving the CBC, 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.

Last month, LifeSiteNews reported on how the CBC will join a global “Public Spaces Incubator” initiative to combat online “misinformation” despite recently coming under fire from its ombudsman for violating its ethics code.

CBC viewership ratings have been steadily declining for years, with some estimates from 2021 putting the average national viewership rate at less than 3.9% of the Canadian market despite the Canadian federal government providing some $1.5 billion annually in funding.

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