CBC branded itself Liberal this election

Kay dismissed my charge that the employees at the CBC are generally in the tank for Trudeau’s Liberals. He said it was nonsense because many at the public broadcaster are NDP supporters, too.

I countered that more left-wing individuals at the CBC inevitably get in line when push comes to shove. Even Dippers within CBC’s ranks come to the aid of Trudeau in his times of need in order to keep the Conservatives out of power, even if that means sacrificing their own party’s gains.

(It’s the same reason why NDP think tank Broadbent Institute’s Press Progress predominantly attacks Conservatives, despite Liberals being a much greater challenge to the NDP’s success. Furthermore, CBC attacks The Post Millennial for Conservative pamphleteering, the public broadcaster has cited Press Progress‘s work without questioning the source.)

I know this is the case because I can still distinctly remember the election bias from the last campaign in 2015. That was when I first started writing about politics while teaching English overseas. One of the first pieces I ever wrote–and the first to get thousands of visitors to my makeshift website–was entitled “CBC’s Insolent Election Bias,” in which I documented the absurd in-your-face bias the supposed public broadcaster displayed for Trudeau throughout that election.

But the CBC outdid itself this time around.

The little Twitter tiff between Kay and I ended with me saying he would eat his words come election season. And boy was I right.

The CBC’s koolaid drinking for Trudeau started right out of the gate during the leadup to the election being officially called.

When the Toronto Star–now also a beneficiary of millions of taxpayer’s money courtesy of the Liberal government’s $600 million bailout of political journalism, not including the CBC–dropped a so-called exclusive of Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer’s comments in the House of Commons about gay marriage from over a decade ago the CBC ran hard with the story as if it were breaking news.

That, as well as Scheer’s own personal views on abortion, were hot topics of conversation the CBC would belabour about for days on end, despite the CPC leader making it clear these issues were not going to be touched by a Conservative government (they’d be political suicide anyway). All the while CBC ignored Trudeau’s own statements to the CBC in 2011 that he himself is personally pro-life (days later, when some reporter finally got around to trying to show some semblance of balance, Trudeau was asked about it and said he had changed his views).

As the CBC incessantly went on about SoCon issues that would not get any attention in Ottawa if the CPC won, it downplayed real issues like national debt, the SNC-Lavalin scandal and graft.

When Trudeau was found to have worn blackface on three separate occasions because a private citizen decided to provide Time magazine with a copy of a yearbook that Trudeau was in charge of overseeing and that included a picture of him in blackface, the CBC decided it was a good idea to harass the individual who drew the public’s attention to Trudeau’s poor decision when he was 29. CBC essentially was sending a message to anyone else with damaging information on the incumbent PM: Stay quiet.

And why would CBC have such a fealty for Trudeau? His increasing of the state broadcaster’s annual $1.1 billion federal subsidy once assuming power might have something to do with it. Trudeau shamelessly reminded CBC employees who butters their bread by giving its senior political reporter David Cochrane free poutine on the campaign trail in September while saying, “The Liberal Party always supports the CBC.”

Even though Cochrane should’ve followed CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices and declined the poutine in order to avoid a “real or perceived” conflicts of interest, the symbolism of him smilingly while taking the poutine from Trudeau spoke volumes.

Speaking of conflicts of interest, somehow CBC management and journalists John Paul Tasker and Rosemary Barton thought it was perfectly acceptable for them to single out the CPC for a copyright suit, meanwhile ignoring other parties and Liberals’ use of CBC material. All the more obvious it was a political decision to go after CPC was the fact that copyright lawyers and professors were in agreement with the party’s use of CBC material fell well within fair dealing.

As the CBC’s boneheaded decision to file a lawsuit with not just the broadcaster as a plaintiff, but both Barton and Tasker blew up in their faces, the silence and mealy-mouthed non-answers raised more questions than answers.

CBC hired top lawyers, so it’s hard to imagine that they would’ve been negligent enough to not get the permission of Barton and Tasker to include them as applicants in the lawsuit. Neither the two journalists nor the CBC have clarified if the journalists were involved in the lawsuit. But it is noteworthy Barton’s mentor and predecessor Peter Mansbridge requested management get the CBC to sue the CPC during last election for using a clip from one of his interviews with Trudeau in which the party used the Liberal leader’s nonsensical answer about the Boston Bombing. Did Barton take a page out Mansbridge’s playbook? An Access to Information request for the internal communications regarding the latest lawsuit will hopefully get to the bottom of it.

At the very least Barton should’ve been pulled as one of the four hosts of The National while her name was still on the lawsuit, but instead, she continued and was the lead host of their election coverage, where many Conservative observers again noted her bias for the Liberals.

But it wasn’t just the credibility of Barton, Tasker and Cochrane that were put into serious question this election. Other CBC senior reporters covering federal politics also showed favouritism towards the Liberals.

CBC Ottawa reporter Katie Simpson wrote a piece the day before the vote in which her piece—filed under news—claiming a big “momentum shift” for the CPC campaign in which she suggested things were going badly in the last two days of the campaign. The article had to be corrected because Simpson cut part of a Scheer quote where he said the Liberals would have to raise the GST “or cut completely the Canada Social Transfer to the provinces.” Only after a complaint was filed did CBC clarify that Scheer wasn’t saying necessarily the GST would be raised, but that something would have to give.