Thank you very much.
I'm the editor of CBC Watch, a website entitled www.cbcwatch.ca, that was established early in 2004 for Canadians who had enough of the bias activism and extremism of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. CBC Watch includes viewpoints on issues that the CBC wilfully neglects to include in issue debates. CBC omissions are to the detriment of the overall public debate. Since conception, the website has had more than three and a half million individual visits—that's not hits. CBC Watch is a website that doesn't cost Canadians a single penny. The website is currently being revamped, and it's going to relaunch in May.
The website regularly exposes clear CBC policy violations of stipulations of the Broadcasting Act. It also exposes various other actions, productions, or omissions on behalf of the CBC that undermine the integrity of broadcasting in Canada.
Contrary to what many CBC supporters believe, it's not an anti-CBC website. CBC Watch is an anti-CBC-bias and anti-CBC-activism website. Unlike the CBC, CBC Watch is not required to be balanced by any Canadian statute. Subparagraph 3(1)(i)(iv) of the Canadian Broadcasting Act states that the CBC must “provide a reasonable opportunity for the public to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern”. Clearly the CBC has failed to do that, so it is our position that portions of this section should be added to CBC's mandate.
The CBC knows it has this problem. In a memo released in November 2003, CBC news head Tony Burman admitted that the CBC commissioned a study and found that Canadians found the CBC to be biased. Exactly in what ways Canadians found the CBC to be biased is not known. The CBC refuses to release detailed data of the multi-million-dollar study to the people who paid for it, the Canadian taxpayers. What's interesting about Tony Burman's reaction is that he actually took solace from the fact that the study showed that Canadians did not find the CBC as biased as CNN.
In other words, Burman seems to think CBC bias is okay, as long as it's not as biased as some private American cable news channel. Sorry, but the law says that's not good enough. The complaint system at the CBC is not meant to correct or address any ongoing bias, even if the CBC uncovered that bias. It is a smoke screen. There is little if anything accomplished by CBC's in-house complaints response mechanism.
Former CBC employee Robert Fulford—his wife is a CBC producer—put it best when he said:
But citizens who complain to management receive CBC-justifying letters that inevitably explain that the CBC is consistently fair. These letters are so long and tedious that they fill with glue, perhaps fatally, the mind of anyone who reads them. I think of this process as Death by Ombud. Its purpose is to ensure that the citizen in question will never, ever write a letter of protest again.
So we have recommended that future ombudsmen be appointed from outside the ranks of the CBC.
Later in that same column, Mr. Fulford writes of the CBC's lack of diversity of viewpoints:
Many journalists find working for the CBC highly educational. Certainly it was for me. In the days when I first began broadcasting on the CBC, the term “politically correct” didn't exist. But no one at the CBC needed a term. They lived by it without knowing what to call it. As I listened to them I began to realize that they all read the same publications and thought the same thoughts. Many became friends of mine, but I developed an aversion to their eerie uniformity of views.
This was in the National Post on September 23, 2006.
Critics at the private news media argue that CBC's bias provides a counterbalance to the private news media organizations. Private news media outlets are allowed to have editorial bias, and balance can be achieved across the private media spectrum. The CBC, however, is required by statute to reflect all Canadians, not only left-wing Canadians, or be both an interpreter and the counterbalance. It has to be balanced. To ensure this, we have recommended that controls be instituted. Unchecked CBC bias over time becomes a false Canadian historical record.
Again, the CBC is required by statute to reflect all Canadians, not only left-wing Canadians. It's required to be balanced, yet it refuses to be fair and objective in its presentation of issues, ideas, organizations, and political issues. To ensure balance, we have recommended that procedural and hiring controls be instituted.
Thank you very much for this opportunity.