Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for coming this morning.
Throughout our hearings we've discussed a number of times pressures from advertising on news, issues of bias in news, and what stories are chosen. I've been thinking a lot about the pressure on a public broadcaster. The BBC was shaken to the foundation over the Andrew Gilligan story and whether or not the dossier was sexed up. But clearly the BBC was faced with a direct frontal attack by the Prime Minister's Office. It would do anything it had to do to get that story killed. And in the end, a journalist lost his position and the head of the BBC was tossed. History seems to have vindicated the BBC's original story.
I'm looking at issues with the CBC. The CBC isn't nearly as independent and financially secure as the BBC. I was thinking of the Terry Milewski story on the whole APEC summit. Susan Delacourt wrote that it was Milewski who was solely responsible for pushing APEC to the top of the news agenda through his dogged release of the leaked documents and his continuing attention to the APEC issue. Yet the PMO launched a right-in-your-face assault on CBC, and Milewski got the bounce as well.
How do you choose to take on government when biting the hand that feeds you could be problematic?