In Print

Network brass backs the Liberals

By Kevin Steel ⋅ February 28, 2005 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Who says the CBC has a political bias?

When Stephen Taylor happened to catch a documentary on the CBC’s The Fifth Estate about the Fox News Channel, he experienced a bit of déjà vu. The Jan. 26 show, “Sticks and Stones,” asked of the cable news channel, which began broadcasting in Canada in January: “It’s loud, it’s raucous, but does it have anything to do with the truth?” and bruited the theory that Fox’s loudmouth personalities were dividing Americans. But, for a show about authenticity, the talking points seemed a lot like the ones raised in last year’s documentary, OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, which had asked the same questions.

But the financers of OutFoxed were openly partisan–namely, the grassroots democratic group MoveOn.org. So Taylor, a graduate student at Ontario’s Queen’s University, wondered what kind of political agenda might be behind the CBC’s own skewering of Fox. He decided to run the names of the directors on the broadcaster’s board through Elections Canada’s database of political contributors. It turns out the honchos that oversee the nation’s broadcaster are every bit as partisan as the Republican-bashers at MoveOn. Eighty-two per cent of all the cheques they wrote to political parties since 1993 went to one place: the Liberal Party of Canada.

Taylor admits he has his own bias: he ran unsuccessfully for the Conservative nomination in Kingston, Ont., prior to the 2004 federal election. But, he points out, he doesn’t broadcast documentaries warning Canadians that a competing channel might turn us all against one another. “Everybody should be able to contribute to the party of their choice, but when you make decisions to fund documentaries that hold one political philosophy higher than another, and complain that there is going to be a competitive political atmosphere in Canada because of the introduction of Fox, I find it a little hypocritical,” Taylor says.

The directors’ pro-Grit stance shouldn’t come as a big surprise: they were, after all, appointed by a Liberal prime minister. Noreen Golfman, chair of the pro-CBC group, Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, told a 2003 conference at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada: “Our research indicates that every member of the present CBC board of directors is affiliated with the Liberal Party of Canada.” And the CBC, in turn, relies on the Liberal government for financial support. As a matter of fact, just one week after the documentary–which criticized some of the Fox personalities’ criticisms of Canadian foreign policy–aired, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage voted to provide the network with “stable, multi-year funding.” You can bet it won’t be long before the network brass comes up with an appropriate gesture to show its gratitude. Better get out the chequebooks, folks.

[This article appeared in the February 28, 2005 issue of the Western Standard.]