Yahoo Finance Terence Corcoran: The big idea within Musk’s CBC attack
The clash between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Elon Musk‘s Twitter over government funding has ramped up into an entertaining media free-for-all over whether Canada’s national broadcaster is or is not a state-funded propaganda arm of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. Terry Glavin called it “hysteria.” But the debate over government funding should not stop with the CBC. The fundamental principles extend far beyond broadcasting and media. Maybe Elon Musk’s little foray into the state subsidy debate will expand into a broader warning about government funding as an economy-wide problem.
This is not to suggest that the CBC funding debate is unimportant. It is almost one year to the day — April 25, 2022 — since Elon Musk’s $44-billion Twitter takeover. His plan was instantly attacked by a battalion of critics, including the CBC. In its report on the takeover last April, the network’s flagship news show, The National, anchored by Andrew Chang, led the broadcast with the CBC’s standard ideological perspective.
“Tonight, $44 billion for 240 characters … the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, now owns Twitter, joining a club of billionaires in charge of publishing, tech and social media. So, what’s he going to do with it?”
To answer that question, The National turned to a typical CBC objective source: Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University in New York and an active critic of online media owners and executives. A Musk-controlled Twitter, she said, would “remove all of the moderation, which just means a massive influx of fake accounts, spam accounts, pornography on the site, hate speech, things like that.” Then Chang went on to warn that “Whether you tweet or not you have likely been influenced by Twitter’s ability to amplify and distort information.”
As noted in this space at the time, when it comes to amplifying and distorting information, few Canadian media can top the CBC. Through The National, other CBC broadcasts and the network’s radicalized radio operation, Canadians are constantly being bombarded by one-sided distortions on every tweak of the news flow — all while portraying itself as a disseminator of “truth.”
When the CBC looks at a news development or issue, there is only one “true” side to the story, with climate change being its most one-sided of all, a deliberate strategy formally set out in public policy statements. “The planet is changing. So will our journalism.”
As a national platform for Ottawa’s Liberal-led climate policies, the CBC fulfills its mission through programming such as What On Earth, an hour-long radio show dedicated to spreading climate change alarmism. Topics on a typical edition earlier this month included: “A writer gazes into the future to find greener ways to fly. An Alberta teacher reaching kids with climate lessons that ease anxiety. And how the federal budget could make Canada an electric superpower.”
In addition to championing Liberal EV superpowerdom, the episode’s host, Laura Lynch, interviewed experts about people’s “sense of guilt” about flying and then talked to preteen kids who have been plunged into a state of anxiety over the climate crisis. A Grade 5 student said “I would like to have a family” but “I don’t want them to have a terrible life because I was selfish and want to use a plastic bottle.” Where on Earth would a 10-year-old get such ideas? Maybe from the CBC.
One could fill a book with the leftist/activist world views promulgated daily by the CBC. Would the CBC change without government funding? If it were, instead, funded via subscription fees voluntarily paid by Canadians — would it be able to raise $1.2 billion per year to offset the loss of Ottawa’s annual subsidy? The network’s reach for ad dollars keeps expanding. Andrew Chang, for example, has left The National to deliver a “free” CBC podcast that’s funded by advertising (currently from online gambling marketers and fossil-fuel-burning Jeep Cherokees).
Even if privately-funded, the CBC could still be dominated by leftist/activist content — witness MSNBC and CNN in the United States. But at least pay-CBC would remove the implication (and maybe the fact) that the CBC serves as a propaganda arm of the government.
Within the Twitter-CBC funding issue lies a broader question. If it is wrong for government subsidies to distort and shape economic activity and behaviour in media, then the same principle should apply to all economic sectors, including — or maybe especially — Elon Musk’s auto sector. Tesla and other Musk operations have received billions from governments over the years, with more to come. Other automakers, energy companies and scores of industries all over the world are lining up for hundreds of billions of government funding.
Musk has said he thinks government subsidies should end. In that case, maybe a warning label should be incorporated into the Tesla logo (see illustration). And, just maybe, the Twitter affair could help launch a new movement through which all companies receiving taxpayer subsidies are labelled with a warning note: “Government funded.”
