[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ey remember that state-owned, socialism-reliant CBC that I’ve been writing negatively about for a decade and a half, here? And remember how I repeatedly write that the CBC is literally the state competing against its own citizens?
Well don’t worry, the Globe & Mail’s on the case today. After 65 years. They should call themselves an oldnewspaper.
Actually it’s not even the Globe & Mail itself that has awoken from its CBC-luvin’ stupor, but at least they allowed a columnist to go off the reservation for five minutes. Today Konrad Yakabuski chimes in on the socialist lunacy that is the state-owned CBC (he calls it neither socialist nor lunacy nor even state-owned, of course, proving he’s got a mile to go yet). Here’s his big breaking news (by which we mean news to him):
… Ottawa is pumping an additional $675-million into the CBC at the very moment the country’s leading private media outlets are struggling to stay afloat amid fragmenting audiences and advertising dollars. Something about this picture just isn’t right. …
You don’t say. And actually, you all didn’t say anything, for 65 years. In fact quite the contrary. Here’s what Yakabuski wrote exactly a year ago, regarding how the appointment of Mélanie Joly as the new Liberal government’s minister in charge of the CBC felt, to him:
It also felt like glasnost at a public broadcaster that had spent a decade under the thumb of an oppressive Conservative gulag.
The irony (to say nothing of the insult) of referring to glasnost and “gulag” in connection with Conservatives and the state-owned media — seems lost on Yakabuski. The Gulag was the former Soviet Union’s agency that managed forced labour camps during the reign of the socialist/communist mass murderer and dictator Joseph Stalin, until the 1950s. Stalin also ran the state media. He wasn’t really known to be that fiscally conservative actually, and didn’t fancy capitalism and private enterprise much at all. He’d have loved the CBC as much as today’s Liberals do, although he’d likely have hacked their idiotic budget way back.
But you know, with these people, the “oppressive” conservatives are either running a gulag, or we’re Nazis.
But the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its gulags and state-owned media having been mercifully rendered a shitstain on world history, let’s go back to today’s Yakabuski column:
“We don’t think that we compete,” CBC/Radio-Canada president Hubert Lacroix insisted, incredulously, before the House of Commons Heritage committee last month. “There is nothing in the [Broadcasting Act] or in our mandate that prevents us from delivering these services to Canadians in the most effective way – on the contrary.”
So change the mandate. The latter currently does not explicitly prevent the CBC from competing with private media. It should.
So change the mandate you say? Stop it from competing with private media? That’s hilarious. Why now, suddenly, comrade?
… Canadians do not watch them, forcing an already bloated CBC to seek advertising revenue elsewhere.
Hence, the CBC’s push into digital opinion content. Compared to dramatic programming, this is a low-cost venture that might actually turn a profit – and kill off a few already dying newspapers in the process.
Well now they’ve gone too far! Get me one o’ them “neo-cons” on the horn!
Yakabuski seems to have suddenly realized that the ever-growing, socialism-reliant CBC is just being progressive — and thus the creeping socialist giant is now threatening him personally, or professionally, more and more. This is as it is supposed to be. Yakabuski is starting to “feel the Bern!” from a state-owned “business” competing against him and his livelihood — much as we’ve warned for nearly 20 years — and he doesn’t like it. Boo hoo.
He’s all about reigning in that CBC now.
Instead of using the cash infusion from taxpayers to improve core services, particularly regional news operations, the CBC is using some of the money to expand its digital footprint into yet more areas where it competes directly with private media for the same advertising dollars.
Oh I’m in tears for him. Tears of laughter.
Forget ad revenue. Yakabuski doesn’t mention the CBC also competing for attention to its left-wing messaging, as the CBC spends money (ours) and advertises itself all over every type of media simply to try to get you to pay attention to them instead of any of the competition. That is another another missed clue.
I’ll give Yakabuski some credit: Today he is all concerned ‘n stuff, because of the public interest, see.
But if a bigger, more predatory CBC only kills off private competitors, how does that serve the public interest?
Yeah. Exactly the point we’ve been making — but you haven’t — for like 20 years. Too bad you didn’t spend more time reading ProudToBeCanadian.ca instead of watching inane CBC “comedy” fare and giving the CBC a pass (or worse) all these years. Forgive us if we don’t think you really give a hoot about “The public interest” vis-a-vis the CBC.
Hey here’s some more breaking public interest news: For the past 24 years, the state-owned Canada Post has owned one of Canada’s largest courier companies, Purolator Couriers, which competes directly against all the private citizen-owned companies. As we’ve been telling you. You could use all of the same arguments about that abomination as you could for the CBC abomination — even invoking your grand “public interest” canard.
So break your own apparent mandate. Write-up a breaking news column decrying the state-owned Canada Post owning Purolator. Include your laments about all the dozens of other market and career and business-wrecking state-owned “businesses”. Yeah we know they don’t affect your livelihood directly like the CBC does, so do it because that would actually be in the public interest.
Yakabuski’s column, entitled “The CBC has lost its way,” is ironic if nothing else. The CBC is growing exactly as it has been for 65 years. The only people who are lost are those who are just now realizing the damage that has been done and is continuing to be done –when the state competes against its own citizens.
UPDATE:
CBC/Radio Canada asks for $400M in increased government funding to go ad-free. Would equal an additional $12 per Canadian per year.
— CBC News Alerts (@CBCAlerts) November 28, 2016
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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