Seems the CBC is falling over itself trying to back off of claims first exposed by Greg Weston of Sun Media’s Toronto Sun this past Saturday, which indicated that the liberal-left’s CBC division was about ready to demand even more taxpayer cash this year to make up for budgetary shortfalls. I attached the link to that Weston article to a gas-gauge blog entry I’d just posted moments before—it’s an entry which consisted only of a graphic showing how our PTBC pockets are empty, and the CBC’s full. I then followed it up with a blog post revealing the anti-state-media newspaper ad I’ve long intend to run.
I would contend that the impact of seeing that newspaper ad and the potential fomenting of that kind of push-back from the sober Canadian normal set (that’s us!) has had some effect on them and forced them to back off and pretend its not happening at all. Neither Greg Weston or the CBC would acknowledge that of course. Not acknowledging the power of the non-media people is harder for some than others, but because the CBC has sent official legal papers to me in the past sternly warning me that they “will be monitoring this site” (meaning PTBC of course), I can only gather that they did see that ad. And it’s proof that pushing back works. So we must run that ad.
Read today’s idiocy from the CBC via Greg Weston and the Toronto Sun:
A brilliant attempt at damage control by the CBC’s department of executive butt-covering suggests there is nothing at the headquarters of the public broadcaster a bulldozer and a bucket of pink slips couldn’t fix.
A supposed “letter to the editor” distributed across the country Monday attempts to disparage our recent report that while most Canadian media companies are struggling to survive the economic crisis, the money-losing CBC is looking for even more government hand-outs on top of the $1 billion-plus a year it already gets from taxpayers.
Notably, the public broadcaster with 10,200 communications employees hired a private news wire service to distribute the letter nationally as a press release. Your tax dollars at work.
The column in question was based on a memo sent to CBC employees Monday from Hubert Lacroix, the Corp’s $380,000-a-year president, and on the broadcaster’s financial reports filed with the the federal regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
What we didn’t realize is reading, arithmetic and a nominal regard for the truth are apparently not prerequisites for executive positions at CBC. Shame on us.
The Corp’s letter of complaint begins: “Almost all assertions in the article are either a distortion of facts or are flat-out wrong.” For instance, we reported that for the year ending Aug. 31, 2008, the CBC’s billion-dollar-plus handout from the feds was “8% higher than last year.”
The CBC’s own figures supplied to the federal regulator state the agency received a “parliamentary appropriation” of exactly $1,033,585,000 in 2008, an increase from the previous year of $77,049,000—or 8%.
No way, writes the CBC spin department.
[Read the rest at the Toronto Sun — a 10 second read]
Now more than ever I want to run that ad.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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