The Ideological Capture of the CBC

The CBC building in Toronto in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette

Commentary

Elon Musk’s Twitter has dropped the labels “government-funded” or “state-affiliated” from several media corporations, including the CBC.

Nevertheless, calling the CBC government-funded is merely stating the obvious. Last year, the Canadian government provided over $1 billion in funding to the CBC, or about 70 percent of annual operating costs. But as Edward R. Murrow famously observed, “The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”

As I’ve written here before, I was formerly a supporter of the CBC, particularly CBC Radio. Historically it tilted to the left, but one always heard alternative voices, including those of conservatives. I considered the mother corporation an exemplar of Canadian fairness in always treating dissident ideas and those who promulgated them respectfully.

Alas, that CBC is long gone. It’s difficult to pinpoint when this change occurred, but at some time over the past two decades, the CBC decided that instead of striving to be a disinterested and fair-minded bearer of news and ideas pertinent to Canadians, its mandate was to re-make Canadian society.

Happily for the CBC, its version of utopian perfection conforms with the Liberal government’s promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This ideology proceeds from the premise that the majority culture forever oppresses and victimizes the minority “other.”

As a glance at the stories posted on the CBC website will confirm, the public broadcaster is in thrall to this new, identarian dispensation. The mother corporation now sees itself as a media entity whose remit is not merely conveying news to Canadians; it has a much higher calling. It is in the business of remaking Canadian society in line with an ideological, abstract conception of social justice.

It’s instructive to look at job postings on the CBC’s website. The aspiring candidate will soon be directed to the diversity and inclusion section of the website, where they will be met with this statement: “At CBC/Radio-Canada, we’ve come to embrace inclusion as a mindset.”

The notion that a publicly funded news corporation has “embraced inclusion as a mindset” is worrying. To state the obvious, the values advanced by DEI are “ideological” in the sense that political philosopher Hannah Arendt used the term. For Arendt, ideological thinking is contemptuous of the empirical realm. It establishes a “functioning world of no-sense” in which facts are seen only through the lens of an a priori ideological explanatory theory. Ideologies start from “an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it. ... Ideological argumentation [is] always a kind of logical deduction.”

Like the closed, axiomatic systems of logic or mathematics, ideologies are exempt from reality, from the world in which human life takes place. Arendt sums it up this way: “Ideological thinking ... proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality.” What ideologies aim at, says Arendt, is “not the ... transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.”

Why, we might ask, should a state-funded media organization so enthusiastically embrace an overtly ideological agenda? Shouldn’t the default setting of a free press be a wary skepticism of, or outright hostility to, any ideology? Shouldn’t our journalists be asking challenging and uncomfortable questions about DEI? Could the CBC’s full-throated embrace of DEI have something to do with its government funding?

The CBC’s website further proclaims, “We’ve deepened our thinking [about diversity and inclusion] from focusing mainly on numbers and compliance to something far more encompassing...”  The moral earnestness here is unmistakable. They have “deepened their thinking” and have arrived at “something far more encompassing.” I don’t know what this means, but it strikes an ominous and totalitarian note in my ear. The mother corporation appears to be on a crusade to remake Canadian society.

The CBC has defenders who reject outright the idea that it censors or interferes with its journalists. For example, Marsha Lederman, writing in the Globe and Mail, tells us she worked for the CBC from 2000 to 2007 and claims she was never once censored. I have no reason to doubt her. But leaving aside the fact that 2007 is ancient history in media years, she misses the point. The ideological bias in CBC occurs at hiring. New hires must sign on to diversity, inclusion, and equity goals, guaranteeing that all employees subscribe to the same set of values and work for the desired political outcomes.

CBC now speaks with a near-monolithic voice and has adopted a tendentious reading of events, favouring stories, news items, and op-eds that advance DEI’s goals while ignoring with smug and sneering condescension those voices who dissent from its overtly political values. As Matthew B. Crawford notes, “Ideological thinking is intolerant of aspects of the world that resist its intellectual schemes. They must be brought into conformity with the guiding vision, or else denounced.”

As many have pointed out, the irony is that despite its nominal commitment to “diversity,” the last thing one turns to the CBC for are opinions that span the political spectrum. It is a news organization committed to a state-sponsored ideology, and Canadians deserve better.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.