Why We Need the CBC

Everyone in my generation can recall where they were when they received the news of the towers falling on Sept. 11, 2001.

I was four years old, living in the United States and home sick from school. I walked into our small apartment’s living room and distinctly remember watching the coverage of that horrific day on Fox News. The national television channel for conservative news and political commentary would continue to stay on not just for the day but for the many years that followed in our household.

We watched on Fox the drumbeat for George W. Bush’s war on terror, hearing repeatedly the false claim that weapons of mass destruction harboured in Iraq compelled a U.S. invasion. My father would routinely tune in to Fox’s primetime legal commentator Nancy Grace, whose sensationalized, biased spotlight on crime would stoke fears and sow distrust of the justice system.

On the screen most nights Fox’s right-wing Sean Hannity would spar with — and usually seem to trounce — liberal commentator Alan Colmes. Until, after a while, Hannity was granted a solo show free of debate. My father’s world view locked in with what Fox beamed into America’s living rooms. Calling itself “fair and balanced,” the network offered a refuge from the serious journalism done by other networks and major newspapers. Fox News instead steadily stirred outrage and asserted half-truths well before we understood what misinformation really was.

Now, I live in Vancouver, and during this election I see one party advocating for the defunding of Canada's public broadcaster. Perhaps you need to have grown up with Fox News in your household to understand the urgency of this issue.

When I was coming of age in the United States, I didn’t know the news coverage we watched was a product of former Republican president Ronald Reagan’s 1987 rollback of a federal communications policy aimed at guarding against the potential for major broadcast networks to set a biased public agenda.

The lasting impact of Reagan’s deregulatory measures is that U.S. broadcasters can and do provide subjective coverage of the news of the day. As a result, the world view of Americans of my generation has been fundamentally shaped by news stories that, in many cases, told only half the story and purposely obfuscated the other side.

Today, we know that state and non-state actors are using disinformation to sow chaos, and not just in the United States. Here in Canada, we too must combat misinformation. There is a reason that shadowy figures in Vladimir Putin’s Russia are funding propagandistic right-wing influencers online.

So, let’s reflect upon the Conservative Party of Canada’s stated commitment to “defund the CBC” and return its funding back to Canadians. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said he’d keep Radio-Canada if elected, but experts have argued that because resources are shared between the two CBC sister organizations, divorce won’t be clean or easy.

Most Canadians trust and want to preserve the CBC. So why have the Conservatives created an election wedge issue that might keep some voters from casting a vote for them? He has left the door open for the Liberals and New Democratic Party to argue that in the wake of U.S. aggression, a strong public broadcaster is a vital asset for national unity.

The U.S. right has long harboured resentment against public institutions. We saw this with the rise of home-schooling in the 1970s, when some conservative parents felt threatened by the work of the U.S. Department of Education to improve access to public education for racialized, disabled and marginalized students.

In recent years, we’ve seen conservative pushback against public education on issues related to sex and gender, built on the false accusation that “sexualizing our children” is a project of the left.

Who gains when democratic institutions are toppled? Donald Trump echoes other populist authoritarian leaders by seeking to undercut any entity that might offer a check on his power. He has demonized the Department of Justice and even U.S. military generals. Now Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is carrying out systematic cuts across government, hobbling its ability to fulfil its most basic missions in the process.

As academic Daniel J. McCool has noted, most Americans now deeply distrust another institution critical to the functioning of democracy — the news media. The building trend, fuelled by right-wing commentators and, relentlessly, Trump himself, has led to the “merging of personal grievance with political ideology.”

This poses a tremendous risk. Political theorist Hannah Arendt knew and spoke about the intricate, difficult relationship between the truth, media and politics. In her seminal work “Truth and Politics,” she detailed how factual truth is engaged in a battle with political power that seeks to fill a vacuum of shared understanding with its own narrative of ultimate authority.

Here in Canada, Conservative members of Parliament openly state their disdain for “legacy media,” cloaking their language in a euphemism to create elitist associations with a public broadcaster, similar to what other right-wing populists have done around the world.

The Conservatives have implied that once the CBC is hobbled, private news sources will fill the space.

I’ve said that most Canadians trust a public broadcaster like the CBC. To be specific, polling shows that 67 per cent of English-speaking Canadians trust the CBC, while 78 per cent of francophones trust Radio-Canada.

These trust levels are among the highest for any news organization in the country. This is not to say Canadians agree with how or why the CBC reports as it does, but we must credit the CBC for publishing its journalistic standards as an invitation to be held accountable.

A defunded CBC will weaken our collective ability to detect, investigate and combat misinformation in Canada — especially during a period in which the media ecosystem is extremely consequential to our political landscape.

Western politics has a misinformation problem that in recent years has fuelled events like the riots in the United Kingdom and residential school denialism.

Can we really afford to do away with the CBC at this moment when Canadians are ever more pressed to detect, investigate and combat misinformation? We are entering an era when generative AI is achieving dangerous levels of human parity and political actors are honing their use of deepfakes. The Hogue Commission’s probe of foreign interference in Canada’s recent federal elections identified disinformation, aided by the rise of AI and decline of traditional news media, as the greatest threat.

CBC News, whether you agree with its focus or not, exists to inform people through fact-based reporting that is intensely scrutinized before publication. It must abide by libel laws and post corrections whenever its reporting falls short. Over the decades the CBC has built up a corps of professional news gatherers and an ethos of serving the public interest. In a far-flung country the CBC is often the main source of basic, daily news in rural and remote communities.

At a moment when misinformation is laying siege to our fundamental understanding of reality, you do not break your weapon before battle. The CBC is essential to Canada’s history and democracy, and we ought to defend it.