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Originally Posted by The One and Only...
Yet, I must again ask: how many tax dollars are going to it?
I have a feeling that whatever gains you talk of, which cannot be proven, are not worth the money.
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The CBC's operating budget was $1 billion last year, which covers not only the television and radio news divisions, with its national and international offices, but also the entertainment divisions.
Your simplistic reasoning with regards to state-subsidized news reporting - the CBC is funded by the government, therefore is biased towards whichever government is sitting in the day - reflects your ignorance of the role of the CBC in the lives of Canadians. Note I said state-subsidized, not state-run. The CBC, though a crown corporation, has operated at arm's length from the government, and has acted as a watchdog on government policies. They have done many exposes documenting government misconduct. In 1998, for example, CBC journalist Harvey Cashore revealed that Health Canada was planning to relax food standards on soft drinks aimed at children and allow companies to put caffeine in those drinks. Immediately after that report, the government reversed its position.
Is there partisanship in the CBC? I have no doubt. No organization which encompasses such a diverse group of journalists (a group, I might add, that is far more ethnically diverse than the largely white-washed American media) can be completely without bias. However, as I've stated before, the CBC, like its British counterpart, the BBC, is held to a higher standard for objective journalism than many of its counterparts in mainstream American media. Because it is a publicly-funded corporation, it is under great scrutiny for any perceived bias, one way or another. Contrast this with stories from the British journalist Robert Fisk, who, while in Toronto for a journalism seminar, recounted stories of CNN reporters being given memos by AOL/TimerWarner executives on how they should never refer to Israeli settlements in the West Bank as 'illegal', contrary to judgements made by the United Nations on these places.