Terence Corcoran: Our 'public broadcaster' now has journalists shilling for private ad dollars

The CBC logo is projected onto a screen during the CBC's annual upfront presentation at The Mattamy Athletic Centre in Toronto, Wednesday, May 29, 2019. Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press

It should be noted that our ‘public broadcaster’ now has journalists who ask for money for private ads. In this way, there is no doubt that we need a national investigation into the internal operations of the public broadcaster.

In this regard, the CBC television news channel, The National, dropped the ball on Wednesday night. Here’s the news they were not following: The National’s four anchors (Rosemary Barton, Adrienne Arsenault, Andrew Chang, and Ian Hanomansing) were in Toronto that day for advertising money at a television marketing conference. As such, as reported in The Globe and Mail, the four hosts of the daily news program were part of a programming dog and pony performance at Upfront ’19, a trade fair where buyers of the advertising industry get previews of the new programming that television networks have prepared.

New plan

It is necessary to emphasize that the public presentation of the four anchors for advertising dollars was presented by the top executives of the CBC management as part of a plan to expand the funding streams that keep the public broadcaster floating on a transatlantic public fund. and advertising. That being said plan, a complete reversal of the corporation’s proposed strategy of just over three years ago, is to make an effort for a larger portion of the Canadian advertising pie, which includes the largest share in the digital advertising market in line.

Now, under the new president of the CBC, Catherine Tait, the public broadcaster, which received $ 1.1 billion in federal cash last year, aims to do the opposite. Since he plans to continue using that public fund of billions of dollars a year to get more advertising dollars and build a digital machine that will further complicate the transition of his competitors from private media to a digital environment.

Thus, based on Globe’s report, it is clear that Tait’s strategy is to use the CBC’s public funds base to convert the subsidized organization, which obtains approximately 80 percent of its total Ottawa income, into an actor bigger and more dominant in the Canadian media.

Consequently, it is clear that we need a national investigation into the internal operations of the public broadcaster, including a review of its role and future in a new era of the media. You should not be determining your own power expansion strategy.

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Source: Terence Corcoran | Financial Post