I like our local radio station. Mountain FM has a good Squamish and Whistler feel to it, keeps me up to date on what’s going on in our Sea to Sky Corridor, and the DJs always have some interesting tidbits about pop culture. The traffic updates are worth their weight in gold some days – they’ve saved me hours of unnecessary waits on the highway. But most importantly, they just tell it like it is. Good, bad or indifferent, they give us the straight goods.
I have also been a loyal CBC Radio listener for more than 40 years, and now I think it’s time to say goodbye to our national broadcaster. Over the past year I have been listening to two things: Before the election, it was an unending stream of “stories” about how terrible the Conservative government was under Stephen Harper, and since Oct. 19, it has become a love-in for our new prime minister.
Although I have my political leanings (and you might be surprised to know what they are) like everyone else, this isn’t about which party is running the country. Among other things, part of the official mandate of the CBC is to “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions.” It’s bureaucrat-speak for “tell us what’s going on, straight up,” just like our local radio jocks do. We spend about $1.1 billion on the CBC every year to keep it running, so we shouldn’t get what sounds like paid political announcements that are dressed up like newscasts.
This week I was driving down the highway and heard the CBC morning show talk about the fact that Trudeau has hired a couple of resident houseworkers to take care of his kids. Prior to the election, Trudeau had gone on a rant saying that wealthy people like him certainly didn’t need any taxpayer help to raise his children. He seemed to have a change of heart on the day he was sworn in as our new top dog, since it was that afternoon he authorized hiring two workers on the government tab. They get paid $11 to $20 per hour, so at least they won’t break the bank. They won’t get out of the lower tax bracket, even though they are working or on-call 24 hours a day.
In light of this revelation, the CBC news guy went on to say that many Canadians supported that decision, but added that “some didn’t.” That didn’t sound right, I thought. I would think a lot of folks would be pretty upset with the obvious hypocrisy, so I checked the online version of the story. There were almost 9,000 comments posted and the vast majority of commenters were adamant that they were against our newly minted boss spending our money to take his kids to the museum (yes, that happened).
So how did the morning news guy arrive at the decision that most Canadians were in support? I have no idea, but it did make me realize that control of the press is the first move of a command-and-control regime. Decide what you want people to hear, then roll it across the airwaves, calling it news. What’s worse is that our taxpayer-funded broadcaster seems to have signed up to the messenger. It appears critical journalism is rapidly disappearing from the CBC, and we are now paying for a political party spin machine.
So bring on Mountain FM. They seem to be representing us on a shoestring budget far better than the billion-dollar federal government communications department.
