Losing the CBC will not be a tragedy. Article of the Day
In The Weekly Wrap, Sean Speer, editor-at-large for Hub.ca, analyses for Hub subscribers the big stories shaping politics, policy, and the economy in the week that was. Recommended reading as Facebook will not let Canadians see this article
This weekend, my colleague, The Hub’s managing editor Harrison Lowman, has a provocative essay in which he describes such an outcome as a “tragedy” and “damn shame.”
I respectfully disagree.
The principal conservative case for defunding the CBC isn’t “revenge,” as he puts it. As I’ve written several times before, it’s because the public broadcaster has outlived its usefulness.
The CBC was established decades ago due to a genuine market failure. Without a public broadcaster, many Canadians wouldn’t have had access to news and entertainment on radio and television.
Today, that’s no longer the case. The CBC is now one of the virtually infinite sources of information and cultural content. This growing competition is reflected in its declining audience. Less than 5 percent of English Canadian viewers watch CBC television, and barely 2 percent are tuning into the CBC News Network.
(These figures are based on “all Canadians viewing all available TV programming at a given time,” meaning the CBC’s viewership as a share of the total Canadian population is far lower.)
When Lowman writes that the plurality of Canadians who say they intend to vote Conservative turn on the CBC, they don’t hear or see themselves, he wrongly assumes that they’re tuning in in the first place. The evidence is clear: not only are they not watching the CBC, but the vast majority of non-Conservatives aren’t either.
Therefore, his diagnosis is a bit off-target. The CBC’s chief problem isn’t its left-wing bias or Catherine Tait herself. If that were it, Lowman would be right that the conversation should focus on reforming the institution.
The real issue is that a combination of technology and evolving consumer preferences has rendered its public purpose obsolete. It can simply no longer justify a claim on scarce government resources. Therefore, as a matter of principle and practicality, the proper response is to defund it.
Nevertheless, as part of his defence of the CBC, Lowman makes a conservative appeal that tearing down institutions is more complex than building them up. Fair enough.
However, conservatism’s inherent aversion to change shouldn’t cause conservatives (or conservatives) to defend institutions that aren’t worth preserving. Just because the CBC has been around a long time isn’t a case for its ongoing existence. Even Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, famously said, “We must all obey the great law of change. Conservatism, in other words, isn’t nostalgic for nostalgia’s sake.
Lowman also warns that the CBC’s disappearance and a broader decline in the traditional media will necessarily result in the loss of “real intelligence, expertise, depth, accuracy, or seriousness” in our news consumption. This, too, risks succumbing to a mix of nostalgia and misplaced confidence in the mainstream media. Its defence of professional journalism is characterized by (Catherine) Tait-ian romanticism.
The notion that the legacy news media is somehow exempt from bias or errors compared to those of us in new media belies the experience of the past several years. The lack of interest in U.S. President Joe Biden’s infirmity seems to be the only most recent and extraordinary example. That an American outlet rather than a Canadian one broke Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “blackface” scandal in 2019 is another. The list goes on and on.
A Poilievre-led government’s defunding of the CBC will undoubtedly engender a backlash from those who view the public broadcaster as part of their cultural or political identity. But it’s the wrong way to think about this issue. It’s not a drama or a tragedy. It’s about policymaking principles and the role of government itself.
The case for the CBC has been superseded. The proper conservative response is to defund it. (emphasis mine)
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