Criticism of the CBC

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has been accused of many things including political and cultural bias.

Historically, there has been criticism of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for various policies or perceived biases in politics and news coverage since its inception and more recently over its coverage of events in the Middle East.

Political bias
Numerous members of the Canadian Alliance Party complained of biased CBC reporting against their party in the 2000 Canadian federal election. Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is often critical of the CBC, but rarely over matters of bias.

Critics, often led by private media, sometimes accuse the network of cultural elitism, liberal bias, or bias in favour of the Liberal or New Democratic Parties of Canada.

Advertising Dollars
The CBC is also sometimes thought to have an unfair economic advantage in the Canadian television marketplace because it competes with private broadcasters for advertising dollars while receiving government funding. Conservative think tanks such as the Fraser Institute have frequently criticized this arrangement, and say it results in journalism that favours the political party willing to allocate it the most funds.

Public versus private ownership
Controversies within the broadcast industry will often ensue when the CBC launches new services in areas where private broadcasters already do business or wish to do business. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which decides which new broadcast licenses will be granted, is, like the CBC, a government body. The head of the CBC and the commissioners of the CRTC are all selected by the Prime Minister, causing some private broadcasters to suspect favouritism for the CBC.

Many believe the CBC acts as a necessary left-wing counterbalance to what they perceive to be the big business right-wing bias of private networks, or that it preserves Canadian culture against the homogenizing influence of rebroadcast American programming. Canadians continue to poll in favour of maintaining public funding to the CBC, with 89% of those polled in a May 2004 survey supporting continued funding at or above current levels. As it was initially conceived, the CBC ensures that Canadian stations act as more than just affiliates broadcasting foreign content. The Canadian government attempts to balance funding inequities between private and public networks by providing large subsidies for private production of Canadian content.

For instance, the CBC was given the first license for an all-news specialty service, CBC Newsworld. As with other specialty services, that decision automatically precluded any other new service, with a similar format of news and analysis, from launching. When the privately owned headline news service CTV Newsnet launched in 1997, it was restricted by condition of licence to using a constant 15-minute news cycle. Critics of the CBC contend CRTC favouritism is shown by the fact that CBC Newsworld has not faced equal threats of sanctions over its airing of programs outside the “all-news” format, such as the BBC version of Antiques Roadshow. In fact, Roadshow, which may be classified as a documentary series, does technically fall within Newsworld’s permitted range, while comedy series such as This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Royal Canadian Air Farce were removed from the Newsworld schedule in 1997 after complaints from private broadcasters, despite both programs’ focus on current events.

The CBC had directly intervened in every application by CTV to change the restrictions on Newsnet up to the , which largely removed the restrictions in 2005. However, the CBC is not unique in this, as it is common for broadcasters to intervene against one another in licensing decisions. The Canadian market is relatively small and some broadcasters feel it cannot support the free-market approach of the U.S. They argue it is better to favour a specific broadcaster in certain areas, so at least one Canadian channel will be able to prosper.

Other allegations of favouritism have centred on, for instance, the awarding of prized radio frequencies (i.e. for CBLA-FM in Toronto). By the same token, though, not all of the CBC’s applications are automatically approved; at one point the CBC asked for use of a similarly prized Montreal frequency in order to begin a third French radio network, but was denied in favour of a private broadcaster. Many groups that receive favourable decisions by the CRTC have been accused at some point of having secured favouritism from the commission.

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