The poor woman. A lady phoned just after 8pm. I was in a foul mood and on my computer. I growled “Is this a marketing survey ?!”. She answered, “Well, I am from the “Friends of Canadian Broadcasting”, we are an organization to defend the CBC… I allowed her about 20 seconds until she said “Are you interested in helping to save the CBC”? “No!”, I began in a loud voice, “I spend my waking hours thinking of ways to DESTROY the CBC. It is a politically correct mouthpiece of favoured identity groups with whom they make corrupt arrangements…..”
She remained in shock while I ranted on in a spiel that must have lasted 5 minutes before she could break in with a question. I told her about the CBC, the BBC and the ABC, and while I was talking I called up the dozen rants against Mother Corp. on my folder. She became interested to know, as an individual, the titles of each of these so that she could google them. I told her to read Jack Parson’s “Treason of the BBC” to learn about his case study of biased and myopic journalism that seems to be the template for us too.
At the end when things calmed down, she said, “ Well, I must go, but how should I summarize your comments? I replied thusly. “Proportional representation is the buzz-phrase of politics. And in commerce companies are told to hire a workforce that reflects the diversity of the public they serve. If police forces and fire departments must represent diversity, then surely the CBC should do as well. But not ethnic or cultural diversity so much, but the diversity of opinions that exist in Canada. The FULL spectrum of opinions. And spokesmen for causes deemed politically incorrect by CBC producers should not be invited to forums just to be ambushed and outnumbered four to one by the other side.” I told her about several examples of this. I also mentioned that if she read “Conspiracy of Silence at the BBC, the ABC and the CBC”, she would realize that it was not a Canadian phenomena but a formula and pattern of state broadcasting in Anglophone countries. In other words, the problem is endemic to state broadcasting which is a captive of powerful lobbies nurtured or promoted by the government. We need public broadcasting, not state broadcasting. And not journalists and producers who are recruited from the graduates of the mind-bending schools of PC journalism. If the CBC cannot be reformed, it should be scrapped. Rather uninformed than misinformed. Better to leave people to their own brains rather than have them downloaded from CBC Pravda in Toronto.
She got the full earful, and I was fortunate to be able to quickly glance at the text of one or two of my essays to make my words flow. But I didn’t need to touch base with notes. The venom just poured out.
I wonder to what purpose my tirade will be put when she is de-briefed by her superiors. My thought was, why don’t groups such as ours coalesce with other shunned voices to form a lobby like “Foes of Canadian Broadcasting” or some other label? A “Reform the CBC” coalition. Reform it or scrap it.
P.S. : I wished that she could have seen my customized bumper sticker: “Do You Let the CBC Do Your Thinking For You? Or Do You Prefer Reality?” Or my customized T shirt. Front: “CBC: Manufactured Consent”. Back “We at the CBC respect your opinion. We just don’t want to hear it, and we’ll make damn sure our listeners won’t either.”
I compose and design bumper sticker slogans on line (bumperart.com) and compose and design T shirt slogans online at Customlink. I have about 100 bumper stickers and 30 T shirts to rotate to vent my displeasure. Local editors may keep me from their pages, but they cannot stop their readers from noticing my slogans when I am walking about the island. Coming soon, I expect, will be a by-law against displaying “offensive” (ie. non-sanctioned) slogans that don’t match the PC party line. Perhaps the town council of Peterborough, England will help our locals compose the right wording for it.
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, B.C.
