“The CBC will often tell WHAT is happening—however you must use your own judgment about WHY it is happening…SCRAP the CBC and you are left with local growthist boosterism…(and no) ringside seat to the approaching apocalypse.” Peter Salonius
But that’s just it. The CBC is an infallible guide as to what is not happening in the world –or at home. It is like a weathervane pointing in one direction and I know therefore that the wind is blowing in another direction. The danger is, the public has been spoon-fed information from Mother Corp for so many generations that they have come to accept it as gospel. Pull the plug and maybe, just maybe, these people might have to shop the internet, compare sources and learn to become smarter information consumers.
The CBC does not tell us what is happening because its focus is selective. In covering the South African riots, or the French riots for that matter, it looks upon the thousands of rioters as an abstraction and instead focuses on the humanity of individual immigrant victims as a human interest story. Thus social policy is constructed on the basis of poignant individual case histories rather than the broad effects that immigration is having on the resident population.
When the CBC covers illegal immigration in America, its documentary will train attention on a hardworking single Hispanic mother working for a cleaning company in a Los Angeles hospital. But it won’t interview the Americans who lost their jobs when the cleaning company laid them off to hire the cheaper Mexican illegals. No doubt a single mother was among them too. CBC journalist Mark Kelly is the master of this kind of journalism, the kind Garrett Hardin spoke of when he wrote, “Apparently, it is easier for the media to photograph scenes that suggest the suffering of new immigrants than it is to prove, photographically, that widely dispersed, job losses have a common cause.”
The CBC has had a “ringside seat” to the approaching apocalypse, and has sung us a lullaby. On March 14.2007 the Canadian census report revealed that Canada suffered the worst population growth rate of all G8 countries : 1.08% per year for the last 5 years. The CBC, like all other media, treated it like an achievement. They rated “winners” (eg. provinces or cities like BC that gained people) and “losers” (provinces or cities which lost people like Saskatchewan).
A look at how CBC newscasters choose their synonyms demonstrates that it is through language that growthism makes its most incursive, dangerous and decisive intervention in what an audience perceives to be real. The reality of environmental Armageddon as seen through the rose coloured glasses of the CBC, is tinted with phrases like “stagnant” instead of “stable” in referring to an economy or a population that has leveled off. And of course, they talk about an economy suffering from “sluggish” housing starts rather than farmland that is finally enjoying some relief from the urban sprawl that issues from all those housing starts.
There are alternative ways of looking at reality and the CBC way has proven no different than the conventional growthist one. Case in point. Rex Murphy’s flag-ship radio phone-in show, “Cross Country Check-Up”, held a program in the winter of 2007 on alarming urban growth, but never questioned its necessity. In fact, the program ended with one line. “It is not whether we grow that is important, but how we grow.”
One would have hoped that a broadcasting system funded by taxpayers would be more receptive to feedback. But in the Anglophone world that apparently has not been the case.
Our experience in Canada, the experience of Jack Parsons in the UK (cf. Treason of the BBC) and that of Mark O’Connor with the ABC (cf. This Tired Brown Land) seems to indicate that generically they are unresponsive and have betrayed their mandate to represent every thread of opinion in the land.
They all seem to have adopted the CBC Motto:
We respect your right to an opinion, But we just don’t want to hear it
And we’ll make bloody sure No one else hears either!
Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, B.C.
