Saskboy Strikes Again

Or should that be Strikes Out?

At Macleans Magazine's website a debate about Heather Mallick's abuse of public funds is taking place. Saskboy weighs in, defending his favorite propaganda machine, as usual, by pointing out a typo and extrapolating from that:

"typo alert:

“I told him that I didn’t know him personally, but that I was familiar with her writing.”

Fox News is tabloid journalism at its worst. When paid journalists want to write mean things about someone they should be required to talk to that person to try and get a comment. Otherwise they should admit they are just a simple blogger with a salary."

To which I responded (my words in italics, with quotes of Saskboy's words in regular print):

Note to Saskboy @ 2:29 PM.

"When paid journalists want to write mean things about someone they should be required to talk to that person to try and get a comment." So Mallick talked to Palin, did she?

You should sharpen your debating skills a bit there, my darlin'. And while you're at it be prepared to explain why Mallick refused to come on to Van Susteren's program to defend her position."

Let me further explain to Saskboy how private sector networks actually function and the role played by advertisers in those networks.

1) Advertisers seek large audiences. The larger the better for their bottom line.
2) Advertisers pay big bucks to pitch their products on networks that can promise them large audiences.
3) Advertisers move their money away from networks whose audiences are shrinking and will also think carefully about advertising on networks whose programs solicit many letters complaining about programs that they sponsor.
4) What 1 through 3 imply is that advertisers respond to what viewers want. It's not the other way around. This is as it should be.

CBC and other tax payer funded institutions have a vested interest in keeping in power a political party which is most likely to advocate continued support of its government funded status, and will seek to provide programming that furthers that goal (self-preservation). After all, who wants to lose their job? It's the same dynamic as private networks operate, except that the money, in the CBC's case, is channeled through a political party, not from advertisers responding to the public's demands. Hence, CBCs programming responds to political pressure, not to viewer demand. Consider the fact exposed a couple of years ago by Stephen Taylor about political contributions made by CBC's Board of Directors. A full 82% went to the Liberal Party.

I've watched and listened to CBC for forty years. They have gradually become more and more political and less and less responsive to public opinion which does not support their goal. One of the earliest overtly political programs was "This Hour Has Seven Days" way back in the late 1960s. (The current comedy program This Hour has 22 Minutes is a parody of that program.) Over the years the Liberal Party has been the most strident supporter of the public broadcaster. The CBC has responded by becoming more and more political and more and more strident in pitching of the Liberal/left ideology. It has now developed a habit of going absolutely ballistic when election campaigns suggest that some other party has a good chance of getting to make decisions about the Corporation's fate. (There's that self-preservation motive again.)

The Liberal/Left are willing to pay their wages and their operating costs. The CBC is an employer where many an aspiring journalist with liberal/left leanings want to work and where those who do the hiring seek out like-minded compatriots. The ability to please their most willing funder, the Liberal Party, appears to be a primary consideration when recruiting staff.

Why, then, would they need to respond to public outcries, other than through lame letters explaining and defending their position. It's far more useful to act as the semi-official mouthpiece of their public funder, and to do this, a tried and true tactic is to brand those who complain as any number of currently in vogue non-Liberal/Left epithets.

Little wonder that CBCs discussion boards and call in shows are dominated by opinion from the left of the political spectrum. No one else is listening, viewing or reading. We, on the political right, have taken our "eyeballs" and "ears" somewhere else. If we had the option of taking our money with us, CBC would have to respond the same way the private sector responds; by adjusting their programming to regain the lost revenue, or focusing only on their remaining audience and being satisfied to fill a niche market.

Let me be very clear. There is a place for Liberal/Left points of view in a democracy. It is one of many niches that should be filled. I would have no problem with them focusing on their remaining audience, but the problem is, that as taxpayers who do not hold these views, we should not be compelled to pay for the organs that publicize them. That's undemocratic.

Saskboy, you pretend to know so much about the democratic process, yet you continue to uphold the notion that government paid television and radio (and websites) that consistently broadcast political opinion is "democratic". Regardless of what political line a broadcaster takes, it should not be done on the taxpayers dime. It is all too easy for the government to become the guardian and sole arbitrator of political thought when they pay the shot. We are already seeing the consequences of that with our Human Rights Commissions. People all over the world are watching as we sink further and further into a frightening place from which there is no easy return. The CBC must be privatized or its political programming substantially curtailed.