Have you heard the good news, Fort Mac? The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is expanding its bureau in the northern Alberta city, to peddle its anti-fossil fuel, pro-Liberal agenda in an area that produces the majority of Canada’s oil and hasn’t elected a Grit since Elvis Presley topped the charts.
The public broadcaster announced on Wednesday that it will hire up to 30 journalists to work in “underserved communities” throughout Canada. Expanding local news coverage is, of course, a good thing, but the only reason the CBC is able to do this is because it is pilfering an estimated $7 million a year from the $100 million that Google agreed to pay Canadian news publishers on an annual basis to remain exempted from the Online News Act.
In making the announcement, CBC editor-in-chief Brodie Fenlon said the public broadcaster decided to “dedicate the new funding to the hiring of local journalists in underserved communities.” But if that’s true, it means that each new hire will be paid $228,666 a year (once admin fees are subtracted from the total payout) — 340 per cent more than what the average Canadian journalist makes, according to glassdoor.ca.
Or perhaps some of the money will be set aside to fund the $18.4 million in bonuses the CBC paid its executives last year, after laying off 800 workers throughout the country, or to underwrite more CanCon that few people have any interest in watching. Some of it will surely go toward beefing up vanity projects like its Gem streaming service, which the broadcaster says will be adding more local news streams.
Either way, Canadians should be outraged that a Crown corporation that already receives around $1.5 billion a year in taxpayer funds would be included in a deal intended to compensate news organizations for Google’s use of their intellectual property.
Given that the CBC’s public subsidy represents nearly 75 per cent of its income, a good case can be made that its journalism should be owned by the public — not used to take money out of the pockets of private media companies that are already at a disadvantage competing against a Crown corporation that competes for the same dwindling base of ad revenue, yet can afford not to charge people subscription fees due to its taxpayer funding.
Writing in his “Editor’s Blog,” Fenlon argued that, “Local news and local journalism are endangered species, especially in smaller communities, as private media retreat under financial duress.” This is true. But part of the reason why private media companies have been forced to pull out of smaller markets is because they have faced unfair competition from the public broadcaster.
The CBC would like Canadians to believe that all the markets it’s expanding into are barren news deserts, but that is not the case. Fort McMurray, for example, is served by our esteemed sister paper, Fort McMurray Today, along with private radio and television stations that offer local news coverage. Residents of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., also get strong local news coverage from the Sault Star and SooToday.com.
Having the public broadcaster compete in the same markets will only serve to further the decline of private media in these communities, which is perhaps exactly what the CBC’s executives want, as it allows them to continue to justify the Crown corporation’s existence — and continue to collect their bonuses.
If we’re going to have a public broadcaster — and there’s no particularly good reason why we should — it should be prohibited from collecting ad revenue, and its product should be made available for others to reuse under a Creative Commons license and be distributed as widely as possible. Yet despite Fenlon’s boasts that CBC Gem will be adding new local news streams, the Crown corporation still wants Canadians to pay an extra $5.99 a month to access CBC News Network.
This is a slap in the face to the hard-working Canadians who are already forced to fund the channel, along with the rest of the CBC’s bloated bureaucracy, just as the idea that the public broadcaster should be entitled to compensation for Google’s use of content paid for by Canadian taxpayers is a gut-punch to the private media companies that work tirelessly to provide Canadians with top-notch local news coverage, in a marketplace that’s rigged against them.