Today's tonic: "Crappy as it is, the @CBC may turn out to be the hero we need," by Rick Salutin

Today's tonic: "Crappy as it is, the @CBC may turn out to be the hero we need," by Rick Salutin in the Toronto Star. 

Here are excerpts below:

"In true melodramatic fashion, now that it’s on the brink, it may’ve become indispensable to our very survival  

"CBC was created in the 1930s by a Conservative government, under prodding from a national grassroots body called the Canadian Radio League whose slogan was, The State or the States.

"That is, unless a publicly funded network was stood up, U.S. networks would fill every Canadian media need and Canadians would functionally, and then literally, become American. Unlike its model the BBC, which had various justifications, the CBC was created as an existential necessity for Canada.

"The ads still exist but have migrated to the gargantuan platforms — Meta, Google, Amazon — on which news is now mainly delivered. In response, the effectively defunded news orgs cut and cut again. CTV recently cancelled most noon and weekend news. In the U.S. a third of newspapers and two-thirds of journalists have vanished since 2005. The financially healthy news ops are mainly those publicly funded and not dependent on ads, like BBC, CBC or Al Jazeera.

"CBC is probably Canada’s strongest and most reliable news source, crappy as it is and has always been. (Excuse me while I shut the window to dim the howls of indignation wafting uptown from the Globe and Mail.)

"I’m aware of dangers in governments exerting influence on news sources dependent on them, though I’ve never understood why that’s worse than the influence corporate advertisers exert in the private ads model. In either case you can erect ‘walls’ between sectors that will succeed only partly, at best.

"Nor do I see how citizen journalists or feisty, somewhat smug outlets like The Line, can fill the gap left by big news orgs. They sometimes seem oblivious to how dependent they are on actual, very costly news to opine about. Without that, they’ll grow ever more implausible and self-absorbed.

"So you need big news ops and today these are adequately funded chiefly by public sources. Ergo, the CBC. Love it or loathe it, democracy may need it, at least for now."

#cdnpoli #media @TorontoStar @CBCNews