Tag: BBC

November 15, 2025

“I lie the truth,” American film director Oliver Stone once said of his controversial 1991 epic “JFK,” packed as it was with apocrypha and might-have-been speculation.

So did the BBC in its 2024 documentary on America’s insurrection day, January 6th, 2021, “Trump: A Second Chance?”

By now, most have heard about the BBC’s splicing of video clips that juxtaposed Donald Trump urging the crowd to march on the US Capitol with his later suggestion that they “fight like hell” against the Congressional confirmation of Joe Biden’s election victory. He made the “fight” comment 20 times during the speech, but the two comments in the edited clip were spoken 50 minutes apart. 

Omitted in the report was Trump’s suggestion they protest peacefully.

Also omitted was Trump telling the crowd that his Vice President Mike Pence must be stopped from certifying the election results, “We’re just not going to let that happen.”

As the crowd became a mob and surged violently into the Capitol building, some avowing to find Pence and murder him before he could certify, the outgoing President held back for two hours before making a public request to end the violent occupation.

The BBC rightly apologized to Trump for the video editing —-after a leaked document and public pressure made it impossible to do otherwise. The Beeb qualified its mea culpa by suggesting the President had not made a “direct call for violent action.” 

The broadcaster denied defamation but Trump is filing a lawsuit.

It didn’t take long for Canadian commentators to apply the moral of the story to our own public broadcaster, the CBC. 

The Hub’s Full Press podcast offers an intelligent review. 

Globe & Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski did the same, writing about recent events in which CBC management’s handling of an ugly anti-Semitic on-air report from a Radio-Canada foreign correspondent remains in blow-over mode.

The fates of the suspended reporter and the unsuspended news host who ignored the remarks are still unclear.

CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard told a Parliamentary committee that the public broadcaster’s response ends at its full and immediate public apology, not an investigation into how deep such anti-Semitic views do or don’t run in the newsroom.

Best guess: the spotlight will return to this issue when the CBC Ombud makes a report. 

In the interest of equal time, let’s chalk another stroke on the wall to mark Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre’s most recent swipe at the CBC when asked a question he would rather not answer (“aren’t you with the CBC?”). If we’re going to hold the CBC responsible for its public reputation, we should hold everyone accountable. 

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For and CBC doubters and defunders, here’s an insightful and engaging Front Burner podcast featuring the public broadcaster’s three on-the-ground Washington correspondents, Canadians explaining to Canadians what Americans are doing to Canadians.

That’s what you lose without a CBC.

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There’s a lot of media policy cooking in Australia lately.

A report in The Guardian says that the Labor government is going to move forward with incentives —-i.e. monetary penalties—- to lever Meta into reinstating news content on Facebook and Instagram and return to the bargaining table with news publishers to reinstate mandatory news licensing payments, regardless of Meta’s news ban. 

The idea is to set the fine for Meta’s non-compliance at a level just above the dollar value of its expired agreements with news publishers, something that The Guardian cites as 1.5% of Meta’s annual Australian revenues. The Labor legislation is targeted for 2026. 

If the Australians are baring more teeth than Canada has on our own Meta news ban, they are showing a little less on their new legislation that parallels Canada’s Netflix bill, the Online Streaming Act.

As MediaPolicy noted last week, the new legislation would set a spending quota for Netflix and the major streamers to make “AustralianCon” at either 10% of their local content budget or else 7.5% of their Australian revenues.

The 10% figure replicates the AuzCon spending that Australian-owned broadcasters obey for television dramas. By comparison, Canada requires our major domestic broadcasters spend 30% of revenues on Canadian content, including a 5% envelope for drama. 

Another interesting piece of Australian context is that the streamers’ voluntary spending on AuzCon is over $200 million annually, slightly in excess of the Labor government’s estimates of mandatory spending under the new bill.

A government backgrounder keeps reiterating that the mandatory spending it has in mind would be a “guaranteed” spending. The concern is that Netflix and other global streamers might scale back their Australian spending in response to Hollywood’s contraction of content spending.

As an unregulated English-language market, Australia would be a logical place to start cutting. Better to lock in current levels of streamer spending.

Meanwhile, CRTC watchers in Canada will be interested to learn that the Commission is releasing its ruling on video streaming this coming week.

The decision may order Netflix and the foreign streamers to spend more on Canadian programming. It may also change regulatory rules for Canadian broadcasters who have asked for fewer CanCon responsibilities.

New obligations for the streamers will be closely tied into what the CRTC has to say about the ownership of copyright and intellectual property in Canadian dramas that the streamers will have to buy to fulfill a quota for local content.

The Commission must decide whether to mirror federal rules for CanCon financing that make the payment of crucial television subsidies conditional upon a Canadian producer owning the long term copyright in a show.

The global streamers want the option to demand Canadian producers sell them the copyright if the streamers are going to be compelled by the Commission to spend on CanCon.

Another wild card in the deck is the yet to be released ruling from the Federal Court of Appeal on the Commission’s June 2024 down payment of regulatory obligations for the streamers.

Heard by the court in June 2025, the appellant video and audio streamers are challenging the CRTC’s assessment of an annual cash contribution of $200 million to various media funds that channel the money to the financing of Canadian programming and music.

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There is an update in the Globe & Mail reporting on the US lawsuit against Cohere that alleges the Canadian owned AI company is ripping off copyrighted content, even behind paywalls, from major North American media companies including the Toronto Star.

A New York judge rejected Cohere’s preliminary argument that the plaintiffs’ news reporting is so puréed in the AI summary that there is no “copy” being made. The case will proceed to trial.

In Germany, a lower court ruled in favour of music companies who sued OpenAI on the grounds that its ChatGPT application violated copyright by scraping lyrics content.

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This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.