Tag: journalism

October 18, 2025

Last fall, when the CBC seemed destined to fall at the hands of an incoming Conservative government, MediaPolicy published a number of posts on “what is to be done” if the CBC received a stay of execution.

One post (MediaPolicy’s most popular ever) was a guest column from ex-CBC VP Richard Stursberg welcoming the new CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard with some advice for a re-engineered public broadcaster.

One federal election later and we are now getting a clearer picture of what a rethought CBC might look like.

This week Bouchard disclosed an advance copy of her five year plan to Canadian Press which published reports in English and French. The latter story is more in-depth, based on an interview with Bouchard.

Combing through the obligatory recitals for something new, Bouchard’s vision has some promising ideas.

The Plan document makes the familiar aspirational points about connecting Canadians with each other and fostering dialogue. 

More concretely, her Plan commits to increasing CBC’s presence in local communities, “aiming to fund additional overage and hire sufficient journalists to cover 15-20 communities with a population greater than 50,000, that currently have no or little local CBC/Radio-Canada presence.”

Keeping that promise no doubt depends on the Carney government following through on its election promise for $150 million in additional funding.

Then there is the CBC’s platform problem. There are too many of them. But the CBC needs to be on them if it’s going to reach the nation’s audience —-multi regional, multi generational, multi lingual and so on. That’s a resource challenge for Bouchard.

Bouchard says CBC has to follow that national audience, youth in particular on digital platforms. The public broadcaster’s analog-to-digital transformation has been underway for years now —over time, television and radio funding has been cannibalized to support digital, especially the CBC News website. Its YouTube audience has grown quickly and TikTok is a must-do opportunity. Bouchard says the logic of the transition necessarily means cutting costs on other platforms, “stopping or transforming certain activities,” though she doesn’t say where or how much.

As for the CBC’s uneasy relationship with private sector media, always frayed because of CBC’s competition for advertising dollars on television and digital, Bouchard wants to focus on where the CBC can collaborate with local media and independent journalists, but also with the content creators and influencers who are popular with youth.

Bouchard also says the CBC should be “a pollinator, a helper to the [journalism] industry.” She told CP that “when we have services to share or offer, we should offer them on terms that are affordable for these media outlets. We have premises, we have space. We can consider facilitating access to [our] assets at zero cost or at a reduced cost that promotes budgetary balance for our colleagues.”

Finally, she grabs hold of the elephant’s leash: the widespread perception that the CBC isn’t ideologically ecumenical in its editorial curation; that it’s insufficiently conservative by content and temperament.

There will be no pleasing the CBC’s harshest critics, but Bouchard says the CBC wants to make a big effort to win over those who don’t tune in or else “undervalue” (what a euphemism!) the public broadcaster’s content. A step in the right direction is devoting more resources to the West and in rural Canada.

But that doesn’t just require money, it requires a migration of corporate culture.

The five-year Plan is officially unveiled on October 28th.

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There is no sign of the federal government retabling its online harms bill in Parliament. It died on the order table at the last election.

Instead, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s has revived her Bill S-209 which zeroes in on harmful pornography being made available to kids. The debate rages in the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs committee and MediaPolicy reported on it this week.

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The much-slagged Online News Act Bill C-18 took another hit this week from The Hub publisher Rudyard Griffiths who told the Parliamentary Heritage Committee that C-18 protects Google from potential copyright lawsuits for ingesting and repurposing Canadian news content in its AI tools, Overview and Mode, embedded in its search engine. 

The bill, Griffiths told MPs, “requires all news organizations [accepting money under C-18] must make all of their content available to Google. If you are a recipient of funding through the Online News Act, you are unable to prevent Google from scraping behind your paywall, scraping subscriber-only content to serve up in their [large language model]” 

Sections 2 and 26 of the Act grant a copyright waiver for news content that Google “makes available” on Search by “ranking and indexing” so long as Google reaches a compensation agreement with news publishers. 

The Conservatives’ slagger-in-chief of the Online News Act, MP Rachel Thomas, jumped on Griffiths’ claim and posed it as rhetorical question to subsequent witnesses appearing before the Heritage’s committee that is investigating the impact of AI on Canadian media and cultural industries. 

As Canadian news outlets have yet to sue Google for ingesting their news content and repurposing it in Overview and Mode, this remains a hypothetical issue for now. If it got before a judge, the court would have to decide if “ranking and indexing” is what an AI tool does, as opposed to ingesting, summarizing and rewriting from multiple sources. The fact that Mode and Overview are embedded in Search, as opposed to a separate AI app, could be important too.

This idea that that Google might have snagged a windfall immunity from copyright challenges to its content-scraping for AI tools arose previously when Google struck its agreement in June 2024 with the Canadian Journalism Collective for the distribution of Google’s $100 million compensation for Canadian news content, a year after the Overview prototype was launched in the United States.

Taking its cue from section 26 of the Act, Google inserted a clause into its agreement with CJC:

7(h) The Collective will not initiate or participate in, and will include a similar requirement of the Members in the Members Agreement, from initiating or participating in, (i) any bargaining process or (ii) proceeding before the Commission, a mediator, an arbitration panel, or a court of competent jurisdiction, in each case related to (A) any bargaining process in connection with Google, any of its Affiliates, or any Intermediaries pursuant to the Act or the Regulations, or (B) infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act. The Collective will enforce such provision in the Members Agreements to the fullest extent and in a timely manner.

When the Google-CJC agreement was submitted to the CRTC for approval, the Commission appeared to say that the copyright waiver didn’t apply to AI tools so there was no need for action “at this time”: 

Some interveners, including the CP group, Village Media, The Logic, and Unifor, raised issues with clause 7(h) in the Agreement, which forbids news businesses from pursuing Google for “infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act.” The interventions raised concerns that this would limit their ability to enforce their copyright against Google for uses beyond making news content available on Google Search. In particular, interveners were concerned about potential use on DNIs other than Google Search, or used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Google argues that the provision is drafted specifically to reflect the use considered under the Act, namely the making available of news content on the DNI covered by the Agreement.

Section 26 of the Act protects an operator from copyright liability in certain circumstances where its DNI makes news content available. Clause 7(h) of the Agreement extends a similar protection to Google in respect of the making available by Google Search of the news content of news businesses in the collective. (Original Footnote: Clause 7(h) refers to news content made available by “Intermediaries” of Google. Under the Agreement “Intermediaries” is defined as DNIs operated by Google to which the Act applies, which is only Google Search). To the extent that this clause reflects protections from liability set out in the Act, the Commission notes that there is no need for any further action at this time. As a result, the Commission makes no order with respect to clause 7(h) of the Agreement.

So far there’s no copyright lawsuit, so there’s no issue. That might change.

While you’re thinking about news organizations and AI scraping, you might find interesting copyright expert Hugh Stephens’ latest post about the debate that is unfolding at the Heritage committee.

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

Author and CBC Ideas producer David Cayley

September 24, 2025

David Cayley, The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back Again), published by Sutherland House (2025).

The former producer of CBC’s radio show Ideas has a new book that asks and answers a question too often ignored: what is a public broadcaster and why isn’t the CBC behaving like one?

David Cayley’s “The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And how to get it back)” is prosaically titled but elegantly written. Cayley loves ideas of course and his argument is grounded in a series of cerebral set pieces that situate his message that CBC News is too much the storyteller and too little the convenor of open-minded dialogue.

If theories of media communications and linguistics are your thing, Cayley explores and applies the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Noam Chomsky, The Frankfurt School and a host of other thinkers you may never heard of. If you have a taste for this (I do) or consider yourself a left libertarian, there’s lots to eat. Otherwise, you may need to be patient with Cayley.

Each of his excursions into theory provide the context for his core message, which goes something like this:

For decades now, the CBC has strayed from its Parliamentary mandate, for which it is provided with big subsidies, to be the non-judgmental convenor of public debate instead of just another corps of journalists holding inflated ideas of their clairvoyant understanding of Canadians. The CBC suffers from cultural orthodoxy —let’s call it an overweening confidence in the destiny of liberal progressivism— and the newsroom’s belief that it has a special talent for divining truth and misinformation.

It’s a heck of an indictment and the prosecutor makes his case, beginning with Exhibit A: CBC’s coverage of the Covid pandemic and the three-week occupation of downtown Ottawa by the so-called Freedom Convoy, whose participants “manifested a large and vibrant new public,” according to Cayley. 

In his view, the federal government, echoed in its messaging by mainstream media and the CBC, treated the participants in this “generally moderate Freedom Convoy” as enemies of the state and this demonstrates the dangerous polarization of the Canadian polity and the pressing need for more civic dialogue in this country. Cayley just published the relevant book excerpts in the National Post. On the other hand, the CBC Ombud’s judgment is here.

If you choke a bit on that lionization of the Freedom Convoy, you may be recalling that it was riddled with avowed insurrectionists and defiers of public health directives enacted by a democratically elected government in the name of reducing critical infections that threatened to kill untold thousands and overwhelm hospital emergency rooms. The incipient threat of violence associated with clearing the occupation was never far away. 

Cayley is a skeptic of anything described as a consensus by the medical and science establishments and he reminds us of this when he lampoons the worldwide public health response to Covid as “comprised of speculative computer models whose probative value lies just north of tea leaves and bird entrails.” 

He argues that Convoy participants were vindicated in their opposition to Covid vaccine mandates by later findings that vaccines became less effective over time in preventing the spread of the disease. Meanwhile the CBC and other media organizations disparaged the occupiers’ dissent as “misinformation,” unworthy of serious news reporting. 

In this review I am not going to litigate this public health issue, or the openness of media coverage, to a conclusion. But suffice it to say it’s a contentious point on which to rest his argument that the CBC newsroom is swaddled in its own filter bubble.

How the CBC became its own biggest fan, says Cayley, can be traced back to its early departure from a more neutral role in public dialogue and its quest for mojo as an edgy news organization in television shows like the investigative journalism of This Hour Has Seven Days. Despite the fact that Seven Days, which ran only two seasons from 1964 to 1966, was cancelled by CBC management —guaranteeing its legendary status as Canada’s media iteration of the Avro Arrow fighter jet— its strong editorial voice and visually manipulative narrative style exemplifies for Cayley what’s always been wrong about CBC’s news journalism. 

Cayley connects the immense popularity of Seven Days with a “populism” that seats media gatekeepers into the role of the audience’s surrogate, as its watchdog over the powerful, its advocate for justice, or (using just one more metaphor) the high priests of a media church sermonizing the congregation, vindicated in their righteousness so long as attendance remains high.  

What suffers when the CBC insists on being the audience’s surrogate, he says, is the neglect of its core Parliamentary mandate, articulated by the first two words in its mission “to inform, enlighten and entertain.” 

Once upon a time, the old guard in the early CBC were more inclined towards “adult education” and news you can use, rather than theatrical news reporting and laying claim to Canada’s voice. Cayley wants the CBC to get back to that “inform and enlighten.”

Cayley never makes it clear if he wants to blow up CBC’s editorial identity as a news reporting organization entirely or just re-set the newsroom mindset to something better aligned with “inform and enlighten.” He cautions that he is not advocating for a University of CBC. 

Mostly, he critiques the CBC’s workplace culture as suffering from a baked-in orthodoxy of thought. He can be quite funny writing about this: his insider account of CBC management’s top-down reset of its corporate culture is relatable to anyone who has ever endured the same. His cheeky disparagement of Jian Ghomeshi’s popular radio show Q may leave a smile on your face or okay boomer on your lips.

But the prosecutor Cayley gets himself into trouble when he puts forward Exhibit B which purports to quantify the pervasive reach of the orthodoxy inside the newsroom.

He begins by citing a Léger poll commissioned by the Macdonald Laurier Institute  that self-identified leftists outnumber conservatives in Canadian universities by a ratio of nine to one and that this is killing dissent and fostering self-censorship among the minority. From this poll he links to the CBC’s culture, claiming “the case is the same at the CBC, as I have already shown.” 

Well no, he doesn’t show that at all. 

To rebut, let me first note that the Léger poll was non-randomized and relied on voluntary participation. It collected lopsided data culled mostly from faculty in the humanities and social sciences —prolix socialists, all— and under participation from STEM departments.

More to the point, where’s the proof that CBC staff are nine-to-one lefties versus righties? Cayley points to three journalists (Exhibit C), one of whom is neither a journalist nor works for CBC but once wrote an analysis of CBC’s news coverage of Saskatchewan’s transgender laws. 

He notes the troubling story of a veteran CBC Winnipeg reporter Marianne Klowak who quit in disgust at a management kibosh on her reporting that gave voice to vaccine dissenters. 

He cites the departure of CBC Toronto news producer Tara Henley who also quit in disgust, issuing a public indictment of the “cognitive dissonance” created by the CBC newsroom’s groupthink.  

Two journalists (make it three including Cayley) out of 3,000 is not enough evidence to support his claim, but to be fair it would be difficult to rely on anything but anecdotal evidence without the kind of newsroom polling that is impossible to provide.

Still, Cayley once lived in the belly of the beast and is likely on to something. Common sense tells you that a newsroom where most reporters live in three big cities may well list to the leftish values of urban progressivism. 

On the other hand, my own experience of a lifetime representing reporters and journalists —although never at the CBC — convinces me that the left-right thing is for the opinion pages and eclipsed by the dominant spirit in all newsrooms: a Watchdog ideology that posits white-knight journalists at the service of the public by “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Nevertheless, Cayley views the CBC’s self-coronation as public champion as the problem that needs replacement by a more passive role as the convenor of civic dialogue, the aforementioned “inform and enlighten.” 

His intriguing idea is there for your consideration. But in Exhibit D, the prosecuting Cayley again goes too far when he says that “what is more serious is the way the CBC has lost the country’s attention”.

I beg your pardon, it has not. CBC radio is a market leader across the country. Its online news website earns top ratings, vying each year with CTV for the most consumed or most trusted online source. Even CBC’s much maligned television ratings —which lag behind CTV and Global— are weighted down by flagging audiences for CBC’s entertainment programming which must compete head-on during prime time against American hit shows on private Canadian networks and also a little streamer named Netflix. 

Cayley’s overstatements don’t detract from his deepest conviction: that Canada is becoming increasingly polarized, even a “fatally divided polity,” and a public broadcaster needs to engage the participation of all. A more open-minded programming culture of inquiry and intellectual curiosity may be the tonic. More reflection, fewer snap judgments.

Most book-length critiques of CBC tend to focus on news programming rather than television drama, which is too bad (Richard Stursberg being a notable exception). In fact, Chris Waddell and the late David Taras go so far as to recommend jettisoning entertainment programming altogether and saying uncle to Netflix.

Cayley discusses entertainment programming briefly, mostly in the context of the unstoppable tide of American shows that sets the cultural tone for Canadian content.

He calls upon the CBC to rely less on knock-off genres of television drama, set in classic Canadian landscapes, and more on historical and contemporary stories of Canadian self-discovery. Amen to that, but it’s not clear to me that the CBC isn’t already doing this with the limited production budgets that it has. When it wants to step up its game for bigger audiences, it makes co-venture deals with Netflix.

Finally, Cayley says almost nothing about Radio-Canada, an understandable limitation on the scope of his essay. The application of his critique and his solution, the question and answer about the CBC’s public broadcasting mission, might provoke more insights if anyone in Québec were to take up and explore his views.

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