[Jaime_Souviens]

It is true that you cannot eliminate bias.

That's why you need as many news sources as possible.


I don't know why the free competition of ideas is so difficult for people here to grasp.

But what you don't need is one competitor to come to the competition with a bottomless bank account and it's own institutional inclinations to spin things their own way. Nor should the people be compelled to pay for it.

[Scape]

SireJoe SireJoe:

I completely disagree. The CBC is publicly funded, it should give the Canadian people UNBIASED straight news. No spin.

Impossible. No medium is flawless. The CBC does have the ombudsman process that it has to answer to as well as the CRTC guidelines. The damage has already been done and there is no redeeming features for people who see the CBC as pandering to political interest that are diametrically opposed to their own.

As Hardy has pointed out a made in Canada solution for public broadcasting still runs cheaper than other nations. However, even if the CBC is changed into a national 411 on a shoestring budget with all the controversy of the weather channel it still will not quell their contention as long as they pay taxes.

As long as the CBC was a public broadcaster that was seen as providing a national service for that afforded all Canadians access and had a large loyal cadre of supports with deep pockets that also ran the country then that gripe was effectively squelched. Now however with internet, satellite TV/radio and the Liberal party out of power it's not so easy to overlook and hard questions that have been delayed, dismissed or ignored before are now clamoring for a response. That response is not an unreasonable one and when we see biased reporting it only justifies the line of questioning.

If the Conservatives get a majority the CBC will probably be nixed as we know it and we may end up with a charity driven version very similar to what is already running in the US. Some diehards will see that as heresy and others will be seeing it as putting to pasture the white elephant that the CBC has become. It will be the voters, not the views that will decide.

[ridenrain]

"That's why you need as many news sources as possible."

And an iron fisted set of rules to ensure that only thr CRTC/CBC chose what gets on the air.
If freedome were to reign, which I agree with, we would not have the CRTC telling us what to see, read, view.

[Hardy]

Toro Toro:

Hardy Hardy:

You're not paying much at all anyway, CBC's budget was drastically cut several years ago.

German public broadcasting: $85 per capita
BBC: $83 per capita
Japanese public broadcasting: $49 per capita
CBC: $28 per capita

USA $1.33 per capita.

Yep, and if all you want is 20 year old episodes of Sesame Street, and don't mind that places far from major markets get no coverage at all, then I guess you're content. You get what you pay for.

(Here, I get nothing. There is no public TV station within 150 km.)

[Wullu]

Hardy Hardy:

Toro Toro:

Hardy Hardy:

You're not paying much at all anyway, CBC's budget was drastically cut several years ago.

German public broadcasting: $85 per capita
BBC: $83 per capita
Japanese public broadcasting: $49 per capita
CBC: $28 per capita

USA $1.33 per capita.

Yep, and if all you want is 20 year old episodes of Sesame Street, and don't mind that places far from major markets get no coverage at all, then I guess you're content. You get what you pay for.

(Here, I get nothing. There is no public TV station within 150 km.)

Gotta disagree with you here Hardy. PBS puts more original and actually interesting and entertaining programing on the air in one year then the CBC would do in a decade. Innovation, Nova, History Detectives and all the Ken Burns productions by themselves put the CBC to shame.

I contribute regularly to PBS fund raising. Unfortunately I also HAVE to support the CBC.

[Yank-in-NY]

Wullu Wullu:

Gotta disagree with you here Hardy. PBS puts more original and actually interesting and entertaining programing on the air in one year then the CBC would do in a decade. Innovation, Nova, History Detectives and all the Ken Burns productions by themselves put the CBC to shame.

I contribute regularly to PBS fund raising. Unfortunately I also HAVE to support the CBC.

I'm with Wullu, I also contribute to PBS, it has great programming.

Why doesn't the CBC do the same thing? Get funding from the people?

PBS does receive government funding but the majority is donations.

[PluggyRug]

Wullu Wullu:

Gotta disagree with you here Hardy. PBS puts more original and actually interesting and entertaining programing on the air in one year then the CBC would do in a decade. Innovation, Nova, History Detectives and all the Ken Burns productions by themselves put the CBC to shame.

I contribute regularly to PBS fund raising. Unfortunately I also HAVE to support the CBC.

Another regular contributer here.

[Toro]

Wullu Wullu:

Hardy Hardy:

Toro Toro:

Hardy Hardy:

You're not paying much at all anyway, CBC's budget was drastically cut several years ago.

German public broadcasting: $85 per capita
BBC: $83 per capita
Japanese public broadcasting: $49 per capita
CBC: $28 per capita

USA $1.33 per capita.

Yep, and if all you want is 20 year old episodes of Sesame Street, and don't mind that places far from major markets get no coverage at all, then I guess you're content. You get what you pay for.

(Here, I get nothing. There is no public TV station within 150 km.)

Gotta disagree with you here Hardy. PBS puts more original and actually interesting and entertaining programing on the air in one year then the CBC would do in a decade. Innovation, Nova, History Detectives and all the Ken Burns productions by themselves put the CBC to shame.

I contribute regularly to PBS fund raising. Unfortunately I also HAVE to support the CBC.

Not only that, NPR is miles better than CBC Radio.

[Jaime_Souviens]

The American PBS also does NOT run on a shoestring budget. In most cities, the biggest broadcast facilities are the PBS ones, and they often look like office campuses, rather than the cinderblock and ceiling tile facilities most television stations have.

A huge chunk of the Ray Crock / McDonald's fortune just went to public broadcasting.

[Wullu]

Now to see what the ombudsman does. Probably won't bother holding my breath on it though.

[Canadiansis]

ridenrain ridenrain:

With this sort of obvious cut and paste rubbish, it's no wonder the gov. wants more official news and less CBC media spin.

Oh Gawd. THAT is bias?

She said clearly Harper was not swayed by the protesters, and that's what he went on to say..that he would not be "concerned or preoccupied" with reactions in individual communities.

It's funny watching the rightwing think they've identified bias. It's almost always a lack of rightwing bias that they think is leftwing bias.

That's for the laugh. Bias, sheesh man!

[Hardy]

Wullu Wullu:

Hardy Hardy:

Toro Toro:

Hardy Hardy:

You're not paying much at all anyway, CBC's budget was drastically cut several years ago.

German public broadcasting: $85 per capita
BBC: $83 per capita
Japanese public broadcasting: $49 per capita
CBC: $28 per capita

USA $1.33 per capita.

Yep, and if all you want is 20 year old episodes of Sesame Street, and don't mind that places far from major markets get no coverage at all, then I guess you're content. You get what you pay for.

(Here, I get nothing. There is no public TV station within 150 km.)

Gotta disagree with you here Hardy. PBS puts more original and actually interesting and entertaining programing on the air in one year then the CBC would do in a decade. Innovation, Nova, History Detectives and all the Ken Burns productions by themselves put the CBC to shame.

I contribute regularly to PBS fund raising. Unfortunately I also HAVE to support the CBC.

NOVA isn't produced by PBS, it is produced by WGBH Boston and the BBC. It is primarily funded by licensing of the show to networks in over 100 countries, and by fairly huge gifts from Google, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and others.

$1:

NOVA was created in 1974 by Michael Ambrosino in imitation of the BBC television series Horizon, and in the early years many NOVA episodes were simply Horizon episodes licensed to Nova with the narration done in American English rather than British English. That practice continues to this day, though to a lesser extent, and some segments now also go in the other direction.

Additionally, the vast majority of funds for US public television do not come out of the public coffers. The closest station to me, for example, KQED, says

$1:

KQED relies on federal funding, channeled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) for about 8% of its budget.

That's pretty typical of the stations in major markets. The handful of stations in rural markets are much worse off in terms of both financing and programming, but they bring the national average up to 24% public funding, 76% private funding. For public radio the government funding level is less than 2%.

If PBS stations, or US public radio stations have anything good on their airwaves, the government doesn't have much to do with it.

[Wullu]

They did not pay for the Ken Burns documentaries either Hardy. My point is that PBS with minimal public funds puts out MUCH better programing than the CBC does with large public funding. The little news programming they have on PBS is much more in depth on topics of the day, without wasting a single second on what Mel Gibson said.

As for who makes their programming? Very few of the main stream shows you see are actually made by the networks anymore. Studios produce the shows for the networks. PBS just picks insanely better content than any of the other US or Canadian networks.

[Hardy]

Wullu Wullu:

PBS just picks insanely better content than any of the other US or Canadian networks.

Beating out commercial US broadcasting is a cinch, isn't it? The best things on are friggin' cartoons! And if you add in 100 cable or satellite networks, you get maybe 2 more shows that are worth watching. We finally gave up and cancelled our satellite feed, even though we cannot pick up a single station by antenna in our area. The TV is now just for VHS, DVD and Playstation use. But I digress...

PBS programming decisions are made (and paid for) at the local level, which is why PBS sucks in poor rural areas, but is great in major cities. They still have "filler" content a fair amount of the time, but they also have good, big-budget shows like the ones you like, thanks to big donations/writeoffs from corporations, foundations, and viewers. No doubt the need to keep donors and viewers satisfied, to keep the cash flowing in, has something to do with keeping quality high. It may also have something to do with keeping content from being very controversial, or far out of the mainstream.

But CBC does not really resemble CPB/PBS, as the needs of the country are very different. In BC, CBC has 5 TV stations and 7 radio stations to serve 4 million viewers. That's about the same number of viewers as KQED in San Francisco has, and listeners as KQED-FM has. In other words, CBC has a mission to bring content to everyone, even though it means carrying a fixed overhead which is much higher than PBS's. Which gives them far less to spend on programming.

But all of this is neither here nor there. This thread was based on complaints about perceived political slant in CBC news. This is identical to what has been going on in the US, resulting in repeated attempts to eliminate CPB's budget, and in the appointing of political hacks to major positions in the CPB. The ironic thing about it is that, in wealthier, urban areas (which tend, as a semi-accurate generality, to be more leftist), eliminating all CPB funds would not have much impact at all on the stations. What eliminating their budget WOULD do is to kill educational programming in rural farming communities, the same ones who voted a lot of those critics into office. If they do manage to kill CPB, all they will have done is to shoot themselves in the foot.

My wife grew up watching (educational) public TV, and taught herself to read when she was 4. My son did the same, when he was 5. In rural parts of the US (as in much of rural Canada), most of the schools are pretty bad, and the only thing a lot of those areas have going for them is that preschoolers, at least, maintain parity. To try to take that away, because one has a different political slant than the news, is pretty fucked up.

[Jaime_Souviens]

Hardy Hardy:

...My wife grew up watching (educational) public TV, and taught herself to read when she was 4. My son did the same, when he was 5. In rural parts of the US (as in much of rural Canada), most of the schools are pretty bad, and the only thing a lot of those areas have going for them is that preschoolers, at least, maintain parity. To try to take that away, because one has a different political slant than the news, is pretty fucked up.

The old service to the boondocks argument is out of date. As I said before elsewhere, with the internet and satelite, broadcast television is becoming a dinosaur.

I bet rural areas have really bad telegraph service, too. Who cares?