TEMPLE OF THE BRIGHTS

The lessons I learned at CBC (Robert Fulford, National Post, September 23rd, 2006)

In their own quiet way, CBC people have become a remarkable cult, the proprietors of a vast reservoir of smugness they are incapable of recognizing as such. For generations, they have been constructing a body of impregnable, self-regenerating opinion. As employees they are pre-selected and their views are pre-recorded, like most of their programs. A single rule governs all personnel selection: Like hires like. That principle, followed for seven decades, produces seamless intellectual agreement in all corners of the staff. Occasionally a few oddballs somehow slip through the screening process. They are allowed to hold unofficial views, providing they have the good sense not to express them. Otherwise, the CBC encourages everyone to speak up.

CBC producers glory in what Wordsworth called "smooth and solemnized complacencies." They believe in universal one-tier medicare, feminism, the Kyoto accord, employment equity and the United Nations. They consider Israel an embarrassing upstart state and remain unimpressed by its accomplishments. They hate the Bush administration but they are routinely anti-American even when someone more agreeable occupies the White House. They don't much like business. In their view the free market causes more trouble than it's worth, and globalization is another word for evil. They believe unions are usually on the right side (even if they think their own unions are led by idiots). They have learned that there is one side to every question.

Much of this will sound like caricature to those who are unfamiliar with life in the CBC. Surely it can't be that bad? But those who get close to it often come away with similar observations. Their prejudices naturally affect their programs, as many viewers and listeners notice. One of my readers wrote to me: "The CBC has conditioned me to expect an anti-business, anti-American view on just about every conceivable issue."

But citizens who complain to management receive CBC-justifying letters that inevitably explain that the CBC is consistently fair. These letters are so long and tedious that they fill with glue, perhaps fatally, the mind of anyone who reads them. I think of this process as Death by Ombud. Its purpose is to ensure that the citizen in question will never, ever write a letter of protest again.

We understand a standard job interview at the CBC consists of two questions: “What contribution do you feel you can make to our organization?” and “What’s the matter with Kansas?”.