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Ticked-off hockey fans, and 1.4 billion other reasons to defund the CBC

The CBC got into trouble last week, when it broadcast the finale of the Eastern Conference between two American NHL teams, but not the last two games of the Western Conference Final, which featured the Edmonton Oilers as the last Canadian team standing. That got folks upset, including Conservative Party Deputy Leader Tim Uppal, who tweeted:

“The Edmonton Oilers are the only Canadian team left in the playoffs. Despite receiving $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars this year, CBC decided not to air the Oilers games. Instead, CBC aired a Just For Laughs replay. It’s time to defund the CBC. #DefundCBC

It’s not just those two missed games – there are 1.4 billion other reasons the CBC should be defunded. And they’re not the only reporters the government is funding – legacy media outlets like the National Post and the Globe and Mail divvied up approximately $885 million taxpayer dollars over the course of the last 5 years. The CBC took in more than $5 billion tax dollars over that 5-year span, and also more than $2.5 billion in ad dollars. How much of that advertising revenue could online independents like the Western Standard or True North have had coming their way if they weren’t competing against these taxpayer-propped-up giants? We haven’t even gotten into the CBC’s ”Pride” pushing, abortion-affirming, and transmutilation-defending agenda. On these three fronts, and more, the CBC is opposing God Himself.

Then there’s the enormous problem of the government subsidizing the very media that is supposed to hold it to account. We can be thankful that some independent outlets do still exist, and the Opposition Leader has learned how to use his YouTube channel to sidestep the media altogether to get his message out. But it shouldn’t surprise us if the CBC and the now paid-for legacy media is reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them.

So yes, let’s defund the CBC.

And let’s do more than that. As the Fraser Institute reported in their “Federal Support for Journalism” study, the government’s attempts to support journalism haven’t even preserved journalists’ jobs. Since 2011 more media outlets have closed each year than new outlets have begun. The Liberals’ most recent “media-supporting” effort, Bill C-11, has hurt rather than helped. It was supposed to support legacy media outlets by squeezing money out of social media heavyweights like Google and Meta whenever they listed a Canadian news article. While the government did get some money from Google, Meta decided that, instead of paying, they’d simply get rid of all the Canadian news off of Facebook. That hurt Canadian news organizations, big and small, by shutting off access to their own social media audience.

So the government should defund the CBC, but it shouldn’t stop there. The government needs to stop meddling in the media in every other way too. Who knows what kind of media we might get if only open, fair competition were allowed to exist.

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Media bias

Dear Mainstream Media: 4 strikes and you’re out!

Like many of you, I grew up with the mainstream media being a part of our household. We got the Globe and Mail delivered daily; when they displayed too obvious a bias in favor of same-sex “marriage,” my dad switched to the National Post. We got TIME magazine weekly. When I moved out on my own for the first time – from Chilliwack to Calgary, Alberta – the first thing I did was get a subscription to a newspaper. But as the years went on, my “take it with a grain of salt” attitude to the mainstream media evolved into overt distrust. The feeble attempts at fairness largely disappeared, and brazen cheerleading for the movements destroying our society took its place. Strike 1: Hating babies One of the first breakdowns of trust between Christians and the press came with the issue of abortion. Christians view abortion for precisely what it is: an act of violence that ends the life of a developing human being. With only a few notable exceptions, the mainstream media in North America backed the abortion rights movement and opposed the pro-life movement. Dehumanizing language was deliberately used when referring to pre-born children. The issue, in most cases, was presented as a political struggle between the “pro-choice” movement and the pro-life movement, with the main characters – the pre-born babies at the center of the struggle – left entirely out. This bias has only grown exponentially, especially in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturn. The media deliberately misrepresents pro-lifers; it seeks to portray the movement in as negative a light as possible, and it actively ignores malfeasance on the pro-abortion side. I have read stories about people I know, in which I am quoted, that are obviously false. To read a story in the mainstream press about abortion is to see journalists assert, with complete confidence, that the baby in the womb is not, in fact, a baby. It is to read “fact-checkers” debunk objectively true claims on behalf of the abortion industry, and to see the pro-life movement portrayed as misogynists, religious fanatics, and, frequently, white supremacists. The mainstream media’s rule is “if it bleeds, it leads” – except when it comes to abortion. In fact, when David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress released bombshell videos in 2015, proving that the abortion industry was trafficking in baby body parts, the media promptly launched a massive investigation…into the Center for Medical Progress. The reality is that when you read a story about abortion in the media, it is almost certainly packed with disinformation and outright lies. Strike 2: Hyping hedonism It isn’t just abortion, of course. On virtually every issue, the mainstream press takes the side of the sexual revolutionaries – and when churches are covered by the media, it is almost always a story about a conflict between Christianity and the sexual revolution. It is not news that Christian institutions generally adhere to a Biblical view of sexuality, for example, but Canada’s state broadcaster and major newspapers treat us to an endless stream of breathless coverage reminding us of the fact. You have probably never heard about the community service work done by staff and students at Redeemer University. You probably have heard the stunning revelation that, as one CBC headline put it, this “private Christian university says no sex outside heterosexual marriage.” Progressive politicians and their media allies have put a lot of elbow grease into stereotyping conservative Christians, and it has been effective. While Christians are condemned for opposing an increasingly radical LGBT agenda, the press – especially Canada’s taxpayer-funded state broadcaster – has bent over backward to condemn parental rights, defend drag shows targeted at children, and justify a pornographic sex ed curriculum. Strike 3: Doubling down on death The same is true for the issue of euthanasia. With one exception – Andrew Coyne, who was then a columnist for the National Post and now writes for the Globe and Mail – the media was entirely in favor of legalization, and treated dissent as unworthy of coverage. I remember tuning into the CBC for a debate on euthanasia, only to discover that the debate was not between someone who opposed it and someone who supported it – it was between an advocate of the incoming law and a fellow who didn’t think it went far enough. In short order, the media wasn’t even calling it euthanasia or assisted suicide anymore – they’d switched the terminology to the sterile, soothing-sounding “medical aid in dying,” conveniently shortened to “MAID.” Only when the horror stories pro-lifers predicted began surfacing in rapid succession did some media outlets begin asking if we had perhaps “gone too far” – and none admitted that perhaps the pro-life advocates they’d ignored were correct. Strike 4: Celebrating castration But the nail in the coffin of the media’s credibility – not only amongst Christians, but in the broader public, as well – was their whole-hearted embrace of the transgender agenda. Prestigious media organizations with Pulitzer Prizes and foreign correspondents in a dozen countries began to publish articles with phrases such as “her penis” and “his breasts.” Scores of “human interest” stories about “pregnant men” – I’m not making that up – were (and are) published with full photo essays. The claims of the transgender movement on everything from suicidal ideation to the acceptability of subjecting gender dysphoric minors to double mastectomies and castration were accepted at face value, regardless of how ludicrous they were or how much contradictory evidence existed. Most damning were the countless stories about allegedly female criminals featuring photographs of ugly, snaggle-toothed men guilty of often horrifying violence against real women. Nearly all of them went viral, and the universality of the mockery was devastating for the media’s credibility. Trust in the press can survive mistakes – even catastrophic ones. But it is a different scenario entirely when the press consistently challenges its viewers and readers with obvious lies and asks them: “Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?” I’ve even seen mainstream journalists such as Jonathan Kay (of Quillette and the National Post) make the observation on Twitter – the reason transgenderism is so toxic, he noted, is that “ isn’t just destroying trust in the educational/political elites when it comes to gender. It’s destroying trust, full stop. If elites…think waving a fairy wand turns boys into girls, what other crap do they believe?” Precisely. Over the past several decades, the mainstream press has revealed that it serves as the propaganda arm of the Sexual Revolution – and in the last ten years, it has abandoned reality entirely. You’re outta here This is undoubtedly a serious issue, because in the vacuum left behind, many people merely hunt for sources that back their preferred narrative on a given issue and independent platforms deliberately cater to this. I agree with the mainstream journalists who worry that the collapse of trust in the Fifth Estate is a huge problem. It just happens to be a problem of their own making. Jonathon Van Maren has written for the National Post, National Review, First Things, LifeSiteNews, and many other publications. He blogs at TheBridgehead.ca....