On weekday nights at 6:00 p.m., the CBC news comes on my TV station in Toronto. At one time long ago, I turned it on right on the hour to get the most important news stories.
In the last few years, I began to turn it on at 6:10 and now I am up to 6:22 p.m. before I turn on this one hour long newscast.
My reason is that the first 22 minutes are mostly taken up with shootings, knifings, death, mayhem, police reports on the above and very occasionally with the news stories I would find of real interest on politics, city services, finances, government or human interest.
I tune in generally right after a commercial and then get the weather report followed by everything else. Most evenings, the shootings are done by 6:22 but not always.
Government bungling
Curating my news in this manner got me thinking about other set pieces that one sees on the government funded CBC news. One repeating genre is the heartwarming ‘good news’ item. But another is a story on government.
Most often the piece (or pieces) on government are about government ‘bungling’: trains that don’t work, cost overruns, payments for services not delivered, overpaid intransigent bureaucrats, inflation, high interest rates, road closures, traffic snarls, silly forms, unpaid benefits, high pensions, debt, deficits and the like.
Once I stopped watching the daily shootings, I started to concentrate on the government bungling stories and realized quickly that they are often, if not always, a daily item.
At the same time, I was watching how Mr. Trudeau was being blamed for almost all aspects of government bungling in the House of Commons by the official opposition. Whether the Prime Minister’s fault or his level of government or anything he had any control over, the message was the same: Trudeau’s fault.
But it did not stop there. We started to hear about informal armies of people on-line and on Parliament Hill at the ready to accuse governments and their supporters of almost everything in the public sphere that goes wrong.
And if you listen to the news, the only things you hear about when it comes to government is things being bungled or going wrong. Right now, the official opposition has a government funded mouthpiece to amplify and endlessly repeat stories of mistakes being made.
And the public buys it as recent polls indicate.
But if the official opposition wins the next election as they are poised to do, this still leaves the CBC reporting a steady diet of government bungling. The state sponsored bungling stories will, over time, start to belong to the new government in power.
Now I understand why they want to defund the CBC.