I hope that, like me, you’re enjoying the brilliant self-parody CBC’s The National has been running as the holidays approach. Before going any further, however, I have to say, as one must these days, that this column is being written by a senior white male settler who is therefore irredeemably Privileged, Prejudiced and Past it. (I’m not actually a “settler” in the sense of having come here in a Red River wagon and broken ground to start subsistence farming on land I stole myself, but rather in that my grandparents came over on steamships just after the turn of the 20th century and settled in the country’s then-metropolis, Montreal. The rest is, as they say, neo-colonialist history.)
The New York Times claims it provides “all the news that’s fit to print.” The National produces “all the news that fits in the very narrow ideological spectrum of downtown-urban wokeness.”
There are four essential components to The National these days: something climate, something anti-Trump, something Lefty-heroic, and something Indigenous. Other news is allowed but these seem obligatory. Tuesday night’s edition was exemplary.
Susan Ormiston provided a feature piece on Jane Fonda. Yes, that Jane Fonda, who at 82 is channelling Greta Thunberg by taking Fridays off to protest climate change and its corporate enablers. Jane Fonda is definitely a woman of the Left. Why her views are of interest is not so clear. She is a celebrity, if now a minor one. But you’d think a serious state broadcaster wouldn’t cater to celebrity, a problem Ormiston finesses by asking about the role of celebrity in protest, to which Ms. Fonda provides the very sensible answer that if she weren’t famous, CBC wouldn’t be talking to her. Good for her. Self-understanding doesn’t escape everyone on The National.
Given Fonda’s views on some past matters, however, it’s not clear why we should take her advice on climate. There was a time, Ormiston mentions, when she was known as “Hanoi Jane,” for having visited Hanoi during the war and being filmed beside anti-aircraft guns, maybe one that shot down the late Sen. John McCain. Ormiston mentions, twice, that Fonda has apologized for that but when she asks about it Fonda says what she learned from the experience is “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Not quite repentant.
What we’re supposed to take from the piece is that even at 82 it’s good to hold fast to your beliefs. Fine. Good point. But why is it completely unimaginable that The National would have made it by profiling a superannuated right-wing war-horse? It’s the fact of having beliefs we’re supposed to be impressed with, isn’t it?, not the actual beliefs themselves. In the end we learn Fonda’s protests will soon end as she leaves Washington, D. C., and heads back to Hollywood to tape another season of her current show. No mention of whether she’ll be getting there in a sailboat, like Greta, or by bike or however.
That was a Left/climate story. The pure climate story Tuesday was about Liverpool, N.S., a town in danger of disappearing because of rising sea levels. The story featured neat virtual reality graphics showing how the water will move in and which buildings will get swamped first. But there was no actual data on historical trends: How much flooding has Liverpool seen in the past and how much more is it seeing now? Yes, “some” climate research says the sea could be six metres higher by the time climate stabilizes, a fact reporter Tom Murphy illustrates by recounting it from a rooftop. But even the UN IPCC forecast says just 20-39 inches by 2100 even under an extreme-emissions scenario.
The anti-Trump something? Yet another breathless story about the “historic” impeachment vote. Please, I’m a never-Trumper, too, but CBC is more all-in than even standard issue U.S. Trump-thumpers, who understand the House will say Guilty, the Senate will say Innocent, both sides will take maximum partisan advantage and in November the people will decide. What would have been the CBC line if, just a few months from our own October election, Justin Trudeau had been impeached over SNC-Lavalin, which involved, not nudging a foreign government, but subverting time-honoured legal traditions? I suspect it would have been: let the voters decide.
Finally, a trifecta of sorts, the story of how a Manitoba Indigenous woman’s beaded amulet in honour of murdered and missing Indigenous women made it to Whoopi Goldberg’s bodice on her TV talk show The View. Goldberg is a noted woman of the American Left and a ferocious anti-Trumper. The only thing missing was a climate angle.
The truly shocking thing about the piece, however, was Adrienne Arsenault noting at the end of it that Donald Trump had recently authorized an executive branch task force to look into missing and murdered native American women. When The National says something nice about the, yes, generally loathsome American president, you almost fall off your couch.
Despite the image of ourselves presented on CBC, only a minority of Canadians actually have a university degree and only a minority of them received their degree after climate, identity and “social justice” — as opposed to old-fashioned simple justice — began to obsess the universitariat.
We all pay for CBC. Far from all of us see our concerns reflected on it. And based on what the ratings show us, not many are watching, at least not The National.
Financial Post
