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Notes -
CanadaBC is leaving Twitter due to its tweets carrying the label "government-funded Media". This is particularly suprising, as unlike BritishBC or NipponHK, which are given government monopolies, but don't get money directly from the fiscus, CBC does. The Canadian state budget has an explicit provision that appropriates money appropriated from Canadian taxpayers to CBC.
The CBC on its own website even admits this fact in what might be the most misleading graph I have ever seen. If one isn't careful to look closely at the Y axis, one might miss that numbers from $700m to $1700m are omitted, thus making the 71.2% of the 2018/2019 budget which was given to it by the state, appear more 40%.
Both of these facts (objecting to being labeled GFM and the deceptive graph) point to CBC apparently thinking getting funds from the fiscus isn't a "good luck", thus it seeks play down this fact, by hook or by crook.
But why? Why would it be more shameful for a newsources sources of money be decided representatively democratically, where each person rich or poor has approximatelly the same weight, than if it were owned by a billionaire like Bezos?
ABC Australia and the SBS have also been labelled, but they have given signs that they don't plan to throw a fit about it.
I wonder what the difference is.
It might be that the abc and sbs have a better relationship with the public - even though they often push progressive propaganda, they still have an affectionate place in a lot of Australians' hearts, because even in the 21st century there were a lot of places in Australia where they were the only television channels you could access. There have been some big pushes by some of the conservative media in Australia to get the government to reduce their funding, but they get a lot of push back from more rural areas.
The CBC used to be this at least through the 90s -- I used to have the radio on in the background essentially all through my waking hours.
Now I basically only listen at all in the truck, and play a kind of social justice bingo where I switch the station after hearing two egregious CW statements by hosts or 'expert guests'.
I can usually get through the hourly news, but that's about it -- there's roughly four half-hour segments per week that I don't mind listening to, plus a bunch of Toronto bubble stuff that's not that interesting but fairly unoffensive. (mainly unfunny comedians that can't survive on their own merits)
This is actually pretty sad for me -- to the extent that "government funded" is not a sin in and of itself, I appreciated the radio as a way of tying the country together -- Peter Gzowski, or political comedy shows that lampooned all the silly politicians equally I would argue had value inasmuch as they could espose the nation to quirky stories that they wouldn't otherwise hear about. It's a big country after all. This activity probably wouldn't be commercially successful, but did create a cohesive national identity -- so as government functions go, there are worse ones.
Now that it's all white-guilt all the time, might as well burn it with fire I guess -- but the dream would be to fire virtually everyone and send offer letters to the people still slogging it out in small-town newspapers across the country, with a mandate to inform instead of indoctrinate. (burn it with fire it is, then)
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