Categories: Andrew Coyne, Capital Read

Apocalypse now

by Andrew Coyne on Friday, October 2, 2009 1:25am - 82 Comments

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Post today announced an agreement which will allow both organizations to share content across their respective media platforms. The agreement is effective immediately.

CBC.ca will run daily financial stories and podcasts from the Financial Post in CBC’s online Money section, and The National Post will run daily sports stories in the sports section of nationalpost.com and periodically in the sports section of the newspaper. Financial terms were not disclosed.

No, this is not April Fool’s. I don’t quite know what to make of this, it’s so bizarre. I don’t mean it’s a bad idea. It’s just … bizarre. And I have a feeling this is just the beginning.

There are two ways of looking at this. One, the National Post, a private newspaper, is now partially funded by the taxpayer.

Two, the CBC has just been partially privatized.

Either way, the implications are profound. Will the Post have to troop off to CRTC hearings to explain why it is not featuring more aboriginal women in its sports coverage? Should the CBC’s public subsidy be reduced proportionately in line with the amount of privately-funded content it runs?

Plus the CBC is a union shop, while the Post is not. Isn’t this a way to do an end run around union contracts? What if the corp goes on strike? Does this put the CBC in the position of running scab copy?

A little while ago I warned of the consequences of broadcasters and newspapers getting into bed together. But I’d no idea it would come to this…

UPDATE: But of course, this is the real news.

Tags: cbc, strange bedfellows

More by Andrew Coyne

http://www.intensedebate.com/people/JulesAime JulesAime

Where did the comments go? There were 52 of them just a while ago and now they have all disappeared?

Update: Never mind, they're back. For about fifteen minute sthere they wouldn't show up for me.

http://intensedebate.com/people/macleans macleans

Thank you, we will look into that issue.

bchunter

Robert MacLelland: The CBC is right wing, and left wing media is almost gone in this country?

How far left can you possibly get that the CBC looks right? Enver Hoxha?
Blame Crash

" I love the smell of napalm in the morning, it smells like victory"
Which brings us to the important question of who will be the napalmee, and who will be the napalmer.
Bill G.

Does this mean that Rex Murphy will write the sports column ??
http://www.conservative.ca Harper Rocks NAC

Weird. I hope the people who still think that the Post – owned by the heavily Liberal race hustling Asper family – is "right wing" or "conservative" get the knack here and clue in. They're hideously culturally Marxist and don't even bother concealing their hatred of white/Christian Canadians anymore.
Hugh Andrew

Behind this action is the fact that newspapers, and the media in general, increasingly under financial stress. This results in them not being able to obtain the breadth of coverage that major newspapers used to have. They cannot afford to do do the real investigative journalism that provides meaningful insight. They cannot afford to be controversial because they cannot defend frivolous lawsuites – especially in Canada where if you dare speak of the current international roots of terrorism you get dragged in front of a Human Rights Commission ( We’ve read lots about the unreasonableness and incompetence of those groups in McLeans before) to defend yourself on your own dollar while taxpayers pay the complainants bill.

All of the foregoing mean that the reader is less informed and that the media, as historically, a key defender of each citizens right to to know, think and express is increasingly being deminished. The search for a new financial and operatiing model is required and I don’t think the traditional media have solved such core issues. Just saying, go to the interent, is too vague to be meaningful to them.
P.H. Koch

I know this agreement must sound strange to many readers, but I think either of Andrew's "two ways of looking at it" would be overstating the case. The CBC is not being privatized, and the National Post is not receiving taxpayer funding. Nor is this agreement really all that "bizarre" — except when one considers the fact that the National Post not that long ago had an active CBC-bashing campaign. Strange bedfellows, perhaps … or perhaps not.

For several years at least, many of the stories and photos you find at CBC online have been from Canadian Press, which shares content among numerous other mostly privately owned media outlets, in particular most Canadian newspapers. A couple of years ago, however, Canwest pulled out of Canadian Press, and the word is that Sun Media is preparing to do the same. So this content-sharing agreement between the Post and the CBC seems to reestablish a link in a long-established Canadian media content-sharing chain, a link that was broken when Canwest newspapers left CP.

What is at stake here is not the nature of the CBC as a publicly owned and controlled media organization, nor whether the National Post might receive backdoor funding from Ottawa, but the role of CP as the main vehicle of content-sharing among large Canadian media organizations. For reasons we can imagine, it may be more palatable — or more feasible — for the National Post to share content with the public broadcaster than with other privately held media organizations (read competitors).
http://intensedebate.com/people/SeanStok SeanStok

Maybe not quite the same thing, but haven't CBC and TSN done some content sharing in the past? (curling, maybe?)

Also, I remember that failed Idol rip-off show hosted by George Strombo was a co-production with an American network.

I only mention these to muse if this isn't the first time the CBC has gone a bit 'private,' and that private enterprises haven't partly benefitted from a taxpayer corporation.