Probably some of our readers are chuckling this week at the chaos that has broken out on Twitter over the correct verification labels for various public broadcasters. A couple of days ago, Elon Musk, the owner and CEO of the social media site, made an appearance on BBC television and was challenged on Twitter’s decision to give the BBC’s main account a “government-funded media” label. The “government-funded” tag isn’t meant to be purely a criticism or warning: in Twitter’s scheme of tags, a media company or news agency that is directly government-controlled and used to promote a country’s foreign policy would attract a different “state-affiliated” label.
But not everybody understands the nuances of the scheme, which is now subject to Musk’s notoriously whim-based decision-making, and the BBC is, like all government-funded western-type state media, hypersensitive about its political independence. The BBC, however, further insists that it is not really government-funded at all. Its revenue comes from the notorious and archaic television license fee — a tax on owning and operating a television that is enforced by the government (including a fleet of BBC electromagnetic detection vans that prowl the streets and lanes of Britain) but that does go directly to the corporation rather than to the general revenue of the United Kingdom government. In the BBC’s account, it is semi-voluntarily funded directly by the citizenry; and, in fact, if you don’t care to own a TV or turn one on, you aren’t forced to pay for the Beeb.
How much true political independence does this pettifogging technical consideration give the BBC? Well, the BBC has a pretty strong global reputation for impartiality, one which Musk actually endorsed in his BBC interview. People in Britain might have different opinions. (In truth, they’re the opinions you would infer by analogy as a CBC viewer: the Labour left and those left of Labour complain that the BBC doesn’t promote socialist revolution more aggressively, and the Conservatives see the BBC as a hereditary enemy.)
What we noticed about the BBC’s self-defence, based on the license-fee funding model, is that it doesn’t apply to its Canadian spiritual offspring, the CBC, whose Twitter accounts have no “government-funded” label yet. CBC-baiting Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre noticed this with amusing alacrity, tweeting (at the Queen’s-educated Musk) that the CBC’s accounts should be labelled “government-funded.”
Again, let’s return to Twitter’s official doctrine about these labels: a “government-funded” news outlet identified as such is one “where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content.” A spokesman for the CBC, interviewed by the Post’s Anja Karadeglija, made the point you would expect him to make: the Government of Canada has no editorial involvement with the CBC. Why, its political independence is specified in, er, the Broadcasting Act. That’s the federal statute that, ummm, defines the editorial mandate of the CBC, requiring the corporation to promote “national consciousness and identity” and to “reflect the multicultural and multiracial nature of Canada.”
In short, as every Canadian adult knows, the CBC has a statutory political doctrine that it’s required to interpret and promote in a way that’s independent from day-to-day partisan politics. The CBC would never, for example, file a frivolous garbage lawsuit against a political party in the last hours of a federal election for strategic reasons — that’s the kind of thing its proud editorial independence makes completely impossible, right?
We’ve heard from friends who wonder why Poilievre is spending time gratuitously antagonizing the CBC. We can only say these people have been awfully quick to forget that the vexatious and nonsensical CBC lawsuit against the Conservatives was an unapologetic desecration of the broadcaster’s non-partisan status, and that the CBC has never given an explanation of the suit, much less made an apology to the Canadian public for it. Maybe Musk can come up with an all-new label for “out-of-control state media that can’t even pretend convincingly to be independent.”
National Post
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