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Media Report

Never say anything good about the Tories

by Arthur Weinreb

June 30, 2003

Citytv ran a human interest story about Mrs. Hanna, a kindergarten teacher who is retiring after 45 years of teaching. She is the longest serving teacher in Toronto and possibly the province. The point of the piece was to show how sad that everyone at the school is that Mrs. Hanna is leaving. The reason for her retirement--she turned 65, the mandatory retirement age.

The Tory haters at City, the station that doesn’t even attempt to hide its left wing bias, failed to mention that the Ontario PCs have promised to bring in legislation to abolish mandatory retirement. Had either of the other two parties proposed a change that would have allowed Mrs. Hanna to continue to work if she wanted to, you can bet the station would have mentioned it.

The Rolling Stones gather no moss

They many not be gathering up any moss, but they sure are going to be bringing in the GST to add to the government coffers. When the Rolling Stones concert was announced, Liberal Senator Jerry Graftstein proudly announced that a one dollar surcharge would be placed on the ticket price with 50 cents going to health care workers and 50 cents to the Toronto hospitality industry that has been decimated by the SARS outbreak. While the media gushed at this, no one bothered to mention that the federal government’s take, in the form of GST will be about three times the amount that will go to each of the groups. To his credit, Toronto MP Dennis Mills did mention the tax to point out that part of the $3.5 million that the federal government is throwing in, will be recouped. But the media, quick to praise the government for putting money in, failed to mention what the feds’ take is in the event. This is particularly significant since it is unlikely that the federal government will plough any of that money back to the province to pay for SARS' related costs.

The Stones concert is already helping Toronto’s recovery from SARS--it has the media all excited. A typical but exaggerated media response came from Anne Rohmer on her Cityonline show. Laughing and giggling like one of Mrs. Hanna’s pupils, Rohmer declared that the SARS outbreak has turned the corner. The more the media hypes up the concert, the less time they will have to report on the devastation of SARS and clips of the Rolling Stones will replace the Sheela Basrur and Colin D’Cunha show where viewers are exposed to non-stop doom and gloom scenarios. The media focus on "the SARS crisis" was at least, in part, responsible for the loss of tourist dollars to Toronto.

CBC replies

Last week, I wrote about steps that are being taken in England by the BBC to address accusations of bias that have been made against it. I also pointed out that the CBC’s solution to bias accusations is to just deny it.

It didn’t take the network long to reply to the National Post’s "CBC watch". True to form, the editor-in-chief of CBC News, Tony Burman, wrote a lengthy letter to the editor which was recently published. Burman denied that there was an anti-Israel bias in the network and spent more time attacking the Post than he did defending the CBC. There is no doubt that the National Post is pro-Israel. But, whether or not the Post is biased has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not there is bias in the CBC and Burman’s attack on paper was nothing more than an attempt to avoid addressing the issue. Burman only gave generalities about how they’ve interviewed pro-Israelis (that was big of them). Again, that does not address the accusations of bias.

Burman stated in his letter that: "Canadians told us that they have found CBC’s coverage more balanced and objective than other Canadian networks or CNN and, far from tuning out, audiences increased by a third." Burman fails to state how many of those people that were questioned rely on the CBC as their main source of news. If someone knows nothing about Jenin, other than what was reported on the CBC--that the Israeli army massacred over 500 Palestinians there, then of course they are going to think the CBC is fair and balanced in reporting that.

It’s a disgrace that the CBC doesn’t take accusations of bias as seriously as its British counterpart does.