Sins of Omission: Shaping the News at CBC TV

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s.

Barry Cooper is a distinguished political scientist at the University of
Calgary with many books to his credit. His Deconfederation (with David
Bercuson) more or less proposed chasing Quebec out of Confederation. His
Sins of Omission more or less proposes shutting down the CBC on the
grounds that its TV news is biased, so biased that it risks making
Canadians unwilling to trust the information handed to them.

Cooper’s method is empirical, a careful analysis of CBC foreign news
coverage in 1988-89, focusing on United States-Soviet Union relations;
the Afghanistan, Ethiopian, and Mozambican wars, and South Africa. He
demonstrates—to me irrefutably—that the news was regularly presented
with what one might call a leftist and anti-American bias. Gorbachev, he
says of the coverage of a Reagan-Gorbachev summit, was the embodiment of
progress, Reagan of “deviance.” South Africa’s military
involvement in Mozambique was evil personified, though South Africa was
only one of the many tyrannies in Africa—and arguably not the worst.
What did this amount to? Cooper says that “the visualizations provided
by the CBC of the Soviet Union and of their friends in Africa did,
indeed, serve Soviet interests.”

One may like this slant or not. but that it has been proven to exist
suggests that such words as “fairness” and “objectivity” have
lost their meaning in the newsrooms; moreover, it suggests that the
journalists who produce the news are, arguably, out of tune with their
watchers. That is a dangerous state of affairs, and if the coming cuts
in the CBC budget are not resisted by aroused viewers, there just might
be a reason.