CBC demands blind trust from viewers in bizarre Instagram video
According to CBC News' Editor in Chief, Brodie Fenlon, Canadians will "never ever have to wonder what is real or what is fake if it comes from CBC News."
Author: Clayton DeMaine
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s news division released a video urging Canadians to “trust” its reporting, saying Canadians will “never ever” have to determine what is “real and what’s fake” in its coverage.
Critics online weren’t convinced, with many on X pointing to CBC coverage of major political flashpoints, including the reported discovery of unmarked graves near Kamloops in 2021 and the 2022 Freedom Convoy, as well as what they describe as “lies of omission” in covering some international stories while overlooking others of a similar nature.
“You will never ever have to wonder what is real or what is fake if it comes from CBC News,” Brodie Fenlon, General Manager and Editor in Chief of CBC News, said in a video posted to Instagram. “At CBC, our journalism is fact-checked, it’s verified. We don’t put anything out into the world unless we know it to be true, or if we haven’t verified it, then we’ll tell you that.”
The video continues, stressing that the state broadcaster, which receives approximately $1.38 billion annually from the federal government, is made by humans and meets a “really high bar” of standards.
“We’re accountable for our journalism, and in the rare cases where we get something wrong, we’ll own it. We’ll tell you what we got wrong and how we fixed it,” Fenlon said. “You will never ever have to wonder what is real or what is fake if it comes from CBC News. That’s the invitation. Choose news, not noise.”
CBC English TV’s prime-time audience share has fallen from 7.6% in 2017-18 to between 4.4% and 5.2% in recent annual reports, a decline of roughly one-third to two-fifths.
In response to a Wednesday post by Juno News managing editor Cosmin Dzsurdzsa sharing the video, critics pointed to several instances where they said the CBC blurred the line between politically charged fiction and accurate reporting.
One such article was reporting on the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s claim that they uncovered “confirmation” of 215 children buried at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. To date, no bodies have been found at the site, and full excavations haven’t taken place despite millions of dollars in funding for the First Nation to do so.
The article includes an editor’s note stating the band later clarified the discovery was of soil anomalies they believe may indicate unmarked children’s graves.
Following media reports—some more definitive than others—more than 132 churches have since been burned or vandalized, as the Catholic Church ran the school.
Another critic pointed to one of the CBC’s now-deleted footage of what appeared to be a man in an ICU bed hooked up to a ventilator, supposedly due to the COVID-19 crisis. The CBC had to apologize for airing the image “outside of the context of training facilities.” Critics at the time said that using the image exaggerated the severity of hospital crowding during COVID-19.
In response to the video, National Post columnist and drug policy advocate Adam Zivo pointed to a CBC article, which he said prioritized defending the Liberals’ “safer supply” drug policy over fully disclosing that one of its sources used diverted “safer supply” hydromorphone.
“The CBC was so committed to defending the Liberals’ safer supply experiment that they essentially lied to Canadians — including parents with vulnerable children — about the dangers of diversion,” Zivo wrote on X. “They put kids at risk for the sake of their partisan agenda.”
The article omitted the facts that the drugs were obtained, not by a doctor, but were resold by one of the government programs’ clients.
Others pointed to reporting by the CBC itself during the Freedom Convoy protest against vaccine mandates. CBC’s reporting at the time focused on outliers such as a man carrying a Swastika flag or a Confederate flag, without reporting that videos showed the latter being told to leave the protest by others. These two incidents took place amid a protest, which at its peak was estimated to have up to 18,000 people.
Alexander Zoltan, a Western Standard reporter, pointed to footage of CBC News stating that “swastikas being painted onto Parliament Hill being used to deface property,” despite no evidence of such a case.
CBC coverage at the time was largely negative toward the protest, which many attendees said was a call to end lockdown and vaccine mandate measures.
Another critic pointed to what they described as a contrast between CBC coverage of George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. and its reporting on the murder of English teenager Henry Nowak.
One critic, Maret Jaks, used AI to compare coverage, claiming the CBC published 15 articles about George Floyd in the first week, not including video reports, compared with one article on Henry Nowak.
Police body cam footage released by police after Nowak’s murderer Vickrum Digwa, shows that police handcuffed him after he informed them multiple times that he was stabbed. Police said, “I don’t think you have a mate.”
Before police arrived, Nowak’s murderer, Digwa, told police that he was the victim of a racist attack from a white teen. There are several moments in the distressing police footage where Nowak says, “I can’t breathe,” but he was ignored by the police, who arrested him before he died from his injuries.
Notably, these were the same words George Floyd said multiple times before his death, which was ruled a murder.
Digwa stabbed Nowak five times, including with a ceremonial Sikh blade, a Kirpan.
The CBC wrote one article about the incident, only to write that the “far-right hijacked” Nowak’s murder to “trigger another battle over race.”
In a separate post, Zivo wrote that he doesn’t “recall” the CBC condemning the “far left’s” “politicization” of George Floyd’s death, which led to several deaths and millions of dollars of property damage to businesses and communities across the U.S.
Such liars and thieves.
My father always told me “never trust someone that tells you how honest they are”. Truer words never spoken.
Sickening coward propagandists!
The cbc editor in chief fenlon is absolutely correct. Critical thinking Canadians know it's ALL fake news if it comes from the cbc! I wouldn't waste my time listening to their garbage. It's still a shame that we are forced to pay heavily for it though.