How Does the CBC Understand its Mandate?
How they define their flagship product: online news
This post is a by-product of a larger project I’m working on relating to the CBC.
Given that the CBC’s online platforms are now, for all intents and purposes, the only company assets Canadians consume, it’s worth exploring exactly what it is that they offer.
The cbc.ca address takes you to a landing page from which everything on the site is accessed. But besides links to sections like sports, TV, and regional services, the page also typically contains a few dozen news headlines. Visitors to the site are, no doubt, meant to think of the stories linked from the home page as that day’s key news. These, in other words, are the corporation’s primary expression of their mandate as a “unifying force” for Canadians.
How do CBC editors envision “key news?” Trying to manually summarize the recurring topics from just a couple of days’ worth of headlines risks misrepresenting the site’s editorial approach. But gathering headlines from historical versions of the page involves a lot of work - and time travel.
Being professionally averse to hard work – and having no access to time travel – I chose a different approach. I dug into the WayBackMachine from the Internet Archive to download one sample homepage edition from each of the past 12 months. I then used AI tools to automate the process of stripping the text of just the headlines from each busy webpage.
Once I’d collected around 550 headlines, my goal was to feed the data to my default generative AI tool, ChatGPT-4o, and have it categorize each headline. Sadly, GPT was having a difficult day and failed to categorize more than 20% or so of the entries. Anthropic’s Claude-3 AI, on the other hand, was in fine form. Here’s the prompt I gave Claude:
The following text contains headlines from the website of a Canadian news provider. I would like you to assess each headline and assign it one or more of these categories: national news, local news, tabloid-style news, gossip, sports, politics, gender identity, fashion, culture, or sex. Could you then create a new CSV file that identifies the categories you've selected for each headline?
I took the results (which you’re free to view here) and graphed how frequently article headlines from each category appeared on the CBC homepage:
Which is fascinating. From the balance of categories, I’d say that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have purchased us something not too different than Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid. But is that what Canadians really need?
Here are just a few representative samples to give you a taste of what’s there:
Tabloid-style news:
Your horoscope for the week ahead: The new moon in Scorpio will help you redefine what matters most
Gypsy Rose Blanchard released from prison years after convincing boyfriend to kill abusive mother
You don't want to ask these embarrassing body questions so we asked for you
Culture:
Don't write don't show up! Tips for healing a heartbreak
How my epic fail of a preteen makeover made me a star. Sort of
It's 2004 somewhere (or time isn't real according to pop culture)
Prehistoric kids loved to have fun too!
Gossip:
Meet the newest sports power couple Japan's Shohei Ohtani and Mamiko Tanaka
As 'where's Kate' conspiracy theories run wild here's how the story became such a royal mess
Why is this veterinary assistant dressed like a fox at work?
Gender identity:
Drag queen star Kyne Santos is teaching math to show people how to see the world differently
Meet Manny Dingo the magnetic drag king redefining Black masculinity on stage
Buxom, bearded, beautiful: Alma Bitches is at the heart of Vancouver drag
Since the implementation of cable and satellite, there's been no reason for the CBC to exist. It is even more redundant now that it's slowly dying corporate media clones mostly compete in leftist bilge. When Trudeau put them on the take as well, he wasn't buying their partisanship which was already in the bag, he was subsidizing their employment as raw political favour.
I lived in the US for 6 of 8 years of the Obama administration before returning to Canada where I discovered a people who fawned over a President who was otherwise deceitful, transformative and ideologically opposed to what America was intended to be about but he was charismatic. The Canadian media was responsible for engineering the Obama envy leading up to the 2016 election of "our Obama" in Trudeau.
Like many things political, you first sense there is a wrongness to the reporting you are being subjected to, then after thorough surfing, and targeted internet searches you start to see the stories being told on the CBC are being told in a manner that does a certain injustice to the story, and slants the narrative in a manner that is most favourable to the Trudeau government, but is cleverly lacking detail in a manner that could be defended in a court of law. Lacking in detail, the CBC is not actively false, merely we call their coverage, false adjacent... The CBC has been largely unwatchable for many years now.
I continue to check in, try to reassess, perhaps I am pleasantly surprised by coverage of a story I am already familiar with, before being hit by "NEWS" coverage that can best be summarized by the list of headlines you have included above. I would call any time spent following CBC as time wasted. When Jonathan Kay was booted (resigned) from CBC as a panelist some 7 years ago the point of no return was passed.
I am looking forward to your coverage of the Public Broadcaster (now fully transitioned from guard dog to lapdog), bought and paid for, the toothless, feckless meandering husk of what was once Canada's News Corporation, our once beloved now Public Embarrassment, Canada's CBC.