Source : Globe & Mail

The folks at the Fraser Institute, those masters of nuance, have declared that the CBC has an anti-American bias.

Anyone who is surprised that the Fraser Institute finds fault with a publicly funded broadcaster should brace themselves. In other news, hell is hot, the Pope is a Catholic and Belinda Stronach is rich.

Of course, the folks at the Fraser Institute do not simply declare that the CBC has an anti-American bias. They kick it up a notch and attempt to intellectualize the situation. The official description of the findings is this: "This anti-American bias at the CBC is the consequence of a 'garrison mentality' that has systematically informed the broadcaster's coverage of the U.S. Garrison mentality was a term coined by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. He used it to describe a uniquely Canadian tendency reflected in our early literature, a tendency, as he put it, to 'huddle together, stiffening our meagre cultural defences and projecting all our hostilities outward.' "

Dragging Frye into this sorry tale is a cunning ruse. In fact, there is nothing truly thoughtful or literary about the Fraser Institute's attack on the CBC.

In reality, the Fraser Institute takes a WWE approach to Canadian culture. Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner, the decent America-loving, tax-paying Canadian who believes in the fundamental right to take advantage of being Canadian while holding an abiding belief that Canada sucks. And, ladies and gentlemen, in that corner, the taxpayer-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corp., purveyor of tedious dramas featuring lawyers in Toronto and cops in Vancouver, a broadcaster adhering to the absurd notion that CNN is not the model for television news and that the antics of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston do not actually belong on the national news agenda! Boo. Hiss.

For all the corralling of Frye, the Fraser Institute's report does not actually arise from anything approaching intellectual rigour. It's just spin. While the institute's press release refers to the CBC, the study was limited to The National, over the course of one year.

That year was 2002. The institute says: "The authors chose 2002 because it followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but was prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq."

Okey-dokey. But the year 2002 produced a fevered climate of debate about the United States and its potential reaction to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. To use it as a sample year is just ridiculous.

The "study" found: "In total, there were 2,383 statements inside the 225 stories that referred to America or the United States on CBC in 2002. As with most news coverage, the largest number of statements was neutral; they constituted 49.1 per cent of the attention. Thirty-four per cent of the attention to America or the United States was negative, over double the 15.4 per cent positive descriptors. Only 1.6 per cent of the statements were considered ambiguous."

Yoo-hoo! Any study that finds "the largest number of statements was neutral," actually finds that the broadcaster is doing its job.

In fact the level of neutrality is extraordinary given one of the key stories of 2002 -- the killing of four Canadian soldiers and the injury of eight others in April, 2002, when a U.S. fighter pilot dropped a 500-pound bomb on the Canadians in Afghanistan after the pilot's commanders had initially denied him permission to drop it. The incident stunned Canadians and the first reactions from the U.S. military galvanized many into genuine anger at the United States, which lasted for months.

Choosing one news program during a year of intense feelings and then spinning the figures is just bogus. There is more integrity in a WWE bout.

Finally, I'd point out to the Frye-reading nabobs of nuance at the Fraser Institute that, the other night, on CBC Newsworld's The Hour, one of the on-air staff, the guy who tells George about the e-mails, was wearing a T-shirt that said "Michigan."

Spin that.

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© Globe & Mail

Related Documents

June 7, 2005 - Canada Newswire: Fraser Institute Press Release: CBC television news guilty of anti-American bias says new study
Fraser Institute study of programming on "The National" from 2002 concludes that the CBC has an anti-American bias.