Here’s how the news is made, at least on the CBC sometimes.

On Monday night on The National, CBC news anchor Peter Mansbridge interviewed Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It wasn’t much of an interview, but that was hardly Mansbridge’s fault. Everyone in the business knows a prime minister or any senior politician of any party is not going to go on national television and say anything important that he hasn’t said before, unless he is drunk, stoned or stupid.

The prime minister was none of the above, or so it appeared. While the interview turned out to be not exactly a meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society — one suspects the two are not beer buddies — it was, one senses, a meeting of the Mutual Advantage Society. Curiously, the acronym for both groups (MAS) is the same. Both of them got what they wanted from it.

The CBC might have gotten even more than any other organization would have anticipated. On Tuesday night, the two lead items on The National were about CBC news anchor Peter Mansbridge interviewing Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It was, if you will pardon the cliché, like déjà vu all over again, which is hardly the essence of news except on the CBC, where the network’s "exclusives" tend to drag on for days and days and days and... Well, if you, like me, are one of the CBC’s few remaining news watchers, you know what I mean.

All of this — plus, of course, the alleged sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie — costs Canadian taxpayers about $1 billion a year, whether they ever tune in to the CBC or not. Which brings up an interesting question. Just exactly who is the "we" whom CBC news shows always refer to when they are announcing in their stentorian or dulcet tones, depending on the announcer, that they have actually covered a news story: We asked this correspondent to look into events in Syria; we asked that correspondent to make the Conservatives look bad; we asked the weatherman to not bother with what the weather is like in Manitoba because Toronto doesn’t care.

That "we" certainly isn’t us, even though we’re paying for all this. And we’ll continue to pay for it, not just because we have no choice, but because, beyond all reason, we still care about the CBC and, again perhaps beyond all reason, we hope that it will get better, somehow, someday. And it can’t get better if it’s no longer there. Pity.

© Winnipeg Free Press