Strange thread here ignoring the very important points about the media Tara is making.<p>'Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted.<p>It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.<p>To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.'<p>I would argue the UK BBC & US NPR are also in dire straits because of similar erosions of impartialness.<p>Neilsen demonstrates that the legacy media are dying fast, fewer and fewer people are tuned in as the broadcasting becomes more and more toxic. This is a good thing imo.<p><a href="https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-business-presidential-elections-arts-and-entertainment-7cc91db0950a8e7e7bcf50d5d23dfc26" rel="nofollow">https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-health-busin...</a>
Except at political groups to which I belong, I am almost always the left-most person in the room. The Lefts greatest weakness is an enthusiasm for splintering over small matters of doctrine. Identity politics, tribalism over principle, virtue signaling, whatever fad this is, it's deeply hurting progress.
> To see billionaires amass extraordinary wealth and bureaucrats amass enormous power — with little scrutiny.<p>Not an accident, I believe. Occupy Wall Street made the billionaires and Wall Street take notice. As a consequence, they probably decided people need to be busy with something else, just in case, so they don't get any more funny ideas. Identity politics is a great one to divide people, fan anger, get more clicks and views, and at the same time get them uninterested what the billionaires and Wall Street firms are doing.
> It is to sign on, enthusiastically, to a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States and spread through American social media platforms that monetize outrage and stoke societal divisions.<p>I’m glad people are starting to realize that participating in culture wars, regardless of the side, is supporting American cultural dominance.<p>I say this as a fairly jingoistic American, who feels American influence does much more good than harm.
> It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like<p>Very glad this got mentioned, in all of this people have forgotten who their enemies really are: the government for some, the big corporations for other, sure as hell the real enemy is not Sam from around the block who doesn't believe in LGTBQ rights. Sam doesn't have an ounce of power, no matter how retrograde or not his beliefs are, the government and the big corporations have, lots of it.
yet another instance of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".<p>Measuring diversity of organisations is a good way to know if people are being excluded from opportunities based on immutable factors. It's not something you should be actively boosting by refusing to hire cis/het/white/male people and calling that equality.<p>A much better approach would be to say something like "oh, our company hires less black people than you'd expect based on demographic data. Where's the bottleneck? Are we discriminating in hiring, either intentionally or unintentionally? Is our industry insulated from black employees by geography, culture, perception?" Then when you know (or at least have a good idea) where the bottleneck is, you know where to intervene if it's something you're able to do. It's basically just the institutional equivalent of investigating problems based on dashboard metrics. If you have a dashboard of t1 vs t2 subscriptions and you think the ratio's wrong, you don't just start banning t1 subs to fix the metric, that's moronic.<p>Good "wokeness" is just egalitarianism with a systemic/holistic perspective. Bad "wokeness" is just more racism a la "two wrongs make a right".
The primary arts centre in one of Canada’s largest cities spent most of last summer running a series of events where transgender artists presented children’s songs and stories. I can’t help but think that for the vast majority of casual viewers (pedestrians and casual passers by) it was confusing at best and “another example of how we waste money on the arts” at worst.<p>I love and respect the arts. It’s goals are worthy. It needs to do better than this.
><i>It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.</i><p>Don't worry, you're still the furthest to the left.<p>It's the others that have aligned with the priorities of mega-corporations, think tanks, and power centers - downplaying class and overplaying identity issues (and at the moment when those are the least anti-establishment and most incosequential position). Worse, they're using this as a weapon for class warfarce (against the working class, white predominantly, but they'd also openly use it against the poor black and latinos too, but they need to pretend they champion them) and a class signifier.
I wonder where she will go after publishing her book. Postmedia? Bell media? Staying independent? The news landscape in Canada is rather limited and still consolidating. Think what you may about the CBC and its biases, its nothing compared to the National Post where the owner, Conrad Black, airs his crappy opinions.
I am curious what Canadians think of this argument. Does it seem true? It's hard for me, a USA resident who doesn't follow the CBC, to really evaluate.
This is incredibly tedious. I can't fathom how this has anything to do with "Hacker News" but I guess it's appeal to a certain subset of the audience here overrides that.
Hmm going on a tangent here: do HNers "consume" news from old style media any more? I'm pretty certain that I haven't got my news from either radio or TV in a billion years. Since I had a pet dinosaur.
Sounds more like an ad for their Substack. No proof or backing for any of their claims, just a bunch of hollow, inflammatory statements<p>What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
What clearly seems wrong is the requirement to fill out forms on the race and gender of people you interview, and to have quotas to control whose voice is heard based on those irrelevant traits (irrelevant relative to the individual person's life, ideas, experiences, ability to express themselves etc.)<p>My policy is to refuse to give my gender or race. If everybody did this, high frequencies of "other" or "unknown" could be spun any way they want to people looking at statistics. If they aren't satisfied with this, they have to go on record clarifying exactly how they define race - which seems difficult since they're also the people who claim it's not a real concept.
I honestly believe that bringing back the FCC fairness doctrine (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine</a>) would help alleviate some of the divisiveness in America. Being presented both sides of an argument really helps people empathize and come to compromises. It also makes people less angry.
“The last 18 months” coincides perfectly with start of the BLM protests.<p>I’ve been involved with an arts-based non-profit for a long time. They do very specific type of older art. They produce it, exhibit it, encourage others to produce it, etc.<p>The art form is Eurocentric, with a political history that contains some small instances racism, and vast oceans of mainstream liberalism.<p>Every since BLM protests happened (the second time - in June 2020), they’ve been freaking out.<p>Suddenly they’re trying to hire as many “BIPOC” as possible, even though there aren’t many open slots.<p>They’re acknowledging every racial injustice under the heavens. They’re apologizing for existing (literally).<p>Most of all, they’re scared.<p>When I go to their exhibitions, every single person, is white. Occasionally a Black family will be there. Everyone in the crowd parts to allow them through. Everyone greets them - and only them.<p>I imagine this awkward veneration is one reason why so few Black families come.<p>Most of all, the leaders of this org are scared. Terrified. They don’t want to be considered “non-anti-racist.”<p>When speaking with others, the terror is palpable.<p>Edit: just to be clear this is an author specific type of performance art. Think a Bach symphony, a Wagner opera company, or a Shakespeare theater.
This article wasn’t really about race. It was about the freedom of speech and the chilling effect upon news journalists of late due to editorial guidelines enforced by pharmaceutical sponsors and fact checkers also sponsored by the like.
> To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.<p>Unfortunately, it appears fairly clear that over the past decade, a deeper cognitive dissonance is that of journalists' beliefs about their profession. Journalists seem to believe that Quality News [0] can sustain itself.<p>News is entertainment. Quality News loses because it commands less engagement than tweets, youtube videos, tv/movie streaming, gaming, and others.<p>News organizations survive now by aligning their stories with a chosen tribe (liberals, conservatives, whomever) and inflaming the base with rage rhetoric.<p>Unfortunately, it turns out that people don't really care about truth - it's pretty boring.<p>[0] Quality News defined however the particular journalist wants to define it (ethical/fair/unbiased/relevant/etc)
The CBC got a $1.2B in government funding in 2019-2020:<p>Source: themselves:<p><a href="https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/impact-and-accountability/finances/annual-reports/ar-2019-2020/financial-sustainability/revenue-and-other-funds" rel="nofollow">https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/impact-and-accountability/fin...</a><p>Can you believe it?<p>Yet, these money-grabbing robber barons don't provide Canadians with streaming.<p>There is a shitty CBC app compatible with Android TV which serves some canned videos and pictures, and a CBC News app for phones that has live news (that will Chromecast).<p>I say cut the taxpayer funding, or else make them deliver to Canadians the content they are paying for.<p>In Japan, NHK (rough analog of CBC) has a website where you can watch the actual broadcast. (Not available outside of Japan without a VPN, but that's entirel beside the point.)
I can't but agree with this column. I've come to think of CBC News as the "Women's Human Interest Review" except Hanomansing of course, but getting decent news two nights a week for billions of dollars a year isn't what the Canadian tax payers signed up for. It's time for this Emperor to get some decent clothes on tout suite.
> This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.<p>I know that sort of announcement is not the place where she'd answer this question in depth, but that line made me curious, and I wished she had. 18 months is a very short timespan: since before the start of quarantine. What does she feel precipitated these changes at the CBC?
>It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like.<p>as a regular reader of CBC, this is the line here that resonates the most with me. If CBC was a left-wing organization advocating for tearing down the structures of power and building a more equitable society, their focus on whatever microagression is currently trending would seem a lot more honest. but their bias is overwhelmingly in favour of the governments and corporations who have built the status quo, so their articles decrying social inequities ring pretty hollow.
Problem with that is that the cooler heads will leave.<p>A saying in German is that the smarter one gives in...<p>To be honest, I don't really believe people that cannot see this problem are trustworthy.
I was part of many left wings groups and I remember there was a transitional period in which there was a lot of talk about intersectionalism, that is how we need to not only take into account the class, but also race, gender, sexual orientation etc. Then slowly the class part dissappeared so only the latter were left to intersect.
Left and liberal do not mean the same thing. Basically all of my blue or red friends agree with the principles of Liberalism, which brought us the enlightenment and [modern] civilization. You can ask your own friends, here's a definition:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism</a> (quote below)<p>In terms of numbers, about 8% of the US population is.. left. 25% is traditional conservative. And the other 67% is regular folks who in fact agree on most policy questions<p>From Wikipedia:<p>> Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), democracy, secularism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and a market economy
> "It is to endlessly document microaggressions but pay little attention to evictions; to spotlight company’s political platitudes but have little interest in wages or working conditions. It is to allow sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures to roll out — with little debate. To see billionaires amass extraordinary wealth and bureaucrats amass enormous power — with little scrutiny. And to watch the most vulnerable among us die of drug overdoses — with little comment."<p>Your movement (progressivism) has been co-opted. The same happened to the religious right a generation ago. Grifters told you that winning was the most important thing, and that politicizing identity was how to do it. Now your views have been reduced to platitudes and slogans meant to mobilize sheep and distract from real issues while the powerful plunder (as they always have). I'd say, "learn for next time," but let's be honest, it will be some other movement (likely one that rises out of opposition to this current one) that will be the next one to be co-opted, and you won't be part of it because it will be ostensibly "right wing."
The CBC's funding was decreased by a bunch in the Harper years. I imagine the liberals haven't reinstated it.<p>Without funding, they can't stay independent of what's fashionable
Glad someone said it. I don't follow the CBC (I imagine only canucks do) but any article I've seen in the last few months has been outright commie garbage.
I'm not sure these sorts of articles provide much value on HN.<p>By "these sorts of articles", I mean the ones that have claimed that "diversity efforts have gone too far <i>this time</i>." Regardless of your support or opposition to diversity, I think one would agree that these rapidly turn into unproductive, highly divisive comment sections that are out of place with the rest of HN.
> It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.<p>I've heard people say something similar, about how they were left-wing when they were young, but found themselves right-wing when they were older, without changing their politics, because the next generation had moved the Overton window, but it's surprising to hear of an environment where the shift happened in the space of 18 months.<p>I think that many people on the right imagine that identity politics is the true form of left-wing politics, and that it was invented by Karl Marx for some reason, but experiences like Tara Henley's suggest that identity politics is more like an aggressive meme that takes over the brains of some subset of people who happen to gravitate towards left-wing politics, and it perhaps has a disingenuous astroturf form which appeals to people on the right as a way to shield themselves from left-wing criticism.
Henley's departure from the CBC is a real blow to that organization. The loss of her reporting on critical issues like "Can hitting snooze and taking a long lunch be the real keys to success?" [0] or "Five West Coast hikes you probably don't know about (but should!)" [1] will be catastrophic to Canadians' ability to understand what's happening in the world around them.<p>In all seriousness, I imagine that Henley decided that writing sponsored content for CBC wasn't a solid career, and wanted to get on that contrarianism gravy train that folks like Bari Weiss have been pioneering.<p>Check out the rest of the articles published under Henley's byline—they're all in the same vein: <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/life/work-money/author/tara-henley-1.4401986" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/life/work-money/author/tara-henley-1.4401...</a><p>[0] <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/life/wellness/can-hitting-snooze-and-taking-a-long-lunch-be-the-real-keys-to-success-1.4127784" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/life/wellness/can-hitting-snooze-and-taki...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/life/wellness/five-west-coast-hikes-you-probably-don-t-know-about-but-should-1.4027920" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbc.ca/life/wellness/five-west-coast-hikes-you-p...</a>
Why is this here, it's just clickbait self promotion:<p>The TLDR:
- She claims she's not an aggrieved conservative<p>- She blows a bunch of right wing dog whistles<p>- Says she quit<p>- Plugs her book and new substack effort (Check out my soundslice!)
Yeah, those abolishinists and civil rights protesters were very unpopular. These "woke extremists" are not sympathetic to how most people around me feel about them.