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[sundubuman]

CBC Television News Guilty of Anti-American Bias Says New Study


Release Date: June 7, 2005

Calgary, AB - The CBC��s television news coverage of the United States is consistently marked by emotional criticism, rather than a rational consideration of US policy based on Canadian national interests, according to The Canadian released today by The Fraser Institute.

This anti-American bias at the CBC is the consequence of a ��garrison mentality�� that has systematically informed the broadcaster��s coverage of the US. 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 meager cultural defenses and projecting all our hostilities outward.��

��The anti-Americanism of the CBC, we argue, is a faithful reflection of the garrison mentality evoked by Frye,�� said Professor Barry Cooper, co-author of the paper and managing director of the Institute��s Alberta Policy Research Centre. ��This mythical and symbolic anti-Americanism typifies a broad view of the world disproportionately maintained and believed in by Canadians living in the Loyalist heartland of southern Ontario.��

The authors examine the kind of anti-American views expressed in one major Canadian news outlet. They attempt to determine whether views critical of the United States reflect chiefly a rational criticism of the United States based on reasonable differences in interests with respect to policy questions or whether they are more a reflection of the emotional anxieties of the garrison mentality.

��The former is simply an ordinary disagreement between friends; the latter reflects more the limitations of Canadians than it does the defects of our neighbours,�� said Professor Lydia Miljan, co-author and Senior Fellow at The Fraser Institute.

To gauge the extent of anti-American sentiment on CBC, one year��s coverage of the Corporation��s flagship news program, The National, for 2002 was examined. The authors chose 2002 because it followed the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, but was prior to the US invasion of Iraq.

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 percent of the attention. Thirty-four percent of the attention to America or the United States was negative, over double the 15.4 percent positive descriptors. Only 1.6 percent of the statements were considered ambiguous.

The main issue, constituting 27 percent of the coverage, was relations between Canada and the United States. Within this category 41 percent of statements were neutral. Of the remainder, statements were over twice as likely to be negative as positive regarding Canada/US relations (39 percent versus 18.9 percent).

Terrorism was the second most-often cited issue area where CBC mentioned America, at 10.8 percent. Here the negative comments overwhelmed positive evaluations by a 9-to-1 margin (37.6 percent and 3.1 percent, respectively). Neutral statements, however, constituted 58.1 percent of the total coverage, which somewhat restored balance insofar as even a factual report on terrorist activity is usually seen to be a negative reflection on terrorism.

The third most mentioned American issue on CBC in 2002 was build-up to the war in Iraq. At 10.5 percent, this topic was covered almost as extensively as terrorism, which received 10.8 percent of the CBC��s attention. The negative evaluations of the American policy in Iraq were only slightly lower than on terrorism, comprising an 8-in-10 negative-to-positive ratio, compared to 9 in 10 for terrorism.

In total, despite the relative short period of time after the 9/11 attacks, the CBC��s opinion statements of America during 2002 were overwhelmingly critical of American policy, American actions, and American purposes.

��CBC has certainly claimed an important agenda-setting role for itself. To the extent it deserves the reputation it covets, the corporation is at least partly responsible for enhancing and sustaining anti-Americanism in Canada following the 2001 terrorist attacks. CBC, in short, helped turn the joint outrage of Canada and the United States at the terrorists into mistrust and animosity between the two neighbours,�� Cooper concluded.
- 30 -

Established in 1974, The Fraser Institute is an independent public policy
organization with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto.

[Alias]

The Fraser Institute

[Paji eh Wong]

[some waygug-in]

Here's a thought :

Why not start a new thread, " Idiot Rich boy/lying bastage of a president misleads the public and through his misguided policies - stokes anti-Americanism"

[mindmetoo]

[Moldy Rutabaga]

There is a tendency here to shoot the messenger and to discredit the Fraser Institute as a right-wing propaganda agency. But their statistics are at times well-done, and Statscan is hardly a bastion of objectivity either. To me it concretely verified what most people outside of central Canada know; that the CBC has a government agenda which is generally left-wing and validates only upper Canadian values. I have never forgiven nor forgotten the CBC for the maudlin, round-the-clock tearfest they gave to Trudeau's funeral, a man who nearly destroyed and bankrupted the country (and threw half of my family out of work with his NEP). The CBC's resentment of the USA should seem obvious to people who watch it.

Ken:>

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Alias]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[mithridates]

I'm really not surprised that it went down in 2002. Mine went down too when I saw Rumsfeld attempting to tell all the other ministers that Iraq was a big threat, that Europe deserved to be split into two. Then Powell with his less than credible report in front of the UN while each major figure in the administration spent most of the day on tv talking about smoking guns and mushroom clouds. That false sense of urgency was what got to me, because it came out of nowhere. Oh, suddenly we must act now! Because we found aluminum tubes! We already received a detailed report stating that they are most likely unusable for nuclear tests, but there's always that 1%!

I was looking forward to a few years of steady progress in Afghanistan with the world paying a lot of attention. Maybe rebuilding the statues, capturing OBL (who's he? He bombed a tower that a lot of you forgot about), maybe even turning Afghanistan into a post-war marvel like Germany and Japan. At least compared to the countries around it, that is - I wasn't hoping for the impossible.

I'm a big fan of steady progress myself, and I don't get bored with it. That's why I like Wikipedia, seeing things improve one step at a time, and I know how things can fall back into the way they were before if you're not paying attention. Afghanistan seems to be doing *all right*, but I really was hoping for a lot more.

And by the way, Pashto and Farsi are closely related. There's also a lot of people living on the west side of Afghanistan that speak Farsi/Persian, and cultivating intelligence over there would have really helped in dealing with Iran. The US intelligence service is still based on an anti-USSR-style approach, with lots of people capable of blending into places like Moscow and Warsaw. Most of the few people that knew much about the middle east and any of the 'stans were sent off to Iraq.

Joo, 76000 people were trained as terrorists during the 90s. Wow. Too bad your forces are finite and that having them fight two battles at the same time made things worse. Why is it that nearly every culture in the world has a saying for 'he who chases after two hares loses both'? Because it's true. The war in Iraq also went against nearly every rule in Sun-tzu's book of war, and in case you don't think I know what I'm talking about I've read it in the original Chinese thrice. The vast majority of the rules there were broken, and I'm surprised nobody took the time to think about the long-standing rules of war that surpass any amount of 21st-century technology. 21st-century technology managed by 30 000 year old bodies and minds (that's when homo sapiens emerged).

During the election in 2004 CBC had a number of open forums where people of all sides were invited to participate, and it was quite open and honest, without leaving any conclusions behind at the end of the show. I could tell, of course, that most of the commentators were secretly hoping for a Kerry win, but that was obvious. They watched their speech very carefully to avoid being seen as having a bias but everybody knew what they wanted.

Well, good luck with your recent spat of extra anti-Americanism over the past few years because I hope it pans out and we have a situation where the scariest thing you have is Starbucks and Wal-Mart like in the 90s. I love your movies, your space program, your inventive genius (Google, Wikipedia, etc), your bill of rights, your first amendment, most of your founding fathers, and your peaceful co-existance with the land that I was born in. Unfortunately, I will never love how you write 'axe' as 'ax'.








Oh, this is rather post-climatic, but here's a study done on some German media.

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[Tiger Beer]

Yeah, no big surprise.

I thought I hated FOX for its pro-war basis (and I still do)..

But the BBC (British) and just about every media source that comes out of Canada is so fucking biased.. its mind-warping uneducated Canadians to degrees that the FOX news network would be envious of.

[The Lemon]

[sundubuman]

Canadian Ambassador should stand up to anti-American CBC
By Judi McLeod
Thursday, June 9, 2005

Toronto, ON--

Fresh back from `Bilderberging�� with the big boys, Frank McKenna, Canada��s Ambassador to the United States, was lecturing mainstream Canadians about How Washington sees us from the op-ed pages of the National Post yesterday.

Bilderberg 2005 drew the usual suspects in late May this year. It draws the world��s most powerful financiers, industrialists and political figures to a secret annual meeting.

According to enterprising report-on-Bilderberg journalist Daniel Estulin, "Its meeting was held under its usual secrecy that makes freemasonry look like a playgroup."

In his Post piece, McKenna informed Canadians "Americans take offence when we endlessly moralize about what they should be doing" and opined about how since September 11, "Americans are now consumed with the need to protect their physical and financial security."

"This trumps all other issues in Washington, and everything that we do in terms of the relationship between Canada and the United States has to be understood through that prism," McKenna wrote.

After only three months on the job, the former New Brunswick premier has the big picture on American-Canadian relations.

McKenna goes on to write, "There��s no doubt that Canada is in a bit of a national funk right now, whether it��s the loss of NHL hockey, the political environment or just the weather."

The weather? Weather experts have just finished telling us that here in Toronto we had more tropical temperatures the first week of June than we had all last summer.

Other ambassadors from other countries, McKenna says, talk to him with "so much admiration, so much respect and so much affection for our country that it would almost make you weep".

"When I try to explain to them, for example, that our health care system isn��t perfect, they��ll say, `You have no idea of just how good it is compared to other places in the world.�� When I try to tell them that our political institutions are going through a rocky patch, they��ll say, `You have no idea how lucky you are that you can settle your differences peacefully rather than at the end of a gun."

Only a Liberal politician-cum ambassador could try to explain Canada��s current mega-million dollar Liberal sponsorship scandal as "going through a rocky patch".

When it comes to lectures from Canada��s rookie ambassador to the United States, it should be the Canadian Government and its state-controlled Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that McKenna should be taking on.

In the news section of the same daily where McKenna was pontificating from the op-ed page, about how Americans really feel about Canadians, was the story, CBC feeding anti-American view: study.

According to the respected Fraser Institute, "(CBC��s) coverage of the U.S. in 2002 was very critical".

"CBC Television��s news coverage is overwhelmingly critical of the United States and has fed anti-Americanism in Canada since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center," says a Fraser Institute Report released yesterday. (National Post, June 8, 2005).

"Researchers for the think-tank say they found anti-American bias by examining the corporation��s flagship news program The National in 2002.

"They 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.

"`Whatever the cause of Canadian anti-Americanism, it is unquestionably exacerbated by CBC TV News," said Barry Cooper co-author of the paper and managing director of the Institute��s Alberta Policy Research Centre.

"`CBC��s coverage is marked by emotional criticism rather than rational criticism where you have genuine conflicts such as the softwood and cattle trade disputes,�� he said.

"He acknowledged some of the negative coverage stemmed from coverage of statements of Canadians such as former prime minister Jean Chrétien and his senior staff (for example, his director of communications, Francoise Ducros, who famously called U.S. President George W. Bush "a moron")."

The CBC, is, of course denying the institute��s anti-Americanism findings.

Ruth-Ellen Soles, a spokeswoman for CBC, said the report��s findings of an anti-American bias are "patently false".

"CBC News takes fairness and balance very seriously," she said.

If Frank McKenna wants to be taken seriously in his Liberal-appointed post as Canada��s Ambassador to the United States, he should aim his lectures at a direction where they more rightfully belong, the shamefully anti-American Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

[mithridates]

Let's do a bit of thinking on our own, shall we? Here are the titles of the first few articles that turned up under Google News for "cbc united states" (all the applicable ones)

US, Britain reach deal on African debt
US health insurers eye court ruling
'Anemic' Canadian productivity lags US
USDA secretary supports restoring full cattle trade with Canada
Trade surplus widens to $5.1 billion in April from $4.8 billion in ...
Candy maker Russell Stover to cut 400 jobs at Tennessee plant
US agriculture secretary defends border opening
US auto parts firm R&B Inc. to acquire Ontario-based Automotive ...
McDonald's gives Ronald jock makeover to fit with healthier menu
US court finds pot illegal, even on doctor's orders
US government forecasts increase in new jobs but slightly slower ...
Greenspan: no easy explanation for divergence of short-term, long ...
General Motors to cut 25,000 US jobs from now to 2008, will close ...

[bucheon bum]