‘People who write for CBC Life are not journalists,’ CBC spokesman says
“When we talk about people with disabilities, they’re either shown as inspiring models of overcoming adversity, or as people left helpless.”
Farzam Dadashzadeh took too long to file his lawsuit, the public broadcaster says
Private broadcasting is supposed to be diverse under Canadian law, but the government doesn’t require that companies publish their employment equity numbers.
Because of weak and inconsistent reporting guidelines, it is impossible to know the racial makeup of of private Canadian broadcasting—or whether their diversity expectations are being met.
Under the the Broadcasting Act, the bible of Canadian media regulations, private broadcasters are expected to serve and reflect the multicultural and multiracial realities of Canadians through “programming and employment opportunities.” About one in five Canadians identifies as a visible minority and more than four per cent identify as Aboriginal, according to Statistics Canada.
Private broadcasters share a few numbers in their diversity reports to highlight the success of their initiatives, and some volunteer corporation-wide numbers, but they don’t need to track their newsroom’s annual equity statistics. The public broadcaster keeps its own internal statistics, which show that the CBC is about 90 per cent white.
It’s impossible to compare statistics between different companies, according to Ryerson University researcher and professor Charles Davis.
“We’ve been through a hundred or so of those [cultural] reports,” Davis said, adding that while some broadcasters only file their initiatives, others report on-screen diversity, and still others behind-the-scenes numbers. “So you can’t really track it from year-to-year.
“The problem is inconsistency in the [CRTC’s] reporting requirements.”
Davis is the E.S. Rogers Sr. Research Chair in Media Management — in 2011 and 2012, he was part of a research project and follow-up roundtable that addressed the participation of visible minorities in screen-based media. He said the CRTC should eventually require companies to provide separate numbers for their media counterparts so they can track the shift, or lack thereof, in newsroom diversity. “CRTC doesn’t really have jurisdiction over employment equity, so I think that’s a problem.”
Broadcasters that have more than 100 workers file their employment numbers under the Employment Equity Act to the Human Rights Commission, and not to the CRTC. The racial makeup of Canada’s broadcasters is largely buried in the company-wide statistics of Bell, Rogers, and Corus. The diversity statistics for their media divisions aren’t broken out, so there’s no way to tell how diverse the on-air product is.
“We were interested in diversity in a creative occupation, whereas you find probably more diversity in a technical occupation,” Davis said. “So when they provide aggregate numbers, it doesn’t really show where the diversity is and where it isn’t.”
For example, BCE publishes its company-wide equity numbers every year. But it doesn’t publish separate numbers for its Bell Media subsidiary, which produces MUCH, CTV, and numerous other channels. Bell Media employees make up about 13 per cent of the BCE’s 50,000-person workforce.
A table from BCE’s corporate social responsibility report, showing company-wide diversity. Screenshot/BCE
“We publicly report numbers for Bell overall but not for specific business units,” said Scott Henderson, Bell Media’s vice-president of communications. “Reporting an overall number for Bell gives a far better reflection of our progress as a company.”
Bell’s chief competitor, Rogers — whose media holdings include City, OMNI and Sportsnet — also leaves out employment equity numbers for its media subsidiary in its report.
According to Rogers spokesperson Andrew Garas, Rogers Media employees make up about 20 per cent of the total Rogers workforce, but the Broadcasting Act doesn’t force them to publish media-specific numbers.
“The Broadcasting Act itself does not set out the reporting requirements, just merely indicates that the broadcasting system should reflect cultural diversity in employment opportunities,” Garas said in an email.
A table from Rogers’ corporate social responsibility report, showing company-wide diversity. Screenshot/Rogers
Nanao Kachi, the director of CRTC’s Social and Consumer Policy, said in an email that private broadcasters must file Corporate Cultural Diversity Reports in order to “report annually on [the broadcaster’s] progress on these diversity issues.” These documents set best practices and equity goals.
In 1992, the CRTC made diversity an element of licensing, saying the designated groups — women, Aboriginal persons, disabled people and members of a visible minority — continued to face “underrepresentation, high occupational concentration in clerical jobs and wage disparity” in the communications sector. It later clarified companies already covered by the Employment Equity Act wouldn’t need to answer for their employment equity practices at licensing.
The most comprehensive study of diversity in the broadcasting industry was commissioned in 2001, when the CRTC called upon the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) to form a task force to report on the cultural diversity of Canadian television, partly to set a baseline to improve upon in the following years. Four years later, the CRTC responded to the task force’s findings and said mainstream media lacked fair representation.
“Most participants perceived Asians, the largest visible minority population in Canada, as being severely underrepresented,” the CRTC said in the notice, adding that the appearance of Hispanic and Middle Eastern people was “sporadic” while Black people were better represented thanks to U.S. programming. The most pressing issue, as noted by the task force and the CRTC, was “the virtual absence of Aboriginal peoples in all genres of programming” outside of APTN. “In 10 of 11 genres studied across two languages, the presence of Aboriginal Peoples is less than one per cent of the total,” the notice said.
More than a decade since the study, no follow-up or similar report has been commissioned by the government — according to Davis, the lack of “systematic study of on-screen diversity” since 2004 has added to the problem of inconsistent reporting guidelines. However, he said that from what he understood, the CRTC is in the process of hiring a company “to sample on-screen programs and then to figure out how to measure diversity.”
Journal de Montréal columnist Richard Martineau is suing the crowdfunded media outlet Ricochet for defamation over a sharply satirical fake obituary.
Ricochet says while they’re confident they’ll eventually win the $350,000 suit, fighting it in court could bankrupt them. “He never contacted us, he went straight to a lawsuit seeking a ridiculous, totally unreasonable amount of money. It certainly seems like the intent here is to drag us through a long legal process which he hopes will bankrupt us before a judge ever gets an opportunity to rule on the case,” Ricochet co-founder and editor Ethan Cox said.
The obituary, posted in February, included a cartoon of dogs lining up to pee on Martineau’s grave, and another God tossing Martineau’s orphaned soul in the trash, after it’s dropped off by Death for entrance to heaven. Written by Marc-André Cyr and illustrated by Alexandre Fatta, the obituary takes aim at Martineau’s ideas and intelligence.
“His remains will be exhibited at the corner of St. Catherine and St. Laurent in Montreal. Rain, wind, dogs and birds will have the chance to turn those scraps into a homage of the infinite profundity of human stupidity,” the obit closes.
Cox said the obituary wasn’t an to wish Martineau death, but to lampoon his writing. “It was a satirical death notice, but the intent was to say that his style had jumped the shark, that his style was dead,” he said.
“[Martineau] was really unhappy about it at the time, and he published a column complaining about it,” Cox said. “So he used his platform to respond and that was that, and it was all done.” Martineau never contacted Ricochet to request a retraction, and the only direct correspondence they got from him was the lawsuit, Cox said.
Martineau could not be reached by CANADALAND for comment. As always, if we hear back we’ll update our story.
One of the cartoons featured in the satirical obituary of Richard Martineau. Alexandre Fatta/Ricochet
Cox said over the summer Ricochet received a notice from the Quebec Press Council a complaint had been filed about the obituary. The council said in the letter they’d dismissed the complaint and there was no ethical fault in the obit, according to Cox.
The same press council has censured Martineau for his work. “In two separate decisions upholding complaints against the columnist, the council found he had used “discriminatory words and expressions of prejudice” towards Muslims and others,” a press release from Ricochet says.
In addition to writing his Journal column, Martineau hosts a program on the LCN cable news network in Quebec. Martineau was a vocal supporter of the Quebec Charter of Values, pitched by the Parti Quebecois in the last provincial election to ban government employees from wearing religious attire—including hijabs, turbans, and too-large crucifixes.
Martineau’s history was all the target of Cyr’s piece, which portrays him as a commentator past his usefulness. “When a person without too much intelligence is unable to respond to rational reasoning by another, they must caricature the position of their opponent by denigrating it to a level intelligible to him,” Cyr wrote in French. “To do this, Richard Martineau used his essential strawmen: the ‘Muslim-terrorists,’…the ‘violent-unions,’ the ‘frustrated feminists,’ the ‘dictator’s pressure groups.’ ”
Martineau has long been a free speech advocate, but not quite an absolutist. When Quebec comedian Mike Ward was ordered by to pay $35,000 to a handicapped boy featured on reality TV he joked about, Martineau supported the fine.
“You can not say you test the limits of freedom of expression, and then bawl because we told you that you have exceeded the permitted limits!” Martineau wrote. “No freedom is absolute, all rights have limits, and the law is the same for everyone.” But, Martineau has also chastised the press council for reprimanding him for making up a quote he called obvious “caricature” and “satire.”
Before the case goes before a judge, Ricochet is looking to crowdfund $50,000 for a legal defence fund. As of Monday afternoon, they’d raised nearly $20,000.
***
DISCLOSURE: My mother-in-law is a columnist at the Journal de Montréal and a colleague of Martineau’s.
editor@canadalandshow.com
There is a strong bias against black and immigrant men in Canadian newspaper coverage of HIV nondisclosure trials, according to a new study.
The report is titled Callous, cold, and deliberately duplicitous: Racialization, immigration and the representation of HIV criminalization in Canadian mainstream newspapers. It analyzed 1680 English-language newspaper articles about criminal HIV nondisclosure – where a person living with HIV was criminally charged for not disclosing their status to an uninfected partner.
The study found stories about black and immigrant men were vastly overrepresented in the press over the last 28 years. Though black and immigrant males make up about 20 per cent of the 181 people convicted for this crime in Canada, they account for 69 per cent of the newspaper stories, according to the report.
“What we found is that newspapers really overwhelmingly and I think unjustifiably focused on cases that involved black, immigrant male defendants and what results is a kind of prejudicial coverage of cases that involve black men,” said Eric Mykhalovsky, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at York University. “It’s almost a sort of ‘racial profiling’ of HIV nondisclosure as a crime of black men despite the fact that most of the defendants are in fact white.”
Mykhalovsky and his team also analyzed the individual content contained in the stories associated with many cases. Four specific cases involving African, Caribbean, or American black men living with HIV, garnered nearly half of all the newspaper stories in the study. The immigration status of each defendant and their mugshot figure prominently in the coverage and talks about their “exotic strains” of HIV, making them appear as a foreign originator of the virus.
“At the start it will maybe be something like ‘so-and-so from Uganda,’” he added, “and then it’s ‘Ugandan-born’ and then by the end of it, the person is ‘the Ugandan.’ That’s the sort of coverage with one of the individuals that we looked at. There’s a continual emphasis of the person not being from Canada.”
In one case that garnered nearly a quarter of all the newspaper coverage, former Saskatchewan Roughrider Trevis Smith was repeatedly referred to as a “reckless” and “dangerous,” an “Alabama native” who had “come in and disrupted [perceived] wholesome prairie culture,” Mychalovsky said. Smith was charged with aggravated sexual assault and eventually deported back to the U.S. He did not transmit the virus to the complainants in his case.
In Canada, people living with HIV must disclose their status to partners before engaging in vaginal or anal sex or potentially face the very serious charge of aggravated sexual assault. It carries a maximum life sentence and potential sex offender registration, even if no transmission occurs. In 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that putting a sexual partner at “significant risk” of HIV exposure is enough to constitute an assault, even if the latest science says that people taking antiretroviral drugs to suppress their viral load to undetectable levels in the blood are virtually uninfectious.
“It’s the same pattern of coverage,” Mykhalovsky said, “the same type of story that’s being told, how this black man is presented as a sort of sexual casanova with a rampant sex drive who is deceiving and tricking women into having sex.”
Valérie Pierre-Pierre, director of the African and Caribbean Council on HIV/AIDS in Ontario, says the report confirms what she and the people living with HIV who she works with have known all along.
“I personally consider this type of coverage to be violent, a type of violence against black communities,” said Pierre-Pierre, who also served on the advisory committee for the study. “People living with HIV, whether they’re black, white, Asian, no matter where they come from or how they identify their race or ethnicity, are people and I think there needs to be a humane approach to how reports or articles are being written about HIV, people who are living with HIV.”
There is a broadening consensus among AIDS service organizations and activists that the law needs to catch up with the science, but both Pierre-Pierre and Mykhalovsky say the coverage continues to focus on the criminality of a very small number of people living with the virus.
“The way articles are being written, you have the nice stories that come around World AIDS Day on December 1, but apart from that they are othered, stigmatized in media portrayal,” said Pierre-Pierre.
The report recommends assigning health reporters to HIV criminalization stories rather than crime reporters and avoiding the use of mug shots, which the report says only further emphasizes the race of the accused. Reporters need to seek out more people living with HIV and AIDS service organizations that have intimate knowledge of the disease.
Pierre-Pierre emphasizes that the vast majority of people living with HIV are well aware of the risks and always engage in conversations with their partners about the latest science about treatment and risk, “because if you’re in treatment, you talk to your medical practitioner, you have conversations, you understand how it works, so you don’t intentionally put people at risk,” she said.
“I think it needs to be covered in such a way that it’s made clear that [nondisclosure] is not the norm and that they are actually outliers, and it’s often more complex than people think.”
But having people talk about how the media should cover a story and what the media can do to change its attitude toward stories are two different things. Desmond Cole, a columnist for the Toronto Star, former CANADALAND COMMONS host, and prominent commentator on racial politics in the city, thinks papers need to work harder at telling more than one type of story about a particular community.
“This is part of the reason why we talk incessantly about diversity in newsrooms,” said Cole. “It’s not just about tokenism. It’s not just about being able to say that one or two of us are there. It’s that we are probably, given our life experiences, more likely to see something like that and start asking questions.”
Editors should also be aware of who they are assigning to stories and, Cole said, if these common cliches appear in stories, then they should assign writers that understand their harm. It comes down to the need to constantly reassess how journalists’ personal biases about race, HIV, or other forms of identity play out in their coverage of stories.
“All the biases that tend to play out in our country on a day-to-day basis are going to play out in the media, so if our country in general is suspicious of newcomers, which we know Canada is, then that’s going to potentially play out in any story involving those folks and that’s just a thing to be mindful of.”
For one day this week, Kellie Leitch wasn’t the focus of press coverage in the Conservative leadership race. Her rival Maxime Bernier captured some headlines with a plan to drastically change the CBC’s mandate and funding model, removing ads and slashing funding.
Then Leitch jumped on the same topic, and trumped Bernier’s radical plan with a downright extreme one.
“My fellow leadership candidate, Maxime Bernier, has called for CBC reforms. I totally disagree,” she said in a Facebook post. “The CBC doesn’t need to be reformed, it needs to be dismantled. Period.”
The press took the bait. Stories quickly appeared from the Toronto Star, iPolitics, the National Post, and The Canadian Press.
It’s part of a running pattern for a candidate who’s stealing tone, tactics and even tweet style from the victorious Donald Trump campaign. The similarities are hard to ignore.
Here’s Leitch praising Trump:
“Tonight our American cousins threw out the elites and elected Donald Trump as their next president. It’s an exciting message and one that we need delivered in Canada as well. It’s the message I’m bringing with my campaign to be the next prime minister of Canada.”
Here’s Leitch tweeting like Trump:
The Liberal decision to fund UNRWA, a group with alleged ties to terrorist organization Hamas, is outrageous and dangerous. Bad judgement!
— Kellie Leitch (@KellieLeitch) November 17, 2016
Look at the way Crooked Hillary is handling the e-mail case and the total mess she is in. She is unfit to be president. Bad judgement!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 1, 2016
Here’s Leitch being belligerent with the press, like Trump.
Here’s Leitch misspelling a bunch of simple words, which was taken by some as a deliberate attempt to get “elites” to mock her, like they did Trump:
Multiple typos in this Kellie Leitch announcement, including misspelling @MaximeBernier’s name. pic.twitter.com/TtGsD4Er0T
— Jason Fekete (@jasonfekete) November 24, 2016
It keeps them mocking her, which is the whole point. https://t.co/WlHzcvAKS3
— Chris Selley (@cselley) November 24, 2016
But Leitch’s most successful media tactic is unique to Canada, and she has exploited a major vulnerability in our media to catapult her once-faltering candidacy.
Even before Donald Trump won his shocking upset victory, the Canadian press was doing what it always does with a big U.S. story: looking for a “Canadian angle.”
Leitch has positioned herself as the embodiment of this angle. If the press needs a Canadian Trump, she’s happy to play the part, in contrast to what she said to the CBC when The Donald was down in the polls, and her Canadian-values pitch was getting a Trump comparison: “This isn’t the same thing … this is about having a conversation about our Canadian values, about what we’re about, about a positive, constructive conversation about the reality of the values that built our nation.”
Google Trends* shows searches for Leitch spiked well above of her rivals as soon as she explicitly linked herself to Trump on election day. While searches for her name have dropped off slightly in the intervening weeks, her name is still being searched about 10 times more on average than Lisa Raitt’s.
Google searches for the top five candidates over the last month. Searches for Leitch, in blue, show a sharp peak just after election day in the U.S.
This leads to a question: After watching the American news media fuel Trump’s ascent with nonstop free coverage, are we making the same mistake in Canada?
Since sending a notice to her supporters about how excited she was that Trump was elected, Leitch’s campaign has garnered daily coverage. She’s getting the benefit of news stories, column piled on column. Most of the coverage trends negative, but that doesn’t seem to matter because Leitch has positioned herself as the anti-elite candidate. It doesn’t matter she’s a surgeon with an MBA who used to sit in cabinet any more than it matters that Trump flies around in a 757 with his name on it. This isn’t about reality, it’s about image and it’s about name recognition — thanks to two weeks of constant press, Leitch now has it.
Leitch has used every opportunity to link herself with the U.S. president-elect. She quickly put out a news release comparing her vision to Trump’s on election night. Leitch explicitly said she shared some of his values at a recent leadership debate. It’s unlikely the press in Canada actually want to create our own Trump, but our storytelling reflexes are leading us down that path.
Of course, Leitch has not simply been mimicking Trump’s style. She has also been aping his policies — policies Canadians arguably rejected last election.
When their prospects dimmed in the last federal election, the Conservatives turned to thinly veiled anti-Muslim xenophobia. The party got thumped for it, and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals got a majority. Canadian voters explicitly rejected this sort of politicking by a tired government.
Leitch made a tearful apology for being a part of the “barbaric cultural practices” hotline launch, set up so neighbours could snitch on the “cultural practices” of their implicitly Muslim neighbours.
Her contrition was soon abandoned. Leitch has made screening immigrants for ill-defined “Canadian values” the central plank of her campaign. Media outlets began polling on whether her values pitch was working (notably using her terminology to do so) and they found many Canadians approved of the idea. This, in turn, fed back into Leitch’s campaign as proof she was on the right direction. The press then fed on this, and Leitch landed on the cover of Maclean’s, defiantly holding a Maple Leaf.
The cover of the Maclean’s Magazine Oct. 3 Issue.
Of course, the coverage is often negative. But there’s so much of it! Leitch has been condemned in editorials in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail (and praised by editorials in the Toronto Sun). Her pitch has been discussed at length in columns in the National Post, Ottawa Citizen, and CBC. By way of contrast, Leitch’s opponent Michael Chong only seems to get wide coverage when he’s attacking Leitch or taking part in scheduled debates.
A quick search for “Leitch” and “Trump” since the U.S. election on the media-monitoring website Infomart, and you get nearly 300 hits for stories in newspapers from around the country. And those are just the articles making the direct link between the two. Search the same website for “Maxime Bernier” — another of the leading Tory candidates, polling eight points behind Leitch — and you get 50 results over the same period.
But it’s hard to measure true support of candidates in the leadership. There are polls that show Leitch leading the pack, but there are a dozen people looking to win the top job. In the latest poll, nearly as many people are undecided as they are for Leitch. And that assumes the polls are at all trustworthy to begin with. Our confidence in polling is lower than ever, but Leitch’s numbers are showing a clearly upward trend. As she gains more attention and recognition, her numbers are following suit.
There’s one last way to measure support in the race: fundraising. In that metric Leitch is also leading. She’s been able to pull in about $450,000, according the latest fundraising documents reported by Postmedia. Following close on her heels is Quebec MP Maxime Bernier who’s raised about $425,000. After that the totals quickly fall off with Michael Chong pulling in about $200,000. (Many of the other candidates have only recently joined the race, and not had to file the paperwork for how much they’ve raised.)
Leitch’s lead, whether it’s real or just perceived, has another effect. Her platform is now seen as viable and maybe even popular. This is giving other candidates the opening to use her ideas for their own benefit. Quebec MP and former public safety minister Steven Blaney stepped into the race on a platform promising to screen immigrants “understanding and appreciation of Canada’s core principles.”
Kellie Leitch is on the path to victory. If she wins, the press will have played a major role in promoting her name and legitimizing her, even while decrying her. The possibility of simply ignoring a once-fringe candidate with ideas rejected by most Canadians, has already passed.
***
editor@canadalandshow.com
*EDITOR’S NOTE: Google Trends uses a relative scale to compare how popular different searches are. It does not give the absolute number of searches made for any given term. From the Trends website: “Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. Likewise a score of 0 means the term was less than 1 per cent as popular as the peak.”
Staffers describe grim mood as company slashes payroll
A group of high-ranking former producers and executives at CBC, calling themselves Public Broadcasting in Canada for the 21st Century, have submitted a proposal to the Heritage Ministry, calling for an ad-free CBC.
The signees include Bernie Lucht, the former Executive Producer of the CBC Radio show Ideas, and Jeffrey Dvorkin, former Managing Editor and Chief Journalist for CBC Radio, and former ombudsman of NPR Radio. Dvorkin currently runs the University of Toronto’s Journalism department. They write:
It has become obvious to many that requiring our public broadcaster to apply the practices of the private sector to its civic and cultural mission has not resulted in the creation of a large body of distinctive, informative and inspiring social and cultural capital for Canadians. While French services and English Radio have fared better, it has turned CBC English television into what its own executives have described as a “publicly subsidized commercial network.”
[…]
…we recommend that all the services provided by the CBC/Radio-Canada must be non-commercial, including its online operations.
Green Party leader Elizabeth May retweeted (but did not endorse) CANADALAND publisher Jesse Brown’s message in support of an #AdFreeCBC.
And Conservative Party leadership hopeful Maxime Bernier laid out his vision for the CBC on Wednesday. Bernier wants to severely limit the CBC’s mandate, but also want the broadcaster to replace its revenue from ads through donations from the public, in a way similar to PBS and NPR in the U.S.:
All private media outlets have had to make deep cuts and to lay off journalists by the hundreds in the past few years. Yet, after getting a head start with more than a billion dollars in taxpayers’ money, CBC/Radio-Canada unfairly competes with struggling private media in a shrinking advertisement market.
To replace its revenues from advertisement, which amounted to about $250 million last year, the CBC/Radio-Canada will have to switch to the PBS/NPR model in the US and rely on sponsorships from corporations and foundations, as well as voluntary donations from its viewers and listeners. Of course, changes to the structure of CBC/Radio-Canada will also require changes to the Broadcasting Act.
Michael Geist is a University of Ottawa law professor with an expertise in the digital space. His argument for an ad-free CBC is based on the idea a publicly funded news outlet should be competing for ad dollars on top of eyeballs.
While the CBC should be responding to its audience with a strong digital news service, it does not follow that it should also compete for digital advertising dollars. As noted in the CBC letter, its total digital advertising revenues are relatively small (and they are even smaller — roughly $6 million — for the online news service) so the foregone earnings will not have a material impact on the CBC. However, there is a market effect of having the CBC compete for ad dollars that affects news organizations of all sizes. This includes large players like the Globe as well as smaller, independent media for whom a loss of thousands in advertising can be significant. An ad-free online service would better justify the public investment in the public broadcaster, make for an enhanced user experience, and remove the concern that the CBC is harming private sector alternatives by competing for advertising dollars.
The full text of the Public Broadcasting in Canada for the 21st Century submission can be found here:
PBC21 Submission PDF
***
editor@canadalandshow.com
The morning show host on Ottawa’s most popular news talk station will headline a political fundraiser for the Ontario PC Party next month, in what appears to be a clear conflict of interest.
Bill Carroll, host of CFRA’s Morning Rush, will be the headliner at an early-December fundraiser for Goldie Ghamari and the Carleton PC riding association. The fundraiser is billed as “Dinner in the Dark” an event using “minimal hydro.” For $100, guests get dinner and will hear Carroll speak. For $150, donors get attend a “meet and greet with Bill.”
Tired of over-paying for #hydro? Join @billcarrolltalk, @carleton_pc & me on Dec 7 for #DinnerintheDark! #Ottawa #ottcity #onpoli #PCPO pic.twitter.com/dUcmnu0gZq
— Goldie Ghamari, MPP | گلسا قمری (@gghamari) November 19, 2016
The director of Bell Media’s news and local stations division, Matthew Garrow, said there was no problem with Carroll appearing at the fundraiser. “It is important to note that Bill’s talk show is not a news program, but instead an opinion show that, by definition, reflects his personal views and opinions.”
“Bill is not a reporter, but instead his role is like that of a columnist — one who is clearly opinionated but entirely open minded to the facts of the issues he raises during his show,” Garrow said.
At other news organizations, columnists are treated no differently than reporters. They don’t typically offer themselves to politicians looking to fundraise. In many cases it is explicitly prohibited.
Garrow said Carroll was not being paid for his appearance. But Garrow did not reply to follow up questions. He was asked whether Carroll’s appearance would be considered a donation of his services, as laid out in the Ontario’s election finance laws. He also did not respond when asked where the line is drawn for staff at Bell news organizations for political participation. If we receive an answer, we’ll update our story.
CFRA screenshot
Carroll has said on Twitter he does not consider himself a journalist, despite being an on-air host at a station billed as “news talk radio.” He’s a frequent and vocal critic of Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government, but said he would appear at a Liberal event if he were ever asked.
and I would speak at a Liberal event too if they asked.
— Bill Carroll (@billcarrolltalk) November 18, 2016
Questions to CTV Ottawa’s news director Peter Angione, who oversees CFRA’s news operation, were forwarded along to Garrow. Questions sent to Carroll received no response.
Ghamari is the provincial Tory candidate* in the Ottawa-area riding of Carleton.
***
editor@canadalandshow.com
*CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Ghamari was a candidate for the PC nomination in her riding. That was incorrect, she’s already won the nomination. We regret the error.
