CBC covering up for Goodale?

By now, most of us have heard that the RCMP is investigating Ralph Goodale’s income trust announcement.

Here’s the letter that set off the news-storm addressed to NDP finace critic Judy Wasylycia-Leis from the RCMP.

I just received an email from a concerned conservative in Ralph Goodale’s riding and he details suspicious behaviour from the state-run broadcaster:

CBC National News with Peter Mansbridge gets introduced on the broadcast originating in Regina tonight at 10 pm. Mansbridge begins his intro of the lead story – the Ralph Goodale RCMP Investigation.

No sooner has Mansbridge begun, but commercials start running instead. This goes on for several minutes, returning to the feed only when reporter Caroline Dunn is wrapping up her report.

Mansbridge moves to an interview with Goodale. Less than a minute into the interview, commercials start running again, returning to the feed only at the very end of the interview.

After this, there are no other broadcast problems.

Now, occasionally, we do get the Winnipeg or Calgary feed accidentally, so something might have happened accidentally. However, any CBC feed in Winnipeg would have been showing the same thing as Regina (CBC National News), and any CBC feed from Calgary would not be broadcasting commercials from 2 minutes until 6 or 7 minutes after the top of the hour. That’s when you run compellling content to grab viewers.

The obvious conclusion is that it was a deliberate move by someone inside the CBC Broadcast Centre in Regina (where Ralph has friends) to ensure the biggest story of Ralph Goodale’s political career was not broadcast into his own riding.

I smell a rat…

UPDATE: In a followup email:

the 11 pm broadcast is on right now. So far, it’s been OK. But the bulk of the audience is at 10 pm.