CBC Board member is Iggy’s newest recruit

Joseph Handley, who is still listed on the CBC website as a member of that crown corporation’s board of directors was named today as Michael Ignatieff’s newest candidate for the next election.

Handley was also a former cabinet minister in the Northwest Territories.

The embarrassing thing? This Conservative government appointed him to the Ceeb’s board, a board whose bias against Conservatives I’ve written about in the past.

That’s the same CBC that took a shot against the Prime Minister for partisan patronage “hypocrisy” during the last election.

To my friends over at Canadian Heritage and PMO: you get a free pass on the partisanship of your next “patronage” appointment at the CBC to replace Handley. Nobody who has a serious voice will blame you for it. And frankly, it’s time to make more partisan appointments to the public service. Yes, today we also learned that Iggy was courting former Clerk Himmelfarb to be his Chief of Staff.

Some would argue that Prime Minister Harper should stay away from politicizing the bureaucracy and making the civil service more “partisan”. Those people would be the same that don’t differentiate between “Liberal” and “non-partisan status quo”. Indeed, a change can only be made to the right. Conservatives, your opponents will either criticize you or undermine you — critics are more easily identified and deflected.

CBC Board of Directors Political Contributions by Party

As I prepared this post, a rerun of the CBC’s fifth estate documentary was lamenting the arrival of that “loud”, “raucous” cable news channel that has debuted on Canadian digital cable. I am, of course, talking about Fox News.

Bob McKeown has an obvious thesis. He claims, quite correctly, that Fox News has aided in the division of the United States into Red and Blue. He calls it “a very un-civil war”. Ironically he uses Al Franken and his Air America to confirm his thesis that Fox News is conservative (and thus quite evil). Yet, he ignores that by appealing to Franken he becomes unfaithful to his original thesis of media division of opinion as unfavorable.

I’d venture to guess that Bob took a lot of notes when he saw the Democratic Party funded documentary on Fox News: Outfoxed. All of the points were there. If I produced Outfoxed, I’d look into suing the Fifth Estate for plagiarism.

There is something quite ironic about the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation identifying media bias when the American news channel itself will compete directly with CBC for viewers.

So, I decided to look into the political influence behind what may direct the decisions at the CBC, from the stories that they choose to cover to which rerun of the Antiques Roadshow they’ll play on Newsworld whenever the Conservative Party gets together at a convention or leadership debate.

Thus, I present the political contributions by party made by the current CBC board of directors.

cbc board of directors.jpg

Consider that these powerful positions are appointed by the government and that state media should of course be unbiased.

The CBC documentary on Fox News dreads a division of opinion in the news media concerning the stories that are reported, the facts which are selected, and the tone of the broadcast. I would much prefer a “divide” than such a disparity which is as evident as the chart above describes.