CBC Misjudges 'News Story of the Year'

While Canadians were donating a million dollars a day to the trucker convoy, national broadcaster buried the story & misled listeners.

CBC radio demonstrated ‘wilful blindness.’ Stock photo (click image for source)

The western arm of the Freedom Convoy began rolling in British Columbia on January 22nd. For the next several days it gained momentum as it traveled across the prairies. Protesting truckers departed Enfield, Nova Scotia early on January 27th, as two separate convoy streams from Southern Ontario prepared to do so in Sarnia and Fort Erie.

During the final week of January 2022, therefore, tens of thousands of people gathered on highway overpasses madly waving Canadian flags. They stood outdoors for hours with their kids. In communities along multiple routes, they showered the truckers with food and gift cards. By the Wednesday of that week, the truckers had raised an eye-popping $5.3 million via GoFundMe. A day later, an additional million dollars had poured in.

Yet the Canadians who get their news from CBC radio knew nothing about any of this. In the early pages of Honking for Freedom, convoy spokesperson Benjamin Dichter describes what happened:

Anybody tuning in to CBC Radio that Friday [January 28th] - the day before the official arrival at Parliament Hill - would have had no clue about the excitement and exhilaration sweeping the country. “The Media is the Virus,” some placards said along the way, but no criticism fully captured the extremes of the state broadcaster’s willful blindness.

The Current, CBC Radio’s morning newsmagazine, buried the convoy story. Host Matt Galloway opened with a COVID-19 update from Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C. chief medical officer of health, the type of interview he had been conducting for two years. For the second item, he spoke separately to two people about federal draft proposals to improve long-term care homes. The third item featured the inventor of an internet search engine for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books. The fourth and final item was titled “the convoy approaching Ottawa.” Rather than speak to a trucker, Galloway interviewed Justin Ling, a self-described ‘freelance investigative journalist’ from Montreal, who would become the CBC’s go-to reporter on the Freedom Convoy…

‘This protest did not begin as a protest of vaccine mandates for truckers,’ Ling said categorically, beginning an analysis that was to give CBC radio listeners close to the most distorted picture of the convoy possible. [bold added]

Many months later, on December 19th, the Canadian Press wire service (CP) would declare the Freedom Convoy 2022’s news story of the year.

Did the geniuses at the CBC recognize the significance of these events early on? Did they keep the public properly informed? Hardly.

So much for professional news judgment.