Twitter defines a “government-funded” media outlet as an outlet “where the government provides some or all of the outlet’s funding and may have varying degrees of government involvement over editorial content.”
CBC in Canada is one of the latest organizations to receive the rating, initially being labelled “government-funded media,” but now labelled as “69% government-funded media.”
This of course is entirely true. CBC received $1.24 billion in 2021-2022 in federal government funding. This sum is for all of CBCs content, not just news, but it doesn’t change the fact that CBC News is largely funded by government money.
CBC was not happy about the label and publicly took to Twitter stating:
“Our journalism is impartial and independent. To suggest otherwise is untrue. That is why we are pausing our activities on @Twitter”
They followed up with an article stating:
“We cannot in good conscience continue to post fact-based news and information to Twitter, or engage on it, while a false impression of government involvement in our work is allowed to stand.”
They are stating that by being labelled “government-funded” people will assume they won’t be impartial. But who would decide if someone is impartial? How would we know other than to look at the type of content CBC produces? Doesn’t CBC realize people think they are partial because of their heavy bias on events like COVID and the Freedom Convoy?...<<<Read More>>>...