Skip to content

Palmer: CBC Morphed From Public to State Broadcaster

Day 4 · 0:43:37 · Rodney Palmer

  • ⬆️ He defines public broadcasting as bottom-up news-gathering that knits the nation together through local stories.
  • ⬇️ State broadcasting, he says, is top-down intentional manipulation via lies and half-truths using the same anchors and reporters.
  • 🌏 Palmer likens COVID-era CBC to the state media he witnessed in China, Syria, and North Korea.

Core thesis opens the slide-supported critique of CBC’s pandemic coverage.

← Journalist Rodney Palmer Sworn In on CBC Conduct | Lab-Leak Segment: Fear, Family Division, No Evidence →

Transcript

Rodney Palmer · 0:43:37

I do. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Allison, for holding this inquiry. Thank you, Mr. Buckley. I worked at the CBC for these times, and I, and at, at CTV, but I was primarily, I was trained at the CBC from a young age, a young journalist. I was trained in their system, and what I observed very quickly during COVID was that the CBC morphed into the type of broadcaster that I witnessed in China, in Syria, in North Korea. It wasn't the public broadcaster that I had been trained as. It's— I, I believe it's, it's a state broadcaster, and I'm going to explain the difference between those two things. A public broadcaster engages in news gathering, which is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as the process of doing research on news items. And the way it works is from the bottom up. So a little reporter in a small town in Saskatchewan will do a story that's local, and maybe Western Canada becomes interested in it, maybe The Nation does, and it goes up and it becomes a national news story. That's a bottom-up. That's how the apparatus is designed to work. That's a public broadcaster.

Speaker F · 0:44:36

A broadcaster.

Rodney Palmer · 0:44:37

It tells the story of the nation that holds us together and knits us together by telling our stories. But I heard it becoming a state broadcaster, and a state broadcaster works on propaganda. It uses the same apparatus, the same anchors, the same reporters, right down to that little reporter in Saskatchewan. And what it does, it's, it's defined in Oxford as the intentional manipulation of public opinion through lies and half-truths. It uses the same apparatus, but it comes from the top down. The government tells us right down to that little reporter, and they all speak with a unified voice.