Richard Stursberg the president of English programming at the CBC, hit back at critics who have been accusing the network of anti-conservative bias.

In a article in yesterday’s National Post, Stursberg said

Maybe a few observations about “bias” are in order, from an organization that has been accused of bias from most points of the political compass for much of its nearly 75-year history.

Here’s the thing. Rabid partisans — of whatever view — will never agree with the CBC’s coverage of their areas of interest, unless we provide unqualified and uncritical support for their opinions. Nothing else will do. Everything else looks like “bias.”

Our news is never — and can never be — usefully addressed to those whose minds are already made up.

The CBC has been facing complaints of bias for weeks prior to the launch of Sun TV News, a new conservative-slanted all-news channel.

Kory Teneycke, a former communications director in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office is behind the new venture. During the launch event last Tuesday he said CBC News is boring:

Canadian TV news today is narrow, it’s complacent and it’s politically correct. It’s bland and boring. Our aim is not to bore people to death, we’ll leave that to the CBC.

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	Executives, News & Journalism	Posted at 6:24 pm (24 Jun 2010)

A 5.5 magnitude earthquake was felt across Southern Ontario, Quebec and parts of the Northern U.S. this afternoon

That’s what you felt in the CBC buildings in Ottawa, Toronto, Windsor and Montreal.

This is CP’s wire story of the quake:

There are reports of a possible earthquake shaking buildings across Ontario and Quebec.

The Internet is abuzz with people saying they felt the earth rumble in cities across the province, including Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal.

The quake seemed to last for about 30 seconds in Ottawa and rattled downtown buildings, homes in west-end Ottawa and government offices across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Que.

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	Drama	Posted at 1:51 pm (23 Jun 2010)

People living near Sackville, New Brunswick sometimes hear voices.

Little, faint whispers from the kitchen.

A bit of a hum from the office.

Sometimes the voices are in English, sometimes Asian or European tongues.

Yet they’re not crazy, and their houses aren’t haunted.

So what’s going on?

The residents of the area are the audience for an unusual phenomenon known as “external rectification,” where metal objects pick up radio frequencies and act as a speaker.

‘Here’, a local paper, recently wrote an article on the effect:

“The plumbing acts as an antenna,” area artist and burgeoning historian Amanda Christie said. “When two pipes cross, the appliance ends up acting as a gramophone speaker. All of a sudden, people will hear the radio coming from their sink, but this happens with other things, too, that have pieces of metal touching at the right point.”

The reason residents hear Chinese, Swedish or German voices is because the frequency is from the nearby CBC Radio Canada International transmitter, which is also used by a bunch of Asian broadcasters, Radio Sweden, the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle as part of a transmitter time exchange agreement.

The transmittor is pretty powerful. It’s Canada’s only shortwave transmitter station, broadcasting to Europe and South America.

Christie is working on an art installation based on the effect:

“It’s a part of the history of the region that isn’t written anywhere. Seems that if you live here, you just know about it,” she said. “There’s mythology, too. Some say the radios affect their dreams. Others say they keep people in Sackville, while some say they force them away. Like a magnet – it attracts and repels.”

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	The Odd File	Posted at 6:32 pm (22 Jun 2010)

CBC/Radio-Canada has launched an initiative in the lead-up to Canada Day with the idea of “Celebrating Canada” What does that mean to you?”

The request is “to share a piece of your story through a cool photo or two. Show us what it means to you to be Canadian, what Canada represents for you, or what you cherish most about Canadian citizenship,” it says on the CBC/Rad-Can site.

You can send your photos as an attachment to your email (Photo@cbc.ca) or by uploading directly to this page on Flickr.

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	Asides	Posted at 5:56 pm (17 Jun 2010)

Krista Erickson is leaving CBC News to join the the new Sun TV News channel.

Erickson has worked at CBC News for over a decade. She started in Winnipeg in 1999 and worked on a bunch of shows and earned a Gemini nomination in the process.

In 2008 she was embroiled in a mini-scandal after a CBC investigation determined that she passed questions to Liberals during the Mulroney-Schreiber hearings. Erickson was cleared of any allegation of bias by the CBC ombudsman and she was later reinstated to the Ottawa parliamentary bureau.

The new all-news channel is set to launch on new year’s day 2011. The new channel, put together by former Harper communications director Kory Teneycke, is intended to be a conservative slanted news outlet, like Fox News.

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	People	Posted at 6:03 pm (15 Jun 2010)

The World Cup is drawing record numbers of online viewers.

The opening match of the tournament drew 269,000 total streams, that’s about a third the size of the television audience of 900,000.

That ratio is much higher than online numbers for the Stanley Cup. For instance the final game between Pittsburgh and Montreal drew 130,000 views online, yet the television audience was 4.2 million.

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	CBC.ca web site, Programming	Posted at 3:53 pm (15 Jun 2010)

Ross McAuley, a Toronto photographer, recently uploaded this drawing of Jonathan Goldstein, the multi-tasking host of CBC Radio One’s Wiretap.

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	Wiretap	Posted at 6:44 am (10 Jun 2010)

The CBC station in Windsor has been presented the president’s award for coping through layoffs while managing to integrate their newsroom.

The newsroom merged their radio, television and online resources into a single unit last year, despite losing several positions. The president’s awards are meant to honour innovation and accomplishment across the CBC.

CBC President Hubert Lacroix visited the station yesterday to present the award. He said the station’s adaptability was “the only way to survive.”

When you take out nine total positions in reporting, if you want to continue giving to Windsor a window and a mirror of what it’s all about, you need to cover the community and you need to be in the community and the only way to do this was to merge the teams.

There’s more on Lacroix’s visit here.

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	Integration, Layoffs	Posted at 6:33 am (10 Jun 2010)

A commentator pointed out that The Ryerson Review of Journalism has a fascinating article on the renewal process that changed the face of CBC News. It touches on the Hub, the relaunch of the supper hour newscast, The National and, yes, the issue of Mansbridge standing. Here’s a snippet:

In the months since the October relaunch, The National has in many ways returned to a calmer format. The new set remains, but the stories and nightly lineup have strengthened. The choreography has largely been done away with in favour of the camera focused on Mansbridge standing behind the desk. This can be credited to the show’s leadership under Harrison and Whitten, both of whom Stewart says kept the show functioning during the relaunch. Plus, they have succeeded in breaking away from what Whitten calls the traditional newscast format of intro, item, repeat. The National has been flashy, yes, but it’s also been consistently interesting.

Harrison and Whitten are both sensitive to the impact on the audience, but they also feel the show had to respond to the times if it were to continue. Whitten points to The National’s website and 10-minute downloadable podcast (updated every weekday at 6 p.m. ET before the main broadcast) as examples of the show’s attempts to adapt to the times. “It’s recognizing that, 10 years from now, are people really going to be still sitting waiting for 10 o’clock at night to get the news? And The National is a hugely important brand for CBC, so why have people wait until 10 o’clock at night?” Whitten says. “This was a pretty wide-ranging change in the way we do things. It didn’t really involve the set and whether Peter stood or not. And I think that gets kind of lost in a lot of the hubbub.”

The whole article is available here.

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	Behind the Scenes, News & Journalism	Posted at 7:49 am (09 Jun 2010)

Ron MacLean broke from his lunch with Don Cherry on Thursday to help save a man who had jumped into the Delaware River in Philadelphia.

It was apparently a suicide attempt, and when MacLean realized what was happening, he rushed over to help fish the man out of the water.

“I kind of hop over the rail and jump down to help this guy that’s already in the water with the man who is taking his life, as it turns out…”

“It was an unbelievable scene,” MacLean said. “So I get back to the table, Grapes sits down and says, ‘Well that’s just great. I’m telling a wonderful story about Dave Bolland, enjoying a nice lunch and you go running down to the river.

The whole article on CBC.ca is here, plus there’s an interview with Mark Kelley

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	Asides	Posted at 8:33 am (04 Jun 2010)

CBC Ottawa is adding a bit pedal power to its fleet.

A informal green committee came up with the idea of using bicycles to cover local stories. The employees pitched the idea, and it was quickly approved. “The best part about this project is that the reporters themselves came up with the idea and they’re really excited about it,” Rob Renaud, CBC Ottawa’s managing director said.

Alistair Steele, a reporter in Ottawa, said using the bicycles to cover stories offers more than the obvious environmental benefits. “we’re more visible, and I think we’re going to get stories that we wouldn’t have got enclosed in our cars. We’re more approachable.”

Steele also said the option of avoiding traffic jams and transit is also a plus. “People have enjoyed it. Reporters have come back and said ‘wow, what a nice ride.’ You never hear reporters say that when they take transit or a taxi,” he said.

Giacomo Panico, an assignment editor in Ottawa said the bikes are economical and fast, “we can see reduced costs, whether it be for taxi expenses, or parking costs, or tickets. We also have the benefit of sometimes getting to the story faster,” Panico said, “and the bikes don’t have a maintenance costs.”

It’s not for every story. It’s an option. It’s a good tool to have,” Panico said, “We can act as an icebreaker with the public, and there is the ecological benefit.”

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	Environmental	Posted at 8:27 am (03 Jun 2010)

The Hollywood Reporter has noted some big moves within the CBC’s comedy unit.

A story yesterday by Etan Vlessing, a guy who always seems to have the scoop on just about anything to do with TV,  noted some of the recent changes in the CBC’s Arts and Entertainment department.

In the latest sign that Sally Catto is consolidating power at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Carol Commisso has left the public broadcaster as executive in charge of comedy production.

And Anton Leo has been replaced as creative head of comedy at the CBC by Jenny Hacker, who joined the CBC in 2007 as executive in charge of comedy development.

Hacker will now oversee all live and scripted comedy at the CBC, while Leo becomes senior executive in charge of production for live comedy.

Both Leo and Hacker will report to Catto, who in November 2009 replaced Fred Fuchs as executive director of arts and entertainment for the CBC’s English TV service.

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		Posted at 7:02 am (02 Jun 2010)

The CBC released an interim report on its journalism and reporting this afternoon.

The report describes itself as “the most comprehensive and detailed examination” of CBC News in history. It was commissioned in January 2009 and this is the first glimpse at the findings. These interim findings are being released following weeks of criticism that CBC news coverage has a left-wing bias.

The executive summary of the report deals with both the tone of the CBC reporting and the amount of coverage the government receives. “Overall, the tone of CBC news is very close to that on competing sources,” the report says, noting that the tone on The National is very close to that on Global and CTV.

The study also looked at how much interview time each party received on from CBC News on both radio and TV at the network level. “The Conservatives had 70% of the interview time and the opposition parties 30%,” the study says. Comparing that to other networks, “the Conservatives had 74% of federal interview time on The National, 67% on the CTV National News, and 55% on Global National.”

Jennifer McGuire, the general manager and editor in chief of CBC News had this to say as the report was released:

Journalism isn’t a science. It isn’t a business. It’s unpredictable, sometimes chaotic. It’s frequently criticized. Some of our critics have skin in the game – the coverage we offer can have a material effect on their fortunes, as in the world of politics. We understand that.

In evaluating our political coverage, we see that the government gets more coverage than opposition. We have also evaluated the tone of our political coverage (with stories categorized as “positive,” “neutral” or “negative”). The majority of the coverage is neutral. However, the government attracts both more negative and more positive coverage than the opposition. Coverage of the opposition is more likely to be neutral. This is perhaps not surprising, since it is the government that makes decisions and is held accountable — and criticized — for them.

The interim report is available here.

The executive summary is available here.

The full report will be available later in the fall.

What do you think of the findings so far?

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	News & Journalism	Posted at 1:31 pm (01 Jun 2010)