Anti-American Bias in the Canadian Broadcasting Company

Via East Coast Wisdom:

A content analysis from Canada’s Frazier Institute showing a leftist anti-American bias in the government owned Canadian national broadcasting network. According to the study:

This anti-American bias at the CBC is the consequence of a “garrison mentality” that has systematically informed the broadcaster’s coverage of the US. Garrison mentality was a term coined by Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye. He used it to describe a uniquely Canadian tendency reflected in our early literature, a tendency, as he put it, to “huddle together, stiffening our meager cultural defenses and projecting all our hostilities outward.”

To gauge the extent of anti-American sentiment on CBC, one year’s coverage of the Corporation’s flagship news program, The National, for 2002 was examined. The authors chose 2002 because it followed the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, but was prior to the US invasion of Iraq.

In total there were 2,383 statements inside the 225 stories that referred to America or the United States on CBC in 2002. As with most news coverage, the largest number of statements was neutral; they constituted 49.1 percent of the attention. Thirty-four percent of the attention to America or the United States was negative, over double the 15.4 percent positive descriptors. Only 1.6 percent of the statements were considered ambiguous.

We don’t think the “garrison mentality” explanation is sufficient — just good old leftist bias works better to explain this. If this “garrison mentality” explained the bias, it would not be the left in Canada that is particularly anti-American.

Thus the CBC, like PBS and the British Broadcasting Company are examples of media that give free reign to the liberal biases of journalists. Not constrained by commercial pressures, they are not really constrained by politics either — since they have political allies to protect them.

And the taxpayers are the poor chumps who have to pay for the propaganda.