Should Canadians Expect More Objectivity from their Taxpayer Funded Public Broadcaster?

So below is the 1st post that the CBC wouldn't publish for the 1st 5 or 6 days they just didn't until I questioned them then they said they needed to talk about it and we did I made some minor edit more for style, they said they didn't like that I focused just on the CBC so I reworked the article to the one now below so that it is not just an article about media bias but whether the CBC as our public broadcaster should be held to a higher standard of Objectivity which i thought was a good issue to examine but obviously the CBC doesn't.

Originally Submitted April 15th then edited and resubmitted April 21st Still not published as of April 28th

Should Canadians Expect More Objectivity from their Taxpayer Funded Public Broadcaster?

“First get your facts, and then you can distort them as much as you please” - Mark Twain

The truth of the matter is this election isn’t really engaging the average Islander at least the people I talk to. Those of us who are political junkies are engaged but because of the really low amount of information coming from the local campaigns on the Island much of what we hear about the election is coming from the media. So I had to question the reliability of what we are hearing .

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine a long time Liberal who expressed these words to me while we were discussing media coverage of this election, “if the CBC doesn’t stop having such an anti conservative slant to all their election coverage people might think we’re paying them off”

Now I wouldn’t go far as my Liberal friend for instance the “your take” bloggers seem to be balanced and if nothing else from reading everybody else's bios there seems to be more people of the conservative persuasion (I’m not sure if this was intentional or just representative of the polling showing larger support for conservatives) But the fact of the matter I could see where one might think it’s biased such as the distinction made when racist comments are made by a Liberal Candidate the headline seems quite benign compared to if it was a Conservative who made the same comments, I’m not the only one who noticed this but it is a frequent comment to the article.

Or even the recent coverage of the Helena Guergis story seems to try and make it a scandal especially from the main headline and In-Depth Headline. It is not until actually reading the story you get the facts out though skimmed over really that the Tories got information about possible wrongdoing and then reported it to the authorities. This seems like the right thing to me but isn’t presented that way. If they had not reported it or took any action then I would understand it being a scandal, but why is doing what is right being portrayed as something bad?

While maybe the intention is one of bias or not I know it is actually having the opposite affect and is generating sympathy for the conservatives where really there should be none. So much so that my friend John (who I think has voted for all 3 main parties in his life) said he’ll vote for the Conservatives not because of anything they are saying but rather in his word’s “if the CBC seems to be so against him he must be doing something right”

Again my apologies to CBC it is just that it is the main news source for me and most of my friends so it tends to get picked on more than anybody else.

Ok before you all start screaming at me at commenting what about SUN TV or the National Post I would concede that probably every media source can be seen to have some kind of bias and indeed every individual has some kind of bias. I think that all media should strive to provide a balance approach to reporting, unfortunately that is not so, they often bring these biases in based on the owners/shareholders own biases they hire journalists/talking heads etc based on those.

The bigger question is should the CBC as a crown corporation be held to a higher standard when it comes to objectivity as we as taxpayers are their “shareholders” ?