Canada’s national public broadcaster increasingly behaves like a government mouthpiece: David Cayley.

From the National Post: In his provocative new book The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back) — released by Sutherland House Books on September 16 — veteran producer and broadcaster David Cayley examines the decline of the institution he served for more than four decades. He argues that the CBC has abandoned its duty to speak to and for the whole country, retreating instead into narrow ideological echo chambers. In this excerpt, Cayley revisits the broadcaster’s early coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, showing how its suppression of credible but divergent views revealed a troubling willingness to act as a mouthpiece for government rather than as a true public forum. [Read the original excerpt in full at the publisher’s website here].

In Brief by Probe International

The careful and considered opinion of a seasoned professional who had proved prescient on public health matters in the past was suddenly equivalent to “climate change denial.” This set the tone for coverage in which scientific disagreements were rigorously excluded from public discussion. People were simply told that their leaders were “following science,” regardless of the fact that the available science was both scant and contested. The virus was new, so was the policy being used to combat it, and yet “the science” was held up as if it offered transparent, obvious, and unequivocal guidance. Often the term meant nothing more than the opinion of some credentialed person.

Cayley recounts the example of a March 2020 interview with Dr. Richard Schabas, a former Ontario chief medical officer, who questioned COVID-19 lockdown measures. A frequent go-to expert for Canada’s national public broadcaster with “literally hundreds” of appearances and sound bites to his credit—Dr. Schabas suddenly found his skepticism on this particular matter warranted his cancellation by CBC News, which deemed him an “outlier” akin to a climate change denier.

Despite his past credibility, Dr. Schabas’s concerns, along with those of other public health experts advocating for a balanced response to COVID-19, were largely ignored by the media and political leaders, highlighting a systematic censorship of differing opinions on pandemic policies.

This pattern of silencing dissent extended to CBC journalists, contends Cayley, who faced restrictions on covering protests and vaccine side effects, reinforcing the perception that the broadcaster acted as a government mouthpiece rather than an independent news source.