The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Post today announced an agreement which will allow both organizations to share content across their respective media platforms. The agreement is effective immediately.Now, I'd think there's little room for dispute that most media outlets have a self-interested perspective when it comes to discussion of financial and economic matters. As major corporate entities themselves, they have every incentive to present reporting and commentary that affirm their own nature and serve the interests of their corporate owners - even if the effect is purely unintentional. (And of course it should be mentioned that the National Post tends to be a particularly noteworthy offender on that front.)
CBC.ca will run daily financial stories and podcasts from the Financial Post in CBC’s online Money section, and The National Post will run daily sports stories in the sports section of nationalpost.com and periodically in the sports section of the newspaper. Financial terms were not disclosed.
In contrast, the CBC is the only national media outlet which can combine both the capacity and reach to investigate and report on financial issues across the country, and an internal structure which gives it a different perspective on such issues - even if it too is bound to be sensitive to the interests of corporate advertisers. Which makes it a serious concern if the CBC is about to amplify the views of just another corporate media outlet rather than continuing to offer its own take. And the problem is equally obvious whether one actually prefers the CBC's theoretical position to that of the corporate media, or merely recognizes enough value in media diversity to view it as a plus for both types of perspectives to be presented.
Mind you, the deal's announcement doesn't say specifically that the CBC is actually planning to cut back on its own financial reporting. But it would only make sense that to the extent it plans to populate its own Money section with content from the National Post, the CBC will end up reducing its own reporting efforts. Which means that while the one media outlet capable of remedying that problem instead directs its attention toward reporting on sports (where there's surely far less reason for concern about presenting multiple perspectives as a matter of citizen information), Canadians will have effectively nothing but corporate voices to listen to in a major area of public interest.
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