I’ve been catching up on all the coverage of CBC’s latest scandal. That’s the one where their senior business correspondent and The Exchange host, Amanda Lang, has been revealed as having way too friendly a relationship with some of those corporations she’s supposed to be covering.
First, we found out that she’d done paid speaking gigs for Manulife that she then followed up with softball interviews with Manulife’s CEO.
And now we’re learning that in 2013 Lang tried to interfere with an investigative piece by her CBC colleague, Kathy Tomlinson, about RBC’s misuse of the temporary foreign worker program. Lang even went to so far as to pen an editorial in the Globe and Mail trivializing what Tomlison had uncovered.
Going behind your colleagues’ backs to trash their work in another media outlet? Not cool.
And Lang did all this after doing paid speaking gigs at RBC-sponsored events and while she was in a serious relationship with a member of RBC’s board.
It’s all very sordid.
And, big surprise, CBC management has leapt to Lang’s defence. In other words, it’s backing its celebrity anchor despite being handed evidence of journalistic impropriety — same as it did for Peter Mansbridge and Rex Murphy when it was revealed they were taking money to speak at oil industry events.
It’s another ball dropped by CBC management. Seems they’ve learned nothing from their mishandling of the Q affair.
All these seedy revelations are coming out of Jesse Brown’s Canadaland, a website and podcast dedicated to Canadian media criticism. I recently signed on as a supporter through their Patreon page because I think it’s the most interesting thing happening nationally in media. And because I think people should sometimes maybe kick in some financial support for alternative news sources that give their product away for free… hint hint. (You’ve maybe noticed that Support Prairie Dog link to the right, right?).
Continue reading “I Totally Ate The City Hall Cookie”
