CBC’s English TV ad revenue collapsed 37% in one year—from $178M to $112M—while audience share hit record lows: 1.4% for news, 5.3% total, with digital engagement barely averaging 50 seconds daily. New CEO Catherine Tate’s push for "truth" as a counter to "disinformation" clashes with CBC’s exclusion of climate skeptics and critics of mass immigration, while Trudeau deflects blame for Iran’s downing of a Ukrainian plane killing 176 Canadians, despite Tehran’s admitted missile strike. Think Sharp’s Manny Montenegrino calls this reckless, accusing the CBC of parroting government talking points to avoid accountability, mirroring past controversies like the two Michaels in China. The broadcaster’s shrinking relevance raises questions about taxpayer-funded bias and its role in shaping public discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello my rebels, I've got great news for you as from one shareholder to another of the CBC they have their annual report today.
I'm kidding around, of course neither you or I are allowed to shit to sell our shares in the CBC and they wouldn't be worth much anyways, but I'll take you through the report and show you some of the little hidden gems in there that'll just make you, I don't know, laugh, cry, but both.
Before I do, can I invite you to become a premium subscriber?
What does that mean?
It's eight bucks a month and you get the video version of this podcast plus Sheila Gunn Reed's show, plus David Menzies' show, plus of course the knowledge that you're helping to keep the rebels strong.
That's how we pay our bills.
So that's premium.rebelnews.com.
Okay, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, the CBC's ratings plunge and advertising revenues are down 37% in a year.
Despite record subsidies, fewer people than ever are watching Trudeau's state broadcaster.
It's January 14th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government will buy a publisher is because it's my bloody right to do so.
The CBC has released its annual report and it's a doozy.
Now, if you were a shareholder, you'd sell.
You'd probably sue them for mismanagement.
You'd fire their board of directors.
Alas, although you own it, all that really means is that you're on the hook for it.
Justin Trudeau and his extremist new heritage minister, a lifelong environmental activist from Quebec named Stephen Gilbeau, they control it.
And they use it the way other countries use their state broadcasters, whether it's Vladimir Putin's RT, Russia Today, Qatar's Al Jazeera, or Turkey's TRT.
That's their global broadcaster.
Each of those broadcasters occasionally tells the news straight up.
Sure they do.
And each of them has interesting people on it.
Sure they do.
But like the CBC, at the end of the day, they know who their boss is and they pay extremely close attention to what their bosses want.
Turkey's Erdogan, Russia's Putin, and Canada's Trudeau.
So the CBC is a propaganda machine, really.
You know that because it seeps from the news into the entertainment divisions.
I use the CBC's so-called comedy department as a barometer for this.
If there's a new Liberal Party talking point on Monday, you'll see it show up later in the week on, say, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, one of their comedy shows.
I mean, fat jokes, for example, about Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
Several anti-Trump tweets a day, really.
There's a show I watched one time on the CBC called Kim's Convenience.
I'm pretty sure they screened their actors and only allowed left-wing or Liberal Party political activists to even audition.
I don't think that's actually reflective of the Korean Canadian community, by the way.
So yeah, you know it's a propaganda channel when not just the news shills for the government, but even the dramas and the comedies and even the sports dude too.
is the Russia today Al Jazeera model.
Anyways, yeah, when they have an annual report, it's not like a real annual report of a publicly traded company on the stock market where the directors have a real fiduciary duty to investors.
For example, a company on the stock market has to disclose which executives earn what.
Executive pay is a big issue in rich companies because you want to hire an excellent executive team.
And it's absolutely appropriate to reward them well if they meet their targets.
And conversely, to sack them if they fail.
And to be able to know the difference.
The CBC keeps all of that a secret from you and me.
We know how much staff on Parliament Hill make.
We know how much MPs and senators and cabinet ministers.
And we even know how much Justin Trudeau makes.
We know their expense accounts or most of it.
We know a lot about our elected politicians, but not for the CBC that we all own, even though we allegedly are its shareholders.
We're not.
It's a fake, this whole annual report thing.
It's disinformation.
It's a trick.
Even the British version of the CBC, the BBC, even they disclose their salaries, not the CBC.
It is obviously shockingly high how much they pay their talent if they insist on keeping it a secret.
Otherwise, why would they keep it secret?
Anyways, the annual report is a propaganda exercise, just like the rest of the CBC is.
But tucked away amongst its many self-praising pages are a few details that are shocking nonetheless.
Like I say, in a publicly traded stock market company, someone would be sacked for this, but no one gets sacked in government, do they?
I think the most incredible thing to see right off the top is that advertising revenues in English TV plummeted by 37%.
I was first alerted to this by BlackLock's reporter.
So it's down in one year.
Do you see that?
From $178 million down to $112 million.
Those are millions, not the thousands they appear to be.
I mean, I've heard of companies with troubles in this new media environment.
I mean, every kind of media is having a tough time, right?
But to lose 37% of your revenue in a single year, I have never heard of that.
I've never heard of that before.
Boy, you've got to bring in some experts to do that poorly.
People are watching more content in the world than ever.
There's actually never been more advertising in the world than there is at this moment.
It's just not on the CBC.
Look at this part.
CBC News.
See that there?
Do you see their targets for 2019-20?
Their goal, their big hoped-for outcome, their big plans, is to try to attract 1.4% of Canadians to watch their news at any time.
Do you see all-day audience share at any time during the day?
1.4%.
And even their non-news programming, their big goal is to see if 5.3% of Canadians might watch.
So they know that no one wants their news, but even their non-news, no one wants.
They have a billion and a half dollars a year poured into them by Trudeau, plus whatever ad money still comes their way.
And they acknowledge that 98.6% of Canadians don't want their news.
That's what's left after they get their 1.4%.
And they acknowledge that 94.7% of Canadians, and everyone's watching TV more than ever, more screens than ever.
94.7 don't want anything from the CBC, not even their dramas or their comedies or their kids' shows or their sports.
No one's watching it.
Look at this.
There are 6 p.m. local TV newscasts.
So that's your CBC Calgary, CBC Toronto, CBC Vancouver.
In the entire country, it's 319,000 people.
So on average, just over 10,000 people per town.
It's one in a thousand people watch the local CBC broadcast.
Just in any given town, maybe 10,000 people.
It's tiny.
I mean, my high school had 2,000 people in it.
For $1.5 billion a year, you could probably have someone drive around town in a Rolls-Royce, handing out DVDs to those handful of CBC viewers, like a paper route, and it would be cheaper.
So maybe you're thinking, okay, well, they're probably just killing it on digital, you know, YouTube, Twitter, whatever, stuff like that, the way kids watch TV now on their phones.
Yeah, I know.
Look at this.
Their goal for CBC News is to get people to visit their website for 27 minutes per month.
You see it says monthly average minutes per visitor.
Monthly?
That's not each day.
Each month.
So it works out to about 50 seconds a day.
That's their big hope for outcome.
That's what you're paying $1.5 billion tax dollars for.
By the way, we here at the Rebel have 1.28 million subscribers and we get millions of visitors a month.
And our average viewer, according to YouTube, our average viewer watches our average video for four and a half minutes per video.
So we don't get people who stay for 50 seconds.
Every single one of our videos keeps our viewers an average of four and a half minutes.
That's according to YouTube stats.
And we don't get any money from the taxpayer.
Look, no one really wants to watch the CBC.
Not even their allegedly non-political stuff.
But the funniest part to me are the excuses by the new boss of the CBC.
Catherine Tate is her name.
She's been in America for years.
She was brought in for the job from the States.
I don't know.
There was no one in Canada who could do it.
But Trudeau said she was hired because she's a woman.
That's what Trudeau does.
That's what his announcement emphasized, her gender, not her skills.
I mean, it's a hell of a thing to lose 37% of your ad revenue in a year.
But hey guys, she's a woman.
Did I mention that?
How demeaning to her.
I can't believe she accepted that.
Let me play for you her excuseology when she appeared before a parliamentary committee.
And this was last year before the bad news even came out.
One of the reasons that I accepted to this wonderful job is because I believe that public broadcasting never has been more important than it is today.
And that, and when I meet with other public broadcasters in Paris or in London or by telephone to Australia, we are all facing the same challenge, which is how do we protect and defend our citizenry from this unbelievable tsunami of disinformation.
And in a sense, we become a beacon for truth.
And the key to your question in the notion of a public versus a state broadcaster is we need the public to feel safe, that there is that we are a beacon for that truth and that they know what a messiah complex.
She thinks she's saving us from ourselves.
Is any of that the job of the CBC to correct people's opinions?
Imagine the chutzpah, the gall, to say you are the beacon of truth.
That's sort of like how the Bible talks about Jesus.
That's how Catherine Tate talks about herself.
I mean, just for one example that's going on this very minute, the CBC are the ones who claim that Aboriginal bands are opposed to that gas pipeline in northern BC, when in fact 20 out of 20 Indian bands support it.
So they're liars.
They're not promoting the truth.
They're actually disinforming.
I won't go so far as to say they're purposefully lying.
They probably just think of it as spinning or something.
But they're absolutely promoting Trudeau's brand of politics, which is why barely 10,000 people in any given town tune in to CBC News at 6 p.m. each night.
They don't want to be scolded or spun.
And get this comedy.
Everybody makes mistakes, but the journalistic standards and practices state very clearly.
We measure, we research, we're transparent, we weigh, we try very hard to present both sides or all sides of a particular subject.
That is the nature of the public service and the mandate.
Do you think that's true?
Does the CBC present the other side of the story?
Does it present the skeptical side of the story with regards to the theory of man-made global warming?
They do not.
In fact, they explicitly say they won't have climate skeptics on.
Do they have skeptics of mass immigration?
Do they have anyone who's pro-Trump or even just, for example, skeptical of the three-year Russia collusion hoax?
Don't make me laugh.
Hey, that could be the CBC Comedy Department's motto.
Don't make me laugh.
They're very successful at that.
The thing is, look, we should be crying, not laughing.
We Canadians have never paid more for the CBC in taxes than we do now.
And they've never had fewer people listening and watching and clicking as a percentage of the population as they do now.
They're shrinking.
I guess that's a kind of good news.
Stay with us for more.
Innocents Bear the Brunt00:16:09
Do you think that the people who died on that plane are collateral damage in the tensions between Iran and the U.S.?
I think so.
I think if there were no tensions, if there was no escalation recently in the region, those Canadians would be right now home with their families.
This is something that happens when you have conflict and war.
Innocents bear the brunt of it.
And it is a reminder why all of us need to work so hard on de-escalation, on moving forward to reduce tensions and find a pathway that doesn't involve further conflict and killing.
You know, when Trudeau does his bedroom voice, when he gets really deep and sexy like that, you know that's the time to hang on to your wallet.
Did you hear what he actually said there?
He blamed the tensions for shooting down an airline with over 170 casualties.
The thing is, tensions don't shoot down airlines.
There's tensions all the time, especially with the dictatorship.
What shot down that airline was a missile that the Iranian government admits they shot.
Justin Trudeau is still blaming others, including America, and that's a media party trope that even Iran no longer argues.
Joining us now to talk about this is our friend Manny Montenegrino, who's the CEO of Think Sharp.
He joins us now by Skype from Ottawa.
Am I overreacting?
Was Trudeau being nuanced and friendly, or is he actually trying to take the blame away from Iran and just sort of say, well, accidents happened, things happened, and America raised the tensions, so they're equally to blame.
That's how I felt.
Am I misreading it?
No, I don't think so, Ezra.
You are nailing it as it should be said.
First of all, Ezra, my prayers and thoughts are for the 176 killed.
It is the most disturbing news you could hear, but it is terrible.
So I'll start with that.
I have some good Iranian friends, and I certainly learned a lot about Iran through my Iranian friends.
And one is a member of parliament, a provincial parliament, a conservative member of Ontario.
No, it's not wrong, Ezra.
Your feelings are right.
I'm surprised because the prime minister resisted blame game for a couple days.
And now, while Iran accepts blame, accepts criminality, in fact, this was a criminal act or a gross criminal conduct or a gross negligent act.
Either way, it is criminal in nature.
The Iran government itself has set up a judiciary committee to review, and as I understand, as of today, are charging and have already detained the criminal conspirators to this mass killing.
To sit there and lay blame to tensions and anything else and directing it to President Trump is reckless.
There are no reasons or explanations for criminal conduct.
Iran is even on that path.
So it shocks me to see that the Prime Minister is moving towards that narrative.
So it is just wrong.
It's wrong in so many levels.
No time, even during conflict, should there be any criminality, intentional killing of innocent victims.
And it's criminal in nature.
You can't say that the tensions resulted in this.
We will see who did it, who was ordered, and why it was done.
But at no time, even Iran is not taking, is upset by this at this moment in time.
Yeah.
You know, I knew Trudeau had gone so far when I saw a story by Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, which is an extremist dictatorship in the Gulf region.
They're known to support terrorist groups, like they're very radical.
And they were praising Trudeau's, how he verbalized this.
When Al Jazeera, the state broadcaster of Qatar, thinks you're right, that's probably a sign you're doing democracy wrong.
Well, there's more to that, Ezra.
You know, unfortunately, we seem not to be guided by history.
We seem not to remember what happened last week, last month, or the months before.
We seem to ignore the plight of the Iranians.
Iranians have been protesting for months to remove this terrorist regime.
300 Iranians, according to Amnesty International, have been killed in these protests.
This is as of December, my numbers, there might be more.
Thousands have been imprisoned.
I mean, 300.
That's twice, those are two of those planes of Iranians that were killed by this regime because they were protesting against this terrorist regime.
Thousands are in jail.
We see a similar what's happening in China with Hong Kong, and the Chinese government has not killed any Hong Kong.
Sure, they've imprisoned them, but Iran has gone way past, and to sit there and not understand or to give them some form of exemption, this government that's already killed 300 of its own people, imprisoned thousands, it just beyond any comprehension.
Yeah, you know, this is obviously the official government line.
We saw there from the softball question from Donna Friesen.
I suggest that question was set up because in Trudeau's first press conference, after Iran confessed to this, no fewer than three CBC journalists within the course of an hour had that same narrative.
Here's a quick clip of Rosemary Barton, Katie, I think Simpson is the last name, David Cochran, and one other CBC journalist.
Here, take a quick look at this.
63 Canadians dead because of the unintended consequences of a decision made by the U.S. President.
Who's to blame, right?
I mean, in terms of, is it the United States?
Is it Iran?
Is it both?
Who's to blame here for what happened?
Manny, to have four CBC journalists to have the exact same line, which is a very unusual thing to blame America for Iran shooting down a plane.
I think that's an official talking point of Trudeau and Trudeau's CBC.
I don't understand why.
I mean, it's not like Trudeau's pushing the blame off himself onto Trump.
It's like he's siding with Iran against Trump.
I don't really know what to make of it.
Well, it's easy.
I mean, it's easy.
In Canada, Trump is a negative.
I think the last time I've seen 75% of Canadians don't like Trump.
And so it's easy.
If you don't have any intellectual planning or thinking about what our foreign policy should be, well, take the quick, easy, low-hanging fruit and blame Trump and everybody's on your side.
I get it.
But if you look at, if you look at what's, I mean, Ezra, I keep saying on your show, I think of the two Michaels in China.
Right.
The two Canadians in China.
They saw that after the election, or just before the election, the prime minister goes to Washington to plead for the president to do something to save these two Canadians.
And we saw that that was an election move.
I knew it was an election move.
I knew he wasn't sincere.
He did that.
Right after the election, you have the mean girl talk of the G7 meeting where they're all making fun of the president and Trudeau's leading the gang.
That hurts the two Michaels in China.
Now, today, how do the two Canadians in Chinese jail, the two Michaels, feel when the prime minister gratuitously, wrongly, and for no reason attempts to shift the blame of a criminal act?
It wasn't an act of war.
It was criminality.
It was wrong.
It was negligent.
It was grossly negligent.
The Iranians say so, but the prime minister gratuitously blames the, or indirectly blames the president, who he seeks their help to get these two Michaels released from China.
It just, it baffles me.
And I don't get it.
I do get this, though, Ezra.
I do get this, because obviously I have, you know, being a lawyer, I understand there are many people that don't want adversarial confrontation.
I get that.
Most people don't want to go into a fight.
I understand that.
I guess people forget that in Benghazi, the embassy that was taken over and four Americans were killed, the thought at that time was, well, let's not escalate this.
Let's not build the confrontation.
Well, that's fine, except for the four Americans that died.
Well, what we had here, General Somali strikes the Baghdad embassy, and Trump responded differently.
He did the anti-Benghazi.
He sent the troops in.
So in light of that strike on an embassy that attempted to kill diplomats and Americans, you could see that the president, with a long, rich history of killing Americans, this Iranian general, decided to act.
And I know that most people don't want that.
And you know what?
Let more Americans die so we don't escalate it.
This president thinks differently.
Yeah.
You know, the juxtaposition you make between Trudeau giving China a pass when they really are to blame and Trudeau falsely blaming America when they're not to blame.
It's so striking.
And I think you're right.
I think Trudeau's just pandering to anti-Trump sentiments.
But I think it goes beyond that because you can be anti-Trump, but also anti-Iran.
And let me just show you this one tweet from Rosemary Barton, the senior political correspondent for the CBC.
She says that by giving black box information to the West, Iran has gone above and beyond their duty.
I mean, praising Iran.
And like, you can be anti-Trump.
I don't agree with it.
I think it's inappropriate for a state broadcaster to do that.
I think Trudeau's wrong.
But to praise Iran, more news.
Manny, I see today that Trump is not only ratcheting up sanctions on Iran, but he's trying to get NATO allies like France and the UK to join him.
I don't see Canada doing that same thing.
They just killed dozens of Canadians, including a lot of Persian Canadians from across the country.
I don't know the exact number.
I think it's slightly less than the originally reported 63.
Trudeau won't lift a finger against Iran, even when other allies are.
Help me riddle that one out.
Well, there is this, I guess it's easy, Ezra.
It's easy for people that don't parse through all the facts to simply knee-jerk and dislike Trump, and it works.
It just works.
There are 83 million Iranians that want this government done, gone.
I have, my problem is I'm old enough to remember in 1980 when the Shah of Iran was toppled, this theological group, the mullahs, they took over Iran.
They took over the U.S. Embassy.
Canada played a large role in helping America.
Canada was there standing against this democracy that's trying to take over and remove people's rights.
I remember the Iran before this religious zealots are running the country.
It was a country that Canada would admire with our values of equality of women, equality of people.
There was no push of religious ideologies.
These were a wonderful, beautiful, smart people.
They've been crushed.
They are rebelling on the streets now.
We don't see it.
But the rebellion is getting stronger as a result of the lies and as a result of the negligent criminal killing of the 176 people on board that plane.
There is, I hope, I hope that through this great tragedy, that 83 million Iranians get back to the lives that they once enjoyed and this government is gone and this government kills 300 people for protesting, puts thousands in jail and creates and killed hundreds of Americans.
So it's that easy.
I think it's just if you don't think it out, you don't know what's happened the last 30 or 40 years, you don't care about the 83 million Iranians.
I mean, my Iranian friends tell me, and here's a great line.
When we saw the Supreme Leader crying at the death of General Soleimani, she said to me, Are they going to cry for the 300 people that they killed that were protesting?
Are they going to cry for the 176 people that were shot down in the plane?
Will the Supreme Leader cry for these people who are innocent?
And the answer is no.
They know what they feel.
And I think it's time that we, and I don't know why our Canadian government doesn't care about the values that we love in Canada that should be spread to the Iranian people who are seeking it.
But I do think, I do hope and I pray that this tragic event will lead to the less killing of protesters in Iran, the less dominating their lives.
I don't even think they have the internet ability there.
They've been imprisoned.
83 million Iranians are living in prison under this regime.
And maybe out of this ugly tragedy that killed a few, maybe many more lives will be saved and maybe Iran will claim its former glory of this great nation that it once was.
I hope you're right.
Yeah, Iran actually, it does have a glorious history.
And I think of all the countries in the region, the one that's most likely to become modern, progressive, integrated, peaceful with the rest of the world, I think is Iran.
I'm so glad you reminded me of Canada's role during the hostage crisis where Canadian diplomats helped free American hostages.
Clearly, we were on the side of the good guys, both the Americans who were held hostage and also of the previous government that had been kicked out by the violent revolution there.
That was a more noble Canada than the one that's siding with the bad guys.
Manny, it's great to talk to you.
As always, thank you for taking the time with us today.
Boycotts and Brands00:02:28
No problem.
That's right.
Thank you.
My pleasure.
That's our friend Manny Montenegrino.
He's the CEO of Think Sharp, and he joined us today from Ottawa.
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, welcome back on my monologue yesterday about Maple Leaf Foods CEO Michael McCain being mad at Donald Trump, but not mad at Iran.
Kevin writes, hit them in the pocketbook.
Plenty of better sources of meat in Canada.
I think you're right.
I think actually the pain will come from investors, big, you know, corporate investors, banks, pension funds saying, whoa, if that's the temperament, if that's the bad judgment of your CEO, I think I'm going to switch Maple Leaf Foods from buy to hold or from hold to sell.
It's hard to boycott something so ubiquitous that has such market share in so many different brands.
And of course, there's related brands.
There's the McCain brands.
So it's like trying to boycott lob laws.
I am outraged at lob laws and the fact that they stole money from the poor with the bread price fixing scheme and then stole money from taxpayers.
You know, in that case, with the permission of the Environment Minister buying them new fridges, but try boycotting loblaws in some communities, some neighborhoods, it's the only food market there is.
But I agree with you.
It has certainly lowered my esteem for maple leaf foods if I had any.
Karen writes, leftists hate Trump so much they will blame him for absolutely anything.
They probably think he's responsible for the Australia fires too.
Michael McCain is clearly another Canadian NPC who voted for Trudeau.
NPC stands for non-player character.
It's sort of an online way of saying just like a robot zombie, just someone who's going and doesn't even have a speaking role, like a cameo, like an extra in a movie.
I think so, except for he probably thinks he's exquisitely well-informed.
I mean, he grew up in a life of luxury.
He lives in the lap of luxury.
He probably has the fanciest friends.
But I think sometimes it's people like that who actually know the least about the wider world because they're in some sort of a bubble.
Mark Morano's Bubble00:01:08
On my interview with Mark Morano, Stan writes, Extinction Rebellion members should be arrested and prosecuted when they cause disruption.
Sooner or later, someone is going to be hurt or killed because of their actions.
Yeah, well, listen, let me be clear.
I think that they should be arrested and prosecuted when they break the law.
They should be allowed to protest.
They should be allowed to have their stupid climate strike.
I don't think that extremist lobbyists like that should be allowed into schools, which really irritates me.
But I think it should be legal to be wrong.
Where I differ, and this is what Mark Morano and I were talking about, is when they do things like block roads, you saw when they blocked that subway.
I think in that case, shut them down, arrest them, charge them.
You can't stop hundreds of people from getting to work so you can make some stunt.
I agree with prosecuting them and prosecuting them hard.
Like they're a fundraising machine.
Prosecute them and take away their ill-gotten gains.
Well, folks, that's the show for today.
Until tomorrow, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, to you at home, good night.