CBC and Suzuki team up to prove that neither is interested in, nor capable of change

The latest cozy interview predicts the unpredictable and confirms that, like the weather, everyone talks about the CBC but no one will ever do anything about it

Grok image of David Suzuki as a CBC firefighter

Reading my Rewrite colleague Mr. Peter Menzies’ post about the explosive ousting of former CBC reporter Travis Dhanraj for failing to be the right kind of token, I could only paraphrase the line attributed to Mark Twain about the weather.

Like the weather, everybody talks about the Mother Corp. but nobody does anything about it.

As Mr. Menzies wrote on July 14, even the Sturm und Drang over Dharanj’s public allegation that he was hired to tick a racial diversity box and then figuratively frog marched out the door when he dared show political diversity will invariably subside before autumn leaves wend their way earthward.

The great hunkering mass of progressive hot air that CBC breeds into Canada’s stultifying political ecosystem seems somehow impervious to change. Its perpetual BIPOC fixations. Its quaintly Victorian upper middle class pity for the suffering masses. Above all, Mother Corp. looms lugubriously in its unwavering devotion to the debunked and defrocked doomsday cult of climate alarmists.

Exhibit A was a CBC News item published July 11 under the headline “No, David Suzuki hasn’t given up on the climate fight – but his battle plan is changing.” The click bait claim compelled me to, well, click. For the life of me, I could not recall anyone ever asking with grave concern whether David Suzuki has given up on the climate fight.

In fairness, I have heard exactly no one ever confess to having two thoughts of any kind to rub together about David Suzuki beyond peremptorily dismissing him as a weather-obsessed crank riding the currents of once minor CBC celebrity. So, why would our $1.4 billion tax-funded “national story teller” expend precious resources just to prove Churchill’s axiom about a fanatic being someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject?

Well. it seems the full bore wind tunnel has, in fact, changed his tune. In place of second verse same as the first, Suzuki is now whistling us into the graveyard rather than just past it.

“I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late,” reporter Bridget Stringer-Holden quotes the man himself based on his remarks to another publication.

But Stringer-Holden quite rightly isn’t content to just scalp bon mots about the pending apocalypse. She pursues Canada’s perpetual climate Cassandra for details. How bad, oh Seer of Scientism, is it going to be? Badder than worst, it turns out, according to Suzuki.

“It’s going to get hotter, there’s going to be floods, and all kinds of other things that we can’t predict at this point,” he forecasts.

Of course, journalistic instinct would compel asking: “Say what, now?” Or more directly: “Could you expound on ‘there’s going to be floods’ because back in Sunday School, like, you know, we had this guy called Noah and he had his Ark, and like, will these be that kind of flood or different?” Moving in a strictly logical step-wise fashion (admittedly a highly unfashionable move in current journalism), the question might also have been popped: “Can you help me understand how there will be all kinds of things we can’t predict, which is of course a prediction that denies its own predictability. Like, are we talking AI hallucinations or what?”

Stringer-Holden does show a flair for seeking alternative sources to buttress her interview. Alas, one of the sources happens to be the self-referential quoting of another CBC program on which Suzuki had previously expounded, errr, expanded, errr, exhausted the topic that he can’t stop talking about.

“Humanity has lost the fight against climate change,” he repeats repetitively. “It’s an unpredictable world that we’re heading to, and so much of our efforts in the environmental movement have been spent on assuming politicians are going to take the right steps.”

In my midnight confession, I would ask the Creator’s forgiveness for writing from an old editor’s reflex in the margin of my printout: “This quote reads as borderline insane.”

Let us here, however, invoke the seal of the confessional and render my reaction more generously as the blue-skying of a 89-year-old Mother Earth mystic who sometimes loses track of the need for words to at least correlate to, you know, coherent meaning.

We might also ask diplomatically whether such a mish-mash of convoluted contradictory premises coming from the mouth of, oh, say, Donald Trump would have been repeated with the same reverence by a CBC reporter or, indeed, emanated from the CBC itself.

Which actually pinpoints the real problem.

For the point here is not to mock the neophyte Bridget Stringer-Holden, who is a identified as a CBC associate producer and “news scholar” with a Master’s degree in journalism from UBC and a passion for “science and climate reporting.” It’s not even just to poke fun at the near-nonagenarian non-stop climate chatterbox who, to his credit, managed to parlay early expertise in the genetics of fruit flies to the status of oracle on all things environmental.

It’s to underscore the abject (and very expensive) failure of the CBC at the workaday level of competent editing, yes, but also in its heights and depths as Canada’s largest-by-far journalistic institution. The Suzuki story is but a representative sample of the Category Noah flood of execrable journalism that institution foists on us time after time. It’s not just a question of bias. It’s a culture-permeated by refusal to adhere to the most fundamental principles of fair, accurate and balanced journalism.

To put a point on it:

• How, other than in a news institution steeped in propagandist propensities, could a newbie news gatherer fail to be corrected for quoting someone from something called the Climate Emergency Unit in support of David Suzuki’s claims – without pointing out that the Climate Emergency Unit is a project of the David Suzuki Institute?

• How was she not mentored against quoting freely the Swedish environmental scientist Johan Rockström as a Suzuki ally without at least a counterbalancing reference to the Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg who, while affirming climate change, argues climate catastrophizing actually impedes development of practical solutions?

• How was she not guided to include the clarifying fact that the Biden administration budgeted $400 billion in 2022 to combat climate change, much of which has been exposed as utterly wasted and even skimmed off in outright fraud?

All of the above require simple two sentence paragraphs, if not mere parenthetic qualifiers. They would have rounded out, fairly and accurately, a balanced Suzuki story. Indeed, in an old school honest newsroom culture, observant desk editors would have either counseled the young reporter in her craft to include them, or naturally written them in themselves before hitting send.

Alas, as Travis Dhanraj insists, possibly even affirms, institutional honesty in CBC journalism is just fakery by another name. And no one does nuttin’ about it.