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Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

tarahenley.substack.com

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Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#341

Post by 908B64B197 »

olivermarks wrote: post #282
InTheArena wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the Overton window at work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window In the US, it goes far beyond broadcasting. Note how lin manuel miranda's Hamilton has gone from Obama era cultural gold to "cringe-worthy" - https://www.vox.com/22641501/hamilton-parks-rec-harry-potter... Or how JKR on Harry Potter went from being vilified by conservative voices to the modern "She who will not be named" of Lefty HBO.

(response to post that was just deleted) 'critical to note that she is just recounting of her own perception of herself.' Tara is outlining why she quit a job she couldn't do anymore because the CBC were ignoring important local stories to focus on CRT, identity politics and racialization of everything, biased reporting and click bait. 'People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack…

I always considered the idea of CBC to be... extremely weird. Having government approved journalists on government payroll sure sounds like something out of China, Russia or Cuba. Not a western democracy. From the article:

> To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my newsroom, to fill out racial profile forms for every guest you book; to actively book more people of some races and less of others.

Here you can see someone "from the top" made that request and that the (taxpayer funded) employees are filling out their request. So much for "journalistic independence".

To me that, and that they are using taxpayer money to fund sitcoms and entertainment while it's one of the most profitable businesses on earth, is completely bizarre. I mean Disney and Marvel made billions just last year simply by producing content people want to watch!

> Most journalists know if they get paid they are expected to promote the owner's views - the line between pr and journalism is a fine one - but that they will be promoting wholesome, useful values and information. When the owners lurch too far people leave, both writers and readers/viewers, leaving a weak core.

At the same time they can push this ultra-liberal agenda because they aren't subjected to market forces. It doesn't matter if more and more people tune out, funding is guaranteed and comes straight from the (captive) taxpayers.

Lastly, for an "anti-racist" media, they aired content that was quite racist not that long ago, and refused to edit any of it. [0]. Maybe some races are more equal than other according to these people!

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/cbc-apology-story-of-u...

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#343

Post by dang »

lnxg33k1 wrote: post #248

Quoted post unavailable.

Please don't do generalized putdowns of entire classes of people. That's flamebait (and worse), and not in the spirit of this site. If you have a substantive point to make, you can make it without doing that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#344

Post by kbenson »

throwawayboise wrote: post #309
kbenson wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that such a terrible thing to have to deal with? For me? No. I imagine that someone that might deal with that 10 times a day or more might feel a bit different about it, and be tired of being in the situation of either correcting people or just letting it go because it's too tiring to deal with. I mean, I used to get that way because of my first name which has an uncommon spelling, and just correcting people wri…

> if Jim has corrected me once already or has registered a preference that I've seen, I should probably address them as they'd prefer, right? Anything else is just being an asshole, IMO I agree (but honestly, if the preference is for something like "zhe" I will be rolling my eyes a bit). > They/them went out of favor a while back I really don't like the singular use of "they" as it was drummed into my head in 12 grad…

> I really don't like the singular use of "they" as it was drummed into my head in 12 grades of English classes that it was wrong,

Yeah, that's the sad thing. At some point we decided that gender neutral pronouns were less favorable, and then taught generations of people not to use them, a couple hundred years before a big cultural mixup where it would have been very useful to have. I was lucky enough to always feel it was appropriate and that the recommendations to not use it were shortsighted. This came about when there was a shift towards people saying we should use "she" instead of "he" for generically referring to a person, but that just seemed silly to me, why would we shift from incorrectly addressing roughtly 50% of the population in writing to incorrectly addressing the other roughly 50% of people, when we could just use "they" and do away with that specific pronoun problem in an accurate and even handed way?

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#345

Post by onphonenow »

badRNG wrote: post #64
teg4n_ wrote: post #24

This is incredibly tedious. I can't fathom how this has anything to do with "Hacker News" but I guess it's appeal to a certain subset of the audience here overrides that.

The strong opposition to diversity efforts has been a pretty common trait associated with the tech community/silicon valley. It seems reasonable that a subset of the culture that produced the work environment at Blizzard [1] or has historically rallied behind alt-right thought leaders would also be here on HN. Talk to any woman software engineer, I 100% guarantee they have multiple stories about dealing with a...spec…

It's so weird (being in the bay area) to hear that tech companies are not pushing diversity stuff but perhaps chicken farms in the south are?

Can you even do the types of strikes / walkouts that the tech workers do on these issues in the south and keep your jobs? Ie, the associates of an energy law firm in texas do a walkout over the lack of action by their firm on climate change?

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#346

Post by dang »

badRNG wrote: post #224
hammock wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the HN algorithm More accurately, it's people flagging it and also manual nerfing by @dang

To be fair, every comment that didn't agree with the conclusion of the article was nerfed. The top comment on this post for most of its existence immediately left the top and within seconds jumped to being the very last comment at the bottom with all the other even vaguely pro-diversity comments.

Your and others' comments criticizing the article have been heavily upvoted, so this is clearly not the case.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#347

Post by groby_b »

david38 wrote: post #141
nefitty wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Thiel (gay man), Caitlyn Jenner (trans woman) and Kanye West (black man) all publicly support Donald Trump. It's not identity that's the issue, it's economic inequality. Even as part of marginalized groups, these people's vast wealth allowed them the luxury to support a man who did not have marginalized group's best interests in mind. If I was rich and wanted to take over a local government, I would channel my…

This. IMO, most of the culture was a distraction from what really matters. People are up in arms on TV over who can claim to be a woman, but meanwhile, the concentration of wealth and economic power and worse than even the guided age. If the bottom 50% of the population (economically) united on JUST this topic, they would see massive change - better structured education, housing, health, etc. Instead we get what I ca…

"Culture wars are nonsense and distraction - wait, let me add an aside about the group I hate" is maybe not as strong a point as you think it is.

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#348

Post by version_five »

908B64B197 wrote: post #341
olivermarks wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(response to post that was just deleted) 'critical to note that she is just recounting of her own perception of herself.' Tara is outlining why she quit a job she couldn't do anymore because the CBC were ignoring important local stories to focus on CRT, identity politics and racialization of everything, biased reporting and click bait. 'People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack…

I always considered the idea of CBC to be... extremely weird. Having government approved journalists on government payroll sure sounds like something out of China, Russia or Cuba. Not a western democracy. From the article: > To work at the CBC now is to accept the idea that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others. It is, in my new…

I think a lot of what is happening inside the CBC reflects what is happening in Canada's public service generally. The whole institution has gone from traditional "Liberal" left to a bad caricature of the US left (especially because in Canada we don't have many of the same issues).

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#349

Post by dang »

swayvil wrote: post #275
dang wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but you're assuming your conclusion by using a word like 'murdered' in any case. In general, there's a lot of space on HN for arguing contrarian or minority views, as long as you're actually using the site as intended, i.e. for curious, thoughtful, respectful conversation. Most accounts that I see complaining that they've been suppressed haven't been doing that to begin with.

I'm referring to the numerous replies in this thread that have been rendered "dead" (thus "murdered".) via the HN voting/flagging system. Duh. So you think the hivemind makes a good conversation-dictator? I don't.

What are some flagkilled comments in this thread that haven't been breaking the site guidelines, such as by calling names or posting flamebait?

You're breaking the site guidelines yourself here, btw, including the one asking you to avoid snark ("Duh") and the one that asks you to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says ("So you think").

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

#350

Post by finite_jest »

smnrchrds wrote: post #333
finite_jest wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right that newspapers lean capital C Conservative [1] in Canada. It is mostly due to Postmedia. Ownership by Postmedia is quite conspicuous in the list. CBC is really woke though. You don't need to suffer them too much to notice that. Randomly turn on the radio while driving a few times, and you will see. [1]: Which in its current form looks like a bland, toothless, uninspiring, "big tent" party. Roughly spea…

Now that TorStar is on its deathbed, without CBC, Canadian English-language media will be comprised of solely Postmedia. That's not a future I am looking forward to, but one that is quite likely the next time CPC gets elected. No party wins popular vote anymore (as in more than 50%). With FPTP, we are stuck with less-than ideal seats-to-votes correlation.

I think I broadly share your distaste for bias and corporate media in general. However, one would hope there could be better alternatives than woke to bland and indefinite conservatism.

> No party wins popular vote anymore (as in more than 50%). With FPTP, we are stuck with less-than ideal seats-to-votes correlation.

As a side-note, I recently learned that the more unambiguous terms for this are "plurality" (more than all others) and "majority" (more than half). I think "popular vote" is also often used as a synonym for plurality, but I am not completely sure. Sorry, I am ESL :-)

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