I used to be the Globe and Mail’s national security reporter and I wrote a book about Canada’s spy agency, CSIS. So I know something about secret services and how they treat pesky reporters who ask prickly questions about how they operate.
I had more success prying out information about CSIS’s dubious conduct than I have had recently delving into the questionable practices of CBC News and one of its high-profile and (usually) loquacious personalities, who has, in the face of some uncomfortable queries, suddenly and uncharacteristically taken refuge in the cone of silence.
My disturbing odyssey into the CBC’s byzantine world of subterfuge, duplicity and plain lunacy began several weeks ago. In early January, I started researching the number and content of speeches that Rex Murphy has made about the oilpatch and the petroleum industry generally.
I found that Murphy has made several speeches to oil-friendly audiences who lap up his cheerleading about the industry and his wisecracks about Neil Young, environmentalists and do-nothing Easterners, including his CBC colleagues.
One speech that particularly caught my attention is captured in this YouTube video, where Murphy, cradling a glass of red wine, is in full rhetorical bloom at an oilpatch love-in in late November at Lake Louise, Alberta.
A Calgary Herald account of the 18-minute speech described Murphy’s performance in glowing terms: “A words-weary audience jumped to its feet with an enthusiastic ovation for broadcaster Rex Murphy after he urged pipeline builders Friday to stop being ashamed of the multibillion-dollar projects they are trying to build … The audience reaction showed they were ready for some plain talk from someone clearly on their side.”
He was on their side, alright. Murphy’s speech was more like a hyperbolic pep talk about the virtues of oilsands development, delivered by a self-defined ‘journalist’ to Alberta’s corporate and political elite.
“Energy rules the world,” Murphy told his appreciative audience. “You should exalt in what you’re doing … this is a triumph of the spirit, not something that anyone has to apologize for.”
Then, on January 17, 2014, in one his soliloquies on the CBC’s The National, Murphy excoriated Canadian artist Neil Young for being, among other things, “unfathomably irresponsible” for criticizing proposed oilsands development.
That Murphy injected the idea of ‘responsibility’ into the debate was serendipitous — since I was wondering how responsible CBC News executives were in permitting Murphy to disparage Young and other oilsands opponents on the public airwaves without informing viewers that he had championed that very development in a so-called ‘speech’ several weeks earlier.
Since then, I have attempted to get answers to that and many other important ethical questions that his controversial address raises about journalism, money and conflicts of interest — and the quaint notion of offering full disclosure to the audience.
First, I tried to find out what Murphy was paid for his Lake Louise appearance by contacting the National Speakers Bureau, his Toronto-based agent. The firm’s CEO, Theresa Beenken, confirmed Murphy was a client, but she wouldn’t disclose his speaking fee for — remarkably — “competitive reasons.”
Beenken said, however, that a well-known personality like Murphy could charge between $2,000 and $30,000 for a single speech.
Beenken added that she had “reached out” to Murphy about my request, but he wasn’t interested in speaking to me. The Lake Louise event organizers were, not surprisingly, equally mum about Murphy’s fee and whether they covered other costs associated with his November speech.
On January 30, I provided a lengthy list of questions for Murphy and the CBC respectively to Corey Black, a CBC News publicist. The questions concerned Murphy’s speaking fee, the speech’s content and journalistic probity — questions his speech triggered not only in my mind but, CBC sources tell me, in the minds of many concerned journalists toiling at Mother Corp.
I also requested an on-the-record interview with Murphy and a senior CBC news journalist. Six days later, on February 5, Black informed me that Murphy had “declined” to be interviewed.
Think about that. A journalist who has spent much of his long career proffering opinion — often laced with acidic contempt, derision and ridicule — about ethically-challenged politicians and fractious public policy issues had retreated into silence.
It’s depressingly apparent that Murphy has adopted the shopworn tactics of the accountability-allergic politicians he so often skewers on the CBC and in print. How’s that for hypocrisy?
Then my dealings with the CBC turned surreal. Since Murphy was avoiding me at every turn, I began by simply asking Black, the CBC News publicist, to confirm that the Cross Country Check Up host also occasionally appeared on The National in a segment dubbed Point of View.
“No comment,” he replied.
When I told Black I planned to quote him, he quickly tacked: “Of course he’s on The National.”
I then asked the publicist what Murphy’s role on The National is. “No comment.”
I was beginning to wonder if the CBC flaks think of Murphy as a deep-cover agent who has to be shielded at all costs. Black never answered my questions. Instead, he bounced me to another CBC media relations guy, Chuck Thompson.
In a cryptic February 6 email, Thompson referred me to a short blog post by Jennifer McGuire, CBC News editor-in-chief, that — according to him — “addressed the matter” and my many questions.
McGuire’s post is dated — you guessed it — February 6. It is a hollow, self-serving bit of exculpatory nonsense that limply suggests that because Murphy enjoys a “freelance relationship” with the CBC, neither he, nor the CBC, has a duty or responsibility to disclose that he’s likely pocketing money from powerful outside vested interests on subjects that he rails about on the CBC.
McGuire’s note is also the cynical product of a bait-and-switch: Find out details from a reporter about the pending story’s potentially embarrassing focus, then “get out in front” of it to suggest that you’ve already “addressed” the issue. (McGuire also refused to be interviewed.)
Apart from this predictable public relations ploy, CBC News executives are the architects of another whopping piece of ethical hypocrisy. During the Jan. 30 broadcast of The National, Peter Mansbridge told viewers prior to a discussion of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s Senate gambit that regular On Point political panelist, Bruce Anderson — also a CBC freelancer — has worked for various political parties and that his daughter works for Trudeau.
I asked CBC News why the network’s “chief correspondent” made Anderson’s conflict of interest public, but not Murphy’s.
In a Feb. 7 email, Thompson wrote that the decision to disclose Anderson’s “familial” ties was taken by “The National’s senior editorial team” in the interest of transparency. (Thompson answered only two of my 39 written questions.)
So, senior CBC news executives are now seriously suggesting that one freelancer’s family connections constitute an ethical no-no that demands full disclosure, but it’s apparently OK to withhold information about another freelancer’s big, fat conflict of interest from the very same audience.
That’s not only corporate double-speak, it’s also double-think.
In the end, I think the CBC is engaged in a corrosive, myopic effort to circle the proverbial wagons in order to protect its battered “brand” and a popular performer — at the expense of honesty, openness, transparency and — yes, Rex Murphy — journalistic responsibility.
It’s pitiful and it should not be allowed to stand.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Andrew Mitrovica
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