CBC scribes worry about their reputations, but not so much about a major news story
National Post, 11 December 2020
Why did a big news story about the federal government’s cravenness to China receive no mention from our national broadcaster this week?
Might you find it interesting — perhaps on pure curiosity grounds, to say nothing of the diplomatic implications — that the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) participated in the 7th Military World Games in Wuhan, China, just weeks before that city unleashed a pandemic upon the world?
Might you wonder why the CAF delegation was sent to whoop it up in Wuhan while Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig were being held hostage by the Chinese communist regime?
Might you wonder why the CAF does joint training with China’s “People’s Liberation Army” (PLA) — including inviting PLA personnel onto Canadian bases — when every contact with Chinese officialdom is exploited for espionage purposes?
Might you consider any of this — le mot juste — newsworthy?
Ezra Levant’s boisterous Rebel Media released government documents on Wednesday that showed that the CAF trains the PLA on cold weather combat, right here in Canada. When the CAF tried to scale back contacts with the PLA in 2019 after China kidnapped the Two Michaels, senior diplomats in the foreign affairs ministry took umbrage — against our own military and on the PLA side.
It is a big story. The National Post reported on it on Thursday. The Globe and Mail assigned two of its most senior reporters to it, Robert Fife and Steven Chase.
Yet two days afterward, the CBC main news site (cbc.ca) had no mention of it. The CBC ran that same day a long commentary on how our ambassador in Beijing, Dominic Barton, has been clever enough to learn that China is a tyranny, not only a mass market. But no room for the Chinese appeasement story.
Over on CTV (ctv.ca), there was no room for the PLA documents either. What might have caught CTV’s attention instead? They covered a study from the University of Guelph which found that “honeybees use feces to ward off murder hornets.”
Bee excreta? Is that why they call it a honey wagon? No, actually. Apparently apian frass doesn’t quite do the trick, so the bees collect feces from other animals and pile it up as an olfactory offensive against wasps. So it is not the bees–t but the bulls–t, pardon the expression.
The latter has been piling up this past week.
Continue reading at the National Post.