Skip to content
Breaking News Alert Georgia House Guts Bill That Would Have Given Election Board Power To Investigate Secretary Of State

Producer Resigns Over CBC’s 18-Month Spiral From Public Broadcasting To Pushing ‘Radical Political Agenda’

Tara Henley on her book "Lean Out"
Image CreditYouTube/Photo
Share

A journalist resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation last month after she said the media network swiftly accommodated a “radical political agenda” that she believes “abandon[s] journalistic integrity.”

“To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity,” Tara Henley wrote in a Substack article.

Henley said CBC went to great lengths to promote the “‘woke’ worldview” as “near universal — even if it is far from popular with those you know, and speak to, and interview, and read.”

“Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted,” Henley noted.

Viewers noticed too, Henley said, and complained that the network was trading important local coverage for virtue-signaling progressive topics.

“When I started at the national public broadcaster in 2013, the network produced some of the best journalism in the country,” Henley said. “By the time I resigned last month, it embodied some of the worst trends in mainstream media. In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press.”

Henley said she used to be the “one furthest to the left in any newsroom” but she quickly became the “most conservative.”

“This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change,” she said, noting that most of her political spats with colleagues centered on identity politics.

Henley said she decided to leave the network after she determined no one could work at CBC without accepting “that race is the most significant thing about a person, and that some races are more relevant to the public conversation than others.”

“To work at the CBC is to submit to job interviews that are not about qualifications or experience — but instead demand the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma,” Henley wrote. “It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like.”

“It is to endlessly document microaggressions but pay little attention to evictions; to spotlight company’s political platitudes but have little interest in wages or working conditions, she continued. “It is to allow sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures to roll out — with little debate. To see billionaires amass extraordinary wealth and bureaucrats amass enormous power — with little scrutiny. And to watch the most vulnerable among us die of drug overdoses — with little comment.”

Henley said the CBC’s new mindset is that “a growing list of subjects are off the table, that dialogue itself can be harmful,” while attempting “to shut down critical thinking, to stamp out curiosity.”

“How could good journalism possibly be done under such conditions? How could any of this possibly be healthy for society?” Henley asked. “All of this raises larger questions about the direction that North America is headed. … These questions keep me up at night. I can no longer push them down. I will no longer hold them back.”