CBC employees pen open letter, petition gov. seeking CRTC investigation of branded content

Impatient with the progress of a month-old Part 1 application at the CRTC, a group of some 500 current and former CBC/Radio-Canada employees have authored an "Open Letter to Canadians" demanding that the broadcaster drop its English-language branded content initiative, Tandem. In a separate letter to Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 35 former CBC employees also asked the government to intervene. The open letter refers to the branded content initiative as "insidious" and "dangerous." Tandem "promises corporate clients they can ‘leverage' the CBC’s reputation by aligning their message with the 'trust Canadians have in our brand,'" the letter reads. "That reputation was built by people like us — generations of journalists who earned your trust by informing you faithfully and truthfully every day. 'Paid content' does not leverage that reputation, it makes a mockery of it. In an era of 'fake news,' where misinformation is already rife, it undermines trust." According to a Wednesday release, the letter marks a significant escalation of "their fight against their management and the CBC’s Board of Directors." Former head of CBC Radio Gloria Bishop said in the release that the broadcaster "has never created advertising for clients in such secrecy." "What’s at stake are the basic principles of transparency and accountability. It’s bad enough that the CBC's Board of Directors and its senior management approved branded programming behind closed doors but, even worse, they are now ignoring the thousands of Canadians who have objected to Tandem," Bishop said in the release. The letter to Guilbeault expressed frustration with the CRTC's process. "Faced with the CBC's revenue-obsessed determination to sell its integrity to the highest bidders and the CRTC’s deafening silence when asked to address this important issue, we respectfully ask that you intervene," the signatories wrote. The letter said that a number of employees had presented a petition with 11,000 signatures to the CBC's board of directors in late November, but that CBC president Catherine Tait informed them that the CBC was pushing ahead with the branded content initiative. In a Part 1 application filed with the regulator on November 13 but still not posted to the CRTC website Wednesday, the former employees want the CRTC to force the CBC to answer several questions about the practice: when it was first approved, when did it first begin, whether the branded content is subject to the CBC's advertising standards policy, and whether or not the activity is permitted under the Broadcast Act. If the CRTC declines to hold a standalone investigation into the practice, the Part 1 application's signatories wrote that the issue should be added to hearings on CBC’s broadcast license renewal, scheduled for January 2021. The letter to Guilbeault also complains that the CBC failed to disclose its branded content activities in fall 2019 filings with the CRTC, related to its license renewal. "Apart from not disclosing to members of Parliament the CBC's decision to produce and sell branded advertising content, the CBC apparently also withheld this information from the CRTC, the quasi-judicial tribunal that the Broadcasting Act establishes as the 'single independent public authority' responsible for regulating and supervising the broadcasting system, including the CBC," the letter to Guilbeault read. In October, a CBC spokesperson told The Wire Report that the Tandem initiative had been put on a "brief pause." “We feel there are more insights to be gained on this initiative and to that end, we are taking a brief pause on booking any new branded content campaigns while we dig a bit deeper,” Chuck Thompson, CBC’s head of public affairs, said in an email at the time. — Reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Tim Forster at tforster@thewirereport.ca

CBC employees pen open letter, petition gov. seeking CRTC investigation of branded content

Broadcast | December 9, 2020

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CBC employees pen open letter, petition gov. seeking CRTC investigation of branded content

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