EDITORIAL: Former rising star says CBC biased

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It’s one thing for Conservative MPs and Conservative supporters to claim the CBC is biased against them.

It’s quite another when a former rising star of the publicly funded broadcaster says they’re right.

That’s what Travis Dhanraj, ex-host of the CBC’s prime-time political commentary program — Canada Tonight with Travis Dhanraj — has alleged in a story broken by Postmedia’s Brian Lilley.

In a no-holds-barred public denunciation of the CBC, Dhanraj, a veteran journalist with 20 years of experience in private and public media, accused CBC leadership of forcing his “involuntary resignation” by making “it impossible for me to continue my work with integrity.”

Dhanraj’s lawyer, Kathryn Marshall, told The Canadian Press that Dhanraj wanted to share a wider diversity of political opinions on his show — including having more conservative guests — but CBC management and senior staff objected.

Dhanraj said when he tried to introduce more diverse political commentary into his show, he encountered “performative diversity, tokenism, a system designed to elevate certain voices and diminish others.

“I was repeatedly denied access to key newsmakers, internal booking and editorial protocols were weaponized to create structural barriers for some while empowering others — particularly a small circle of senior Ottawa-based journalists.

“When I questioned these imbalances I was met with silence, resistance and eventually, retaliation.”

The CBC has categorically rejected Dhanraj’s allegations of systemic bias within the CBC and his allegations of a harassment campaign against him, adding it is limited in what it can say because of concerns about confidentiality.

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To be clear, the CBC has many good journalists who often break stories critical of the current Liberal government and accurately cover the Conservatives.

But in our view, the political culture created by CBC executives and some senior journalists clearly skews toward the Liberals, versus the Conservatives, on issues as diverse as carbon taxes, gun control, immigration, Canada’s energy sector and the criminal justice system.

That’s hardly surprising given that during the last election the Liberals promised to increase the CBC’s budget of almost $1.4 billion last year by $150 million, while the Conservatives vowed to defund it except for French-language programming.

In another example, the CBC launched a weak lawsuit against the Conservatives near the end of the 2019 election claiming copyright infringement, which it predictably lost.