I never expected to reach this conclusion, but after thirty-plus years of rarely missing at least one newscast a day, today I still listen, but wonder, when the taped weather update symbolically sums up the news with a report of conditions eight hours ago, why I bothered turning on the radio.

I'm sorry. I feel guilty, for the CBC has been an integral cog in our Canadian society's functioning.

True, switching to any commercial station's news or tuning in to what passes for news in America is cause for a major re-think. Who wants to be left with national news headlining a wild dog in a Toronto park (earlier this year) or with reports on the tears of parents who have lost a son or daughter in Afghanistan (in place of reports on the real situation in that war)?

That's commercial radio's news. Increasingly, that's what we've been getting from CBC, too.

However, if we listen to Radio-Canada, CBC's French-language counterpart, it's as if listening to a foreign country. Radio-Canada leads off with reports from Japan or Europe; CBC leads with a domestic stand-off in Ottawa. Radio-Canada is far from perfect, but seems much closer to it than CBC's growing fascination with the emotional trivia thrown up by national and world events, rather than with those events themselves.

"World events", of course, rarely means events of the world. It means, at best, anecdotal coverage of American and western European events as they affect the world. We are constantly surprised by world events, because most of the world remains off the radar screens in our newsrooms. We hear nothing, for example, of the present insurrection and the political turmoil afflicting our NAFTA partner, Mexico.

Perhaps we are foolish to believe that while commercial media reads from the songbook of commercial interests, "public" radio is unaffected by changing winds, attitudes and policies of the government which funds that public radio.

Today's government, clearly committed to dismantling state intervention in all parts of society, can't sell off the CBC without raising a cry across the country. But our governments have been slowly cutting the funding - starving-public radio, until it is merely a shadow of what we had all expected of it.

CBC still offers fair news coverage and analysis in The Current, Dispatches, As It Happens, and, occasionally, Ideas. Even these programs are diluting their mandate with the pablum of "human interest", "spiritual", and "popular culture" subjects, under the guise of attracting more listeners but which are, in effect, excuses for blunting the arrow of clarity and analysis.

One more re-broadcast of Ideas' series on L'Arche, with Jean Vanier confiding that the real issue facing humanity today is "to recognize that we are human," and I'll tear the radio out of my car and pitch it out the window.

Or is it the rise of the internet, of blogs, that has taken the steam out of the CBC news? How can that be? Blogs are journalists' surrender to globalization, working for a dollar a day or less to compete Chinese-style with corporate media. Are blogs - personal opinion and invective, with no editorial oversight, no peer-review - harming the CBC's network of professional, accountable journalists? If CBC news is that shaky, my point has already been made.

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Copyright © 2007 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/01.07