By TIM SHOULTS
Guest columnist
I LISTEN TO A LOT of podcasts when I’m driving around town — everything from Canadian history and politics to British satire to a lot of media industry podcasts from Canada and the U.S. If you’re a podcast listener, you’ll know that there’s a lot more ads on them lately, from local car dealers to tech platforms to mattress ads. (So. Many. Mattress. Ads.)
Tim Shoults.
I was listening to a podcast recently when I heard a new ad that surprised me.
“Local news is in decline across Canada,” said a strident voice over some stirring music.
“And that’s bad news for all of us. Rumours and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction.”
OK, you’ve got my attention, strident voice actor. Go on.
“That’s why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us. Because local news is big news. Choose news, not noise. CBC News.”
It’s a good thing I don’t drink coffee in the car, because I probably would have choked at that point.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a CBC hater. I think a country with as much geography and as little population as Canada absolutely needs a public broadcaster to knit the country together with national and regional coverage, and to cover the communities that just can’t support private media outlets to serve them.
But there’s the rub: CBC spends a tremendous amount of its resources covering communities that already have local news outlets — some of them, like us, locally owned and operated. That’s unnecessary duplication, at your expense.
And they’re adding more. In addition to its $1.4 billion in funding from the federal government and the hundreds of millions more it pulls in advertising and subscriber fees (competing with private media in the process), CBC is getting $7 million a year from Google as its share of the Online News Act. This is the same fund that has provided funding to community news organizations like ours. At Great West, we gave our share directly to our local reporters, bringing their wages up for the first time in years.
CBC used that money last year to hire another 30 reporters in communities across Canada, which is great. The problem is, it’s not in places like Gibbons or Legal in Alberta that have no community news, but towns like Red Deer and Medicine Hat, which already have daily newspapers, private TV stations, multiple radio stations and online news outlets. Towns like Banff, that are already served by community news outlets like our very own Rocky Mountain Outlook — a bureau they’re now expanding to two reporters.
Better still, it’s poaching those reporters from community news companies — two last year from our company alone, offering wages we can’t even come close to, even with our new funding.
I have no problem with CBC stepping in to fill the gap in actual news deserts — communities that have lost their local news organizations, either recently or many years ago.
But covering communities that are well-served by local media just because CBC doesn’t have a presence there isn’t useful — if anything, it could make it harder for those local outlets to survive. I have a problem with that.
And I really have a problem with them spending their government money advertising their expanded competition with community media. Here’s an idea for the CBC: look to the United Kingdom, where the BBC’s Local Democracy Reporting Service funds 165 reporters for news organizations across the country, with the stories they create shared with more than 1,100 media organizations.
I sure wouldn’t complain about hearing that on a podcast ad.
Tim Shoults is vice president of Great West Media, a family-owned and operated community news media company serving 20 rural and suburban Alberta communities. He is also a former publisher of The Kamloops Daily News.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Tim defends “locally owned” media as the virtuous alternative, yet never once acknowledges that those same outlets routinely violate the very professional ethics he implies are missing at CBC. Almost every Canadian news organization, public or private, fails the test of verifiable, measurable, peer-reviewed reporting. They substitute emotive opinion, selective history, and agenda-driven narratives for facts. Tim paints local media as innocent victims, I disagree as they are co-perpetrators of the same trust-destroying behavior.
The deep crisis here is ignored as Tim frames everything as an economic/market-share fight (“duplication,” “poaching,” “advertising against us”). That is real, but it stops at the surface. He ignores the fact that the entire industry has abandoned the Professional Code of Ethics that legally and contractually binds them. CBC is governed by law; local papers by contract with their readers. Both owe the public natural justice and fairness, not “caveat emptor.” Tim never demands accountability on that level from anyone, including his own side.
Tim builds his outrage on a podcast ad. Podcasts have zero editors, zero peer review, zero gatekeepers, exactly the “garbage in, garbage out” medium he elsewhere criticizes. It undercuts his credibility from paragraph one.
Media (all media) treats informed citizens like idiots, ignore their higher education, and show zero respect for their dignity or right to objective information. Tim never touches this. He complains that CBC is harming local outlets’ survival, but never complains that both are harming the public’s right to trustworthy news.
By refusing to apply the same ethical lens to local media, the piece reads as “protect our turf” rather than “protect quality journalism.” I could respect this is Tim had said “CBC should stay out of served markets AND every outlet, including ours, must be held to verifiable, non-emotive standards, or none of us deserves public or Google money.”
Bottom line, Tim’s column is a solid, narrowly focused complaint about wasteful duplication and unfair competition. It is factually accurate on those points.
But it is intellectually incomplete and strategically weak because it refuses to confront the industry-wide ethical collapse as everyone can see the hypocrisy of those who claim that they represent our collective values. Until local media admits it is part of the trustworthiness problem, not just the victim of CBC, its defense against public-broadcaster overreach will ring hollow to anyone who has watched the broader decline in journalistic standards. Tim’s piece would be twice as powerful if it incorporated even half of my critique.
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“ They substitute emotive opinion, selective history, and agenda-driven narratives for fact”…that sounds like the CBC as of late to me.
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Ok, I get the point, but heres the other side.
CBC radio provides not just local, but provincial and national news, intertwined with cross country cultural info based shows involving the Canadian music world, film/TV/and media based cultural content.
Everyone knows this.
Then add to that many other pockets of interest I might like to know about as a regular scheduled part of the CBC day; books, science, humour, sports, gardening … on and on … plus a backbone of live call in shows, provincial and national where regular Canadians can talk about the issue of the day with experts in the field.
This might be locally produced in the morning show like Kamloops, or regional like Kelowna or CBC North, or provincial produced content through the day out of Vancouver, with exceptionally high quality national content from points east.
Everyone knows this too.
My point is, I get all this at one radio station.
No channel changing, no searching, just local to national info in one place.
Just what ‘local’ provider does that? None.
No one can or is able to do this level of work, but Im supposed to think that because local providers cant do this, I should negate CBC because they do?
If these local providers want to get my listen, they need to do what I want to listen to; A full, broad, local, regional, provincial and national … Canadian approach to Canadian info, knowledge and content.
You say remote listeners should get the CBC, but in markets where other providers are … listeners shouldn’t because local providers dont want to spend to send signals remote … just listen to yourself there. That a very NIMBY argument.
More generally, Ive heard all this before … and it just smacks of “we can not do this because we dont have access to the national market’ … soooo … its CBC’s fault”. Why dont you just be a competitor?
You wont, but then resort to complaining about CBC’s access to public dollars to do the job no one else wants to. Do ya hear the cycle?
btw … If you want to keep staff, pay them commensurate to what they could make elsewhere, and they might stay.
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The CBC can afford higher wages thanks in no small part to the overly generous contribution form the Canadian taxpayers.
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