OFFICE OF THE OMBUDSMAN ENGLISH SERVICES OMBUDSMAN ANNUAL REPORT 2020-2021 June 3, 2021 Michael Goldbloom, Chairman of the Board CBC/Radio-Canada Catherine Tait, President & CEO CBC/Radio-Canada Members of the Board of Directors CBC/Radio-Canada Mr. Goldbloom, Ms. Tait and Respected Board of Directors Members: Attached please find the Annual Report of the Office of the Ombudsman, English Services for the period April 1, 2020 to March 31, 2021. Sincerely, Jack Nagler CBC Ombudsman, English Services CBC OMBUDSMAN ENGLISH SERVICES ANNUAL REPORT | 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Highlights .......................................................................................................................... 4 Trends ............................................................................................................................... 5 • The COVID-19 Pandemic ...................................................................................... 5 • Precision and Trust ............................................................................................... 6 • Accountability and Trust ........................................................................................ 7 • Inclusion and Trust ................................................................................................ 8 • Unpublishing and Trust ......................................................................................... 9 Other Issues .................................................................................................................... 11 • An Awkward Apology .......................................................................................... 11 • Non-Mandate Complaints .................................................................................... 11 • Changes to the Mandate ..................................................................................... 12 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 13 Communications & Reviews ........................................................................................... 14 Ombudsman’s Mandate .................................................................................................. 15 CBC OMBUDSMAN ENGLISH SERVICES ANNUAL REPORT | 3 HIGHLIGHTS All news organizations, whether they are private or public, large or small, analog or digital, try to convince their audiences that they are distinct. Traditionally, they might argue that they are the fastest, or the most comprehensive. Perhaps they’d proclaim themselves the most connected to their community or suggest that they deliver investigative stories that you can’t find anywhere else. It says something, then, that right now the biggest challenge for most of the media - and this includes CBC - might be to convince people that they are simply telling the truth. Trust is everything for news organizations, yet it is more difficult to earn now than I have seen in my lifetime. That challenge was reflected by the correspondence sent to this office over the past 12 months. In all, this office received 5,271 comments, complaints and expressions of concern. Of those, 872 were outside the mandate of this office. Of the 4,399 within the mandate, 1,657 were sent to programmers for a response. The remainder were shared with news management so they could take the concerns expressed into account. This office does not insist on a reply if the nature of a complaint is too broad, or if it duplicates a complaint already received as part of an organized campaign. As of mid-April there are 54 complaints still awaiting a response. From the complaints to which CBC responded, there were 61 requests for a review. By the close of the fiscal year, 41 reviews had been completed, and the other 20 were carried over into the new fiscal. Of the 41 completed, I found either a violation of policy or room for improvement in 20 of them. CBC OMBUDSMAN ENGLISH SERVICES ANNUAL REPORT | 4 TRENDS | THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC My office received 670 complaints during the fiscal year relating directly to how CBC has covered the ongoing pandemic, which was easily the biggest single category I tracked. However, that does not include hundreds more complaints dealing with coverage of the pandemic’s ripple effects, ranging from the economic fallout to the politics of vaccine distribution. As the year progressed, themes of the complaints appeared to follow the trajectory of the broader public discourse and are focused more on politics than science. The way people interpreted CBC’s coverage of COVID-19 was often linked to how they felt about Justin Trudeau, or Donald Trump, or Jason Kenney. Coverage of vaccines seemed especially fraught; for instance, programmers were routinely accused of both underplaying and overplaying concerns about links between a couple of the vaccines and rare blood clots. There were also more provincial concerns expressed. I received a notable collection of complaints from Canadians who thought CBC News Network took a disproportionate number of live news conferences from officials in Ontario compared to other provinces. I conducted 10 reviews of stories relating to the pandemic during the year. The themes of those complaints hinted at the breadth of issues arising from COVID-19. They included: 1. CBC’s presentation of data on the spread of the virus 2. Comparisons of the pandemic in Canada and the United States 3. Coverage of the drug hydroxychloroquine 4. Rules of the so-called “Atlantic Bubble” 5. Social media misinformation about the coronavirus 6. The economic impact on renters 7. Possible corruption in the securement of personal protective equipment 8. The search for a medical cure 9. How the media cover China’s role in the spread of the virus 10. A story that suggested pharmacists were profiting off the pandemic CBC OMBUDSMAN ENGLISH SERVICES ANNUAL REPORT | 5 Among the ten reviews, I found that CBC had violated policy three times. In each of the three cases, the fundamental flaw was a lack of precision - headlines which went too far, conclusions which were too blunt, assertions made without providing the detailed information to back it up. While other complaints did not result in a conclusion that CBC was at fault, some sparked interesting conversations about aspects of coverage, such as whether the spread of the virus was best captured through raw numbers or on a per capita basis. The willingness of programmers to pay attention to these complaints and consider adjustments to their coverage is notable. It speaks to a civic-minded approach I’ve observed by CBC as it found multiple ways to give the audience information it needed about the pandemic: daily newsletters, frequent town halls, and a special email address ([email protected]) for people who had questions, suggestions or information to share. On the whole, I am satisfied with CBC’s coverage to date of an issue that has transformed so many of our lives. The odd misstep has been outweighed by a system- wide effort to give Canadians the best possible information available at the time. Having said that, I empathize with complainants who at times have felt overwhelmed by the volume of pandemic coverage, and in particular the volume of coverage with a negative tone. Nobody wants to sugarcoat the seriousness of the issues with COVID, but programmers are reminded that positive developments are newsworthy, too - more of these stories would help contextualize the anxiety we all feel as citizens. | PRECISION AND TRUST If you have read Brodie Fenlon’s Editor’s Blog, you will be familiar with the discouraging results for journalists in surveys about trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2021, for instance, reported that 49 percent of Canadians they polled agreed that “journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.” A fascinating study from the American Press Institute released in April suggested that many Americans do not even agree with journalists about the purpose of journalism. For instance, virtually any reporter would accept as fact the idea that spotlighting the problems in society is a way to make society better. In the API survey, though, fewer than 30 percent of non-journalists agreed. In such a climate, every factual wobble is bound to cause problems. As noted above, there were some of these in pandemic coverage, and the issue arose in other reviews as well. One that concerned me came about because of coverage at CBC Thunder Bay. Officials at the local hospital presented me with a long list of stories they felt were unfair. I did not agree with all of their complaints, but I found enough mistakes that it raised broader questions: “...there is a pattern to these articles: heavily reliant on documents, with minimal use of reaction from principals, analysis from experts, or voices from the community CBC serves. As a reader, I learned some facts, but I did not get enough context that might allow me to draw informed conclusions about the issues at hand. CBC OMBUDSMAN ENGLISH SERVICES ANNUAL REPORT | 6 CBC can and should do better than this. Your complaint revealed some violations of journalistic standards, and it is my belief that asking harder questions before publication might have prevented many of the problems identified in this review. My hope is to remind CBC Thunder Bay - and other CBC newsrooms as well - that the value of news is not in the telling of “stuff”; it’s in the telling of stories that help people