The CBC is in a huff about being labeled government-funded media, despite being…government-funded media.

It’s a replay of NPR’s and the BBC’s complaints that Twitter is stating truths about their ties to the government. “We have integrity!,” they declare while proving the opposite by trying to deny a manifest truth. You would think that denying an easily demonstrated fact would be proof that they have no integrity at all, but plenty of liberals share their outrage.

Well, let me give a simple example of how the CBC in particular lies with a straight face about their finances.

Take, for example, this chart. On its face, it seems pretty obvious that government contributes to its budget, but government contributions are smaller than other sources of revenue.

Just look at the bars! The magenta bar is smaller than the other sources of revenue, right?

So, this in-house CBC graphic is obviously misleading. The pink bar should be a huuuuuuge; dwarfing all others. But whoops; there's a quietly tiny grayscale tilda at the side to omit … ONE BILLION DOLLARS. pic.twitter.com/NmvRL2xxzn

— Tristin Hopper (@TristinHopper) April 18, 2023

Now let’s take a closer look at that graph. The revenue bar in blue totals about $450 million in 2018-19, and $600 million in 2017-18 (the Olympics added to their revenue).

In both years the government bar, in magenta, totaled about $1.2 billion in each year.

Does that make sense? The government bar is smaller, but the revenues are vastly larger. Hmm. What happened there?

If you look at the graph and hop on over to the arrow I put in there (badly), you will see a place where they inserted those two tildes. That indicates a break in the Y axis of the graph.

That break represents $1 billion out of the $1.7 +/- total revenue that just disappears from the graph. Poof. Gone.

Now they didn’t explicitly claim that the government contribution is smaller than the other revenue. If you read the graph carefully you can see it is not.

But that graph exists for a reason: it gives you the visual impression that the opposite of reality is true. And we use graphs instead of tables because they give us a sense of scale. That is precisely the reason why graphs exist–they convey information quickly and well when we need a ballpark sense of what is going on without digging into the numbers.

It is how brains work. The whole point is to convey information in a way our brain “gets” it. And they created this graph in this way to say something that is obviously not true once you look at the sources for the graph.

Did you notice the tildes when glancing at the graph? I didn’t. It wasn’t until somebody pointed it out that it jumps out at you. The coloration has the same impact: a primary color for what they emphasize, and a more muted color for what they don’t want you to look at so hard.

This is the same sort of thing as using nicknames for bills (“Don’t Say Gay”) instead of a neutral description of the reality, or screaming headlines instead of something that describes the reality of a story.

The point is to stack the deck.

The point, actually, is to lie to you without technically doing so.

Just as they are doing with the label “government funded.” They complain not because it implies anything that isn’t 100% true, but because it reminds people of a fact that the CBC doesn’t want you to think about.

It's just a simple fact that the CBC gets Canadian government funding. If they're embarrassed by it, they should reject it.

Google has place similar labels on BBC, NPR and CBC on their YouTube channels but they're afraid to complain to Google the way they do for Twitter. https://t.co/5BGIxxi8X9 pic.twitter.com/scThTQwAsa

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 18, 2023

They think you are stupid. And, if you uncritically consume their media output you in fact are behaving stupidly.

Justin is very mad that @elonmusk labeled CBC ‘government-funded media.’

Trudeau gave the Communist Broadcasting Corporation $1.24 billion last year, and $1.39 billion the year before.

CBC consistently pushes trans propaganda onto kids.pic.twitter.com/V9JrEM7JUp

— Billboard Chris 🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@BillboardChris) April 17, 2023

Even assuming that the powers that be have your best interests at heart, it’s very clear that the government and MSM have a very distorted view of your best interests. They think, for instance, it is in your best interest to hide who pays their bills. That they are subsidiaries of the US government.

Heck, the US government itself is offended when Twitter pointed out that their own news agency–an actual government agency–is a government agency. They complained about being labeled government-funded from the podium at…the State Department.

The head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, a news agency funded entirely by the U.S. government, said it is "very misleading" for Twitter to label it a "government-funded" organization.

Via @ChuckRossDC https://t.co/MNp0WvKhvf

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 13, 2023

But assuming that they have your best interests at heart really IS stupid. They keep shouting at you that they don’t. They call us names, censor our speech, declare us terrorists, release violent felons into our communities, propagandize to children.

They hate you. They tell you this all the time. It’s not me telling you this. Listen to the media folks and the Left and they will gladly tell you it.

Some people think I am too harsh on the elites, catastrophizing what is pretty normal political behavior.

My response is simple: you aren’t paying attention. The FBI declared conservative Catholics potential terrorists. They declared that parents at school boards are potential terrorists. The media distorts reality, declares that anybody who thinks that male and female are real biological categories are hate mongers. They demand pornography be put in schools.

The State of Washington just voted to take children away from parents–and hide them–if the parents object to their sterilizing and mutilating their bodies. Minnesota and California will provide “sanctuary” to parents violating custody orders if they are seeking gender “care” for their children. Conservative Christians are banned from adopting children in Oregon.

I’m not catastrophizing. It is a genuine catastrophe.

NPR, the CBC, the BBC object to Twitter pointing out simple reality is part of the propaganda effort to distort reality for you. How many places outside of conservative media have you seen these stories covered truthfully?

They don’t even admit the most basic facts about themselves. How can you trust them to cover anything else without creating a false narrative?