The CBC's Falun Gong Show

Someone wise once said we should never attribute to malice what can be explained by ordinary human incompetence.

Clinging desperately to that principle, I am stunned by the journalistic incompetence of this report by the CBC.

To begin with, this is not news. Some average Canadian is upset by a piece of unsolicited mail? Dog bites man. First rule of journalism broken.

Second, any news story is supposed to include both sides of a controversy. Second rule of journalism broken. The piece should quote Epoch Times in response to the woman’s charges. It should also quote an expert who thinks the virus originated in the Wuhan lab. There are many. I believe this has become the majority opinion among the experts.

Certainly, the assertion by the average Canadian featured that “we know scientifically that’s just not true” needed to be challenged. It was objectively false.

The CBC narrator later says Epoch Times claims the virus was developed as a bioweapon. This is objectively false as well. The Epoch Times did not say this; it only referred to it as a possibility. Fake news.

The anonymous average Canadian interviewee is quoted calling the Epoch Times “racist,” without this being challenged.

The Epoch Times is here being highly critical of the Chinese Communist Party. The Epoch Times is owned and run by a group of Chinese Americans. Same race.

The Epoch Times is affiliated in some way with Falun Gong. The CBC refers to them as “a dissident group that has locked horns with the Chinese Communist Party.” It might be debatable to what extent and in what way the Falun Gong has been persecuted in China—organ harvesting or no organ harvesting—there is no question that they are being persecuted. And the is no question the dispute began with the CCP attacking Falun Gong, not vice versa, in violation of the principle of freedom of religion which we consider a human right. Speaking of them as having “locked horns” with the CCP, is like referring to the German Jews having “locked horns” with Hitler. This is not a conflict in which a moral person can be neutral. Much less support, as the CBC does here, the Chinese Communists.

Can you imagine them having supported the Soviet government against Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn, declaring the latter racists? The difference in treatment of Russian Communist governments and Chinese Communist governments indeed suggests racism—on the part of the CBC.

It interviews an unidentified woman saying that, because the Epoch Times “always has the same position on a particular issue,” “that’s not journalism. Is it propaganda?” Cleverly worded, perhaps, so the CBC cannot be sued. But by this standard, The Economist magazine is also propaganda, not journalism. It has a consistent position on free markets. Essentially all magazines or newspapers have consistent editorial positions: it is the usual reason for starting a journal, and the usual reason for subscribing to one. In a word, it is journalism.

This is at the same time an example of the simplest and most easily recognized of all logical fallacies: an ad hominem argument. Not the sort of thing a professional journalistic outlet should ever be guilty of; the sort of thing a professional journalistic outlet should be educating the public out of. The reporting of the Epoch Times, like any reporting, must be evaluated on its merits.

The narrator’s arch concluding comment: ““If people don’t like it, they can always drop it in the recycling bin.”

The tragedy is, Canadians cannot do the same with the CBC. We are forced to pay for it, even if we are not forced to watch it.

Someone should be fired over this.