Tara Henley is fed up with the direction of modern news media. With two decades of journalism under her belt, the veteran producer, occasional on-air personality, and bestselling author knows how the media works. She spent nearly a decade at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation before she finally tired of the influence of wokeism at the government-run media outlet.
Now that Henley has left the CBC, she’s opening up about exactly why.
Her new ventures include a Substack page and a forthcoming podcast, and in both, Henley is shedding light on how wokeism has invaded North American newsrooms.
Her Substack debut, with the telling title “Speaking Freely,” details why she left the CBC.
Why I resigned from the CBC and went to @SubstackInc. Speaking freely: https://t.co/9jqVKzq6yZ
— Tara Henley (@TaraRHenley) January 3, 2022
Henley writes:
When I started at the national public broadcaster in 2013, the network produced some of the best journalism in the country. By the time I resigned last month, it embodied some of the worst trends in mainstream media. In a short period of time, the CBC went from being a trusted source of news to churning out clickbait that reads like a parody of the student press.
Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted.
It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.
Henley goes on to note that today’s crop of CBC journalists sign on to the far-left, woke agenda, and by doing so, they “embrace cognitive dissonance [and] abandon journalistic integrity.”
The woke infiltration of the CBC includes an unsurprising obsession with race, from story selection to filling out forms that measure how many minority guests a showrunner books. It also entails accepting government diktats on pandemic policy and shutting down debate. This form of journalism is more concerned with offenses against small minorities than it is about exposing the issues that affect larger numbers of citizens.
Related: Wokeness Emphasizes Race as Much as the ‘White Supremacists’ It Claims to Combat
Henley writes:
People want to know why, for example, non-binary Filipinos concerned about a lack of LGBT terms in Tagalog is an editorial priority for the CBC, when local issues of broad concern go unreported. Or why our pop culture radio show’s coverage of the Dave Chappelle Netflix special failed to include any of the legions of fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive. Or why, exactly, taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as “brainstorm” and “lame.”
Everyone asks the same thing: What is going on at the CBC?
In addition to her Substack, which will tackle books and authors who dare to buck the woke trend, Henley is debuting a podcast this week in which she promises “a podcast conversation with a heterodox author every Wednesday.”
Henley isn’t alone in her criticisms of the CBC. Back in October, veteran journalist Peter Mansbridge told an interviewer about what he saw as serious flaws in the network:
I think this is a flaw in the system of the way the public broadcaster of Canada is run. I’m forever indebted to the CBC. But I’m passionate about it and I worry about it. I think the country absolutely needs the CBC. Do they need the CBC they’ve got right now? Probably not. They need it to be better.
This is outside of our own country, but it sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?
For years — maybe decades — we on the right have lamented and complained about the leftward bent of the mainstream media. But it’s refreshing to see figures within that media-industrial complex waking up to the wokeness that has pervaded our culture, even those figures who consider themselves of the left.
Good for Henley and others like her for having the courage to speak out.
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