Former CBC insider trashes its one-sided, 'thoughtless cheerleading'

The CBC is at a watershed moment, observes longtime CBC insider David Cayley. The previous era of Canada’s publicly funded broadcaster has exhausted itself, Cayley concludes, and in the new era that’s unfolding, what the country desperately needs and deserves is a dialogue, not a monologue. “Everything ends in time,” he observes, “and I believe that (CBC’s) properties, its idea that it would belong to the audience, that it would stake its legitimacy on the audience, has brought it to a place where it has only one preferred audience — and can’t address the rest of the country, and can’t get outside or above or beyond the assumptions it shares with that audience — so it’s become a kind of boutique.” Between 1971 and 2012, Cayley worked as a producer, documentary-maker and program host at