Driving to work on Saturday and Sunday I tune to CBC to get an idea of what is going on in Alberta and the world. On Sunday though I was quite perplexed. The topic was – I think – bear safety.
Bear safety, especially during spring, is a relevant topic in many parts of Alberta as human and wild habitats are now entangled. Reminding humans not to be stupid around bears saves human and bear lives. I was expecting a rundown of the basic tips for not being an idiot around bears. Something like this (also found on CBC).
You know, relevant fact based information that will useful most people. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, I was introduced to ‘indigenous ways’ of coexisting with bears, and how important it was to work with indigenous Canadians. The news piece featured a short interview with an individual who said that coexisting with bears was the indigenous way of life and it was culturally important feature of their heritage.
What I took from the piece was that it was important to, in an ‘indigenous way’ coexist with bears – because Indigenous Canadian Culture…
What was missing from the news story was any sort of factual information on keeping yourself safe during the annual spring bear awakening season(!). I’m pretty sure the phrase ‘indigenous ways of knowing” was repeated at least three times during the piece, and I thought to myself, “What additional knowledge is being added to the topic of bear safety?”.
I’m guessing the answer is pretty close to zero. Biologists have done a fairly good job at studying, recording, and making knowledgeable observations about bear behaviour why not share some of those with the public? But no, our national broadcaster decided to make the story about (undefined) mystical ways of knowing how to coexist with bears.
I know mornings can be a slow news time, but maybe CBC, just maybe make your news stories contain well, news?
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
3 comments
April 26, 2023 at 9:09 am
lungta mtn
Devils advocate …either way… a non event.
“Surprisingly, there are very few bear attacks in Canada. There is often less than one every year. For example, there have only been four fatal bear attacks in Ontario over the last 100 years. Because of these numbers, it’s more likely to die from a dog attack than a bear attack in Canada.”
I get the stupidity tho
I might lose it completely the next time I see someone of color argue any cultural appropriation while wearing a 3 piece suit and brogues on tv.
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April 26, 2023 at 10:29 am
tildeb
I understand that the CBC MUST meet broadcasting subject quotas and, IIRC, ‘indigenous’ topics MUST account for 25% of content. From the CBC’s perspective regarding the Twitter fact sheet denying being government controlled, apparently this is not ‘government editorializing’ of a public broadcaster because it’s not specific enough in content topics. So every topic considered for broadcasting is first fed through this quota frame, which then elevates certain segments above others not because it’s in the public interest or news or even true and useful – like how to deal with bears in the Spring – but rests squarely with addressing the CBC’s quota for some mystical and fuzzy notion of what constitutes an ‘indigenous’ component. This editorial mandate will naturally lead to the public being bombarded (at least with 25% of all content especially during daylight hours) with ‘indigenous’ ways of ‘knowing’, regardless that this may be different from and often contrary to scientifically supported knowledge applicable to everyone everywhere all the time. That scientific framework is too racist and colonial, of course (being fundamental to our current civilization, you see) to be tolerated by the mandarins of the CBC and other state sponsored ‘media’. Being critical of anything presented as ‘indigenous’ – no matter how factually wrong or suspiciously ideological or historically mistaken – is therefore racist because any criticism that reduces respect for all things indigenous is necessarily ‘white privilege’ under the current post modern insanity of reaching equity quotas… equity results from aligning groups possessing certain ‘good’ immutable characteristics with other groups possessing ‘bad’ immutable characteristics all then rage by the shallow but virtuous imbecilic urbanite majorities across the West.
Bears and people? Who cares about passing along good information about human/bear interactions when we can use< the opportunity to push a race-based or ethnic-based narrative in its place that meets the equity quota?
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April 27, 2023 at 10:29 am
The Arbourist
@Tildeb
Exactly this. During the entire 2 minute segment no useful content was present. I kept wait to hear something, well, relevant to the topic at hand. But no, it just went on an on with supposedly culturally relevant interviews (again devoid of fact). It was nothingburger all the way through and I was genuinely shocked that somewhere in the editorial process this was deemed worthy to be broadcast in the NEWS portion of the radio segment.
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