Wikileaks: US embassy says CBC is ‘anti-American’
December 2nd, 2010 - 11:39 UTC
by Andy Sennitt.

CBC programming is decidedly anti-American, according to US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks. A cable from the US Embassy in Ottawa to officials in Washington says CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, “has long gone to great pains to highlight the distinction between Americans and Canadians.” The diplomatic note goes on to say “the level of anti-American melodrama” reached new heights with the launch of the show The Border.

The Border, which launched in January 2008, was billed as a show about the fight against criminals and terrorists at the Canada-US border. But American officials felt the CBC was pushing a storyline that the real fight was with shadowy Americans working with the CIA. “Many of the immigration team’s battles end up being with US government officials, often in tandem with the CIAcolluding Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS),” the cable reads.

The cable lays out several plot lines that portray Americans as arrogant, overbearing and generally not concerned with respecting Canadian sovereignty.

“The degree of comfort with which Canadian broadcast entities, including those financed by Canadian tax dollars, twist current events to feed long-standing negative images of the US - and the extent to which the Canadian public seems willing to indulge in the feast - is noteworthy as an indication of the kind of insidious negative popular stereotyping we are increasingly up against in Canada,” the cable said.

CBC cancelled The Border earlier this year. The cable cites several other CBC shows as examples of anti-Americanism, including Little Mosque on the Prairie and a miniseries called H20.