Dhanraj’s Chorus Of Useful Idiots

On Buying Right Wing Lies

I remain baffled by the number of people who are willingly being useful idiots for Travis Dhanraj.

There is a fun cottage industry in Ottawa and Toronto of getting on TV - it’s a signifier of having made it to do good enough work in the written press to be elevated to a broader role. I’ve never done it, but I can’t exactly say I’ve ever tried to schmooze the powers and people that be to get me on. I’m content with my station, but I’m also understanding of the fact that I’m a nobody. I was an intern to Wayne Long for a year in 2016, and now I’m a writer. A writer with influence, sure, but when the list of people the CBC or CTV could hire is littered with ex-politicians and high level Ministerial staff, a blogger isn’t going to match. I get it.

But what Travis Dhanraj is accusing the CBC of is nefariousness - an intentional stifling of both ideological balance and arguably more importantly people who don’t conform to their status as a token minority. I wasn’t at the CBC at the time and it is more than a bit distasteful for a white guy to tell Dhanraj how he was supposed to feel about supposed racism, but what is fairly easy to make sense of is the problem of the useful idiots around Dhanraj.

Do I think the CBC should have had potentially looser rules around, say, Star Queen’s Park bureau chief Robert Benzie’s availability? Maybe. Benzie is a regular Power And Politics contributor, and according to Dhanraj, was therefore unavailable for his 7PM show even if there was breaking news coming from Queen’s Park. Do I think there could, or more accurately should, be a looser policy? Sure, though I’m not sure why Dhanraj and co would have preferred Benzie over the CBC’s own Mike Crawley for that slot. (Crawley has since gone to Washington for the CBC, but he was at Queen’s Park for the CBC at the time Dhanraj was anchor.)

But the broader story that I can’t get my head around is the number of people who are using Dhanraj’s obvious beat up on the CBC as an excuse to out themselves as petty and petulant fools. The CBC not inviting someone onto their air, or not inviting them back, isn’t a crime, or even a sin. The number of liberal or leftwing people who seem to be willing to legitimize Dhanraj’s crusade because they’re mad they haven’t been chosen is staggering, and frankly alarming. Because if progressives can’t see the world’s most obvious example of conservative bad faith for what it is, they’ll never get anywhere - and they’ll drag us down with them.

Take away the theatrics of Dhanraj’s nonsense, and what you have is a story that isn’t fundamentally very important, nor does it really have any national importance to it. How the CBC decides to allocate panel slots is not actually in the national interest or of national import, unless you’d like to argue Cochrane is being unduly attacked by not being able to book Andrew Coyne or Chantal Hebert because they’re “saved” for At Issue. (Also, on a personal note - hope Cochrane’s doing well, given his medical leave.)

The fact that the CBC is a public broadcaster doesn’t actually change the fact that internal decisions aren’t actually owed public attention. If every writer with 5 figures of Twitter followers and a Substack is owed a CBC platform, then every hack novelist is due at least a pitch meeting with the CBC’s production arm, and that’s not a world we would ever expect or demand. Being a public broadcaster changes the obligations, sure, but the CBC is still a corporation, and they get to make their choices.

The problem with Dhanraj is that, stripped of all its theatrics, his complaint is simply fucking stupid. The Conservative Party was blocking MPs from appearing on P&P while Cochrane was hosting at the time, so obviously the CBC wasn’t going to let Conservatives boycott their flagship political programme and go to what they perceived as an easier interview. Letting Conservative MPs do Dhanraj while skipping Cochrane would have set a dangerous precedent that all politicians have to do to avoid scrutiny is pick and choose their preferred anchors - a position that Dhanraj’s friends on the right would surely hate if Liberals decided they’d only do interviews with David Herle.

The problem with this controversy is that it’s obvious nonsense. I’m mad at myself for giving it coverage. But it is an important story not in what it reveals about the CBC, but what it reveals about the right wing media ecochamber. Part of the way that right wing causes go more mainstream is by picking good targets - targets that have enemies on both the mainstream right and the progressive left. By getting people who would otherwise hate Travis Dhanraj’s politics to legitimize his nonsense by talking about how they’ve also been “blacklisted” by the CBC, this story has gone from right wing talking point to a (semi-)legitimate political story. This is a PR stunt for an agenda that will try and defund important local journalism and for Dhanraj’s media company. Just because you also have issues with this target doesn’t mean you shouldn’t understand that the next time the right picks a target, it’ll be something we actually need.

What Dhanraj is doing is no different than musicians and artists trying to incite a mob against critics, and the very concept of criticism, just because someone has the temerity to say that a song is shit. Dhanraj chose to walk away from an hour of primetime air across Canada every weeknight. He might be right that his influence as a podcaster is more influential, but it’s not on us to make that true. I have written extensively on the issues with the CBC, and if Carney ever appoints a Heritage Minister who reads this site I will gladly use that influence to pitch them a TV show, but at the end of the day I am not stupid enough to let my issues with the CBC indulge Dhanraj’s right wing attack on a venerable institution. That so many people who claim to be capital-U Understanders of mis- and dis-information and right wing propaganda can’t figure that out is idiocy on stilts.