Red faces all round at the CBC as it is forced to backtrack over its attitude towards staffers maintaining blogs.
Last Friday, the Inside the CBC blog reported that new rules had been circulated on blogging. The document said that any CBC employee who wants to start a personal blog which “clearly associates them with CBC/Radio-Canada” now required their supervisor’s permission.
The dictate provoked an angry response from some CBC bloggers, as it was seen as CBC trying to control what they say. It even made it onto BoingBoing:
This is a jaw-dropping policy for a public service news agency to develop – requiring its employees to get permission to express their personal views is absolutely beyond the pale, especially for an institution nominally about freedom of expression.
Now it seems that the document is not a new policy imposed from above. According to Esther Enkin, acting Editor in Chief, it was just an early draft of proposed new guidelines which was “inadvertently passed on”.
In an effort to clarify matters, she says that there are currently no specific corporate policies in effect relating directly to blogging. But she adds that “there do exist HR, journalistic or other corporate policies that are relevant to blogging and these remain in effect.”
In addition to existing policies and the ad hoc advice of managers, we may yet try to provide some additional policy about the do’s and don’t’s of blogging in the coming months. Some of the dialogue that followed your initial posting may well be useful background in that context. In the meantime, if employees have questions, they should ask and we’ll give direction.
While this may help clear the waters, bloggers at CBC may be left wondering what is and isn’t allowed. Some have come up with their own blogging manifesto.
The issue at stake is transparency, and whether CBC as an organisation is ready for its staff to talk about the corporation, warts and all.
Filed under: CBC, Canada, blogs, journalism, media
CBC is government TV and broadcasting I hops we had independent TV or any news paper …to we speak out .
I saw censorship in Iran by mullahs regime now I saw in Canada by Canadian .same regime , no one car at all here about human right , 300.000 homeless in Canada is one of them…suicide between the native Canadian, increase the gangs and gun and murder , drugs and crimes, and poor…who’s run the Canada?
There’s also The CBC Blogging Manifestoo.
Boing Boing reveals that news reporting is not their strength.
Or maybe it’s this web site.
Only an amateur journalist would offer the public a sentence such as:
“requiring its employees to get permission to express their personal views is absolutely beyond the pale”
It omits that this policy is applicable only in relation to the individual’s employment, while working in the service of the CBC.
It’s actually a very old rule about confidentiality about the workplace, as applied to the medium of blogging.
Blog all you want, it’s a free country.
And the same laws apply to everyone.
Yesterday, today and tomorrow.
The CBC has rights too, or are you proposing that it not have any?
If the CBC were to discipline anyone without good reason, I’d hope there’d be a walk-out.
But if something you reveal by virtue of your employment jeopardizes my employment, then please find a more suitable situation to express your poor judgement.
Blogging is exactly like publishing a newspaper.
The greater the freedoms, the greater the responsibility.
To wonder what’s allowed and isn’t allowed is puzzling.
I had thought the CBC employed mostly adults.
> bloggers at CBC may be left wondering what is and isn’t allowed
I’ve asked Esther for some specificity on that and she’s going to get back to me.
Tod