The CBC has done it again.

I’m not talking about the Ghomeshi scandal. That’s the one where a CBC afternoon radio host is on trial for beating women.

I’m also not talking about the Amanda Lang scandal. That’s the one where a CBC “personality” appears to have attempted to scuttle an investigation on temporary foreign workers and the RBC that was being conducted by some real journalists.

She further failed to disclose that she was in a relationship with a top RBC official, while taking a significant fee from that organization for speaking at their events.

No, in spite of all of those uncomfortable, dirty transgressions that the CBC has allowed to happen within their organization, what I’m talking about is something that shows how much more fundamentally broken Canada’s beloved public broadcaster has become than just rotten personalities doing rotten things.

They’ve reported on a teen’s Facebook status.

The way that this CBC investigation seems to have gone is: a reporter was scrolling through his or her Facebook feed, when they came across an article that had 200 ‘likes.’

“Wow,” I assume the reporter thought to themself. “200 is a lot of ‘likes.’ This is news.” At which point they copy and pasted a few quotes from the status and some of the comments into a word processor, made one phone call that went unanswered, and then fired the story off to their editor. I’m just imagining here, but it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to assume that they then took an early lunch.

It doesn’t matter what the content of the article was, but to satisfy your curiosity, the story was about a teenager who was told by school authorities that she wasn’t allowed to wear a halter dress to school. She received detention, and then a one-day suspension for not conforming, but claims that the restriction is an attempt to blame her for others’ sexism.

Like I said, the content doesn’t matter. The content could have been anything, but when a reporter pulls something accusatory from Facebook and prints it without comment from the other side — especially when there is such an obvious other side to this story — is not just lazy journalism, it’s irresponsible, unethical journalism.

It’s also unclear that the reporter reached out to the girl directly for comment, since all of the quotes come directly from Facebook. They did quote some of her parents’ comments through, so don’t worry, that angle was covered.

It isn’t as though the reporter wasn’t aware of his journalistic duty to provide fair comment. The one line in the story that pretends to do justice to the school’s side is “[School] officials could not immediately be reached for comment.”

I get that there are deadlines in this industry, but I fail to see the urgency in getting this one to the presses.