For those of you looking for a happy ending in the long and drawn out case involving the bureaucratic measures to hold the CBC accountable for some of the misinformation they’ve been spreading, well part of that chapter has closed and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission closed case 6932354 regarding the airing of a segment on CBC television’s The National, back on November 13th, 2014. The was a story about the segment that was posted here on One Angry Gamer on November 14th, 2014, detailing the ethical violations the CBC committed in running the story without fact-checking or adhering to their own ethical policies.

Various Canadians complained to the CBC about the segment that resulted in a hand-wave from the CBC Ombudsman, Esther Enkin. However, The National’s own executive producer Mark Harrison responded to complaints about the inaccuracy of some of the information in the report that aired on CBC television, acknowledging that there has been a slant against #GamerGate by the media.

Despite admissions from Harrison about this issue, the CRTC sided with CBC Ombudsman Esther Enkin, responding in an e-mail to Lunar Archivist with the following statement from the director of social and consumer policy, Nanao Kachi…

“In a letter sent on 17 September 2015, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) staff noted that they understood your concern, but that the matters raised your complaint regarding the 13 November 2014 episode of The National on CBC did not violate the existing regulatory policy framework. “Accordingly, case number 693254 will now be closed.”

They also mention in the letter that the CBC Ombudsman was asked how a response would be formulated in reply to the issues raised, and CBC Ombudsman Esther Enkin noted that there are blog posts on the CBC website publicly displaying the reviews of each case and the verdict of whether or not the CBC breached their ethics policy in the post.

There is, however, an upside to this news. Despite it seeming like this is nothing more than a shot to the heart and a break to the back, the letter from the CRTC further states that the additional information that was sent to them regarding the CBC will be forwarded to the CBC Ombudsman to have those issues addressed, with Kachi writing…

“The additional information you submitted to CRTC Client Services in response to CRTC staff’s letter will now be forwarded to the CBC Ombudsman so that they may address it. “CRTC staff asks that the CBC retain the logger tapes of the episodes mentioned in that documentation”

This is just one of several cases filed against the CBC with the CRTC. Again, the upside was that the segment that aired on The National was likely the weakest case that #GamerGate would have against the CBC. Nevertheless, there are still a few other complaints that were filed with the CRTC, so we’ll see if they’ll address those other issues as well, including some of the segments that were broadcast on terrestrial radio.

One comment in particular that stood out occurred during a radio broadcast on CBC hosted by Stephen Quinn from the show On The Coast. The host stated that #GamerGate was an event where players “threatened to rape and murder female game developers”, a grossly unfounded accusation rooted in a lack of proper sourcing or facts. What made that particular segment so bad was that the CBC Radio director, Lorna Haeber, actually defended Quinn’s summation of the event, which actually resulted in the CBC Ombudsman, Esther Enkin, having to publicly admonish them for those comments since those statements have no sourcing or facts to back them up.

Let’s hope that CBC’s purposed spread of misinformation about #GamerGate will at least receive some kind of formal reproach from an organization designed to protect consumers from unethical breaches made by journalists.