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It’s official: CBC stands for Conservative Broadcasting Corporation.

That isn’t a flippant jab at my former colleagues (they’ll get over it.) Like me, most of the worker bees at CBC know their bosses have capitulated to the neocons in and outside the Harper government who consider the broadcaster Public Enemy No. 1 and something to be assimilated.

Take, for example, anti-CBC poster boy Terence Corcoran, who has been whining for decades about how the network is a Marxist hive. Recently, Corcoran wrote that it was time to “re-nationalize the CBC as a totally publicly funded non-commercial government service. Let the left have its dedicated media outlet.”

As with most neocons, Corcoran’s laughable histrionics blind him to reality. The so-called ‘leftists’ inside CBC have, for the most part, retired, moved on, been marginalized (or purged) and replaced by ‘free-market’ zealots.

Exhibit A: Amanda Lang. Peter Mansbridge’s heir-apparent at The National will never be confused with Naomi Klein.

Indeed, Lang’s telegenic corporate boosterism makes her popular on the cash-for-speaking-gig circuit where her well-heeled clients include the insurance and investment industries, among others. Lang’s paid speeches are approved by her superiors, who claim — unconvincingly — that the anchor-in-waiting’s shilling constitutes “outreach” rather than a conflict of interest.

Last April, Lang wrote a revealing op-ed for The Globe and Mail, in itself a curious departure from CBC protocol that once nearly got parliamentary reporter Terry Milewski canned.

Lang’s piece was instructive for several reasons. By choosing to get it published in a competing national news organization, Lang galloped way off the range to defend corporate Canada and the government’s Temporary Foreign Workers Program (TFWP).

“It’s called capitalism, and it isn’t a dirty word,” Lang said in her April 12, 2013 guest column extolling the economic wonders of “outsourcing” and the TFWP.

When Milewski penned a Globe column in late 1998 to rebut Chretien government-orchestrated (and CBC-abetted) accusations of bias against him for his coverage of the APEC protests, Mother Corp slapped the acerbic muckraker with a lengthy suspension — ostensibly because he didn’t get the OK from his bosses to write the piece.

I don’t know whether Lang got prior approval for her column or not. But I do know her cheerleading for the likes of RBC and other big, powerful firms who have used and abused the TFWP didn’t merit so much as a mild rebuke, let alone a suspension from her supposedly crypto-Marxist editors.

The timing of Lang’s piece was also telling. In it, she breathlessly championed the “outsourcing” of jobs as an understandable, even natural consequence of the “free” market’s need to “maximize” efficiency and profit.

Think about it. André Turcotte, a Tory pollster, will soon be taking the lead in devising, framing and commissioning ‘news’ polls and, more broadly, defining the public policy agenda for the CBC as we head into an election year.

Lang’s paean to unfettered capitalism came just days after enterprising CBC reporter Kathy Tomlinson broke the story of how poorly-paid RBC and other bank employees were being pushed out of their jobs by outsourcing made possible by the TFWP.

Tomlinson’s scoop — which still reverberates in Ottawa — triggered a public outcry, an online movement to boycott RBC and, ultimately, significant changes to the TFWP program itself.

So who promptly came to RBC’s rescue — not only with an exculpatory Globe column but also a puffball interview with the bank’s CEO, Gord Nixon? Amanda Lang. Lang’s ardent defence of “outsourcing” and its implicit freelance attempt to undermine her colleagues’ groundbreaking journalism didn’t endear her to other journalists at The National.

Like Lang, National Post columnists Rex Murphy and Andrew Coyne are given starring roles on the CBC’s flagship news program to trumpet their free-market ideologies and other conservative virtues, as they rake in the corporate cash through speaking gigs.

Exhibit B: André Turcotte. Despite official denials, senior CBC News sources have told iPolitics that Turcotte, a former Reform Party pollster, is scheduled to begin working for the public broadcaster early in January.

What does this mean? It means a pollster who has been long associated with the Conservatives and the Manning Centre will now be running the research division for Mansbridge and company. Think about it. This conservative pollster will soon be taking the lead in devising, framing and commissioning ‘news’ polls and, more broadly, defining the public policy agenda for the CBC as we head into an election year. (Sources say the decision to bring Turcotte on board was made right at the top of the CBC’s bureaucratic food chain.)

In February, Turcotte warned a hard-right audience at the Preston Manning Centre for Democracy’s annual conference — where, for five years running, he has unveiled his ‘Manning Barometer’ poll findings — that Justin Trudeau’s popularity is no fluke and that Conservatives had better start talking about issues that concern Canadians or risk losing the next election.

CBC News spokesperson, Chuck Thompson, cryptically denied Turcotte’s hiring. Turcotte did not respond to repeated interview requests.

The CBC brass might be calculating that word of Turcotte’s future working relationship with the network will mollify Prime Minister Stephen Harper enough to make him forget the broadcaster’s past transgressions — like Tomlinson’s exposés of the TFWP.

And then there’s Exhibit C: Andrew MacDougall.

MacDougall, Harper’s former spokesman who sped out of Dodge just as the Duffy affair was breaking, suddenly surfaced as a contributing op-ed columnist for CBC News online. (I looked in vain to see if any former Liberal, NDP, or Green PR types had been given similar placement on CBC’s online portal to opine on all things political.)

MacDougall tries to appear above the partisan fray — since he’s now working out of the U.K. as a PR consultant — but the former kid in short pants remains every inch a rabid Harperite. As a result, his turgid missives for CBC are thinly disguised love letters to his former boss.

How about this bit of lunacy? “A ban on reporters because of editorial positions doesn’t belong in Canada, under any regime, under any circumstance,” MacDougall wrote on September 30, chiding Justin Trudeau for rightly telling the privately-run propaganda arm of the Conservative party, Sun News, to take a hike.

This, from a guy who was on board when his boss engineered perhaps the most pervasive, cynical assault on press freedom in Canadian history.

MacDougall’s columns are little more than absurd, revisionist drivel. Giving him a spot on CBC online was a transparent sop to the Conservative party. That alone should disabuse anyone — even National Post columnists — of the notion that the CBC remains a hotbed of socialist fifth columnists.

The CBC is not run by the sort of people who can bite the hand that feeds them — not anymore.

Andrew Mitrovica is a writer and journalism instructor. For much of his career, Andrew was an investigative reporter for a variety of news organizations and publications including the CBC’s fifth estate, CTV’s W5, CTV National News — where he was the network’s chief investigative producer — the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. During the course of his 23-year career, Andrew has won numerous national and international awards for his investigative work.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.