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More important, the opinions it is now publishing online are delivered, not in the oral tradition of, say, At Issue, but in textual form — just like, well, like this. You will instantly grasp how this changes everything. It’s one thing for the CBC to be competing with the private broadcasters, as it has since time began, i.e. 1960. But now, heaven preserve us, it’s competing with the newspapers.

As they say, when the watering hole starts to run dry, the animals tend to look at each other differently

So the demands have grown for the government to rein in the CBC: cut its funds, forbid it from selling ads online, stop it from publishing opinion pieces, something. This week witnessed the spectacle of representatives of the Globe and Mail and Rebel Media — special pleading makes strange bedfellows — appearing together before a Commons committee to press their case. But the argument has also been made, with increasing vehemence, by my fellow pundits. It’s one thing, they say, for the CBC to make bad documentaries and worse sitcoms, but what’s it doing monkeying around in our business?

All I can say to these latecomers is: where have you been? Some of us have been making the case for defunding the Corpse for, um, decades, at a time when most of my media colleagues were instructing the public in the worship of the CBC as The Only Thing that Keeps Us Together. But then, as they say, when the watering hole starts to run dry, the animals tend to look at each other differently.

Only it’s just a wee bit self-serving, isn’t it? I don’t doubt the CBC’s presence in the marketplace, propped up by $1 billion-plus in public funds, eats into our digital ad sales. But the problems of the newspaper business run a lot deeper than one state-funded website, and while there are lots of reasons to take away the CBC’s subsidy, saving the private newspaper industry isn’t one of them.