1 of 1 2 of 1

For decades, Gillian Findlay has been one of the CBC's more trusted reporters. And last night, the BCIT grad's fifth estate investigation of Jian Ghomeshi's downfall marked a first step in the public broadcaster's effort to rehabilitate its reputation after the worst scandal in its 78-year history.

The show chronicled Ghomeshi's meteoric rise within the corporation and zeroed in on the role that the head of radio, Chris Boyce, had played in the delay in firing him as the host of Q.

The fifth estate's examination left viewers with the impression that management made no serious effort to seek feedback from Q employees after allegations surfaced of him beating and choking women.

This is despite CBC issuing a memo in late October claiming that it had conducted interviews with employees and management. This supposedly occurred after a reporter had asked a Q employee if Ghomeshi's "behaviour may have 'crossed over' into the workplace".

The fifth estate proved this with an extensive survey of Q employees in which none reported that they had been contacted.

In addition, Findlay revealed that the CBC management made no effort to reach freelance reporter Jesse Brown, whose research led to a lengthy Toronto Star investigation into Ghomeshi's behaviour.

It was pretty damning stuff.

In the meantime, the fifth estate still has a way to go before it can claim that its probe of the Ghomeshi affair is complete.

For example, I've wondered when Boyce and Chuck Thompson, CBC's head of public affairs, notified executive vice president Heather Conway and president and CEO Hubert Lacroix about the Toronto Star probe.

Were Conway and Lacroix informed of the Canada Day meeting, which managers attended after learning of allegations that Ghomeshi had punched and choked women?

That was still unclear after last night's broadcast. Conway, who oversees English-language services, told CBC chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge earlier this month that people who work at the corporation "absolutely would not ignore a suggestion that he was punching women".

Findlay didn't interview Conway for this documentary to respond to Boyce's comments or to discover precisely when she was told about this aspect of the story.

There are other unanswered questions, such as:

• How much was Ghomeshi being paid by the CBC before he was fired?

• Were any CBC executives or Ghomeshi receiving bonuses linked to the syndication of Q in U.S. markets?

• If bonuses were being paid, why hasn't CBC come clean about this more than a month after Ghomeshi was fired? CBC is not required to publish salaries and bonuses of its broadcasters and executives, so the public may never know the answer to that question.

• How much did Ghomeshi bill the corporation in expenses during his tenure as the host of Q? Were they in line with what others at his level were billing?

• Why do CBC executives only allow themselves to be interviewed by CBC journalists about the Ghomeshi affair?

• Why has no one at other media outlets been able to ask CBC president and CEO Hubert Lacroix when he became aware of allegations concerning Ghomeshi's conduct with women?

• Why did the Toronto Star wait until after Ghomeshi was fired to publish the findings of Brown's investigation?

• Why did CBC Radio allow Ghomeshi to veto coverage of Canadian arts and culture in favour of so many interviews with U.S. and British celebrities and foreign journalists when CBC's mandate is to promote Canadian culture?

• Why has CBC Radio under Boyce's leadership become so much more entertainment-focused and less news-focused? Perhaps it's all about ratings, even though the radio service isn't yet selling advertisements. According to a 2011 CBC news release, Boyce "has been instrumental in the development" of Q, Randy Bachman's music show Vinyl Tap, and Terry O'Reilly's advertising show Age of Persuasion, as well as the tech-oriented Spark and the medical program White Coat, Black Art.

• Why has CBC chosen to emulate CNN and other U.S. networks by turning its broadcasters into celebrities? It's not only the case with Ghomeshi, but also with Amanda Lang, Rex Murphy, Evan Solomon, and various correspondents on The National, whose faces constantly appear throughout their news stories.

• What role did the former head of English-language services, Richard Stursberg, play in the rise of Ghomeshi's career at the CBC before Stursberg was fired in 2010?

• How was Ghomeshi able to become an entertainment correspondent on The National and the host of Canada Reads, putting him in a position to undermine the brand of these important CBC franchises?

• How much effort has CBC management made in incorporating psychological research into its hiring practices?

• Have executives like Boyce, Lacroix, and Conway given much thought to identifying and weeding out psychopaths and malignant narcissists from reaching positions where they can harm the CBC brand? Canadian researchers have figured out how psychopaths use language differently, so this has become an easier task for corporate executives, particularly in broadcasting, where people talk and write for a living.

• What policies does CBC have in place to protect whistle blowers like those who stepped forward to alert managers about Ghomeshi?

• What role have Conservative government budget cuts had on CBC management's decision to chase U.S. audiences and become more entertainment-oriented?

In the past, the fifth estate showed stunning tenacity in its investigation of the Airbus affair involving Brian Mulroney and Karlheinz Schreiber. It was perhaps the show's finest journalism.

There's an opportunity for Findlay to show the same type of determination with the Ghomeshi scandal, which has rocked an institution that many Canadians trust.

I suspect that the Ghomeshi problem is the product of many forces that have come together over the past decade at the CBC, dating back to Stursberg's tenure as the supreme hand in English-language broadcasting. And I somehow doubt that any CBC-financed investigation by employment lawyer Janice Rubin is going to delve deeply into this history or the impact of government budget cuts on the public broadcaster's overall direction.

When the New York Times was confronted with the twin scandals of Jayson Blair's plagiarism and Judith Miller's questionable reporting on Iraq possessing chemical and biological weapons, the paper conducted a pretty thorough house-cleaning.

Readers of the New York Times were given a blow-by-blow account of how these journalistic atrocities developed. And heads rolled.

The CBC's response to the Ghomeshi affair has been lukewarm in comparison, keeping managers away from reporters from other outlets and earlier claiming that Ghomeshi's lawsuit (since dropped) precluded them from speaking. The fifth estate is in a good position to help repair the damage—if the corporation has the guts to let Findlay loose and allow the chips to fall where they must.