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In fairness here, an opinion section is not so much new to the CBC as it is a new emphasis: the CBC’s website has featured commentary, including specific columnists, since its inception, and talking heads are a staple of its radio and television broadcasts, from Cross-Country Check-up to the At Issue panel on The National.

This concentrated digital effort, though— full disclosure, the CBC has hired Robyn Urback away from the National Post for this venture —signifies the growing prominence of opinion writing in the CBC stable. It also represents an effort to stay in line with the times: informed commentary – well, I mean, presumably informed, certainly commentary – having become one of the internet’s preferred ways of processing information and drawing eyeballs.

If you are willing to grant that the CBC does a lot of relevant and even otherwise unfeasible journalistic work outside of this commentary, however, the new emphasis ultimately raises questions about the purpose of media: why is it actually important that we should have the media, and in particular a publicly funded version of it, in the first place? The answer is not quite as straightforward as it would seem. Or at least, like most questions of purpose, it can get mixed up with a lot of other issues and concerns that affect it.

We are in the midst of a great debate about the value of media: the rather dire financials of most media organizations has encouraged both people who make it and people who want to keep consuming it to figure out what separates media – or maybe more precisely, journalism – from any other pleasant diversion. The answer typically boils down to the fact that journalism and the access to information it provides is an essential a pillar of democracy Put another way: in order to make anything resembling an educated decision about how to live in the world, we need the media to find and report on stories that are capable of changing how we see the world: stories that undermine the official narrative, that bring to light something that would rather be kept dark, that try to understand the world as it actually is, not just as we’d like to be.