Jesse Hirsh the CBC Toronto's longstanding and deservedly respected tech columnist, a fixture for many words, interpreting the tech news of the day for the public broadcaster's nonexpert audience, explaining how tech's turns and twists are relevant to their lives.
This week, Hirsh covered the New York Times's blockbuster report on Facebook, which revealed that the company had chosen deliberate inaction after being warned about its product's role in genocidal murder-sprees, and then the company hired a notorious dirty-tricks PR firm that created malicious, false, anti-Semitic news stories that linked Facebook's critics with George Soros.
This is par for the course with Hirsh, who has long been a sharp critic of Facebook (as Jesse Brown notes on this week's Canadaland podcast, Hirsh is of the generation of technologists who have always eyed Facebook with suspicion as a centralizing walled garden where surveillance and casino-style intermittent reinforcement are combined to produce the most toxic force in technology today).
But then Hirsh broke with his normal coverage and explicitly called out the CBC for its cozy relationship with Facebook, which is reinforced by management's exhortations to its on-air staff to regularly remind the CBC's audience to follow programs and personalities on Facebook, and by the broadcaster's commercial relationship with Facebook (presumably this refers to ad buys for CBC programs).
Hirsh reveals that every time he criticizes Facebook on air, Facebook's corporate officers complain to CBC, and that "CBC has not defended me, or has not defended our right to have these conversations" (Hirsh adds that CBC Toronto's Metro Morning does defend him). Read the rest
