Shed no tears for Bell Canada executives.

CTV’s recent fake news incident shines a spotlight on a sclerotic C-suite worthy of public rebuke.

This week, CTV News was caught creating a fabricated clip that spliced together different segments of an interview given by Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre into an entirely new one. This spliced segment was then broadcast to millions of Canadians. Said differently, one of Canada's top mainstream news outlets created and broadcast fake news.

Most Canadian political commentators seem to agree that what CTV did was a problem. But there's less agreement among them about who's to blame and what, if anything, should be done about it.

For its part, the Conservative Party believes that the finger should be pointed at those at CTV who were responsible for creating the spliced clip, but also at the leadership of Bell Media, and ultimately Bell Canada Enterprises, CTV News' parent corporations.

After the incident, Conservative media spokesperson Sebastian Skamski characterized the splice as "malicious editing" and announced that the Conservative Party had issued an edict to its caucus (which I am a member) to refuse interviews with CTV reporters and meetings with anyone representing the interests it's parent corporations until a full apology for the incident is issued. These moves came after CTV - under pressure from the Conservatives - issued a statement on the matter, which was phrased to make the issue seem like a simple mischaracterization, as opposed to directly addressing the issue of the network splicing clips together and presenting them as true, original content to the public. 

Some political commentators suggested the Conservative's response went too far. For example, Stephen Maher, a columnist who recently wrote a book about Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, posted a poll which suggested that Mr. Poilievre was "going after" CTV's parent corporations to "rage farm." He also suggested that the splice was likely a simple mistake.  And David Cochrane, host of one of CBC's prime-time political talk shows, suggested that the Conservatives shouldn't be putting the screws to CTV's parent companies because of the potential impact to Bell Canada’s shareholders.

But none of these arguments hold water. Here’s why.

For starters, in a day and age where misinformation is rampant and the credibility of mainstream news outlets is questioned by the public on a daily basis, CTV must be held to account for putting out bonafide fake news. So the first public calls for change should have been coming from Bell Canada’s C-suite, not the Conservative Party. But they weren't, and that's a big problem.

That's because, contrary to Mr. Maher's position, this incident isn't equitable to a simple case of a quote being taken out of context through production carelessness. Rather, an editorial call was made to have a CTV employee cut and splice parts of one of Canada's most prominent political leaders into an entirely new statement, and then broadcast it as fact to millions of people. This is the exact sort of decision that erodes the credibility of journalism, and should be avoided at all cost.

In that, the CTV fake news incident did put the returns of Bell Canada shareholders at risk - but not for the reason Mr. Cochrane suggested. Think about what would happen if a food production company owned by a big grocery chain produced a contaminated product that made its way onto grocery shelves. To maintain the reputation and viability of the parent company (and the public's health), the company's executives would demand things like a product recall and changes to the quality assurance process to ensure it would never happen again. CTV News arguably put out a contaminated product and delivered it to the public, but Bell Canada's C-suite has been silent on this incident - and others like it, too. For example, last year, CTV News was forced to make a high-profile apology for broadcasting highly misleading content that falsely framed a Chanukah celebration as a rally in support of the war. Something is amiss in CTV's newsrooms; ultimately, the buck stops with Bell Canada's corporate executives.

And those same executives arguably took on even more responsibility for preventing fake news from being distributed when they brutally gutted their media division earlier this year. So, to protect the reputational health of the company, the product it produces, and, in turn, jobs and shareholder value, pressure should be put on those executives to make changes.

But there are greater reasons for public calls for executive accountability within Bell Canada than just this issue alone. Canada's telecommunications landscape largely functions as an oligopoly, of which Bell Canada is a prominent player. Much of Bell Canada's enterprise is supported by a federal regulatory landscape that makes it difficult for competitors to enter and sees Canadians paying exorbitant rates to operate their cell phones, while providing customer service that was described by a Quebec judge as “Kafkaesque”. Bell Media is also subsidized by federal government programs. Said differently, Bell Canada puts a lot of effort - lobbying, public relations campaigns, etc. - into ensuring their bread keeps being buttered via preventing the status quo regulatory environment from being changed. But it’s a well known fact that Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives have been making a lot of noise about the need to open the industry to more competition. In that context, for Bell Canada's posture that the status quo is in the public’s best interest to hold water, its executives should be fastidious about preventing even the perception that their media division is creating fake news about federal politicians to creep into the public’s awareness. 

Further, those same executives have given Bell Canada a reputation for paying out lucrative dividends while simultaneously experiencing credit downgrades described as "the last level above junk-bond status." And rather than seeing the primary focus of reporting about the future of its stock being about things like revolutionary new infrastructure investments, Bell Canada's biggest recent news has been about asset sales and layoffs. While these issues might not directly relate to CTV's splice of Mr. Poilievre, they don't exactly scream C-suite excellence either. If anything, they underscore the need for external pressure on Bell Canada's sclerotic C-suite to do something material to ensure its news division doesn't spread actual fake news, as it did this week.

Bell Canada's C-suite should also be sensitive to the fact that when all these factors combine and are made to face public scrutiny, little sympathy is likely to be found for them, given that their six highest-paid executives were paid over $35M in bonuses around the same time that they laid off thousands of workers.

So, those concerned with the welfare of Bell Canada's shareholders, or the public’s rapidly diminishing lack of trust in mainstream news shouldn't be offended by the Conservative's criticism of the company's top brass.

Rather, they should see it as glaringly obvious risk management advice that Bell Canada’s board should have acted upon long ago.