The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias and The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor were inspired to rebut longtime Mulroney lapdog, Sen. Marjory LeBreton, who went after the CBC's news operations on the weekend.

From La Zerby:

And now the door has been opened to a nasty national dialogue about CBC's alleged political bias. Consider last week's comments by Sen. Marjory LeBreton, former aide (and now confidante) to ex-prime minister Brian Mulroney.

She wrote a letter to the Parliament Hill-Times about a recent Decima survey which revealed that 10 per cent of respondents called the lockout "a major inconvenience," 27 per cent considered it "a minor inconvenience," and, as LeBreton put it, "most revealing, 61 per cent reported no impact at all."

Noting that Decima reported that "those who said they were the most inconvenienced by the CBC lockout tended to be Liberal and NDP voters or older people," LeBreton then posited:

"It is most interesting that the political bias of the CBC shows up in a Decima poll. I can well understand how the Liberal and NDP supporters feel. The lockout has deprived them of their biggest cheerleaders on the national scene."

Never mind her bad math, which suggests that 61 per cent of Canadians vote Conservative. She should be so lucky.

Forget her ageism — as if, at 65, she's some spring chicken. So "older people" like CBC. So what? This is no big shock.

It's LeBreton's logic that's supremely faulty.

First, because the poll was conducted between Aug. 18-21, when many people were on holidays — and Hurricane Katrina was just a warm wind somewhere off the coast of Africa.

Secondly, because the survey respondents' politics have no correlation with CBC's journalism. Does LeBreton have a content analysis nobody else does?

Thirdly, and more important, because surveys reveal nothing of audience patterns. It's ratings that count. And, in Toronto, where CBC Radio's Metro Morning was top-rated, you can bet it's missed. It's even worse in the hinterland, where CBC provides the only local and/or Canadian coverage of anything. They can't all be Liberal or NDP voters there.

As for the television side, as ratings expert Barry Kiefl of Ottawa's Canadian Media Research Inc. recently scolded the National Post's Andrew Coyne in a letter to the editor, "almost half the population spend (sic) five minutes or more with CBC-TV on a weekly basis, according to the ratings companies. Almost one in three people use CBC for 30 minutes or more in a typical week, a statistic that Mr. Coyne or the National Post would dearly love to attach to their own creative efforts."

And now Taylor:

You can make many criticisms of the CBC's programming, but its journalistic standards are high and the staff who are now locked out have worked hard to make sure they remain so. LeBreton's accusation is a very old, very multicoloured but still heartily quacking canard. The senator is, of course, a close associate of former prime minister Brian Mulroney, a man who once said he got worse press than Adolf Hitler. He was preceded by Joe Clark, a Conservative prime minister whose entourage also detested the CBC and accused it of purposefully making their guy look dumb, and he was followed by Jean Chrétien, a Liberal prime minister whose regime conducted a witch hunt against CBC television reporter Terry Milewski because it disliked news coverage of protests at the APEC meeting in Vancouver.

Chrétien was also convinced that the French service of the CBC, Radio-Canada, was run by separatists. When Canadian politicians complain about media bias, mainly what they mean is the media is not biased enough in my favour, and when prime ministers complain about the CBC, mainly what they mean is what the hell, I'm funding the thing. The Liberal Party once promised stable, long-term funding for the CBC - remember the red book? - and has never delivered it during 12 years in office, cutting funding by about a third in the first four years and then congratulating itself mightily when it restored a small part of that in 2001. CBCers would have to be some kind of patsies to fashion themselves as apologists for that party: The Liberals may have padded the CBC board with political appointments, but there is no evidence that the journalists are toeing the party line.

To the extent there is some substance behind LeBreton's comments, it lies in a Decima poll showing that 10 per cent of Canadians are deeply inconvenienced by the CBC lockout; another 27 per cent are slightly inconvenienced, and those inconvenienced tend to be Liberal and NDP voters. LeBreton concludes that the CBC is irrelevant and biased, but the numbers are not that simple.

First of all, this means that even in the dog-days of summer more than one third of Canadians are regular CBC listeners or viewers, and aren't happy about its absence. Considering how many other media choices Canadians could make, that strikes me as far too significant a minority to dismiss the public broadcaster as irrelevant.

Those viewers and listeners do tend to be more likely to vote NDP or Liberal. Is that because the CBC reflects a brand of cultural nationalism with which those voters feel more comfortable? Or does its programming coincidentally appeal more to the same demographic -- more likely to be female; more likely to live outside Alberta - that votes Liberal and NDP? What do we know of the voting patterns of those who prefer private media or of those who use other publicly funded cultural resources such as museums or libraries?