Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith wonders if CBC burbling about "diversity" and "accessibility" -- part of but not necessarily stemming exclusively from l'affaire Mallick -- is code for populist dumbing down and pandering to conservative critics.

From the Oct. 2 Globe and Mail:

On the face of it, the decision seems absurd. It is rare not to back a columnist after a controversy, and unseemly, since the column was presumably passed and edited by the CBC. Opinion columns regularly take strident views and regularly provoke controversy. (Ask The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente how many angry e-mails she gets in a day.) Detractors were duly given a public forum for their disagreement.

The column was no ruder than some things said about Hillary Clinton in various mainstream media outlets. It was no ruder than many similar opinion pieces published about Palin in the United States. (Cintra Wilson, in the online magazine Salon, called her a "power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty" and compared her popularity to the rise of Nazism. Comedian Tina Fey's caricatures of Palin on Saturday Night Live portray the politician as stupid to the point of idiocy; they are without doubt viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan, and they are among the most popular skits done by that show in the past year.)

Ah, but it was said on the website of a public broadcaster which has (what's the word I'm looking for?) ... standards. I believe I read something about Mallick's opinings not being fact-based.

But the CBC decision is about more than this particular column: It is about the much broader change of direction being enforced throughout the Crown corporation. The comments by the website's publisher have been widely interpreted to be an admission that the CBC's online incarnation has an anti-conservative bias. It seems to be a promise to present more right-wing views in the future.

It is spoken, however, in perfectly fluent CBC PR buzzwords: The word "diversity" is so crucial to current CBC management propaganda that it is used to pepper all speech, the way "revolutionary" was used by Maoists to mean generally and perfectly good. It can be used to mean almost everything and to mask a variety of subtexts, some of them even flatly contradictory.

Diversity used to mean multiculturalism at the CBC. But in the context of the current campaign to commercialize Radio 2, for example, "diverse" has been used to mean popular and mainstream - in other words, "diverse" essentially means "uniform." Cruickshank's use of the word "diversity" is part of this idea of a more populist public broadcaster, one that, as CBC's English Language Services chief Richard Stursberg once famously said, should be more Tim Hortons than Starbucks.

Smith closed with this:

One wonders if the CBC is desperately trying to make itself more palatable to the majority Conservative government that may be coming our way in October - a government that is already suspicious and hostile to the broadcaster, and that holds its life in its hands.

I would say some political diversity within the ranks of the CBC commentariat wouldn't be a bad thing. I wouldn't really see a problem with reading more conservative voices in the Viewpoints area of CBC.ca, so long as they were providing analysis on public policy stuff rather than partisan ranting. But the site could use more diversity in a number of areas, and I mean that in the real sense of the word.

With respects to wider issues of direction for CBC, I would like to say that as an avid CBC Radio listener, I like the serious-minded offerings of that service's programming. I listen to Dispatches, Ideas, The Sunday Edition, The Current, As It Happens ... the list goes on. Long-time readers of this blog might remember my revulsion at Freestyling, which attempted to bring music you might hear in your dentist's office to CBC. Blecch.

To my mind, a public broadcaster should be filling in the gaps in the journalistic and cultural fabric left by private broadcasters (remember, I work for a private broadcaster).

As a national service, it provides an intellectual lifeline to people living in small-town Canada who get plenty of Tim Horton's for the mind, but little Starbucks, if I can phrase it that way.

It would be unfortunate if the CBC wants to abandon that part of its audience in the hopes of becoming more populist.

(More may come on this topic in the morning or tomorrow night)