Irresponsible Journalism: CBC Gets it Wrong!

In November of 2015, CBC’s investigative journalism program Marketplace ran a heavily promoted program critical of the natural health industry. The CBC has now been forced to admit they were wrong and have retracted that report. . . .

The heavily promoted CBC investigation reported that lab testing had revealed that a number of natural health products were deceptively labeled and didn’t contain what the labels promised. Specifically, they claimed that a vitamin C product contained only a third of the one gram of vitamin C that its label claimed and that two protein powders were more than half spiked with fillers instead of protein.

CBC has now been forced to retract that report.

When CBC was pressured to retest the samples at other independent labs–as any good investigative report would have done in the first place–none of those labs found any problems. The original lab analyses and results were wrong: the vitamin and protein supplements contained exactly what the labels claimed they did.

Unfortunately, the very small CBC retraction won’t get its own hour long, heavily hyped TV show. CBC’s inaccurate and careless claims have been retracted: the damage that the irresponsible journalism has done to those companies and to people’s trust in natural health can’t be.

Now maybe CBC can go back and retract the other irresponsible reporting it did on natural health at the time about vitamin C, the effectiveness of herbs, the danger of natural supplements and the safety of vitamins.