00:00:00.440CBC admits they pushed fake news. The legacy media wage a war against Maxine Bernier while also doubling down on an accusation that conservatives are racist.
00:00:08.900Plus, we'll talk about why you should never, ever, ever listen to the legacy media and their narrative.
00:00:13.940It's Fake News Friday. I'm Candace Malcolm and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:00:21.380Hi everyone, welcome to The Candace Malcolm Show. Thank you so much for tuning in. It's Friday.
00:00:24.700This is the day of the week where we go through the most egregious lies that get pushed by the legacy media.
00:00:29.420We deconstruct them and we talk about why so much of the information that gets pushed in the legacy media is fake news.
00:00:36.520So, sometimes here at The Candace Malcolm Show, we come across a story that's just so delicious, so rewarding.
00:00:42.240And I'm going to focus on this story a bit today.
00:00:44.860So, you may remember this story. Back in November 2020, almost a year ago, my colleague Anthony Fury over at the Toronto Sun
00:00:51.400put out a really good report in the Toronto Sun talking about the comorbidity rate that came along with COVID-19.
00:00:58.020He was using official statistics released by the health department over in Alberta and he basically found that the overwhelming majority of deaths in that province
00:01:06.960were of people who had more than three comorbidities. So, people who were suffering serious other illnesses, caught COVID, died.
00:01:14.380We don't know if they died from COVID or from their other illnesses.
00:01:17.180This was kind of something that wasn't really out in the open in that part.
00:01:19.740It was a big report and no surprise, a lot of people were sharing it on social media.
00:01:23.820One of the people who shared that was conservative MP Rachel Harder, the MP from Lethbridge.
00:01:30.040Well, the CBC, being the CBC and doing what they do, they put out a really, really silly story.
00:01:35.400So, this is the original story. It says,
00:01:36.960Lethbridge MP under fire for sharing article on COVID deaths, comorbidities, and restrictions.
00:01:42.940This is like the worst kind of journalism, bottom of the barrel, really, really bad, clickbaity kind of stuff.
00:01:47.720So, basically what happens is a news reporter, rather than writing an opinion piece, rather than being honest about their own views
00:01:53.700and putting them forth as an opinion piece to the audience, they pretend that they're doing journalism.
00:01:58.660Usually, they'll go out and they'll find an expert that agrees with them and it'll be like, expert says so-and-so.
00:02:03.980But when they can't even find an expert, they resort to one step lower, which is social media reacts or social media outrage over this piece,
00:02:11.340which is really just to say, me as a journalist, I don't like this piece, so I've cherry-picked like five angry dudes on Twitter who share my views,
00:02:19.040and I'm going to write a story, construct an entire story around this.
00:02:21.840So, this is exactly what we saw here, the journalist at the CBC called Brian Labby.
00:02:27.480He writes, Rachel Harder shared article that says,
00:02:30.440Just 10 otherwise healthy people have died of COVID in Alberta.
00:02:34.420And again, he just finds like very random people, like not people of interest, not public figures, not like other politicians or like public officials of any kind.
00:02:44.080He just finds like random people out there who are super angry about this and they're ranting.
00:02:48.920And the whole story is based around that.
00:02:51.260So, no surprise, this is the kind of stuff that CBC puts out all the time.
00:02:55.040The reason I'm talking about it today and the reason why it is so delicious is because there was a complaint about this article.
00:03:01.780The CBC ombudsman took a look at this report and they came up with a conclusion that the complaints about this piece were correct.
00:03:09.360The piece did not live up to their standards.
00:03:11.020And so, now there's a little editor's note at the top of this article.
00:03:14.240This article was updated on January 11th, 2021 to better reflect the views of Ms. Harder and contextualize some of the reactions to her original post.
00:03:25.180Blacklock's reporter had a piece earlier this week saying,
00:03:27.340CBC regrets slandering MP, the CBC has expressed regrets over a garbled online story that depicted re-elected Conservative MP Rachel Harder as callous and ignorant.
00:03:38.840Records detailed snide questions from a CBC Calgary reporter who falsely accused the MP of spreading misinformation about COVID.
00:03:46.280I agree we failed to live up to the high standards we set for ourselves on several fronts, wrote Helen Henderson, Senior Director at CBC Calgary.
00:03:54.700The piece fell short of what we deem acceptable.
00:03:57.000Let me reiterate that I regret we did not live up to our and our audience's expectations of CBC News.
00:04:03.240The CBC last November posted a website story headlined,
00:04:06.980Lethbridge MP under fire for spreading misinformation about COVID deaths in Alberta.
00:04:11.520The article recited social media users' comments after MP Harder on her Facebook page posted a November 17th Toronto Sun story.
00:04:19.220That was a story by my colleague Anthony Fury.
00:04:21.220The story goes on to say the Sun item correctly stated that a majority of COVID deaths occurred among patients with pre-existing medical conditions like dementia.
00:04:29.780Figures were supported by subsequent data from Statistics Canada and the Canadian Institute of Actuaries, which put the average age of COVID victims at 86.
00:04:39.000It goes on to say MP Harder called the CBC story bent, inaccurate and sensationalized.
00:05:07.920CBC ombudsman Jack Nagler agreed the story appeared manufactured.
00:05:13.440I am not a big fan of stories based on outrage over social media, he wrote, and that there was no question data in the original Toronto Sun story were accurate, he wrote.
00:05:22.020The ombudsman called the CBC version a significant failure that failed to test a balance.
00:05:27.200Under the Crown Broadcaster's Journalistic Standards and Practices Guide, there were violations of policy and I hope fervently that programmers will learn from their mistakes, wrote Nagler.
00:05:36.480The overall package was flawed, he wrote.
00:05:41.120The network released a text of a written exchange between MP Harder and Brian Labby, the CBC Calgary reporter who wrote the original story.
00:05:47.100Do you believe people with underlying pre-existing medical conditions are less valued, he asked.
00:05:52.740Do you think less of the people because they have pre-existing conditions?
00:05:56.280So you just see how completely biased the CBC reporter is, even the CBC's own management, even their own ombudsman said the story is wrong, it's manufactured, it's trash.
00:06:06.060Yet for some reason it still exists, it's still up on the CBC's website.
00:06:09.180But you kind of get a little glimpse into the process of just how biased the CBC is, that even the CBC's own brass agrees that their journalism is fake and cannot be trusted.
00:06:19.540So pretty embarrassing moment over at the CBC and a little bit of indication for Anthony Fury and MP Harder.
00:06:28.720Moving on to another story that shows the anti-conservative bias that lives in the hearts of so many legacy media journalists.
00:06:36.200I'm talking about the story where a bunch of legacy media reporters decided after the election to run on this narrative that the PPC is actually a far-right neo-Nazi party, like actually neo-Nazi parties.
00:06:48.120Like I think there's like seven or eight neo-Nazis in the entire country of Canada and the CBC and other legacy media outlets is convinced that the real base of Bernier's party is white nationalists, neo-Nazis and far-right extremists.
00:07:01.920And the legacy media sort of act as like pack animals.
00:07:06.080When one outlet or one reporter has an idea for a story, it's like they all follow suit.
00:07:09.780That's why Ezra Levant calls them the media party because not only are they completely anti-conservative and their just innate bias is that they hate conservatives, they're also completely unoriginal, very dull, very boring, and they just follow what the other one does.
00:07:24.380They all decided that Bernier's real base, you know, Maxime Bernier is a libertarian.
00:07:29.300He expanded his coalition in this past election because he really appealed to the anger and frustration that existed over really overzealous lockdown policies.
00:07:38.620So I would call him a pro-freedom, libertarian, anti-lockdown, just a pro-freedom guy that was able to attract people from a broad spectrum of Canadians across the ideological spectrum, but also from diverse backgrounds, more so among people who come from more of a blue-collar background, I would say.
00:07:56.220And for the mainstream media, they just don't see it that way.
00:07:59.640They can only see it in this like very linear way that the conservatives are like the center-right party, even though they're more center or even center-left these days.
00:08:07.780And so the PPC must be to the right, and therefore they must be far-right.
00:08:13.840Okay, if you're far-right, it means you're racist, it means you're probably a Nazi, and they kind of just like do this paint-by-numbers thing.
00:08:19.260So apparently a whole bunch of them reached out to Maxime Bernier asking if Maxime Bernier was courting Nazis, like seriously, straight up, the dumbest kind of thing, the worst insinuation about a person.
00:08:30.720You have Maxime Bernier, a freedom-lover libertarian, and you're accusing him of being a fascist.
00:08:35.820So for stupid journalists out there who don't know the difference between a libertarian, basically the concept of being a libertarian is that you don't want big government.
00:08:44.060You want very limited government, very small government, very controlled government.
00:08:47.600Whereas if you understand properly what a Nazi is and what a fascist is, they're on the other end of the spectrum in terms of authoritarians.
00:08:55.720They believe in big, all-powerful government, social control, controlled order, order at the threat of violence, which again is on the opposite end of the political spectrum from Maxime Bernier.
00:09:05.660So to the journalists who just don't understand this, maybe you should try reading a book.
00:09:09.400Just read one book about history and try to understand what a libertarian is versus what a far-right fascist is.
00:09:15.440I think it would serve the entire country very well.
00:09:17.820Regardless, Bernier got a whole bunch of requests basically asking the same idiotic question.
00:09:47.140These are left-wing activists masquerading as journalists.
00:09:50.040And then he took the screenshots and shared the questions.
00:09:53.020I'm going to read a couple because they're just so steeped in left-wing ideology and woke ideology.
00:09:58.140And also you can kind of get a glimpse for how stupid reporters are because half these questions are incoherent and the people writing them are like illiterate or something.
00:10:06.140So this is a request from Global News.
00:12:10.300Although I understand the anger that Bernier was coming at.
00:12:13.220So no surprise, Twitter restricted Bernier's account for 12 hours.
00:12:16.660And he was forced to take the tweet down.
00:12:19.320So the problem with Bernier is that even though he's right, he's not very calculated.
00:12:23.740He's not very, he's not very calculated.
00:12:25.740He's not very strategic about what he's doing.
00:12:27.440So he's just kind of acting out of anger on Twitter, which feeds into the journalist playbook because this is exactly what they want.
00:12:33.480Right now they get to write stories about how horrible Bernier is, about how he's not only is he far right and extremist, but he's dangerous and he's a threat to journalists.
00:12:42.740And so we saw lots of headlines that looked like this.
00:12:46.940Twitter makes Max St. Bernier remove tweet calling reporters idiots.
00:12:51.200And of course, the Canadian Association of Journalism says going after reporters for doing their job is unacceptable and dangerous.
00:12:58.620Well, I'm old enough to remember what, a week and a half ago, when a handful of reporters from the rebel were ordered by a federal judge to be able to attend the leaders' debates.
00:13:07.980So these journalists were deemed by a federal judge in Canada to be legitimate journalists and enabled them to attend the debate and ask their questions to the political party leaders.
00:13:19.380Both Justin Trudeau, the liberal leader, and Jagmeet Singh, the NDP leader, completely refused to engage with them, refused to answer their questions.
00:13:26.620And Justin Trudeau went on pretty much an unhinged tirade against the rebel media, basically blaming them for all the problems in society, blaming them for the protests, blaming them for a rise in conspiracy theories, and really, really not holding back in his attack and his hatred for right-wing media outlets, right-wing Canadians, and journalists.
00:13:48.980First of all, questions around accreditation were handled by the press gallery, organizations like yours that continue to spread misinformation and disinformation on the science around vaccines, around how we're going to actually get through this pandemic and be there for each other and keep our kids safe.
00:14:12.420And that is part of why we're seeing such unfortunate anger and lack of understanding of basic science.
00:14:22.340Your, I won't call it a media organization, your group of individuals need to take accountability for some of the polarization that we're seeing in this country.
00:14:35.840And I salute all extraordinary, hard-working journalists that put science and facts at the heart of what they do and ask me tough questions every day, but make sure that they are educating and informing Canadians from a broad range of perspectives, which is the last thing that you guys do.
00:14:55.920So wait a minute, why is it okay for left-wing politicians to be deranged and angry and completely non-responsive to journalists if they come from a conservative outlet or a right-wing outlet, but when you have a right-wing party reacting negatively to left-wing journalists who are doing activism journalism the same way as the rebel, somehow it's like this national outrage is a threat to democracy, the Canadian Association for Journalism is chiming in.
00:15:20.780And this is a completely silly double standard, and it's not just the Canadian Association of Journalism that's saying that.
00:15:26.980We have this statement that was put out by the CBC.
00:15:29.280It says, statement, recent online harassment of journalists.
00:15:32.900We at CBC Radio Canada add our voice in support of all journalists who are subject to online harassment and worse because of the work they do.
00:15:41.600It should be obvious to all Canadians that this harassment is unacceptable behavior.
00:15:45.480When the incitement to harass journalists comes from public figures, it is even worse.
00:15:51.140The work of journalists is vital to an informed public and a healthy democracy.
00:15:55.540Criticism comes with a job, but online harassment, particularly inciting others to attack someone for doing their job, puts the safety of people at risk.
00:16:04.600That the worst of this abuse targets women and racialized journalists should make clear just how dangerous this is.
00:16:11.680So again, remember when Justin Trudeau did that tirade, that was against a female rebel reporter.
00:16:17.240No statement from the CBC, no statement from the Canadian Association of Journalists.
00:16:21.260But when it is a right-wing politician doing it against left-wing activist journalists, then everybody is so outraged.
00:18:15.920The CBC and the Toronto Star only care about pinning us against each other on race.
00:18:20.480And it's even more interesting than that because the Toronto Star story talks about how there were a bunch of good candidates for the CBC who were from different backgrounds, who were Chinese or Arab or different backgrounds, but they didn't win their seats.
00:18:34.840So part of Aaron O'Toole's failed strategy in the last election was that he changed the party.
00:18:42.400He was trying to appeal to suburban voters who typically vote liberal.
00:18:46.520And because that failed, the Conservatives ended up losing a lot of seats in and around Vancouver and the 905, the Suburban Belt, around Vancouver.
00:18:53.500That's where a lot of their ethnic candidates or their non-white candidates were running.
00:18:57.080So even though the Conservatives had these candidates, they didn't win, which doesn't really say anything about the Conservatives other than the fact that Aaron O'Toole ran a bad campaign.
00:19:05.540It also says something about Canadians, that they didn't vote for those candidates.
00:19:17.540And the final thing I want to talk about today is after the 2019 election, there sort of became conventional wisdom that was pushed by the legacy media.
00:19:26.140The legacy media concluded that Andrew Scheer was too much of a right-winger and that was a liability.
00:19:30.840They said that he was pro-life and that he was a Catholic and those things were very, very bad, we were told.
00:19:36.400And so the solution to this was that the Conservatives needed to moderate.
00:19:40.020They needed to run someone who wasn't pro-life.
00:19:42.100They needed to run someone who was more liberal in their social values.
00:19:45.660And for some reason, the Conservative Party went along with that.
00:19:49.600They believed that that was the correct analysis of the 2019 election.
00:19:54.460I think that following this past election, seeing Aaron O'Toole run as a moderate, run as a left-winger, lose ground in the places that he was trying to win,
00:20:02.540we can safely say that that narrative that was crafted in 2019, mostly by the legacy media, mostly by people who do not vote Conservative,
00:20:10.180will never vote Conservative, don't have Conservative interests in mind or in their heart, they were wrong.
00:20:15.940It was absolutely not the right takeaway from that election.
00:20:18.820The reality is that Canadians want an alternative to the Liberals.
00:20:23.540They want a Conservative Party that's actually Conservative.
00:20:26.300And so I think that while we're doing this whole post-election, post-mortem trying to figure out what went wrong and what we can do to improve the Conservative movement in Canada,