Juno News - July 08, 2023


CBC 'regrets' publishing fake news

Topics
CBC egg on face
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Bill C-63 User Ed Friesen Calgary Stampede Rachel Emanuel Chuck Thompson Thomas Starzl Reagan Nelson Todd Glass Tamara Leach Dina Hinshaw Chris Sims COVID-19
New Brunswick’s fight for parental rights (feat. Faytene Grasseschi) Justin Trudeau’s growing Khalistan Problem

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

173.11

Word count

1,754

Sentence count

107

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this week's Alberta Roundup, we discuss CBC's latest apology for a story it published about Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's office and Crown prosecutors. We also take a look at Bill C-18 and its potential impact on the upcoming provincial election.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey everyone, welcome back to the Alberta Roundup. I'm your host Rachel Emanuel.
00:00:03.840 I hope that you guys are having a great week so far and happy Calgary Stampede to those of you
00:00:09.380 participating in this year's festivities. I know I've already seen some of you at some of the
00:00:14.480 events and I'm sure I will see many more of you over the next couple of days. If it seems like
00:00:18.960 it's been a quiet week in Alberta politics, well it has been. I think we are in the dog days of
00:00:23.980 summer. However, there was one big headline which dropped this week. I think you guys already know
00:00:29.560 what story I'm talking about today. So we are going to dive into that and I'm going to provide
00:00:35.400 a little analysis on my thoughts. On today's show we're going to be talking about CBC's latest regret.
00:00:42.220 We're also going to be taking a quick look at Bill C-18. All that and more happening now on the Alberta
00:00:47.580 Roundup.
00:00:58.800 Unless you live under a rock, you likely heard that the CBC had to apologize this week
00:01:03.320 for a story it published back in January in which it erroneously claimed that staff in Alberta Premier
00:01:10.300 Daniel Smith's office had contacted Crown prosecutors challenging their assessment of cases stemming from
00:01:16.800 COVID-19 and the Coutts border blockade. Shortly after that story was published, CBC updated it with an
00:01:23.360 editor's note saying that it had not viewed the emails in question. Further cracks began to show in
00:01:31.120 the story when Danielle Smith, her staff and Crown prosecutors all denied that the emails existed.
00:01:37.760 In fact, the public service conducted an independent investigation and it also found no evidence of
00:01:45.540 such emails. And so it seemed the story began to unravel even further. Fast forward to May, we are now in
00:01:53.140 the Alberta provincial election and CBC was still standing behind its reporting. But then came the
00:01:59.280 independent ethics investigation from the Alberta ethics commissioner in which she also found no evidence
00:02:05.280 of emails between Daniel Smith's office and Crown prosecutors. That was back in May. We are now in July.
00:02:12.800 And what happened this week? CBC went back to update the story and say that they returned to their sources,
00:02:21.120 re-interviewed them and could not confirm that the emails did exist. In a lengthy editor's note, CBC wrote,
00:02:29.600 quote, as such, we have updated this story and related pieces, removing references to direct contact
00:02:36.240 between the premier's office and prosecutors, which the premier has vehemently denied. CBC news regrets
00:02:43.600 reporting direct contact by email. I followed up with CBC news head of public affairs, Chuck Thompson,
00:02:49.680 to ask why it took them so long to make this change. Two months after we've seen the ethics commissioner
00:02:56.400 report. In a statement to me, he said, quote, simply stated, that's the time it took to do our due
00:03:01.600 diligence. We know that Alberta premier Daniel Smith has long called the allegations in the
00:03:07.440 CB story baseless and demanded a retraction and an apology. After CBC news corrected its story,
00:03:14.720 the premier said in a statement, quote, after months of the CBC reporting interference between my office and
00:03:21.440 Crown prosecutors. Today, CBC news removed references to direct contact between my office and prosecutors
00:03:28.240 and regrets reporting direct contact by email. I've been vindicated as has my office. Now that CBC has
00:03:36.800 expressed regret for its inaccurate reporting and Albertans know the truth, I consider the matter with
00:03:42.080 the CBC closed. Additionally, I'm asking the Alberta NDP to acknowledge their error also and retract and
00:03:50.000 apologize for spreading this misinformation. I doubt that those of us who have been paying attention are
00:03:55.200 surprised to see the CBC had to change, correct and apologize for the reporting. As I've just explained
00:04:02.240 to you, there were cracks showing in the piece from the very beginning, but I don't think the CBC's regret
00:04:07.600 goes far enough. To make an error of this magnitude, it is not simply enough to change the wording in a story
00:04:14.960 and add an editor's note. This demands a full retraction. And the thing that is so enraging
00:04:22.240 about this is that we, the Canadian taxpayer, paid for this work to be done. We paid for the premier to
00:04:28.400 be defamed for months on end. And I think all of us know that this did impact the outcome of the Alberta
00:04:34.160 provincial election. As a bit of an aside, I'm obviously a journalist and I know what it's like to
00:04:39.200 get things wrong. It's very embarrassing. I also know what it's like to be excited about what seems like
00:04:44.160 a really big scoop and go to your editors and say, I have this great scoop. In fact, at a couple times
00:04:49.440 at True North, I've gone to my editors with such stories and they vetoed it because the sources
00:04:54.400 wanted to remain anonymous. And we didn't have adequate proof that what they were saying happened
00:04:59.280 did in fact occur. This is a problem about using anonymous sources is they can say anything they want
00:05:05.920 and there's absolutely no consequences to them. That's when you need good editors to come in and say,
00:05:11.120 there's not adequate proof for this story. We are going to veto it. In this case, CBC clearly should
00:05:16.880 never have published a story without having viewed the emails in question, which clearly do not exist.
00:05:23.600 And so I have the most sympathy for junior reporters who are doing their best. And I have absolutely zero
00:05:29.760 sympathy for the editors who should have known better. The truth is that these editors probably
00:05:34.480 think that Daniel Smith is crazy enough to do something like this. The CBC's bias against
00:05:40.000 conservatives and certainly against Alberta Premier Daniel Smith has been so evident since day one.
00:05:46.640 And now they have egg on their face. And I'm sorry, but a simple apology is just not going to
00:05:51.680 cut it this time. My question of the week for you guys is that Premier Daniel Smith has said she
00:05:56.240 now considers the matter settled. As I've mentioned, they didn't even issue a full retraction.
00:06:01.280 They simply changed the wording in a story and added an editor. So I don't think that goes far
00:06:06.080 enough. What about you? I also wanted to dive into some of your comments this week because
00:06:10.720 you guys all provided pretty astute analysis on what happened here.
00:06:15.040 Twitter user Reagan Nelson said, maybe CBC should use investigative journalism to base their stories on
00:06:21.040 instead of anonymous phone calls in the night. If you are actually a new service, you would verify
00:06:26.080 all stories before you print them. Basic journalism. Todd Glassman wrote, shouldn't they attempt due
00:06:33.280 diligence before printing an incredibly damaged and completely false story? And Voodoo the Viking had 0.92
00:06:39.120 this funny fake encounter of the CBC publishing a story and then deciding if they would figure out
00:06:44.080 whether or not it was true in a few months. Honestly, I had to laugh at all these because it's
00:06:49.440 exactly correct. Of course, you shouldn't do your due diligence after the story was published. It should
00:06:54.800 have been done well in advance, especially with a story of this magnitude, which had lasting
00:06:59.520 repercussions. Moving on to our next story here, I did have a chance to do another midweek interview
00:07:05.120 and it looks like most of you guys had the opportunity to catch it. But for those of you who didn't,
00:07:09.520 I wanted to quickly talk to you about the financial burden to taxpayers of C18. I know, I know,
00:07:15.760 you guys thought this legislation was just going to make it harder to find the news that you liked
00:07:20.640 on Facebook and Google, but what it will actually do is it will increase the cost to Canadian taxpayers.
00:07:27.680 Imagine that the Liberal government introduces and passes legislation. And of course, there's a fee to
00:07:33.280 all of us. Here's what Chris Sims, the Alberta director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation,
00:07:38.320 told me about Bill C18 earlier this week. The heritage minister piped up and said,
00:07:43.280 Oh, don't worry. We need to make sure that these newsrooms stay open. Who's we? The government,
00:07:50.160 I guess. And we are going to make sure that you have the resources you need. Now resources,
00:07:55.440 of course, is government speak for taxpayers money. This is a huge problem for two major reasons. One,
00:08:03.840 as a long time lifelong journalist myself, it's wrong for journalists to be paid by the government,
00:08:09.360 period. You cannot hold a government to account if you're counting on that government for your paycheck.
00:08:16.240 So that doesn't fly. And two, there's no way that taxpayers should be on the hook to fund media
00:08:22.560 companies and keeping newsrooms open. That is not the role of the taxpayer here. And so we're coming
00:08:29.040 after this for two major reasons. One is accountability. And the second is the cost.
00:08:34.960 And finally, moving into our weekly comment round, we had a little bit of a chat about Danielle Smith's
00:08:39.840 comments on energy policy this week. User Thomas Stewart on YouTube said,
00:08:44.720 It's true the Western provinces are thinking of leaving Canada over this energy from oil issue.
00:08:50.560 Tamara Leach is an active part of the political party whose objective is to do that because of the 1.00
00:08:55.600 oil issue. Putting her in jail and locking the bank account of the supporters of that political party, 1.00
00:09:00.560 its support for the truckers is not something the Emergencies Act was constructed for.
00:09:05.520 No matter what Canada decides, our forests take in more CO2 than Canada can produce.
00:09:10.720 So it's pointless to punish the poor by taxing them out of food, fuel, warmth,
00:09:15.520 when all that it can accomplish is perhaps to end the nation from sea to sea.
00:09:21.280 User Ed Friesen said, Dino Henshaw was a big part of the problem with AHS,
00:09:25.360 not a solution. Perhaps we have just identified about a hundred doctors who are also not part of
00:09:32.080 making our healthcare better for Albertans. Our healthcare system was severely broken and still
00:09:36.880 has a long ways to go back to acceptable standard. Okay guys, that's all I have for you today. I just
00:09:42.960 want to let you know that there won't be a show next week as I am away. I hope that you guys have a
00:09:48.480 great couple of weeks. As always, if you're able, please consider supporting our work. You can do
00:09:53.120 that over at donate.tnc.news. I will see you all in a few weeks. God bless.