Juno News - November 21, 2022


CBC says crosswords are racist

Mentioned
Andrew Deborah Rainwright Trump
CTV News comes to the rescue of Trudeau Convoy lawyer Brendan Miller kicked out of Public Order Emergency Commission

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

196.9

Word count

799

Sentence count

61


Summary

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

Crossword puzzles are everywhere, but how inclusive are the bylines and clues? And let's play a game I like to call Guess the Canadian Media Outlet: CBC has taken aim at the crossword because there is a lack of inclusion.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 If you really want to tackle a lack of inclusivity, you have to go right to the source of this,
00:00:05.500 and I'm talking, of course, about crosswords.
00:00:10.080 Am I reading this right?
00:00:13.120 Crossword puzzles are everywhere, but how inclusive are the bylines and clues?
00:00:18.880 And let's play a game I like to call Guess the Canadian Media Outlet.
00:00:24.800 CBC, bingo!
00:00:26.220 It was kind of a toss-up between them and the Toronto Star,
00:00:28.720 but CBC has taken aim at the crossword because there is a lack of inclusion.
00:00:33.780 Now, I am the in-house crossword expert for True North.
00:00:39.140 I mean, no one assigned me this title.
00:00:41.100 I've just sort of claimed it, so I apologize to any of my colleagues
00:00:43.300 if they're as obsessed with crosswords as I am.
00:00:45.400 I do the New York Times.
00:00:46.740 I occasionally do the Times of London.
00:00:48.600 I'm not great at the cryptics, but I try.
00:00:51.540 Absolutely love crosswords.
00:00:53.020 I even at one point submitted one to the New York Times.
00:00:56.280 They didn't publish it, but I tried.
00:00:57.780 So I like crosswords, and I have never once while I've done a crossword
00:01:01.720 been struggling with the lack of inclusivity.
00:01:04.840 But apparently, it's been an issue that's been going on for quite some time.
00:01:09.500 As one crossword designer says,
00:01:12.440 when you only have puzzles that represent a certain kind of topic
00:01:15.820 or are only of interest to straight white men,
00:01:18.500 a lot of people won't see themselves reflected in the grid.
00:01:21.700 I think crosswords are only of interest to straight white men because other people have lives.
00:01:26.520 We're boring.
00:01:27.400 Let us have our crosswords for crying out loud.
00:01:29.600 No, no, Andrew, you can't get it.
00:01:30.880 But you see, that's exactly why the crosswords aren't inclusive.
00:01:34.280 It's because people like you are the ones that are only doing them.
00:01:37.500 We need to open it up.
00:01:38.320 We need to make it more inclusive for the rest of the rest of society.
00:01:42.200 I just find this so, so hilarious.
00:01:45.380 I don't do crosswords, I have to say.
00:01:47.640 I have a life.
00:01:49.540 But when I did read this, I thought to myself...
00:01:51.720 Stone cold.
00:01:53.760 When I did read this, I thought to myself,
00:01:55.900 well, again, this might be in our yearly Fake News Friday award show, Andrew.
00:02:01.540 But speaking of, we're getting close to Christmas.
00:02:03.080 You hinted at it at the top.
00:02:04.440 We are going to have to do some sort of award show,
00:02:06.460 and we're going to be highlighting the very best of the year in fake news.
00:02:10.920 And I wouldn't be surprised if this makes it into the list.
00:02:14.520 This is what Deborah Rainwright writes in the CBC article,
00:02:19.320 or is quoted as saying in the CBC article,
00:02:21.200 very hard-hitting journalism, real, real important stuff from the CBC.
00:02:24.740 This is what we pay them for.
00:02:26.100 She writes, someone decides what words get in,
00:02:28.720 what's part of the clues,
00:02:29.660 and in doing that, they're deciding what should be common knowledge for every one of us, Andrew.
00:02:33.420 Andrew, that's why you can't be the one writing these crosswords.
00:02:36.800 You can't be submitting them.
00:02:38.120 And in fact, it's probably time that you step back
00:02:40.740 and let others have their go at the crosswords.
00:02:43.220 That's really what's going on.
00:02:44.340 We need to change the target market,
00:02:46.200 and then we'll open it all up to the rest of society.
00:02:50.080 I should say, by the way, this wasn't just the CBC News article.
00:02:54.280 CBC actually ran a documentary a couple of weeks ago about this
00:02:58.300 called Across and Down, which is a great title.
00:03:00.400 But they found that women, Indigenous, Black, and queer-identifying people
00:03:05.160 have been almost invisible in crossword puzzles.
00:03:09.100 So here's the thing.
00:03:10.500 I've already admitted that I have no life.
00:03:12.480 I do the crosswords for the New York Times fairly religiously.
00:03:15.380 But the interesting thing is the New York Times has a crossword blog
00:03:19.420 every day that comes out that has some commentary on the crosswords.
00:03:23.660 And every now and then, I'll read that if I'm interested in the theme or whatever.
00:03:27.780 If you want to have a very good time, and I'm playing fast and loose with good and time,
00:03:32.520 you can see the comments on this.
00:03:34.760 And you get oftentimes these little like woke fights when people don't like
00:03:38.640 that a certain word was said or they don't like that a certain word was used.
00:03:42.220 Like one time, the answer to the crossword clue was non-PC, as in not politically correct.
00:03:48.020 And everyone was like, why are we vilifying political correctness?
00:03:50.640 Political correctness is great.
00:03:52.180 There was another time where it was 45th president, and the answer was Trump.
00:03:56.420 And someone was like, why do I have to see that name in my crossword?
00:03:59.500 So people are getting triggered by crosswords.
00:04:02.000 So maybe I am just being incensed.