CBC stands by their false reporting of the convoy
Episode Stats
Words per minute
188.67097
Summary
In the wake of the Black Friday protests, the CBC has been accused of lying about the amount of foreign donations to the protest convoy, but they say they stand by their reporting on the matter. What's the problem with this?
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Yeah. So, I mean, let's just focus on this very easily debunked claim for a moment that we saw,
00:00:06.120
and if we can throw it up on the screen again there, the CBC editorial, no, CBC News did not
00:00:11.160
retract its stories on convoy protest donations. So they say they stand by it. They say that,
00:00:16.600
oh, it's misinformation that CBC walked back certain bits of coverage. They say, especially
00:00:22.780
it's referring to stories about foreign donations to the convoy protests that were being made by
00:00:28.340
GoFundMe and Gifts and Go, even though we've had a number of financial experts and GoFundMe people
00:00:33.300
and Gifts and Go people that have testified before that parliamentary committee and others to say,
00:00:38.760
no, no, no, it was the vast majority was Canadian. And there was also, though, this report in Black
00:00:45.760
Locks Reporter, CBC Pulls False Convoy Story, and specifically this section on February 10th in a
00:00:53.640
report about the protest convoy, CBC radios, the world this hour, incorrectly said GoFundMe ended
00:01:01.400
a fundraiser for the protesters over questionable donations to the group. No explanation was given.
00:01:07.260
And there have been other examples as well where CBC has corrected this and they've changed this,
00:01:13.080
they've made amendments to it, and they're still claiming, no, no, no, we haven't, just because we
00:01:17.240
haven't hit the delete button on the story, we haven't admitted that we got the facts fundamentally
00:01:22.020
wrong. And one of them in particular, that I think is interesting to point out here, and CBC stood by
00:01:28.700
this one and shouldn't have, was it's reporting on that guy, Martin Joseph Engelhardt, who was this
00:01:33.580
grifter that said that his life savings were drained because of the convoy, when in actuality,
00:01:38.940
he was the one cashing out on it, and he was making money. And then when he went to the media,
00:01:43.240
people sent him more money. And we presented CBC with hard and fast evidence that what they reported
00:01:50.000
was wrong. And they said, no, no, no, we stand by it. So CBC does have a track record. I mean,
00:01:55.840
they did make a lot of changes here, Harrison, but they also have a track record of doubling down
00:02:02.300
Well, yeah. And just to go back, Andrew, to the statement by Brody Phelan, the editor-in-chief
00:02:07.300
of CBC News. I mean, he can, you can, you can not issue a retraction and the story can still be
00:02:12.600
false. CBC even admitted to Black Locks that their radio program detailing these accusations
00:02:18.340
of foreign donations and dangerous donations from around the world was false. So they said it was false.
00:02:25.000
And you can, you don't have to release a right of retraction for the story to be actually false.
00:02:29.240
And I think they're trying to play word games here and say, no, well, we stand by reporting.
00:02:33.240
We didn't retract our story. Well, fair enough. But you did admit to Black Locks that your radio
00:02:37.960
program parroting the exact same lines that you had, that they had been talking about throughout
00:02:42.860
the convoy protest to give the government some ammunition to basically attack these protesters.
00:02:48.960
Well, they said it was false. So it's just one of those, one of those interesting,
00:02:53.700
interesting word games by the CBC to say that, no, we're standing by our journalism. We didn't
00:02:58.000
retract anything. But then in March, actually, they admitted that what they wrote was false.