Juno News - July 11, 2019


Journalists denied access to politicians at media freedom conference

Hosted by
Andrew Lawton
Mentioned
Chrystia Freeland Jeremy Hunt Sheila Gunn-Reed Ezra Levant
No talk of free speech in Canada or UK at press freedom conference Why are world leaders always snubbing Justin Trudeau？

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

179.18

Word count

975

Sentence count

48

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Day two of the Global Conference for Media Freedom in London, a conference co-hosted by the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom, has been a dazzling display of a precise lack of freedom for the press and for everyone else.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Day two of the first ever global conference for media freedom, a conference co-hosted by the
00:00:14.640 governments of Canada and the United Kingdom, with a very simple mission, as you can see from
00:00:19.000 the banner behind me, to defend freedom. But what's fascinating is that in the process of
00:00:24.500 defending the right to media freedom and the right to free speech for the press and for everyone else,
00:00:29.080 this conference has been a dazzling display of a precise lack of that very freedom. A couple of
00:00:36.000 examples here just in the structure of the event itself. For starters, anyone could apply for
00:00:41.800 accreditation from around the world, but one of the biggest issues was that the organizers of this,
00:00:46.760 from the British Foreign Secretary's press office, were not going to respond to accreditation requests
00:00:52.880 until July 5th for a conference set to begin on July 10th. And in fact, the media accreditation
00:00:59.800 website for the conference said, don't book traveler accommodations until you know you've
00:01:03.800 been approved. Now, we fundraised this trip through TrueNorth supporters. We were going to come here,
00:01:08.200 no matter what, regardless of whether we were accredited, to cover the story and the stories
00:01:13.040 beneath the story. We were accredited, thankfully, but had we waited until that last moment to come
00:01:18.960 here on a few days notice, we would not have been able to afford to do so. So already the conference
00:01:24.960 program itself is excluding independent media. People that don't have the massive budgets that in Canada,
00:01:31.960 CBC, CTV, Global, Globe and Mail, and all of these other outlets do. Many of which have foreign bureaus,
00:01:36.960 whose British representatives are here covering this for Canada. Haven't found anyone else who's
00:01:42.480 traveled here from Canada, with the exception of Ezra Levant and Sheila Gunn-Reed of The Rebel.
00:01:48.480 But then you look at the actual event itself. There was no interview opportunity for Chrystia Freeland,
00:01:53.520 Canada's foreign minister and one of the co-hosts of this. No interview opportunities for her British 1.00
00:01:58.000 counterpart, Jeremy Hunt, the other co-host of this event, whose country is playing host to it here in
00:02:03.440 London, England. More importantly, foreign press, except for a hand-picked few, were not invited to
00:02:08.960 a press avail that was made for Jeremy Hunt so people could ask him questions. I wasn't even notified
00:02:14.320 it was happening. And there was just one opportunity for people to ask questions of foreign affairs
00:02:19.040 minister Chrystia Freeland. A scrum at midday on day two of the conference when Chrystia Freeland's office 0.74
00:02:26.480 actually tried to exclude the rebel and me from covering it. We've tweeted about this. You can see
00:02:32.320 what I've written on twitter.com slash Andrew Lawton. But Chrystia Freeland's office actually
00:02:37.120 tried to block me from asking a question of Chrystia Freeland at this press conference. So there was a
00:02:42.560 beautiful moment that gives me a lot of hope about the media industry in Canada. Reporters from Global
00:02:48.320 News, The Globe and Mail, CBC, CTV and Al Jazeera English banded together and said to Chrystia Freeland's
00:02:54.480 press secretary, we will not go to this scrum unless everyone who wants to go is included. And there was a
00:03:01.280 significant delay. There was a chance this whole thing wouldn't even happen. But the reporters banded
00:03:06.080 together and in fact I was allowed to ask a question and it was an important question at that
00:03:11.120 that I'll cover in another video. But the whole point is for a government that wants to export this
00:03:16.960 idea of press freedom it needs to be a lot more inward focused. My report from day one of the conference
00:03:23.040 was that there's been no discussion of internal press freedom and free speech issues in the host
00:03:28.240 countries Canada and the UK. And as the second day of the program shows that problem still exists.
00:03:34.400 Everyone is talking about the abstract ideas of free speech or things that are happening in other
00:03:38.880 parts of the world. Horrific things but no one seems prepared to deal with the issues that governments
00:03:44.080 are imposing on free speech rights in western countries including Canada and the UK. And already
00:03:50.240 there's a plan to make Canada the host of the 2020 Global Conference for Media Freedom. And one of the
00:03:56.160 points that I think was raised very effectively through what happened here from the media was
00:04:00.960 that they need to do a better job at making a media freedom event open for media if they want to have
00:04:06.800 any credibility and any license to pretend that they have a high ground on this issue. The way this event
00:04:13.040 has gone on they don't. I don't want to say it's a sham because there have been good ideas discussed.
00:04:18.080 There have been people brought to the table that have had a lot of good things to say but the
00:04:22.240 governments who need to be adopting these principles are not doing it. They want to talk about free speech.
00:04:27.680 They want to talk about journalists but they don't want to talk to journalists. Here's a video of
00:04:32.720 Chrystia Freeland as she left her morning session. No eye contacted with the media that were waiting to
00:04:41.040 ask her questions. None whatsoever and in fact you see a little bit of it in the video. A human wall of staffers
00:04:46.400 had been formed so that no media could get to her. This is just one of many examples of how media have
00:04:52.960 actually been unfreely treated in the way they're expected to do their jobs here. Myself included in
00:04:58.640 that. It's a global conference for media freedom. If you believe at all in these values this is a
00:05:04.720 message to the Canadian and British governments and any governments you have to talk about it with
00:05:10.160 the media you're claiming you're standing up for. For True North from London, I'm Andrew Lawton.