Juno News - May 29, 2022


The legacy media backtracks after pushing fake news


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

181.5591

Word count

1,083

Sentence count

65

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Justin Trudeau cancels an event in British Columbia because of racial slurs being hurled at him, but there's no evidence of this happening. So what happened? And why did the media make up a story about anti-Trudeaus protesters being racist?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This was the sort of main headline of the week through the legacy media, which was this idea
00:00:04.860 that Justin Trudeau had been the victim of racist slurs or that he had to cancel a fundraising
00:00:10.220 event. So there's this thousand dollar plate fundraising event planned in Surrey, British
00:00:14.400 Columbia on Tuesday afternoon. And before the event was even started, basically the liberals
00:00:20.920 claimed that Trudeau couldn't go. It was unsafe for him. And they claimed that it was because
00:00:25.540 a crowd of protesters were making racist slurs. So there were racial slurs being hurled at the
00:00:32.700 attendees and at the fundraisers. And Trudeau, who just got back from being in a war zone in
00:00:40.580 Ukraine, well, he was told it was too unsafe for him to attend this in-person event. So he would 0.72
00:00:45.920 attend by Zoom instead. You can see the headline there from the Canadian press. It says Trudeau
00:00:50.000 cancels appearance at an event in BC after protesters hurl racial slurs. And of course,
00:00:55.920 you can see it's the Canadian press, which is a newswire service in Canada. So when something's
00:01:00.480 written by the Canadian press, you're going to see it all over the news, Harrison. You're going to see
00:01:04.300 it on in pretty much every major newspaper in the country. You're going to see it on CTV,
00:01:08.960 on global. Basically, they all subscribe to the Canadian press and they all run the exact same
00:01:14.000 nonsense. There's so many interesting, again, levels to this story because the entire thing
00:01:20.580 wasn't verified. It wasn't a fact. I saw that you had tweeted, Harrison, something along the lines of,
00:01:26.060 you know, Canadian press invents a story. It's even worse than that because the liberals invented it.
00:01:29.720 The liberals made a claim. And then the media ran with it without bothering to verify it. Like,
00:01:35.040 what do you mean the racial slurs? Who was saying them? What were the racial slurs? And I know
00:01:40.560 you poured through, I think it was hours of video footage because there's lots of cell phone
00:01:45.640 footage of this protest to verify exactly what was said and what these supposed racial slurs were,
00:01:53.240 Harrison. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
00:01:56.220 So the thing was, is that immediately as the story started to evolve and started to come out,
00:02:03.080 the line from the legacy media, of course, the Canadian press, there's a wire service. They put
00:02:06.620 out the fact that there were racial slurs being thrown and hurled at attendees and at Trudeau.
00:02:13.760 They kind of made Trudeau out to be the victim at the beginning of it as well. But of course,
00:02:18.740 there was video evidence of all of this. There were journalists that were covering the protests.
00:02:22.920 There were citizen journalists that were there, kind of half participating and half covering
00:02:27.460 and documenting what was going on. And so, of course, when the reports came out,
00:02:33.200 everyone started looking for video footage. And I'm sure the Liberal Party staffers that were tasked
00:02:38.680 with coming up with this line were also looking at that footage, trying to find the video evidence
00:02:43.140 that these anti-Trudeau protesters were being racist. Because of course, Candace,
00:02:48.240 we have seen these videos emerge from other protests. And we see how the media responds when
00:02:54.340 accusations of racism get leveled at sort of anti-Trudeau protesters, anti-Jagmeet Singh protests.
00:03:02.140 And whenever there's video footage, every Canadian basically has to see it because it gets put out
00:03:06.960 on social media to show people just how bad these anti-Trudeau protesters are. But there was no video
00:03:12.760 footage, Candace. There's no evidence of racial slurs being hurled, as they say, at attendees or at
00:03:20.840 Liberal Party members. And that kind of became the story throughout the week, right, Candace? It was
00:03:27.080 first, here are these horrible anti-Trudeau protesters once again being racist. Again, 0.98
00:03:32.900 where have we seen the line of anti-Trudeau protesters being racist? It seems to be their
00:03:37.220 playbook now. So that was the original story. Then slowly, outlets started to backtrack and started
00:03:45.320 to change their story because there was no evidence to back any of it up. So CBC, the day after,
00:03:51.200 basically totally rewrote the story, rewrote their headline, took out the line about them being
00:03:57.660 racist and made it an allegation. And John Kaye over at Quillette, he tweeted this and basically
00:04:04.860 drew the arrows telling you how the CBC changed their story. So it went from Trudeau has to cancel
00:04:11.160 the event because protesters were hurling racial slurs to Trudeau cancels appearance at Surrey
00:04:16.900 fundraiser over protest-related safety concerns. And then, of course, the rest of the story gets
00:04:21.760 changed to try and cover their tracks. So the media goes out, calls anti-Trudeau protesters racist
00:04:26.720 without evidence, runs with the story that the Liberals were giving them, Liberal Party staffers
00:04:31.380 were giving them, and now they're having to backtrack, Candace. I mean, this just seems like
00:04:35.560 something we've seen many times before. This is a recycled playbook. Throw out the horrible accusations
00:04:40.580 and then backtrack because there's no evidence to back it up.
00:04:43.340 It's not journalism. It's like the Liberals made a claim. The Liberals accused their opponents
00:04:48.280 of being racist. This is a thing that we have heard the Liberals do 1,000 times over the past
00:04:53.100 10 years. That's their go-to shtick. People I don't like equate to racist. And it's almost become
00:05:00.760 a joke or a meme on the political right that's like, racist has completely lost all meaning.
00:05:05.360 But typically the role of a journalist, Harrison, you know this, you went to journalism school,
00:05:09.020 is to verify. So you don't just run a headline based on what a Liberal MP told you. You could
00:05:15.560 at least write alleges, Liberals, right? Liberals allege racial slurs. No, they ran it as fact,
00:05:22.220 as truth, that there were racial slurs, even though there's no such evidence. And it wasn't
00:05:27.240 just the CBC that had to change their headline. The Canadian press also changed their headline
00:05:31.660 pretty much exactly like the CBC one that you just showed. You can see the side by side here.
00:05:36.880 It went from the protesters were hurling racial slurs, which was unverified and untrue,
00:05:41.740 to Trudeau cancels appearance at event in BC amid angry protests. So, you know, they're still
00:05:47.940 trying to classify the protesters. Anyone who's anti-Trudeau is either a racist or just an angry
00:05:53.880 conservative. And so those are sort of like the two boxes that they can put you in.