Juno News - December 24, 2020


The Liberals take aim at True North

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Erin O'Toole Justin Trudeau
Do we live in a free market anymore？ Is it offensive to say “Merry Christmas？”

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

177.7

Word count

639

Sentence count

22


Summary

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

A Liberal fundraising email sent to supporters of Conservative Party of Canada leader Aaron O'Toole accuses True North's Andrew Lutton of being a "far-right" conservative. True North is a media outlet that offers poignant commentary, break stories, and competes with the mainstream media outlets that Justin Trudeau has given millions to.

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 You know, Justin Trudeau keeps talking about how much he cares about media freedom and freedom of
00:00:09.760 the press and free speech, but he doesn't even pretend to actually believe that in his actions.
00:00:15.240 You may recall last week I did a year-end interview with Conservative Party of Canada
00:00:19.500 leader Aaron O'Toole. These sorts of interviews are very commonplace. Party leaders sit down and
00:00:24.400 have frank but friendly conversations about what they've done in the past year and what they plan
00:00:29.480 to do in the year ahead. But oh no, the fact that I spoke to Aaron O'Toole this year, or more
00:00:34.340 importantly the fact that Aaron O'Toole spoke to me, became the fodder for a Liberal Party of Canada
00:00:39.780 fundraising email. The Liberals sent this out accusing Aaron O'Toole of far-right politics,
00:00:46.220 saying that his granting of an interview to the quote far-right true north really was just akin
00:00:52.440 to speaking to an anti-immigration right-wing think tank. Despite the fact that we're a news organization
00:00:58.540 in a media outlet that offers poignant commentary, break stories, and competes with the mainstream
00:01:03.400 media journalists that Justin Trudeau has given $600 million to. I don't expect the Liberals to
00:01:09.940 agree with us, but I expect the Liberals to acknowledge we have a right to exist. When they
00:01:15.100 take aim at Aaron O'Toole for daring to speak to us, what they're actually saying is that our audience
00:01:20.000 doesn't deserve to hear what politicians are doing. Our audience doesn't deserve to hear what's going on.
00:01:25.540 They're not just going after me, they're going after all of you who pay attention to and support
00:01:31.000 the work that we do. This isn't all that surprising from the Liberals who banned me from covering their
00:01:36.940 campaign in the last election, and from the Liberal government who is paying tens of thousands of
00:01:41.820 dollars to fight against my press freedom, True North's press freedom, Rebels' press freedom, and all
00:01:48.100 press freedom in federal court as a result of our Leaders Debates Commission case. These are the Liberals who
00:01:54.640 stand up there and shake hands and smile for pictures at a global conference for media freedom,
00:01:59.680 but when push comes to shove, actually don't respect alternative and independent forms of media,
00:02:05.120 which in many regards are the future of media. But there's an institutionalization of this that's
00:02:10.960 taking place. Take a look at a draft policy circulated among members of the Parliamentary Press
00:02:16.480 Gallery, which is basically the organization that serves as the gatekeeper to covering any events that
00:02:22.240 take place on Parliament Hill, especially with the Liberals, which have decided to outsource
00:02:27.360 all accreditation to the Parliamentary Press Gallery. This draft policy, written by members of the
00:02:33.360 mainstream media in Ottawa, says that accreditation is a privilege and not a right. They say, according to
00:02:39.840 the Hill Times, that if they allow people in by misusing the policy, allow people in that don't belong there,
00:02:45.760 it would erode the relationship between the institution of Parliament and the Parliamentary Press Gallery,
00:02:51.440 which means if they let those pesky independent journalists in, well, the whole thing is just going
00:02:55.840 to come crashing down like a house of cards. Now, there's no reason that they can't respond by going
00:03:01.280 after behavior. If someone acts out, if someone does something wrong, if someone actually breaks the
00:03:06.880 rules, then deal with it. But by preemptively saying that no one who's not like us deserves to cover
00:03:13.040 what's happening in government, they're actually allowing, the very people that are enjoying press
00:03:18.320 freedom in their day-to-day lives, are actually allowing press freedom to be curbed and curtailed
00:03:23.360 by a government that doesn't want its political opponents to speak to the media outlets that they
00:03:28.160 don't think are legitimate. Press freedom is always a pressing concern, especially now. For True North,
00:03:34.720 I'm Andrew Lutton.