Juno News - March 04, 2023


The media's skewed coverage of Roxham Road crisis

Topics
lazy reporting
Mentioned
Mocha Bezergin Roxham Road
LAWTON： The left is never going to like you The Chinese election interference scandal is far from over

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

144.58

Word count

538

Sentence count

34

Harmful content

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we take a look at the death of a man who was shot and killed by border patrol agents on the border with the United States, and the way the Canadian media covered it. We also discuss the ongoing crisis of refugees crossing the border into Canada from the US.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 CBC, for this show anyway, tends to be the gift that keeps on giving.
00:00:04.600 This one was fascinating.
00:00:06.820 Many of you who are active on social media and you follow footage of the convoy
00:00:11.980 and other big events in the Canadian political sphere,
00:00:14.780 you may know Mocha Bezergin.
00:00:17.580 And I apologize to Mocha for likely butchering his last name.
00:00:20.900 But Mocha used to be at Rebel News.
00:00:23.160 Now he works independently.
00:00:25.060 He's a great photographer and videographer.
00:00:27.060 He's everywhere and including Roxham Road where he's done tremendous footage.
00:00:32.300 So at some point he went to Roxham Road and was filming
00:00:36.200 and a Canadian press photographer got a picture of him walking around.
00:00:42.980 Now CBC then shows this story in an article about Roxham Road.
00:00:49.740 The headline of the article,
00:00:51.320 Man Dies After Encountering Patrol Agents at Canada-US Border.
00:00:56.020 And there's a picture of our friend Mocha next to a big sign that says,
00:01:00.700 Arrete, stop.
00:01:02.460 Now Mocha is not actually dead.
00:01:05.480 And if you look at the caption of the photo,
00:01:08.360 it gets even more concerning because they offer a biographical description of him
00:01:13.560 as being a migrant waiting for transport.
00:01:17.120 So they've not only killed off Mocha,
00:01:19.920 but they've also taken away his Canadian citizenship of 21 years and made him an illegal.
00:01:26.360 And, you know, again, is it sinister?
00:01:28.440 No, it sure as heck is lazy though.
00:01:31.260 Lazy reporting and, you know, the whole issue with Roxham Road,
00:01:36.480 which I covered while I was at the Toronto Sun before I came to True North,
00:01:40.060 has been a huge issue that has filtered into our cities.
00:01:46.340 It's impacted on the city of Toronto where I make my home.
00:01:51.420 Refugees are filling up shelters.
00:01:53.940 Nobody or hardly anybody in the legacy media covers this sort of stuff. 0.84
00:01:58.100 But they get into these sideshows that are absolutely ridiculous.
00:02:01.500 It's rather frustrating to see this kind of lazy, inaccurate reporting
00:02:07.680 when, in fact, Roxham Road should be dissected as to the impact on Canada's cities.
00:02:16.320 As I said, in particular, Toronto, I think what's happened is Quebec has diverted
00:02:21.820 a lot of the refugees who are crossing the border illegally
00:02:25.480 and being allowed to cross the border illegally, I don't understand it at all,
00:02:29.060 now to Ontario.
00:02:31.420 And it's Ontario's problem now.
00:02:33.880 Yeah, and I mean, obviously, this nonsense about the photo
00:02:36.840 is a bit of a sidebar to the overarching issue.
00:02:40.020 And the media, I think, has done a tremendous disservice
00:02:43.160 by buying into the government's language of this being irregular migration
00:02:48.020 instead of illegal migration.
00:02:49.440 They refuse to call illegal immigration, illegal immigration,
00:02:52.920 which is part of the problem here because this is about narratives.
00:02:56.140 And you've got the federal government saying, on one hand,
00:02:58.540 you know, oh, yes, we're taking this seriously, but it's complicated.
00:03:01.500 And yeah, it's not just as easy as going there and turning people away.
00:03:04.680 But that's exactly what they did during COVID,
00:03:06.880 at least in the earlier part of the pandemic.
00:03:08.680 And now they've just gone back to this being an open,
00:03:11.780 I don't even think a revolving door because no one's going the other way.
00:03:14.360 It's just a one-way red carpet.
00:03:16.440 So let's just pause the video,
00:03:32.580 let's hit it.