The Candice Malcolm Show - January 20, 2023


Fake News Friday ｜ The legacy media ignores the WEF

Topics
mainstream media and Canadian journalists at WEF
Hosted by
Candice Malcolm
Mentioned
Chrystia Freeland Brian Stelter David Wamsley Andrew Coyne Bader Jaffer Searchlight Pictures Andrew Stanton Kate McKinnon Andrew Lawton Daveed Diggs Swiss Alpine Klaus Schwab Irene Hell McKinsey Oscar
Fake News Friday ｜ Toronto Star misrepresents doctor who questioned lockdowns Fake News Friday ｜ The CBC doubles down on its fake news

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

192.84

Word count

1,718

Sentence count

101

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

A special edition of Fake News Friday, coming to you from Davos, Switzerland, where we re covering the World Economic Forum. This week, we re talking about the role of the media, and why it s so important to be there.

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.700 Searchlight Pictures presents In the Blink of an Eye on Hulu on Disney+.
00:00:04.800 A sweeping science fiction drama spanning the Stone Age, the present day, and the distant future.
00:00:10.800 About the essence of what it means to be human, regardless of our place in history.
00:00:15.180 The film is directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Andrew Stanton and stars Rashida Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Daveed Diggs.
00:00:21.820 Stream In the Blink of an Eye now only on Hulu on Disney+.
00:00:25.420 Sign up at DisneyPlus.com.
00:00:30.000 Welcome to a special edition of Fake News Friday, coming to you from Davos, Switzerland,
00:00:47.080 where if you've been following my coverage of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in the last few days,
00:00:52.500 you'll know there is no shortage of fakery from the facades of buildings going up,
00:00:57.820 which will be taken down before the private jets even take their wheels off the tarmac,
00:01:03.360 and also the empty ballrooms when heads of government and heads of state are speaking.
00:01:07.900 Yeah, you don't see that on the live streams.
00:01:10.120 But one of the big reasons that I was here in Davos and True North thought it was so important to cover
00:01:14.580 is because the mainstream media just doesn't want to cover the World Economic Forum honestly.
00:01:20.140 When people like me raise very significant questions about the WEF,
00:01:24.780 it gets thrown down as being misinformation or conspiracy theories,
00:01:29.400 even though our coverage is rooted in fact and in some cases quoting the WEF officials themselves
00:01:35.280 or the speakers from the panels, which is the bulk of what we've been doing over the last week here,
00:01:40.860 not to mention just people on the street that we run into, some of whom happen to be world leaders.
00:01:45.300 But because it is Friday, we thought we'd take the opportunity to talk about the media side of things here.
00:01:50.860 It's not going to be a conventional fake news Friday program with story one, story two, and story three,
00:01:56.700 or to use the Swiss German, eins, zwei, and drei.
00:01:59.920 But we will talk about the narrative that is prevailing.
00:02:03.560 And you can't do this without talking about the badges.
00:02:06.940 And I'm sorry if you're sick of me talking about WEF badges now.
00:02:10.000 But so much of the World Economic Forum issues, I think, can be explained by the hierarchical Byzantine caste system 0.53
00:02:17.680 that is the colored badges.
00:02:19.740 The white badges with the blue lines are the invited elites.
00:02:22.740 The orange badges are members of the press.
00:02:25.240 Now, I also learned just on my last day here that there is a sub-level of orange badge,
00:02:31.560 which is the orange badge with the purple line, which is like the support staff for journalists.
00:02:36.540 So I actually got a purple-lined orange badge, but I'm like a support staff to myself.
00:02:41.840 So I don't know how that works because I was going in there alone.
00:02:44.560 They wouldn't actually accredit my videographer.
00:02:46.940 And it's not because he's a shady character.
00:02:48.360 It's just because they said they had spatial limitations.
00:02:51.060 But the reason I bring this up is because so many members of the media are there with their white badges,
00:02:56.120 which means they've been invited by the WEF.
00:02:58.480 Some of them sit on WEF task forces or committees.
00:03:01.960 Some of them are moderating panels.
00:03:04.020 I ended up running into Brian Stelter and asked him how he, as a journalist,
00:03:09.180 justifies being there as an invited guest.
00:03:12.560 Now, obviously, Brian Stelter's not a CNN guy anymore, but he still is a journalist.
00:03:16.920 And he was very friendly with all the folks at WEF.
00:03:19.900 And I think he was doing the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire thing.
00:03:21.980 You ask him a tough question, and he has to phone a friend.
00:03:24.660 So his response was, I've got to get my wife on the line. 1.00
00:03:27.320 And I said, well, if she'd give me an answer to the question, then that would be fair ball.
00:03:30.960 But I didn't wait around.
00:03:31.960 I let him get back to his missus on their little Swiss Alpine trip.
00:03:36.140 But then you look at some of the press conferences.
00:03:38.500 Now, these are where real, rigorous, vigorous questions can be put to people
00:03:42.840 that are announcing whatever the case may be, depending on the press conference.
00:03:46.580 I attended a couple of those.
00:03:48.740 And at one of them in particular,
00:03:50.860 the World Economic Forum was announcing this climate partnership on public-private philanthropy.
00:03:56.880 They had someone from the WEF there.
00:03:58.600 They had someone from McKinsey there.
00:04:00.180 They had other so-called partners there.
00:04:02.740 And I was waiting my turn to ask a question.
00:04:05.400 The first journalist up to ask a question just congratulated them.
00:04:10.440 I want to now open the floor for questions from the media.
00:04:13.360 Yes.
00:04:13.940 And please introduce yourself, and then we can have the panelists respond.
00:04:17.300 Thank you.
00:04:19.220 My name is Irene Hell.
00:04:21.080 I have a press agency.
00:04:22.480 We report for the Copenhagen Post and many, many, many others.
00:04:25.400 So I'm thrilled to be here.
00:04:27.520 First of all, congratulations on Gaia.
00:04:29.960 Gaia means Earth.
00:04:31.240 And the only way to save the planet is philanthropy.
00:04:34.520 All the business are just taking and destroying, other than Badr Jaffer's business, of course.
00:04:40.940 And then I want to salute Badr Jaffer for taking the lead on COP28.
00:04:50.120 I think there's hope for the planet.
00:04:52.500 Do you have a question for the panelists?
00:04:54.160 Yes.
00:04:54.500 Can you imagine doing something so gushy and fawny and calling it journalism?
00:04:59.740 Now, I don't know the woman. 0.97
00:05:00.700 I don't mean her any ill will.
00:05:02.200 Maybe she does great work. 1.00
00:05:03.460 But the whole point is, it seems like a lot of the journalists that are covering the World Economic Forum
00:05:07.900 are doing it because they want to be a part of the club, not because they want to speak truth to power.
00:05:14.200 And I think that brings us around to the Canadian context of this.
00:05:17.380 Where were the Canadian journalists?
00:05:20.080 And you may say, okay, it's expensive to send a crew over to Europe, which is true.
00:05:24.500 But that also hasn't exactly turned off CBC and other companies from going elsewhere.
00:05:29.760 CTV will send crews to any earthquake anywhere in the world.
00:05:33.280 And I think there's a reason for that.
00:05:34.420 If you have journalists that are in different parts of the world, you can send them somewhere.
00:05:37.420 I think all of the news companies in Canada have London bureaus in England.
00:05:41.120 It's not a terribly expensive flight to get over to Switzerland.
00:05:43.940 And you may say, well, what's the big deal?
00:05:45.380 Why do Canadian journalists need to be covering what Klaus Schwab is doing or what the Chancellor of Germany is doing?
00:05:50.680 And I would generally speaking agree, except two of the speakers at this year's World Economic Forum were Canadian Cabinet Ministers,
00:05:58.160 one of whom our Deputy Prime Minister.
00:06:00.640 Now, I know journalists from Canada have followed her around the world, especially when she was Foreign Minister.
00:06:05.840 Canadian journalists were over in Ukraine when Canada's ministers and the Prime Minister went over there.
00:06:10.740 So when we've got Canadian Cabinet Ministers representing Canada at this pseudo-multilateral affair that is the World Economic Forum annual meeting,
00:06:20.020 I think that would actually be something that Canadian media should cover.
00:06:24.000 Now, you may recall this week, I tried to do what no other Canadian journalist, to my knowledge, has done,
00:06:29.500 which is ask Deputy Prime Minister Freeland how she justifies being a member of the WEF Board of Trustees
00:06:35.320 while also being a Canadian Cabinet Minister, which I think is a conflict of interest,
00:06:40.280 as it would be if she were on some corporate board or some lobbying company board.
00:06:45.100 Hi, Minister, Andrew Lawton, True North.
00:06:47.080 I was just wondering if it's a conflict of interest for you to be a trustee while also a Cabinet Minister.
00:06:52.040 Are you proud of the work?
00:06:53.220 And if so, why is there an issue answering a question about it?
00:06:57.400 Enjoy your panel, Minister.
00:06:58.440 Ah, Chrystia Freeland, former journalist herself, the woman who literally wrote the book on the Davos elites
00:07:04.560 and once tried to speak truth to power herself, but as it turned out,
00:07:08.440 just had her nose pressed up against the Davos window until she was a part of the club,
00:07:12.600 didn't want to answer any questions.
00:07:15.000 Now, I don't exactly do this because I'm expecting an award.
00:07:18.100 I'm certainly not looking for any recognition,
00:07:20.500 which I know is not the motivating factor of journalism, or at least shouldn't be.
00:07:24.680 But I did find it funny how the mainstream media type started poo-pooing
00:07:28.660 what I maintain was an exercise in journalism.
00:07:32.000 Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne responded to that video with just two words,
00:07:35.880 and pardon the blasphemy here, but he writes,
00:07:37.740 Oh Lord.
00:07:38.700 Yeah, and I don't think he was talking about Chrystia Freeland's conduct.
00:07:42.260 I think he was talking about mine.
00:07:44.040 Now, it's worth noting that Andrew Coyne's boss at the Globe and Mail, David Wamsley,
00:07:48.720 is here at WEF.
00:07:50.700 I ran into him and had a lovely chat.
00:07:52.540 David Wamsley is a very nice man,
00:07:54.100 but he wasn't here as a reporter covering it.
00:07:56.760 He was here as a participant.
00:07:59.140 So I think that it's clear the coin types are probably more dominant in mainstream media in Canada
00:08:04.920 in that they believe there is nothing to see here
00:08:07.400 and they would be happy enough and comfortable enough hobnobbing with the elites
00:08:11.240 instead of asking them any questions that might challenge the safe space that is Davos.
00:08:16.580 Well, you know what?
00:08:17.500 The silver lining of all of this is that if the mainstream media types aren't interested in reporting,
00:08:21.760 it is more space for us when we come back year after year as long as there is a story here.
00:08:27.560 Let me know if you think we should do that, by the way,
00:08:29.520 because obviously this is entirely a donor-supported project.
00:08:32.900 So if people don't see value in this, there's no point in doing it.
00:08:35.860 But if you do see value, you can head on over to donate.tnc.news.
00:08:39.800 I know it's been a little bit of a different fake news Friday,
00:08:42.360 but we couldn't get away from Davos without shining a little bit of a light on the fake news
00:08:46.960 that tends to be attracted to this global billionaire Disneyland in Switzerland.
00:08:52.400 For True North from Davos, I'm Andrew Lutton.