Fake News Friday ｜ The legacy media ignores the WEF
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Words per minute
192.8387
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3
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Summary
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
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Welcome to a special edition of Fake News Friday, coming to you from Davos, Switzerland,
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where if you've been following my coverage of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in the last few days,
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you'll know there is no shortage of fakery from the facades of buildings going up,
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which will be taken down before the private jets even take their wheels off the tarmac,
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and also the empty ballrooms when heads of government and heads of state are speaking.
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But one of the big reasons that I was here in Davos and True North thought it was so important to cover
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is because the mainstream media just doesn't want to cover the World Economic Forum honestly.
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When people like me raise very significant questions about the WEF,
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it gets thrown down as being misinformation or conspiracy theories,
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even though our coverage is rooted in fact and in some cases quoting the WEF officials themselves
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or the speakers from the panels, which is the bulk of what we've been doing over the last week here,
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not to mention just people on the street that we run into, some of whom happen to be world leaders.
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But because it is Friday, we thought we'd take the opportunity to talk about the media side of things here.
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It's not going to be a conventional fake news Friday program with story one, story two, and story three,
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or to use the Swiss German, eins, zwei, and drei.
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But we will talk about the narrative that is prevailing.
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And you can't do this without talking about the badges.
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And I'm sorry if you're sick of me talking about WEF badges now.
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But so much of the World Economic Forum issues, I think, can be explained by the hierarchical Byzantine caste system
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The white badges with the blue lines are the invited elites.
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Now, I also learned just on my last day here that there is a sub-level of orange badge,
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which is the orange badge with the purple line, which is like the support staff for journalists.
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So I actually got a purple-lined orange badge, but I'm like a support staff to myself.
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So I don't know how that works because I was going in there alone.
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They wouldn't actually accredit my videographer.
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It's just because they said they had spatial limitations.
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But the reason I bring this up is because so many members of the media are there with their white badges,
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Some of them sit on WEF task forces or committees.
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I ended up running into Brian Stelter and asked him how he, as a journalist,
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Now, obviously, Brian Stelter's not a CNN guy anymore, but he still is a journalist.
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And he was very friendly with all the folks at WEF.
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And I think he was doing the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire thing.
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You ask him a tough question, and he has to phone a friend.
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So his response was, I've got to get my wife on the line.
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And I said, well, if she'd give me an answer to the question, then that would be fair ball.
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I let him get back to his missus on their little Swiss Alpine trip.
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But then you look at some of the press conferences.
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Now, these are where real, rigorous, vigorous questions can be put to people
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that are announcing whatever the case may be, depending on the press conference.
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the World Economic Forum was announcing this climate partnership on public-private philanthropy.
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The first journalist up to ask a question just congratulated them.
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I want to now open the floor for questions from the media.
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And please introduce yourself, and then we can have the panelists respond.
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We report for the Copenhagen Post and many, many, many others.
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And the only way to save the planet is philanthropy.
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All the business are just taking and destroying, other than Badr Jaffer's business, of course.
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And then I want to salute Badr Jaffer for taking the lead on COP28.
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Can you imagine doing something so gushy and fawny and calling it journalism?
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But the whole point is, it seems like a lot of the journalists that are covering the World Economic Forum
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are doing it because they want to be a part of the club, not because they want to speak truth to power.
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And I think that brings us around to the Canadian context of this.
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And you may say, okay, it's expensive to send a crew over to Europe, which is true.
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But that also hasn't exactly turned off CBC and other companies from going elsewhere.
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CTV will send crews to any earthquake anywhere in the world.
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If you have journalists that are in different parts of the world, you can send them somewhere.
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I think all of the news companies in Canada have London bureaus in England.
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It's not a terribly expensive flight to get over to Switzerland.
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Why do Canadian journalists need to be covering what Klaus Schwab is doing or what the Chancellor of Germany is doing?
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And I would generally speaking agree, except two of the speakers at this year's World Economic Forum were Canadian Cabinet Ministers,
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Now, I know journalists from Canada have followed her around the world, especially when she was Foreign Minister.
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Canadian journalists were over in Ukraine when Canada's ministers and the Prime Minister went over there.
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So when we've got Canadian Cabinet Ministers representing Canada at this pseudo-multilateral affair that is the World Economic Forum annual meeting,
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I think that would actually be something that Canadian media should cover.
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Now, you may recall this week, I tried to do what no other Canadian journalist, to my knowledge, has done,
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which is ask Deputy Prime Minister Freeland how she justifies being a member of the WEF Board of Trustees
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while also being a Canadian Cabinet Minister, which I think is a conflict of interest,
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as it would be if she were on some corporate board or some lobbying company board.
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I was just wondering if it's a conflict of interest for you to be a trustee while also a Cabinet Minister.
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And if so, why is there an issue answering a question about it?
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Ah, Chrystia Freeland, former journalist herself, the woman who literally wrote the book on the Davos elites
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and once tried to speak truth to power herself, but as it turned out,
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just had her nose pressed up against the Davos window until she was a part of the club,
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Now, I don't exactly do this because I'm expecting an award.
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which I know is not the motivating factor of journalism, or at least shouldn't be.
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But I did find it funny how the mainstream media type started poo-pooing
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Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne responded to that video with just two words,
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Yeah, and I don't think he was talking about Chrystia Freeland's conduct.
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Now, it's worth noting that Andrew Coyne's boss at the Globe and Mail, David Wamsley,
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So I think that it's clear the coin types are probably more dominant in mainstream media in Canada
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in that they believe there is nothing to see here
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and they would be happy enough and comfortable enough hobnobbing with the elites
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instead of asking them any questions that might challenge the safe space that is Davos.
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The silver lining of all of this is that if the mainstream media types aren't interested in reporting,
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it is more space for us when we come back year after year as long as there is a story here.
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Let me know if you think we should do that, by the way,
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because obviously this is entirely a donor-supported project.
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So if people don't see value in this, there's no point in doing it.
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But if you do see value, you can head on over to donate.tnc.news.
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I know it's been a little bit of a different fake news Friday,
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but we couldn't get away from Davos without shining a little bit of a light on the fake news
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that tends to be attracted to this global billionaire Disneyland in Switzerland.