The CBC publishes a racist screed, then quietly rewrites it
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Summary
The CBC publishes a racist screed against white conservatives, and then quietly rewrites the article after some pushback. It's Fake News Friday, and today we're covering a truly remarkable piece that was published by the state broadcaster, the CBC.
Transcript
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The CBC publishes a racist screed against white conservatives and then quietly rewrites the article after some pushback.
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It's Fake News Friday, I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
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Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in today.
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I am going to focus the entire episode today on this truly remarkable piece.
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It was an opinion piece that was published by the state broadcaster, by the CBC on its website,
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and it is one of the absolute worst offenders, worst examples of just absolute malfeasance,
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editorial and journalistic malfeasance on behalf of our government journalists.
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I cannot believe it was published and I cannot believe the way that the CBC tried to cover their tracks
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and cover it up and make it less offensive after the fact.
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So we're going to go into it, we're going to talk about every aspect of this ridiculous piece that was published earlier in the week.
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But first, if you like The Candace Malcolm Show, if you like what we do, if you enjoy Fake News Friday,
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Fake News Friday is certainly my favorite show.
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It is a show that we do every Friday where we go through some of the worst examples
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of the unethical groupthink mentality in the Canadian media.
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We talk about how it is just such a huge conflict of interest that all of these journalists now receive money from the Trudeau government.
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So the exact journalists who are there to hold the government accountable,
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to keep their feet to the fire, to expose corruption, expose bad behavior, expose government waste,
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those same journalists are reliant upon Trudeau and his government to pay their salaries, to support their jobs.
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So if it wasn't for Trudeau, if Trudeau wasn't the Prime Minister, they wouldn't be getting these bailouts,
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Recall that Trudeau has greatly expanded the budget of the CBC,
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despite the fact that CBC viewership is plunging, nobody watches it,
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its credibility is at an all-time low, and yet they're still receiving all of this money.
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It's such an incredible conflict of interest, and that is what we cover every Friday on Fake News Friday,
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But like I was saying, if you like our show, if you like what we do,
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the whole purpose behind True North as a media outlet, as an independent media outlet,
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is that we don't accept any money from the government.
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We think that that inhibits a journalist from doing their job.
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So by principle, we will never take any money from the government.
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But because of that, we need support from our audience.
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And also, don't forget to subscribe to the Candace Malcolm Show so that you never miss an
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Okay, so I want to go back to this original news story that was published on Monday, published
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And just first of all, as a little bit of an aside, I don't really understand why the
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CBC chose to get into the whole idea of editorial news.
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You know, the whole idea behind the state broadcaster, there's a couple basic justifications.
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First is that we need more reporters covering Canadian news.
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The other is to make sure that news is able to travel throughout the country.
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It's a big country, especially in the North, that Northerners are able to access radio and
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news in places where there wouldn't be a market to support that kind of thing.
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But when you get into the idea of opinion journalism, which is a different kind of journalism, you
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Because again, the CBC is funded by the government.
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So when you start hosting opinions, you know, just by virtue of there being opinions in politics,
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You know, I'm an opinion columnist over at the Toronto Sun.
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Sometimes my opinions are very, very controversial.
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There is a whole group of Canadians out there who really hate me, who hate my opinion, hate
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And no matter which position you take, you're going to experience that.
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But when it comes to the state broadcaster, the idea that they would start inserting opinions,
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it sort of looks like it's an officially endorsed opinion.
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It's an opinion endorsed by the state, which again, gets into really dicey territory.
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And this article that I'm going to talk about today is exactly why.
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This is exactly why the CBC has no business publishing editorial opinion pieces.
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I'm basically going to read it in its entirety because it is just so surprising, so shocking,
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On election day, I greeted people who voted for parties that hate people like me.
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And then the sub-headline here says, elections provide numerical evidence of the rise of right-wing
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I think I might be pronouncing that incorrectly.
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And we are told that she was a Elections Canada officer.
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So this is a person who worked for Elections Canada, who is one of the officers who welcomed
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So a government official, a person who has been hired by the government to oversee our
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For some reason, this person felt the need to write an opinion piece to tell us what she
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thinks of Canadians, what she thinks of the people who are voting.
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This woman should never be allowed to work for Elections Canada again.
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People who have outward opinions like this, they don't fit the role of a sort of non-partisan,
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The whole idea of the public service is that it is not partisan.
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It's this sort of stable force within the government.
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The politicians who run the country come and go.
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But this civil service remains neutral and trusted.
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And so when you have a crazy opinion like the one I'm going to present to you, you can
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recognize we have a deeper problem in this country when it comes to the partisanship
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and the ideology, clearly, that's seeping through into the public service.
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OK, so I'm going to basically read this thing in its entirety because it's so shocking.
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It says, I've always loved the idea of democracy in action and have voted in every single election
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This September, I worked for Elections Canada as an information officer.
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On election day, I greeted incoming voters, determined if they were at the correct polling
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address, and helped count votes after the polls closed.
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During the first hour of my shift, an elderly white woman came in with a walker.
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After skimming over her voter identity card, I informed her that unfortunately, she was at
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She thanked me profusely for directing her to the right place.
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OK, so remember that the headline of this article is, I greeted people who voted for parties
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So here we see there's this interaction with an elderly white woman.
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How did she show that she hated people like you?
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Well, the interaction, it turned out, was actually quite pleasant.
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It says, I was buoyed both at her dedication to her civic duty, as well as her kind words.
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However, after she left, I couldn't help but wonder whether, despite our pleasant interaction,
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she was one of the people who hate people like me, dun-dun-dun.
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So again, this woman is just basically wildly speculating that because this woman was old
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and white, she must be a hateful bigot, essentially.
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Even though there's no evidence from the interaction, the assumption that she has is that this woman,
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because she's white, because of her appearance, she must be a hateful bigot.
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Again, because this woman, this elections worker, clearly thinks that Canadians are hateful
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She clearly thinks that the average default position of a Canadian is hateful bigot.
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She goes, obviously, I am well aware that it is unhealthy to distrust people who I have
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But I am a visibly Muslim, South Asian woman, and also well aware of the rising number of
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police-reported hate crimes throughout Canada, like the mass murder of a Muslim family in
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London, Ontario this summer, and the rhetoric that enables it.
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OK, so she's telling us that she is a visible Muslim, that she is from South Asia, and that
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she thinks that basically because of a handful of hate crimes and because of one heinous murder
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that happened in the country, that therefore the entire country must hate her.
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And then she talks about the rhetoric that enables it.
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So stay tuned for that, the rhetoric that enables it, because we're going to try to understand
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a little bit more about what she thinks about why Canadians are so hateful.
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It says, well, it might be tempting to dismiss that as extreme behaviour from a select few.
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Elections, like the recent election of the 2021 Canadian federal election, give us numerical
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evidence of the rise of right-wing politics and hateful rhetoric throughout Canada.
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This evidence, in turn, serves as a reminder that many people in my community hate people
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like me so much that they want to elect officials who have demonstrated similar hatred.
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So she's saying it's not just select examples, it's not just a handful of crazy people out
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there, the idea that elections show us how many people out there actually support this
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And so she's tying that to right-wing politics in Canada.
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So she's saying, OK, here we go, here are the numbers that prove that this hatred
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She says, when I helped count polls during election night and having interacted with numerous
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voters throughout the day, it was jarring to realize that many of the people who had seemingly
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been nice to me throughout the day had chosen to vote for the Conservative Party, whose leader's
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slogan was the xenophobic phrase, take Canada back, and whose former leader Stephen Harper
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sought to ban kneecaps and implement a barbaric practices hotline when he was Prime Minister.
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In fact, almost six million Canadians voted for the Conservative Party this past election,
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Though the Liberal Party won more ridings in both elections, the Conservatives received
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OK, so basically the bill up here is that there are these extreme far-right parties that clearly
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must, what, hate Muslims and support attacks against Muslims.
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So she's sort of setting it up like we basically, what I was expecting anyway, was that she was
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going to go into a tirade against the People's Party and Maxine Bernier because that's the one
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who the media paint as being sort of xenophobic and far-right.
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But then in this paragraph, we realize that she's not even talking about the new absurd
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And Maxine Bernier, remember in 2019, much of his campaign circled around limiting immigration
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and sort of defending Canadian values and sort of no longer supporting the multicultural
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So I expected her to be talking about Maxine Bernier.
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But again, in this paragraph, she reveals that no, she's talking about all Conservatives.
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She's talking about the party that received the most votes in Canada.
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So this woman thinks that anyone who is a conservative, therefore, must be a bigot.
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Anybody who is an old white woman, therefore, must be a bigot.
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Basically, what this piece is revealing is that the person who wrote this piece is kind
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of unhinged, is kind of a lunatic, is kind of a crazy person.
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She's one of those paranoid people who believes that everybody hates her, everybody's out to
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She clearly doesn't have a very high opinion of Canada, the country that welcomed her, the
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And in fact, she's so free in Canada that she even gets published by the CBC, which I
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think is the largest, most circulated website, news website in Canada.
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So even though she feels so oppressed and so hated in Canada, she still has all these wonderful
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opportunities that she doesn't seem very grateful about.
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But again, this story really just reveals her insane bias.
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And the fact that this piece was published is an absolute disgrace.
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She does go on to talk about the People's Party.
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She says, some of the people I interacted with had voted for the far-right's People's
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Party of Canada, whose leader, Maxine Bernier, had proposed to end multiculturalism, reduce
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the number of immigrants and refugees Canada receives, and foster hate speech under the
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guise of free speech as part of his party's platform.
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The PPC received more than 840,000 votes in the 2021 federal election.
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That's more than double the number of votes they received in the 2019 federal election.
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And it's because these policies resonate with some Canadians.
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Well, the reason that Maxine Bernier more than doubled his electoral fortune is because
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he moved away from talking about immigration all the time, and he started critiquing the
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government for lockdowns and overzealous COVID response.
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And so the reason that he got so many more votes and the message that resonated to Canada
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wasn't even about immigration this time around.
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It was about the pandemic and the insane response that the government has been having.
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And even just to go back even further, just because you want to limit the number of immigrants
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that Canada takes doesn't mean by virtue that you're a racist or a bigot.
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It's like, it's like so basic and so limited and just so poorly argued that it's hardly even
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But regardless, you know, this piece is just so pathetic.
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I'll just read a little bit more as I'll skip a few paragraphs.
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She says, the results of these recent elections is tangible proof that this hatred is not
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They are real people, some of whom are my neighbors.
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Some of these people might even belong to my community.
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After all, immigrants and racialized people make up a sizable chunk of right-wing voters
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This is often due to a combination of their economic interests, e.g. less taxes, conservative
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cultural values, e.g. anti-abortion or anti-LGBT policies, support for a specific politician,
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or their internalized self-hatred or views on colorism, which outweighs any oppression
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they may face at the hands of other voters or candidates in their party.
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So first, it's just so obvious from reading this thing that this woman has such a reductive,
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infantile, very simplistic, very silly view of conservatives broadly.
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She's writing an entire opinion piece saying that people who vote for right-wing parties,
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including the conservatives who are hardly right-wing, give me a break, hardly right-wing.
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But if you vote for conservatives, it's because of these very simplistic ideas.
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She clearly has a very low opinion of Canadian voters, including immigrants or what she calls
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There are so many made-up words in this piece, racialized, colorism.
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This woman is definitely a gender studies major.
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It definitely has some kind of a really steeped, woke, leftist ideology.
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So finally, I'll just read the final sentence here.
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She says, I hope I'm wrong to be fearful, and I hope that my neighbors will get to know
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me and my community before casting their ballots.
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So again, the final insinuation here is that if you get to know a Muslim person, if you get
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to know her community, you would never vote for a right-wing party.
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So again, very reductive, this idea that if you are on the right, if you're conservative,
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because you must be a bigot, because you don't know Muslims, because you don't understand
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people from other cultures, it's just plain wrong.
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It's very simplistic, very, very silly view of the right.
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Shame on this woman for being so ignorant and for thinking that her ignorant view is
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so important that she wants to put it out there.
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The CBC should have a better process for screening pieces, for editing pieces, for determining
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It's not like this woman is a paid columnist who gets to submit a piece every week, and they're
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used to her, and they're saying, okay, she might be controversial.
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But we own that, we'll protect that, we'll make sure that everything is bulletproof before
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To the contrary, as soon as this piece started to get some scrutiny, and believe me, it got
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When this piece was put up, there was a lot of pushback, a lot of people online scratching
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their head, wondering what the heck is going on over at the CBC, that they would receive
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this piece, think, you know what, this is a great piece, wow, how thoughtful, wow, this
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is totally fair, wow, these arguments are so well-argued that we're just going to post
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Usually, just sort of to pause for a second and talk about the behind-the-scenes aspect
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of a news organization, I run one here at True North, I'm the editor-in-chief, I know
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Typically, if someone submits an article, or a video in our case, or an op-ed, you know,
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you read it through, you make sure, like I said, it's bulletproof, that every single
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piece can be completely justified, that every stat, every fact has a source, or you know
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where it came from, that the piece is true, that you are confident with it, that it has
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met your journalistic standards, and your integrity, your ethics, and everything like
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Usually, it's read over by at least two or three people, and that's just at True North.
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I imagine CBC has many, many, many, many, many more staff members and people on their
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editorial team that can help with the editing process.
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So the fact that this piece, as I just read it, the original piece, made it through all
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of those stages, and the CBC put it out, is a crazy, crazy indictment of just how terrible
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the CBC is, of just how absolutely poorly organized this place is, of their complete
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lack of ethics and integrity when it comes to journalism.
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I'm just floored by the fact that they would put out a garbage, garbage piece like this by
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a person who sounds like a paranoid lunatic when it comes to accusing everyone around her
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And so, of course, the backlash was pretty strong, pretty fierce.
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Here you have John Kay, who is the editor over at Collette, and he says,
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got it, if someone votes for a party you don't like, they must be a bigot.
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Well, there was a lot of comments just like this on Twitter.
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Well, they basically completely rewrite the piece.
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They take down that original version that I just read, and they put up something that
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is just completely different, completely watered down.
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They clearly recognized that the piece that they put out was indefensible, that there was
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And so rather than just completely killing the piece and saying, we apologize for publishing
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this complete nonsense, we'll try to do better going forward.
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They just kind of rewrote the piece and tried to basically make it seem like they had done
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nothing wrong, hope that people don't notice that this was a completely rewritten piece.
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You can see that there's like stealth edits that really water the piece down.
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But again, they don't make it clear that they've changed it.
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When you go onto the website and you read the piece, there's no big note anywhere at
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There's no correction label or anything like that.
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They just sort of stealth went in and changed the headline.
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It now says on election day, I greeted people who voted for candidates who might hate people
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So they added that who might before it just said who hate people like me.
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So again, that might word really, really couches it and makes it a lot less assertive than
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Basically, I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, who made these changes, whether the editor
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just went in and did it themselves or whether they went back to this elections candidate woman
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and said, look, you got to really make this piece a lot stronger because it's not standing
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But regardless, a lot of the really, really loaded pieces are now gone.
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For instance, for some reason, she still talks about her interaction with the woman in the
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But they took out the fact that she was elderly and white.
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So for some reason, CBC thought that it would be better if they took out the part that identified
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But it sort of underscores the idea that the piece, as it was written, was just really appalling
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Jonathan Kaye does a great job on his Twitter of literally going through, comparing the screenshot
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to screenshot of all the changes and really dissecting it.
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But I will just say that this is one of the worst offenders for Fake News Friday.
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We joked about it internally here at the Candace Malcolm Show and at True North.
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That we might have to do like an award show for the biggest fake news stories of the year.
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And if we did, this would certainly be a contender because this was absolutely appalling.
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And the CBC has noticed this, at least implicitly, by going through and making such drastic changes.
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And the only way that we know that the changes were made, if you happen to come on and see
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this piece after all these edits were made, is just at the very, very bottom, the very,
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First, it says, editor's note, this column and headline has been revised to clarify the
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writer's reaction was to some conservative candidates and their policies, and not broadly
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And it says a previous version of this column said,
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Arpan Canna was a former MP with the Conservative Party.
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In fact, Canna was a candidate for the party, but was not elected.
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So again, just a total, total joke, horrible, horrible disservice and abuse by the public
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It is no wonder why Canadians don't watch the CBC and they don't trust the CBC.
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It is because the CBC is absolutely dysfunctional.
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I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.
00:22:05.880
I'm Candace Malcolm, and this is The Candace Malcolm Show.