The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - February 21, 2025


Liberals push for doubling CBC funding as Poilievre spotlights indie media


Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

185.13658

Word count

2,869

Sentence count

175

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Wyatt Claypools with Greg Staley from Diverge Media on why the government should double the amount of money they give to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and why it should get even more. Also, Jennifer O'Connell makes the case for why the CBC should get more money.

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 .
00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here and today I'm joined with Greg Staley from Diverge Media
00:00:06.360 since we're both out here in Cambridge, Ontario helping the new blue party in the provincial
00:00:11.640 election. Make sure to vote for them if you live in Ontario and as you can see we are obviously
00:00:17.820 in our very plush satellite studio also known as a random hotel room but the show must go on and
00:00:25.920 we want to talk about some Canadian news today and specifically news about the news. Have you heard
00:00:32.040 the Liberals want to double the funding for the CBC? Billion dollars wasn't enough. It's actually
00:00:38.740 1.4 billion and they want to double it from there so it's like 2.8 billion. I heard this not quite
00:00:44.360 doubling but like my goodness they're going to turn into doubling if they try anyways. Why do they want
00:00:50.340 to double the funding Greg? I don't know your polling is going down so invest in government
00:00:57.000 propaganda more? No no no that's the cynical reason. The real reason which is already very cynical
00:01:02.900 is that there are a bunch of dirty nasty Americans who live south of our border and for some reason 1.00
00:01:10.120 we need our own propaganda to allow Canadians to think like Canadians or we might have our minds 0.99
00:01:17.200 infected by American news. But this is I'm trying to be silly about it but that's legitimately it.
00:01:23.420 The Canadian media needs more funding to ward off American perspectives which if you haven't noticed
00:01:31.700 is literally the Canadian government admitting that the Canadian legacy media that they fund is propaganda.
00:01:39.600 We just need more hockey games. We don't need more state funded propaganda through CBC. If we just have
00:01:46.400 more hockey games it has the same effect and then they can run commercials just like they did. The whole
00:01:53.360 game was wild to watch Bonnie Crombie commercials coming on and they were. We saw sometimes the same
00:01:59.700 commercial and like the same commercial break. Obviously we're talking about the Canada-US game.
00:02:04.180 Legitimately he's right. That's like a better propaganda value than just seeing Canadians win a hockey game
00:02:09.520 against the Americans than all the CBC you've ever watched in your life distilled and like injected.
00:02:16.480 There's nothing about the CBC that's remotely interesting. But I want to jump over to I believe
00:02:22.380 it's Jennifer O'Connell here making the case for why Canadian media needs to be even further girded up. 1.00
00:02:30.320 Or this might actually be Pascal Saint-Doge. I can never keep it too straight.
00:02:34.200 The criticism of the company is that it gets a billion a billion and a half dollars in round numbers
00:02:39.320 and doesn't necessarily deliver the audiences and the service that Canadians want. Your argument is
00:02:45.000 that Canada on a per capita basis gets less money than most G7 countries and you're proposing going
00:02:50.280 from 33 per capita which the CDC gets now 33 dollars a year somewhere close to the average of 62 dollars
00:02:56.840 per capita. What's the amount and do you really think there's an appetite for that kind of extra spending
00:03:02.040 at this point in time? Definitely. And I don't think that we should get distracted by the minority 0.99
00:03:07.000 of voices who say that the CDC should should not exist anymore. Has she seen the polling? It's like
00:03:16.040 literally over half. Over half of people want their funding cut. But also that's wild. They want
00:03:21.800 they're proposing 62 dollars per capita so 62 dollars per Canadian to the CBC to float terrible news.
00:03:30.600 That's very biased. And by the way it's based on just an arbitrary measure that other countries give
00:03:36.920 their main state broadcast for 62 dollars a year. I'm like yeah but out of all the other subsidies that
00:03:41.480 the Toronto Star gets that Post Media gets and some of them are more conservative or more liberal but all
00:03:47.080 them like cult MTL the Canadian anti-hate network. If you added it all up we're probably already giving
00:03:52.600 more than 62 dollars a year per person. Yeah you know like there's a broken trust in media. You know
00:03:58.360 what will fix that? More government dollars. Of course. Past number of years close to 80 percent of the
00:04:06.440 Canadian population supports a better CBC. And the investments that I'm proposing are you know yes
00:04:15.480 aiming towards the middle ground of the other G7 countries but it's also. The middle ground between
00:04:21.000 33 and 62 or 62 dollars per capita your middle ground? No I'm saying that there's a lot of there's a
00:04:28.200 lot of room there. Yeah there's a lot of room there. What's important is that the CBC gets the public funding
00:04:36.520 it needs to be able to fulfill its mandate and make sure that it's servicing Canadians both in French,
00:04:42.120 English and 8 indigenous languages. Yeah I'm going to cut her off from here because I don't think we 1.00
00:04:46.760 need to hear the rest of it. I find this perspective so obnoxious and sorry for the reach guys this is
00:04:52.600 like the most ghetto show I've ever run in my life. Thanks Greg for being here. But like the idea that we
00:04:58.760 they need more money to fulfill their mandate. How do you objectively fill a media company's mandate?
00:05:05.480 They're just putting out content. There's like a content. It's not like they're accountants or something
00:05:11.400 like that where you know when they fulfill their job. It's like they're doing weather. They're doing like
00:05:17.560 yeah bad political chat shows. Yeah they're predetermining an outcome on a story and then
00:05:23.880 asking for comment. So one of the things she said was eight indigenous languages. Currently it's just
00:05:30.040 English and French. It was like how much of this proposed funding you're asking for is going to be
00:05:34.680 simply to have eight indigenous channels of like different languages. And let's be clear nobody's 0.99
00:05:43.240 watching it. That's always the dirty secret of the media subsidies. The people being subsidized
00:05:50.760 nobody's watching them on like a per dollar basis of how much money they get from the government how
00:05:56.680 many people watch these people. It's like literally actually probably counterintuitive. Like the more
00:06:02.360 money they get the less people actually watch. That's why the CBC if you remember it was between
00:06:06.680 like 22 and 2023 and people kept quoting it because it was so silly. They had 4.2 market capture as of
00:06:15.160 2022. And then I think Catherine Tate the CEO of CBC then says well this year we're aiming for 3.4.
00:06:23.640 It's like what the heck. You're going to have 0.8 less market capture this year and that's your new
00:06:29.640 red line even though you have more money. You have more money. They have a streaming service.
00:06:35.560 They have literally the money to pay for any person that they want to be an anchor and they can't get
00:06:41.000 anyone to watch. And it's because the propaganda comes before the quality. That's the problem with it.
00:06:46.520 It doesn't matter if you dump 2.8 billion dollars into it to fight the Americans. It doesn't have 0.92
00:06:53.560 the effect that they want. It's a way of keeping propagandists employed who every once in a while
00:06:58.520 will spill out a story against your political opponents. All it is all the CBC's best as Trudeau's
00:07:03.960 been elected is a way for them to carry water for the Liberal government. It's clear to Canadians
00:07:09.000 that's what it is. And so yeah like why can't you build on your numbers despite how much you get?
00:07:14.760 I don't need to go watch somebody like it's very clear that they're a one-sided product
00:07:19.480 news outlet air quote and it's one way. It doesn't go conservative politics route. It's very liberal
00:07:26.280 and so you know what you're going to get if you just take the story take the generic properties of
00:07:31.720 the story and you already know what the CBC is going to say about it. I know I don't think people also
00:07:36.680 quite grasp how little work the typical CBC journalist does. Most of the time it's some
00:07:42.440 random person in a small town who just looks up their council's website and copy and pastes press
00:07:48.120 releases. Oh the city council has announced a new blah blah blah and then they just say who voted for
00:07:54.920 what and what the proposal was and that's it. It's and this person's making probably close to
00:07:59.880 like six figures a year or like fifty thousand dollars at least to print out one or two stories a week.
00:08:05.480 Yeah making a respectable like real people money. And when you actually know how little
00:08:13.080 views get for the type of things that they're reporting and the fact that most people probably
00:08:16.920 could have gotten this information from a local's Facebook post about it who was probably out before
00:08:21.720 the CBC you realize these people are probably speaking to less than 500 people every time they
00:08:26.920 put out an article. If you're below the age of like 60 you're probably not watching the CBC. I don't
00:08:33.080 know what their core demographics are but I hazard the guess it's like 60 to like. News is definitely
00:08:38.840 news is definitely older in general most people who watch political news tend to be older at the same
00:08:44.360 time the thing with the CBC is it's mostly metropolitan as well is that you watch the CBC
00:08:50.280 because I don't watch Fox kind of a mentality. I watch the CBC because I'm not going to watch you know
00:08:55.640 all those racists in the independent press. And speaking of all those racists in the independent
00:09:01.320 press like us by the way guys subscribe to this very racist channel. I'm very much kidding but
00:09:06.040 subscribe. I wanted to bring up this post because it's hilarious. So there's this Nathaniel Dove guy
00:09:12.440 who works for global news or I think yeah global news and he says and this is from a press conference
00:09:18.520 yesterday. He says ahead of Polyev's press conference his comms team announced he'd be
00:09:23.240 only taking five questions from pre-selected media. True North, Why Media, South Asian Daily,
00:09:29.240 Radio Canada which is you know the CBC so they got one in, Rebel News and Oxygen Canada News. When asked
00:09:36.040 why his team just said that's what we're doing today. You can feel the contempt for Polyev calling on
00:09:43.640 independent press here. Yeah like heavens forbid we turn the tables just one time because I remember
00:09:50.200 like it was during COVID and I snuck in with my liberal camouflage. Trudeau was coming through to
00:09:54.760 speak on a campaign tour and I got in because she had to get pre-approved with me so I wore a pink
00:10:00.040 dress shirt and I called my liberal camouflage because they didn't ask many questions after it
00:10:04.200 showed up like that. And yeah they basically told me outright well we'll see what happens if we get you
00:10:10.840 might get a question in but probably not going to happen. They already had their pre-selected mainstream
00:10:15.160 media outlets like your CBC, CTV and it wasn't going to go to an independent guy like me that
00:10:20.120 they'd never heard of. And Nathaniel Dove he's not going to consider pre-selected if he gets selected.
00:10:24.920 The whole point is not pre-selected if it's global, if it's you know the CBC, CTV, you know
00:10:32.120 City News. If they get picked then it's not pre-selected but now it's very concerning.
00:10:36.840 Yeah they picked Juno News which is what True North is now named. They picked the Rebel News,
00:10:45.240 I can't believe it. Rebel News, an organization that actually has its own audience who watches
00:10:50.440 their stuff because they actually like it and not because they're trying to show how like
00:10:54.760 properly Canadian they are because they watch the CBC. And that's the thing, the media just oozes
00:11:02.360 entitlement and contempt at this point. And then you wonder, they wonder why people don't trust them
00:11:06.760 anymore and the trust numbers in Canadian press has gone down every single year.
00:11:12.120 You go back to this idea like you're taking billions of dollars in subsidies,
00:11:15.880 it already plants a mistrust because you're, are you going to speak out against the government if
00:11:21.560 you have a billion reasons why not to? And that could be removed at any moment and
00:11:26.120 hundreds or thousands of people lose their jobs as a result of genuine criticism.
00:11:30.200 Well, I did a story on Cult MTL, that hacky Montreal-based magazine. They also get money
00:11:36.120 from the Quebec government, but they get like $40,000, $24,000 a year from the federal government.
00:11:41.640 It's only like a couple guys running it. That's a lot of money to just a random,
00:11:45.400 a couple random guys who also have other sources of income from a paper. And since they start getting
00:11:50.840 that money, you can literally see that they just start putting a slam piece against poly of every
00:11:54.840 other day. And it's always something absurd, like, Oh, a new poll comes out that shows two thirds of
00:12:00.120 Canadians don't like poly. And it's like, no, no, no. You did a preferred prime minister poll
00:12:04.280 and 35% of people approved of him. And then the next closest person is only at 17.
00:12:09.240 Yeah. It's a little money can do a lot of damage. And so like the idea of dumping more
00:12:14.440 money into state funded propaganda, you have no trust as is. And the reason you have no trust is not
00:12:20.200 because you're not getting enough funding. It's clear as day. You have an agenda and it's not a
00:12:25.480 conservative agenda by any stretch of the imagination. So why would, you know, if,
00:12:31.080 if it's broken and you're just throwing money into the grinder, it's not going to fix it.
00:12:35.800 No, the thing that's also insulting too, is it boxes out independent media or anyone doing a good job.
00:12:41.720 Because the thing is when you employ hundreds and hundreds of reporters, the way that the CBC does,
00:12:47.160 the thing is that they can always get to a story before you. Are they going to do a good job? No.
00:12:51.960 But the thing is that because they also publish it from multiple sources, they'll publish it from
00:12:56.600 CBC, Calgary, CBC, Edmonton, CBC, Alberta, CBC news directly. And so your, you will get buried in
00:13:03.960 the SEO. If you did a good job researching a story and you put it out, you sent all the media requests
00:13:11.320 out. You didn't set people up. You weren't trying to smear anyone. You will never be read because the thing is,
00:13:16.520 they will have gotten to it first. And most people will just click on what happens. Like,
00:13:20.680 what's at the top of Google. They're not going to scroll down and find out who has like more
00:13:25.000 scholarship behind what they did. And that's the thing. Like,
00:13:28.760 you can't compete with that as an independent. All you can do is better quality work. But when,
00:13:33.320 yeah, when it's been picked over 10, 15, 20, a hundred times, by the time you get to it,
00:13:39.480 people are past that story. We live in a short attention span, you know, society.
00:13:45.000 You, I, well, I've seen that title 10 times. I'm not clicking at that point. Like, I don't need,
00:13:50.040 unless, you know, you have a really trusted audience, you'll get some people that will stop
00:13:53.000 and click and read your stuff. But at the end of the day, if I've seen the title 50 times and I've
00:13:56.760 already read an article, I'm not stopping to be like, well, who is this independent I may have never
00:14:01.400 heard of? And what do they have to say about the thing I've already heard about 50 times?
00:14:05.240 Yeah. And so that's, that's a big problem in the Canadian media space that's underrated.
00:14:09.480 It's just how bloated the whole thing gets, which means pretty much nobody's successful,
00:14:13.560 but you don't have to be successful as a CBC journalist, because your salary is paid,
00:14:17.560 whether or not, you know, five people are reading you or 500,000, and it's probably five.
00:14:23.480 But that should be it for us today, guys. We'll probably be back with more videos as we're here
00:14:29.880 in Cambridge. I'm here until like the 25th. You're here in a little bit less than that.
00:14:34.040 Yeah. It's been fun so far hitting doors and having your feet feel like they're freezing off.
00:14:38.600 I underestimated how bad the winter is in, you know, the Kitchener, Cambridge area,
00:14:43.560 because I come from Calgary, where the winter is much more intense.
00:14:47.000 I know real cold.
00:14:48.040 Yeah, I know what the real cold is. You're up in northern Saskatoon or sort of that
00:14:53.480 mid-northern Saskatoon area. So it's like, is that?
00:14:56.840 Yeah, I'm southern Saskatchewan, like Regina area.
00:14:59.400 Fair enough. But still, like, it's like, it's like you had like a negative 40 day before you
00:15:03.720 showed up here. But you probably take that over like the moist cold with like literally eight feet
00:15:09.240 of snow on either side of the road in that in Kitchener. It's ridiculous.
00:15:13.240 Yeah, the snow's a bit much.
00:15:14.360 Yeah, yeah. Okay. We're going to try and go and survive, guys.
00:15:17.480 Thanks for watching. Like, share, subscribe, do all that fun stuff. See you later.