The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 02, 2023


The Liberals Bill C-18 Was Built To Shut Down Independent Media


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

201.49057

Word count

1,523

Sentence count

74


Summary

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

Bill C-18 has effectively shut down Canadian news in Canada, and I'm here to talk about it. I also talk about how Justin Trudeau's greatest asset is having nothing said about him, and why he's actually more popular than most people think.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 After seeing the results of Bill C-18, I hope there's nobody left who thinks that Justin Trudeau's real motivation was to get journalists paid.
00:00:08.400 Bill C-18 is so obviously just about shutting down news in Canada, it's not even funny.
00:00:16.040 It's absurd that we even had headlines out there from places like the Toronto Star who have a financial motivation to supporting Bill C-18,
00:00:23.660 saying that, ooh, Pablo Rodriguez, the former heritage minister, he's taking on big tech, is he going to win, blah, blah, blah?
00:00:30.700 No, that's not the point. He's not trying to take on big tech. They're not trying to get journalists paid.
00:00:35.100 And by the way, big tech does not owe me anything. Facebook and Google are a fantastic platform that I, Daniel Boardman,
00:00:43.100 and everyone else here at the National Telegraph uses to get our news out there.
00:00:46.800 They do not owe me 50 bucks every single time I post a new link to my stuff. That's absurd.
00:00:51.940 But now, on Facebook, we're getting notifications like this, that our content's no longer allowed to be shared in Canada.
00:00:58.120 That we're now, the one good thing, I guess, that came out of this is that we are officially considered Canadian news
00:01:03.840 for all the people out there who say the National Telegraph is not real news.
00:01:07.200 Well, Justin Trudeau and big tech companies seem to think that we are, so I'll take it.
00:01:11.720 But obviously, journalists were never meant to get paid out of this.
00:01:15.960 The big tech companies were never going to be dumb enough to start paying journalists for just posting things on their platforms.
00:01:21.480 Things that big tech never asked them to post.
00:01:23.740 It's just an open forum that you're allowed to post stuff on.
00:01:26.860 But obviously, this was just meant for Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government to demand that big tech do this
00:01:32.700 so that big tech just shuts down news.
00:01:34.980 Because for Justin Trudeau, his greatest asset in terms of the media cycle is having nothing said about him.
00:01:42.080 Justin Trudeau is very much a politician.
00:01:43.760 If people don't hear anything going on with him, they just assume he's probably doing a half-decent job.
00:01:49.480 Because every single time you do hear stuff from him, it's just abysmal.
00:01:53.420 It's just scandals.
00:01:54.400 It's just terrible economic reports.
00:01:56.300 It's just him saying ridiculous things at press conferences.
00:01:58.900 So when you hear nothing, the average person must think to themselves,
00:02:02.200 ah, probably not doing that bad a job.
00:02:04.060 Maybe I'll vote for him.
00:02:04.880 Who knows?
00:02:05.920 So that's why Justin Trudeau is always popular whenever he goes on vacation.
00:02:08.840 Every single time he goes on vacation, except that one time when he went to Tofino,
00:02:12.160 when he had just made the Truth and Reconciliation Day a holiday.
00:02:16.440 Other than that, whenever he's on vacation or he just goes completely radio silence for a while,
00:02:21.860 he's way more popular.
00:02:23.140 Think about it right now.
00:02:24.260 He is absolutely in the dumps right now because he won't shut up.
00:02:27.420 Even though he's not really in the midst of a specific scandal,
00:02:30.440 because he won't stop insulting Canadians and saying they're dumb for supporting the Conservatives
00:02:34.580 or supporting Conservative criticisms of the Liberals.
00:02:37.000 He's driving himself further and further into the floor.
00:02:40.760 And Bill C-18 is effectively meant to remedy the fact that he won't shut up
00:02:44.500 by basically making it so that independent media cannot get their content out on social media.
00:02:49.660 Because the National Telegraph, the Western Standard, Rebel News, True North,
00:02:53.920 all these other places, Westphalian Times, SpencerFernando.com,
00:02:57.520 we all rely on social media to get our content out there.
00:03:02.220 If we cannot post on Facebook, if we can't post it, if we can't be found on Google News,
00:03:07.320 it's going to severely eat into our ability to generate any income and get any viewership.
00:03:14.060 The only place we really have left are just sort of smaller platforms like Twitter,
00:03:18.200 which has far less users than like, you know, Google or Facebook does.
00:03:22.080 And we have like Telegram.
00:03:23.640 But the problem with places like Telegram is you usually have to onboard people through Facebook.
00:03:28.200 So again, Justin Trudeau has basically caused a bit of a win-win.
00:03:32.200 Even if big tech was stupid enough to pay journalists for posting stuff online,
00:03:36.980 the Liberals also have Bill C-11, which allows the CRTC to basically warp algorithms
00:03:42.140 to like direct people towards good Canadian content, which the definition of is always absurd.
00:03:47.900 So effectively, what it would be is either the big tech companies say,
00:03:51.120 we're not going to let Canadian news on our platforms in which Justin Trudeau says,
00:03:54.900 yippee, because now no one's going to read about all the stupid crap he does.
00:03:58.300 Or the big tech does pay Canadian journalists and Bill C-11 will allow the Liberals to effectively
00:04:06.100 warp algorithms so that the people who are being clicked on are good legacy media journalists
00:04:11.020 who support the Liberal government.
00:04:12.980 So Justin Trudeau, and the great thing, though, is that at least a lot of people kind of understood
00:04:18.480 why Bill C-11 was so bad.
00:04:20.680 So I think, or Bill C-18 was so bad.
00:04:22.920 So at this point, I don't think that this is going to be a win for Justin Trudeau.
00:04:26.340 It's a win in the long run, but I don't think Justin Trudeau's government has long enough
00:04:30.700 to survive in order to actually get all the benefits out of Bill C-18.
00:04:35.040 The problem is, at least in the short run, or at least like two years, if you consider
00:04:39.060 that the short run or the long run, it's going to put the National Telegraph and a lot of other
00:04:43.380 independent media companies at great financial risk.
00:04:46.540 Because even though this was not like a primary income for me and Daniel, it was something
00:04:51.640 that was supplementary.
00:04:52.600 It is something that costs us a lot of money.
00:04:54.640 I've mentioned before, I'm being sued by a Chinese billionaire, and I've already had
00:04:58.140 to pay $15,000 to do it.
00:04:59.780 I do not make a lot of money from the National Telegraph.
00:05:02.580 I barely make anything, but it helps be able to sort of pay some of the bills and be able
00:05:05.920 to support the shows so I can invest more money into what we do.
00:05:09.420 Daniel Boardman, the same way.
00:05:10.600 Okay, so right now, we're in a scenario where we cannot get our Facebook viewership on our
00:05:15.880 articles that helps us drive money through AdSense, and we cannot be found on Google News
00:05:21.060 through people organically finding us because we wrote articles on specific topics they were
00:05:25.780 interested in.
00:05:26.680 Now we're going to have to heavily rely on Twitter and Telegram and use our email lists
00:05:33.220 in order to get our articles out.
00:05:34.460 So that probably means that you're going to see us doing a lot more videos simply because
00:05:38.700 YouTube is no longer, is not restricting anyone because YouTube, I think, they technically
00:05:43.340 pay creators if you can qualify with enough subscribers, so Bill C18 didn't affect them.
00:05:48.340 So what I will probably end up doing, and what Daniel will probably end up doing, is we're
00:05:51.660 going to make a lot more videos to go along with our articles, and you're going to start
00:05:55.020 finding a lot more article links in the description of the videos that we will bring attention to
00:06:00.180 if there is an article that we put out in tandem with the videos.
00:06:04.220 But again, this is just all the stupid garbage we have to do because of Bill C18.
00:06:09.360 Bill C18 is not meant to get us paid.
00:06:11.520 It's obviously not meant to get us paid.
00:06:13.740 We wouldn't be under this much pain if it was actually trying to help us.
00:06:17.840 Justin Trudeau knows how to help journalists, and if he was trying to help us, he would
00:06:21.140 actually end the subsidies to the legacy media because that crowds out good private companies
00:06:26.480 trying to deliver the news.
00:06:27.820 Because when all the media dollars are going to the CBC and to the Post Media and Tourist
00:06:33.800 are, nobody else has any money to really spend on media because taxes in Canada are relatively
00:06:39.500 high to other places around the world where people spend their own dollars on the media
00:06:44.220 and they're not being forced to pay certain media companies through their taxes.
00:06:49.620 Regardless, we will still be around.
00:06:51.640 We'll still be delivering the news.
00:06:52.760 We're just going to have to do it in a slightly different way.
00:06:54.980 Thanks to Justin Trudeau and former Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, who somehow still
00:07:01.100 survived the cabinet shuffle and is now the Transportation Minister, which I guess he can't
00:07:05.880 do much worse than Omar Al-Gabra.
00:07:07.400 So maybe Canada benefited in a microscopic way.
00:07:10.620 Anyways, have a great day, everyone.
00:07:12.760 Donate to my legal fundraiser in the comment section that I'll post in the comment section and
00:07:18.320 the description of this video below.
00:07:20.220 Ugh, I'm already dying on my words at the end of this video.
00:07:23.660 Anyways, click the links, like the video, comment, subscribe, and we'll still be around hopefully
00:07:30.880 after two years once Bill C-18 finally ends.