The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 19, 2023


The Media Cites ＂Experts＂ Only To Push Liberal Talking-Points

Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Pierre Poilievre Teresa Wright Bill C-63 COVID-19
Trudeau's Bill C-18 Is Preventing Canadians From Getting Wildfire News Canadians Want The Opposite Of Justin Trudeau

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

191.23

Word count

1,293

Sentence count

54

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about why we need to get rid of "expert opinion" in mainstream news stories, and why the use of "experts" in such stories is a symptom of bias, not a reflection of their expertise.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I think this last week in Canadian politics has proven why we need to get rid of the toxic trend of quoting experts in mainstream news stories.
00:00:07.580 It's absolutely ridiculous that we have supposedly neutral journalists, neutral journalists who are also taxpayer paid, by the way, you know, because that doesn't hurt a little bit.
00:00:16.060 But we have all these supposedly neutral journalists quoting experts in their stories, pretending that what they're doing is just neutral reporting while laundering an obvious liberal perspective through someone who's supposedly so wise that they rise above having any particular political bias.
00:00:31.300 We saw this acutely this last week with the stupid story that came out from the Canadian press that multiple legacy outlets ran that claimed that pure poly of the Conservative Party were embracing conspiracy theorist language simply because they released a press, I think it was a press release, a donation email, basically calling out the ideology of the WF and then condemning the liberals for buying into a lot of what the WF thinks.
00:00:54.360 That's obviously not a conspiracy theory, but the Canadian press story was able to quote two experts in political science and something else, supposedly claiming that now the Conservative Party is objectively embracing conspiracy language. 0.80
00:01:07.540 That is effectively what experts are meant to do.
00:01:10.080 They launder a particular perspective into the news media and their expert status basically makes that perspective a neutral perspective moving forward.
00:01:19.200 That it's not just because it's not their liberal perspective as someone who has some expertise in a particular field.
00:01:25.540 It is now just the expert opinion.
00:01:28.160 This is what leads us to having a journalist or a supposed journalist like Teresa Wright, who works at the National Observer, I believe, or National News Watch.
00:01:36.940 I don't want to smear the National Observer, but National News Watch showing up to a press conference with Pierre Polyev and PEI.
00:01:44.680 And using that previous Canada press story, claiming that the Conservatives were embracing conspiracy language, to then feel justified asking Pierre Polyev if he was dog whistling to the far right. 0.90
00:01:58.360 This was completely ridiculous and unfounded.
00:02:00.780 But you can see from the few days prior to her asking that question, simply by citing some experts in a supposedly neutral story, it is now considered a widespread opinion that Pierre Polyev might be trying to dog whistle and gain the support of the far right and like neo-Nazis and whatnot. 0.98
00:02:19.760 It's completely ridiculous.
00:02:21.760 But this is why I think we need to get rid of the whole idea of experts.
00:02:25.720 I don't quote someone who I know is conservative in a particular field and then just claim that they are the be-all, end-all experts.
00:02:33.360 And it's obvious just from my coverage that I come from a conservative perspective.
00:02:36.840 But the CBC can pretend that it's being neutral while obviously turning every single article into a commentary article by simply quoting someone who's just assumed to just be giving the straight-up facts on a subject matter just because they happen to be in a particular field of study
00:02:53.440 or from a particular sort of background of work.
00:02:56.740 That's obviously not how it works.
00:02:58.460 Everyone knows if they work in a particular field, there is not just the perspective on how things work, other than if you're in math.
00:03:05.080 Although that's increasingly not true these days with a lot of left-wing mathematicians claiming that 2 plus 2 can equal 5.
00:03:10.860 But anyways, in most fields of study, there are always going to be different perspectives.
00:03:17.280 But the news media is sort of doing this nonsense where there is just such a thing as this higher-tiered person because they have a PhD or master's degree that when they say something, there's just some extra weight behind it.
00:03:28.120 While they might have some experience, it doesn't mean that their experience isn't being tainted through bias, that they're obviously not going to make certain conclusions based on just their personalities or their attitudes about specific things.
00:03:43.240 So with the whole story about pure poly of the conservatives being bad for opposing the WF's views, obviously the people who are commenting on that just associate people who talk a lot about the WF with conspiracy theories.
00:03:55.220 And are there conspiracy theorists who obsess about the WF?
00:03:58.220 Yeah, sure, there are.
00:03:58.940 There's people who think that Klaus Schwab is literally the ruler of the world and that he's an evil mastermind.
00:04:04.600 And then there's the vast majority of us who don't like the WF simply because we don't like the ideology they push and the politicians who end up embracing that ideology.
00:04:13.440 That's not conspiratorial, but the person that they were citing, the expert, associates anyone bringing up the WF with being sort of this evil, terrible, right-wing conspiracy theorist.
00:04:24.060 So that was just considered now a neutral perspective.
00:04:27.100 So now anyone who talks about the WF is considered to be whatever that one expert had a bias towards.
00:04:33.000 And this is actually infecting all sorts of other news coverage.
00:04:36.500 This is obviously what happens whenever the issue of climate change is brought up.
00:04:40.500 And the experts are always the type of people who support big government action.
00:04:44.660 It's never a person who just knows a lot about the subject and will inform you about sort of the sort of scientific perspective on the matter in terms of just the, well, here's like the general trends of heating in the world.
00:04:57.980 And here's what technically you can do if you cut this much CO2 in the air, but I'm not going to give any, like, of my opinions.
00:05:04.160 Every single time someone on the climate change issue is cited, it's always someone immediately saying, well, you need to phase out oil and gas and you need to subsidize EVs and different green energy projects.
00:05:15.020 That's always the way it is.
00:05:16.440 It was always the way it was in COVID-19.
00:05:18.820 You never brought up someone who was maybe supporting the way Sweden was dealing with COVID-19 and making sure not to lock down much at all.
00:05:27.120 It was always someone who was very pro-lockdown.
00:05:29.480 And this happens repeatedly on other issues too.
00:05:32.920 And I think now that has definitely infected just basic political commentary in Canada or basic political coverage to the fact that it doesn't matter what a conservative says,
00:05:42.400 you can find an expert willing to say that somehow they're connected to some evil bigoted organization the way that the anti-hate network has clearly done over the last couple of years,
00:05:51.060 is that now this whole expert industry is completely worthless and that we need to get rid of it.
00:05:57.660 Well, but that's just my little kind of mini rant on the whole idea of experts and why I think it's just fundamentally flawed.
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00:06:44.460 And other than that, have a great day.