Western Standard - Alternative Media Panel Discussion

00:00:00.000 Well, welcome to a special presentation and alliance of independent media outlets.

00:00:06.360 We have Sheila Gunn-Reed from Rebel News and Andrew Lawton from True North, along with me here with the Western Standard, all in one spot at the same time.

00:00:15.700 So good to see you all together at the same time, guys.

00:00:18.740 Yeah, the Competition Bureau will be busting this up any minute now.

00:00:22.940 Yeah, thanks for having us on the show.

00:00:24.940 Yeah, that might be the next thing is some sort of media antitrust.

00:00:27.320 But of course, they'll start with the smaller players rather than come and get us.

00:00:30.640 That's the, I believe, the rebel mantra and we'll take it on as well.

00:00:33.860 Yeah.

00:00:34.440 Well, that's it. And it looks like they're trying to come and get us all.

00:00:37.680 But I guess I'll just kind of start the discussion.

00:00:39.840 You know, we've got a world where the government is obsessed with controlling information and media.

00:00:44.600 I think we all kind of agree with that.

00:00:45.980 We've got a number of attacks on a number of fronts, C-18, C-11.

00:00:49.380 But the most recent, I mean, where they are the ones, the arbiters of who apparently is approved media or is real media and who isn't.

00:00:59.000 And maybe I'll get Sheila to explain that.

00:01:00.960 They've rejected rebel.

00:01:02.500 They don't consider you guys news.

00:01:03.880 Not that you ever really asked their permission.

00:01:05.520 Yeah, that's the thing.

00:01:07.620 We don't generally ask their permission to do, well, anything.

00:01:11.300 But let me first thank the both of you for your interest in our struggles with the qualified Canadian journalism organization designation.

00:01:21.120 Because in the before times, in the olden times, I don't know, seven years ago, maybe, all the media landscape would be up in arms defending the free press.

00:01:31.820 And that's not the case anymore.

00:01:34.840 Even when I was assaulted at the legislature back in 2017, there was nearly unanimous support that people should probably keep their hands off of journalists.

00:01:47.580 But I don't think if I were assaulted now that that would happen, that they would rally around us.

00:01:53.660 So with regard to our denial of being designated as a qualified Canadian journalism organization, we are suing the government.

00:02:03.120 People can see our documents at wearesuing.ca.

00:02:07.760 The government had a bit of a witch trial for us. 0.82

00:02:10.840 It took them a year, wherein they went through 276 of our news stories, which I think is kind of funny because many of those stories, we were probably highly critical of the government censors.

00:02:23.720 So they had to watch our criticism of them, which brings me a lot of joy.

00:02:28.420 But 276 of our stories, which actually is quite a small number because we probably do that much journalism in a month, in a slow month even.

00:02:36.000 And they decided that only 1% of what we do at Rebel News qualifies as journalism, which is odd to me because I primarily work in access to information, which is, you know, original source documents.

00:02:51.640 We have teams live streaming.

00:02:53.900 I think this is particularly noticeable during the truckers convoy.

00:02:59.200 We're out there, you know, asking politicians questions, interviewing protesters.

00:03:02.880 It's news.

00:03:04.460 It's just news the government doesn't agree with.

00:03:07.320 And so they've denied us this designation.

00:03:09.960 Now, is that going to change the work that we do?

00:03:14.980 Yes and no.

00:03:15.920 I mean, we don't ask the government permission to do our work, but it will give them the ability to limit our attendance to press conferences.

00:03:24.140 Now, that's not going to stop us from asking those same politicians questions.

00:03:29.560 If our journalists have to jump out from behind a potted plant in the lobby of a hotel, fine.

00:03:34.940 But the politicians are not going to skirt accountability by keeping us out.

00:03:40.000 And it will also give social media giants and search engines the ability to downrank us, which makes it harder for people to find the work that we do.

00:03:53.200 And since we are on the Internet, that's it could spell a death sentence for us.

00:03:59.520 But it also and I think the one that is most atrocious to me is that our subscribers will not be treated equally and fairly under the Income Tax Act because it will not allow our subscribers, our paid subscribers at eight bucks a month.

00:04:16.100 I think that's a bargain, by the way.

00:04:17.640 It won't give them the ability to write off their subscription to us because we don't have this designation, which I think is wholly unfair.

00:04:28.940 It's punishing our paid subscribers for disagreeing with the government.

00:04:33.540 And we live and breathe on our supporters.

00:04:36.280 The only reason Rebel News exists is because time and time again, whenever we are faced with challenges like this, an army of people who sometimes disagree with us say, we need you to live on to provide a counterbalance to the mainstream media.

00:04:50.240 Those people are now being punished because the government hates the work that we do at Rebel News.

00:04:56.500 Yeah, it's it's and it's across the board.

00:04:59.040 It's interesting that you brought up how the other media outlets.

00:05:01.540 And again, I do remember them rallying back when you did get assaulted that time and the silence now.

00:05:06.520 But you see, you've got mainstream outlets, legacy outlets that are beholden to this status.

00:05:10.620 And they're a little less inclined to rock the boat, perhaps like Andrew, do you think there's a chilling effect?

00:05:16.380 And has this impacted you guys at all at True North?

00:05:20.220 Oh, very much so.

00:05:21.500 And I know I've told this story to my own audience, but I'll share it with yours as well.

00:05:25.240 Back in 2019, Sheila and I were covering for our respective outlets, the Global Conference for Media Freedom, which Canada was co-hosting in London, England with the United Kingdom government.

00:05:36.380 And this is a media freedom conference.

00:05:38.240 Chrystia Freeland, the foreign minister at the time, was making this a bit of a pet project for her. 1.00

00:05:43.560 And she was having this press conference after having made herself available in no fora to answer media questions.

00:05:50.980 And Sheila and I both showed up dutifully for the press conference, along with reporters from CTV and CBC and the Globe and Mail and Al Jazeera.

00:05:59.440 And oddly, the room must have been a very weird one because it had room for all but two journalists.

00:06:06.240 And the two, it wasn't CBC that they didn't have room for.

00:06:11.380 I mean, I'm a big guy, so maybe they didn't have room for me, but Sheila's not, and they didn't have room for her either.

00:06:16.200 So I take from that that there's a very clear judgment that the government is executing as far as you are not a journalist if we don't like your coverage.

00:06:25.340 And it has nothing to do with the inputs that Sheila described earlier of filing access to information requests, attending press conferences, asking questions, writing stories.

00:06:34.780 They don't like the outputs.

00:06:36.720 They don't like the types of stories you cover.

00:06:39.220 They don't like that.

00:06:40.000 And the media freedom conference incident was remarkable because of how brazen it was.

00:06:46.380 And because it was so brazen, the great part of the story was that all of the other reporters threatened to boycott the press conference unless we were allowed in.

00:06:54.300 And I don't know if that would have happened in Canada or even in the years since that happened.

00:06:58.900 But it was a very, very marked display of solidarity.

00:07:02.760 But you fast forward, and in the 2019 election, Justin Trudeau would not let me cover his campaign.

00:07:09.400 The Leaders Debates Commission banned Rebel and True North from attending the debate.

00:07:13.540 We had to get a court order.

00:07:15.100 Things got a little bit better last year when True North was allowed to cover the debate, but Rebel was still denied and had to sue and won and ultimately got to be there.

00:07:24.080 So all of these things are showing that the government is not prepared to recognize what journalism is unless they happen to like the specific products of it.

00:07:34.340 And I think that's the challenge here is that there is no license to be a journalist in Canada.

00:07:39.820 In the UK, they have not a license, but they have this National Journalist Association card that is effectively serving as a license where if you can't produce one of those, you won't be allowed into a lot of events.

00:07:51.800 And in Canada, press freedom has been benefited by not having anything like that in the past.

00:07:57.440 Like, we're seeing the problems, though, because with the convoy, especially on the last day, the Sunday, whatever it was, after the protests had been broken up, walking down the street, police were threatening to arrest people, except if you were a journalist, you were allowed to stay there.

00:08:13.340 But then they'd say, well, prove you're a journalist. And it's like, well, I mean, what do you want me to do? Like, how can I prove it? I don't have a license. I don't have a permit.

00:08:20.560 One cop let me go through when he saw my verified Twitter profile. Another required a letter from my editor that I had to show him on my phone. Another just didn't let me pass at all.

00:08:31.220 But this is the problem in Canada is that press freedom is so subjective and independent journalists in particular who don't have the approved opinions are the ones that bear the brunt of this.

00:08:41.640 Well, yeah, and I'm glad Sheila brought up like we focused a lot of the standard on pointing out, you know, that is the subsidies in the bailouts and a lot of programs that a status would qualify for.

00:08:52.860 And, you know, we like to rub their noses in it and take pride and say we're not taking them even if we qualify.

00:08:57.120 But there's much, much more to it that people don't typically see.

00:09:00.380 I mean, this is their ways that they could throttle your access to events, to government functions, to areas where news is breaking, as Andrew said, you know, such as the protests.

00:09:10.020 And that really undercuts a media organization or write offs for subscribers. People don't see that.

00:09:15.600 And most of all, as you mentioned, we're all beholden to the social media giants. It's just the reality of the new media.

00:09:21.240 I mean, we we never would have been able to have the capital to make freestanding broadcast units like the past and things like that.

00:09:28.180 So this new social media is great that way. But if you get delisted or run afoul of Facebook or YouTube or Twitter, that that can impact us very heavily.

00:09:37.000 And if they start making their ratings based on Canada's qualified journalists, they can really make you live or die.

00:09:46.340 Yeah. And I would add that, you know, I've had issues in the past where I've been looking for my own stories, things that I know I've written.

00:09:52.860 And I'll Google the story and I remember the headline. I remember the keywords. I'll even Google with TNC dot news, which is true north domain name.

00:10:00.780 And the story doesn't come up or it comes up, but it's buried beneath a bunch of a bunch of unrelated things.

00:10:07.160 And then I say, OK, well, is am I the problem? Is the algorithm the problem? Is the outlet the problem?

00:10:12.380 But but we know there's manipulation taking place and we know that the big tech companies are, in fact, operating in a way that is not transparent and oftentimes at the expense of of conservative leaning outlets.

00:10:24.060 Yeah, there's I've got a really great example of this. People can do this for themselves, go on to YouTube, open up the YouTube search and type rebel news and you won't get a hit on a story that has millions of views that we've done.

00:10:38.900 You'll get criticism of us first that has tens of thousands of views. That's how they tweak these algorithms to downlist us.

00:10:49.280 And what this QCJO designation does is it basically codifies the requirement to downlist us and to hide us from people who want to see us.

00:11:01.660 And, you know, you couple this sort of downlisting that's going to be codified in in the designation along with Bill C-18, which is the Online News Act, which is really the Online Shakedown Act that, you know, will require payments from these social media giants to creators for linking to the content.

00:11:27.620 And people just aren't going to link to you. That's what's going to happen. I mean, it's just censorship by another way.

00:11:36.980 It's really troublesome. I'm going to ask you to start with Andrew. It brought something to mind just as we were talking, but it chafes on me as a libertarian.

00:11:45.240 I kind of like the Wild West of how it is out there. But could this be solved by some sort of balanced actual licensing scheme?

00:11:53.840 I mean, something where maybe the applications, I don't like more licenses or regulations for anything.

00:11:58.440 So this is hard for me to say. But, you know, where it was just based on having a registered company and having a formal location and just a couple of things, content aside, but just a basis to say that you are media.

00:12:09.600 Because, I mean, I do understand the police are clearing a scene. They do need to know.

00:12:12.720 Are you just another protester or even instigator who's pretending to media or are you real?

00:12:18.960 There could be some value in this. We just don't want the government to be the ones determining it.

00:12:22.420 Yeah, and I understand it, but I would caution people going down that road, partially on my libertarian grounds as well, but also because we just don't see this space being as crowded as people like to think.

00:12:35.840 And to go back to the example I gave earlier of the liberals barring me in the 2019 campaign, I was actually flying around where the liberals were going, trying to cover Justin Trudeau's press conferences.

00:12:47.660 And one of the excuses that was given to me by Justin Trudeau's press secretary was, well, we can't just allow anyone who says their media to come in because then everyone's going to come.

00:12:57.960 And I said, look around. I'm the only one you're turning down.

00:13:01.180 You don't have, you know, Bobby Joe, the blogger flying to Vancouver to cover this campaign.

00:13:06.300 You don't have random people that are showing up in droves.

00:13:09.080 The people that are here are people that are journalists.

00:13:11.660 The only difference is you're deciding based on not liking my coverage that I don't fit that bill when at other events they were letting in student journalists, for example.

00:13:20.580 So I think generally speaking, people tend to overstate how much there is at the floodgates waiting if you were to open the floodgates.

00:13:28.120 I don't think it is huge because doing good journalism, as Sheila knows, is costly.

00:13:32.980 I mean, theoretically, you can do it sitting from your computer, but to do the bootstraps journalism on the ground, to take the time to do the investigative journalism, it comes with a cost.

00:13:42.420 And a lot of companies and a lot of individuals aren't doing that.

00:13:45.500 So I think that any effort to define or regulate in any way is really a solution in search of a problem.

00:13:53.660 And I think that when you talk about the implications of it, government censorship and regulation are bad.

00:14:01.720 Big tech problems are very much a force.

00:14:05.080 It's government empowering big tech that creates a new category of problem that removes the government accountability, but has still the force of law.

00:14:15.140 And we see this with censorship.

00:14:16.680 I mean, the only thing worse than Facebook or Twitter censoring is doing it because they've been deputized by the government.

00:14:21.820 And I think that's the inevitable byproduct of any sort of licensing regime is it basically makes all these tech companies, web hosts, domain registrars, state enforcers.

00:14:31.260 You know, I just want to add to Andrew's comment because, you know, I really think the answer to this, like both of you are pointing out, it's not more government.

00:14:39.980 It's not more regulation.

00:14:40.960 It's exactly what we're doing here today.

00:14:42.660 It's the independent press gallery is a counterbalance to the parliamentary press gallery.

00:14:49.760 And Andrew's right when he points out that journalism really is a sunset industry.

00:14:56.480 Corey, you'll know this.

00:14:58.460 If you are not a journalist in Alberta that is working for either Rebel News or Western Standard or True North, then you work for Post Media.

00:15:07.480 It's really a media monopoly here.

00:15:11.580 And when we applied for access to the Alberta Legislature Press Gallery, the competitors, our competitors at Post Media basically held a witch trial for myself and Kian Bextie.

00:15:25.220 They got together and without us presenting arguments or saying, hey, we're not we're not as bad as you have cooked up in your mind that we are.

00:15:34.000 They did a secret vote and wouldn't let us in.

00:15:37.400 So, you know, the answer is not giving the power to censor to the government and it's not giving the power to censor also to a guild of your competitors, which is what happened to us at the legislature in Alberta.

00:15:54.460 But it also was how the government passed the buck off to blocking us from the debates.

00:16:00.060 They said, oh, you know, it's put together by the Debates Commission.

00:16:02.980 You can't get access to the parliament because the PPG is in charge of that.

00:16:07.780 Well, the PPG is a bunch of bailout journalists reliant on the government for their survival.

00:16:11.660 So they're naturally they're going to do whatever the government wants them to do.

00:16:15.200 So I'm with you when you say it must be the wild, wild west and competition will weed out those who cannot survive by doing good journalism.

00:16:26.280 They'll just go by the wayside.

00:16:28.000 It is expensive.

00:16:29.260 And if you can't do journalism, you'll just go on and do other things.

00:16:33.180 It's the free market at work.

00:16:34.800 The answer is not giving control over what you do to either the government or the people who you exist as a counterbalance to.

00:16:45.740 Yeah, well, and as Andrew pointed out, I guess it's a solution looking for a problem.

00:16:49.280 I mean, if we did see media events overwhelmed by a number of self-styled independent journalists, which are still fine.

00:16:56.060 But if it's becoming that large a queue going on, then perhaps address it at that time.

00:16:59.740 But until if and when that happens, because you pointed out the pitfalls of having an organization or industry type of regulation as well.

00:17:09.020 Again, especially the whole thing comes down to that qualified Canadian journalism thing that makes them beholden.

00:17:13.380 They don't want to rock the boat, even if you're within media and they might be sympathetic to the independent outlets.

00:17:19.600 They're not going to feel inclined to be nice to them.

00:17:22.900 I hate to say it.

00:17:24.660 No, and I'm not a fan of big tech companies at all.

00:17:28.180 I think there are a lot of issues there that need to be dealt with.

00:17:30.680 But the QCJO and the Bill C-18 provisions make me, believe it or not, sympathetic to the Facebooks and the Googles and the Twitters.

00:17:39.760 Because C-18 in particular, of course. 0.74

00:17:41.920 What a miracle.

00:17:42.720 Pardon me?

00:17:43.260 I said it's a miracle, but I thought the same way.

00:17:45.940 The enemy of my enemy of my enemy of my enemy is eventually a loose acquaintance, I think.

00:17:50.560 But what happens is the companies, the tech companies will need to pay, as Sheila mentioned earlier, these media companies that are government approved if they link to them.

00:18:01.520 And by link to, I don't even mean they had to do it.

00:18:05.420 Like, if the Toronto Star sets up a Facebook page and links to itself on Facebook, Facebook needs to pay the Toronto Star somehow.

00:18:13.820 And we've decided that the Toronto Star is not making a decision.

00:18:17.240 The Toronto Star is somehow being exploited by Facebook.

00:18:20.640 Google, which is a search results index that lets people search for things, will now have to pay for the privilege of including something in its search.

00:18:30.320 These outlets want eyes on them.

00:18:32.520 These outlets are using social media.

00:18:34.240 So why have we decided?

00:18:36.100 Why has the government decided that these companies, which, by the way, do not need news sites?

00:18:41.800 I forget the exact number, but I think, like, news makes up less than 10% of Facebook's business, if I recall, from the Australia case where this happened.

00:18:50.720 Like, they need memes and cat videos and influencers and people saying what they had for dinner that day.

00:18:57.500 They don't need the Toronto Star.

00:18:58.880 They don't need CBC.

00:18:59.820 They don't need CTV.

00:19:01.080 So the fact that these companies owe anything to the news industry in Canada is absolutely laughable.

00:19:08.540 Yeah, and I had Peter Menzies on a little while back talking about that, and he was with the CRTC, and he was a publisher, and he's just horrified with where it's going.

00:19:17.560 He called it a shakedown.

00:19:18.660 That was the term he used.

00:19:19.500 They're shaking down the social media giants with this.

00:19:22.860 I mean, you're forced providers in a sense, and that's not going to make the environment any more healthy.

00:19:27.680 I listened to an interesting podcast on Canada land, which ideologically is quite different than myself, but I respect them as another independent outlet, and they're certainly never afraid of being critical of the government either.

00:19:37.420 And they spoke to one of the people on that committee for it, and it was just so clear on how arbitrary the closed-door decisions were on who is going to qualify and who isn't as well.

00:19:48.000 So, I mean, there are independent media outlets that understand this on any side of the political spectrum, but how do you think we can push back against this?

00:19:55.460 I mean, we saw that a conservative government, I hate to say it, would be just as happy to shut down critical media as a liberal one if given the chance.

00:20:03.440 That's just their nature.

00:20:04.700 So I'll start with Sheila.

00:20:06.000 Like, what could we do, though?

00:20:07.160 How can we fight this?

00:20:08.060 You guys are going to court.

00:20:09.340 Are there other ways we can push back?

00:20:10.900 Well, I think for us, the most important thing is to get this in front of a judge again.

00:20:15.240 Every time that we drag the liberals in front of a judge, particularly on free press issues, we continue to win.

00:20:22.860 So this will be, I'm predicting, our third victory.

00:20:25.980 Because as you rightly point out, it's so arbitrary.

00:20:28.540 How do we meet requirements when we don't know truly what the requirements are?

00:20:33.920 I mean, the idea that some government censor was making, you know, $120,000 a year plus benefits to go through 276 of our stories, which is just a light smattering of the work we do, to decide that none of it was news, only 1% of it was news?

00:20:51.380 I'd probably get 10% of my stories stolen by the mainstream media.

00:20:55.860 So how do they say that it's just 1%?

00:20:58.800 But for us, you know, you know, Ezra Levant, release the lawyers.

00:21:04.480 For us, that's the best way.

00:21:07.200 But we are taking on the government with the deepest pockets in the land.

00:21:12.760 They have all the money in the world to fight our little independent news agency.

00:21:16.740 They just keep rounding up lawyers and lawyers.

00:21:19.880 But, you know, like I said off the top of the show, we live and breathe on our supporters.

00:21:25.720 And we have this army of people out there who just come through time and time again who want us to live on and want us to fight the government another day and tell the other side of the story.

00:21:38.640 So we're just so grateful for that.

00:21:40.000 But it's also things like this where, you know, we are, I guess, competitors in the same space.

00:21:46.440 But I think a rising tide floats all boats.

00:21:50.500 And it's not like the United States where there's this overwhelming saturation of conservative media.

00:21:56.680 It's really just us.

00:21:58.860 In Canada, that's doing, you know, source, original source journalism.

00:22:03.020 And we have to stick up for each other.

00:22:05.680 And I think we do.

00:22:06.460 So, yeah, likewise, Andrew, like, you know, the tools or things you have in mind that we could do to push back is this trend.

00:22:13.120 I mean, this is not like anything else with government.

00:22:15.100 Once you let it go, it's a lot harder to undo.

00:22:17.600 I mean, we're still in the early stages.

00:22:19.000 We might be able to head this off yet.

00:22:21.880 Yeah.

00:22:22.220 And I think there certainly needs to be court challenges on this.

00:22:25.640 I mean, True North has never had the legal war chest that Rebel has had.

00:22:30.040 And we also haven't had as many need, as much of a need in a lot of cases to unleash the lawyers.

00:22:35.760 But when we were banned from the Leaders Debates Commission, we felt this was something that could not be allowed to stand.

00:22:40.500 And we fought it.

00:22:41.460 And we ended up being accredited in 2021.

00:22:44.380 And while Rebel wasn't, I think perhaps at the next election, maybe they'll have learned their lesson.

00:22:48.580 But I think that there are two aspects of this.

00:22:51.480 One is that individual people who are hearing this need to support independent media with not just your clicks and your shares and your views, which are important,

00:22:59.660 but also with your money.

00:23:01.200 I mean, one thing that even these social media companies with their algorithms are very responsive to is advertising.

00:23:06.880 And we've had sometimes things that we've promoted and put advertising behind.

00:23:10.980 We are on the ground.

00:23:12.280 And I get so many people coming out who have, even at the convoy, that it's, you know, they'd say, oh, where are you from?

00:23:17.200 And I'd say, True North.

00:23:17.900 And they'd say, oh, I love True North.

00:23:18.980 Or they'd say, oh, what's that?

00:23:19.960 I haven't heard of it.

00:23:20.900 And then they'd subscribe.

00:23:21.660 So being on the ground and covering things is one of the greatest ways of being an ambassador for independent media in general,

00:23:28.300 because people see that we're actually doing work.

00:23:30.940 And the CBC reporters that are cowering in their offices on Spark Street writing about the convoy through their windows

00:23:36.780 versus people like me and my colleagues that are out there from different outlets interviewing people and showcasing that.

00:23:43.500 So but we can only do that with people that support us.

00:23:46.120 And when I say that, I don't mean give us $10,000 if you want to, please.

00:23:50.620 But give us $5.

00:23:52.140 Give us $2.

00:23:53.520 Buy us a cup of coffee.

00:23:54.840 I mean, that's the sort of thing we're doing.

00:23:56.980 So I think that ultimately the audience will be the deciding factor.

00:24:01.400 And the audience is the one trump card that we have because our audience is growing.

00:24:06.020 The mainstream media audience is not.

00:24:08.160 And that's going to be the great equalizer.

00:24:10.220 But we're going to be up against more and more resistance through policies like the ones we've been talking about.

00:24:15.420 Well, and sorry to drag this on a little bit, but we must remember that our audiences are experiencing much the same censorship that we as conservative news outlets are too.

00:24:25.060 They are also being deplatformed, kicked off social media, having their posts hidden from others, being told that they are harmful or harassing.

00:24:36.300 So they really do understand what we're going through.

00:24:40.020 And for us at Rebel News, it's so often because we advocate for those normal people out there.

00:24:47.340 But another way that people can fight back is, I don't know if you guys have heard, but there's this conservative leadership campaign happening right now.

00:24:56.160 I think it's important to put the leadership candidates to the test.

00:25:00.920 It's not enough to do the popular, easy, conservative thing of saying, oh, I'm going to defund the CBC.

00:25:09.040 Okay, great. Thank you. That's 1.5 billion bucks a year. Thank you. Appreciate that.

00:25:13.660 We shouldn't have to pay for people who, I almost knocked over my microphone, people who hate conservatives.

00:25:21.000 We shouldn't have to pay for that. They're free to say it. I don't want to have to pay for it. That's great.

00:25:25.280 But what are you going to do about Bill C-11, the digital charter?

00:25:29.080 What are you going to do about C-18?

00:25:30.780 What are you going to do about the media bailout, the CBC-ification of the rest of the media?

00:25:36.220 What are you going to do about that? What are you going to do about the Online Streaming Act, where they have left the door wide open for regulation of video games?

00:25:46.560 Because the government said they play on the same screen. That is literally the logic they used.

00:25:51.380 I saw it in a document.

00:25:53.480 Press the conservative leadership hopefuls on that, because they're not going to get pressed by it or on it by the mainstream media

00:26:03.740 who are advocating for these laws, but advocating for them to be done quicker and harsher.

00:26:10.280 I think that's another thing that normal people can do.

00:26:13.660 Start hammering your candidates on this stuff.

00:26:16.700 If I could jump on that as well.

00:26:18.780 One thing I would say, even structurally, conservative politicians need to do a better job at working with independent media,

00:26:25.360 and not just during leadership races.

00:26:27.400 You know, I will say in 2020, Aaron O'Toole had in his leadership platform that he would ensure independent press gallery members

00:26:35.380 had equal standing on Parliament Hill to parliamentary press gallery members.

00:26:39.420 And this was something that came out not long after the IPG was born.

00:26:43.060 It was great. He never won, so we never got to see if he would have fulfilled that promise.

00:26:46.780 But I can say, once Aaron O'Toole was leader, it became pretty much impossible to do an interview with him.

00:26:52.220 I did one with him in December of 2020, and then never again, from then until the time he was ousted as leader,

00:26:58.880 was I able to have a one-on-one interview with Aaron O'Toole.

00:27:02.060 Premier Jason Kenney has always come on my show when I've asked.

00:27:05.240 I've appreciated that, even if my audience isn't a fan of him at various points.

00:27:09.320 During leadership races, all the candidates, Leslie Lewis, Pierre Polly, Jean Charest,

00:27:13.500 Ray, they've all been doing independent media. But whenever you see stories of conservative insiders

00:27:18.560 leaking something, it's always to the Toronto Star, it's to the Globe and Mail, it's to CTV.

00:27:23.540 So they still view the mainstream media as being their conduit to an audience.

00:27:29.920 And if it's a big enough story, as Sheila knows, the mainstream media will steal our coverage anyway.

00:27:34.020 So let us break it first. But that's a big thing.

00:27:36.860 Conservative politicians and the Conservative Party need to start owning up to it.

00:27:41.240 I mean, you guys know that the mainstream media is going to burn you every single time.

00:27:45.580 We aren't going to be sycophants. We'll give you a fair shake.

00:27:49.120 But start leading by example.

00:27:52.800 Yeah, well, that puts, you know, a good way to close off because it puts some of the onus on ourselves.

00:27:56.440 As long as we make ourselves too big to fail, we give, you know, too much.

00:28:00.980 If we're drawing too much audience, as far as it's concerned for the others, they can't shut us out.

00:28:05.780 They can't avoid us. And, you know, we have to, if we're putting a good product, we're going to keep getting those subscribers.

00:28:11.460 And we've got to keep reminding people that self-serving plug, sign up for all of them.

00:28:15.240 So maybe we'll close up just to remind everybody where your shows are, guys.

00:28:19.260 Starting with you, Sheila, so people know where to go to find good independent media.

00:28:22.800 Sure. Majority of our content is available for free.

00:28:26.020 If you want to see the uncensored version, might I suggest not going anywhere near YouTube and on over to Rumble because there are many things that we cannot publish on YouTube.

00:28:35.120 But if you want to support our independent journalism, you can do that at rebelnewsplus.com.

00:28:41.660 That's our paywalled subscription service.

00:28:44.920 And we've added two new shows there and we didn't up the price.

00:28:47.800 So that's us helping your family fight inflation.

00:28:50.700 And if you'd like to help in our legal battle against Trudeau for denying us our journalism license, ostensibly, you can go to wearesuing.ca because we are in for truly the fight of our lives.

00:29:05.240 Right on. And Andrew?

00:29:07.340 So True North coverage is all at tnc.news.

00:29:10.860 You can subscribe on Facebook and Twitter and Rumble and all of these other platforms.

00:29:15.340 And then I also do my newsletter, which is over at andrewlotton.substack.com.

00:29:20.700 Right on. And we are, of course, at the westernstandardonline.com.

00:29:24.920 And we're on all those social media majors as well.

00:29:27.700 So I appreciate you guys, you know, responding and us getting together.

00:29:31.220 I'm sure our viewers appreciate seeing the independent media outlets, you know, again, showing some that term that Sheila used earlier that I still mixed on is solidarity.

00:29:39.820 Camaraderie. Let's call it camaraderie.

00:29:42.280 That's how we can make sure we just keep that unfettered information getting out there.

00:29:48.400 Thanks.

00:29:49.840 Thank you.

00:29:50.700 Thank you.

Western Standard - April 21, 2022

Alternative Media Panel Discussion

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript