Western Standard - February 23, 2021


Become a WS Member

Topics
become member Western Standard
Hosted by
Derek Fildebrandt
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Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

155.0

Word count

561

Sentence count

27

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Western Standard has lived up to its mission statement: to be the independent voice of the new west. We re making a big difference, and we re giving Westerners a homegrown alternative to the big, government-owned and government-funded media.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I'm Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard. I want to take two
00:00:16.160 minutes to tell you why it's important to become a member. Our media landscape is
00:00:20.400 dominated by a few big players right now, almost all of which are owned by big
00:00:24.480 Eastern corporate interests or by the government itself. As taxpayers we are
00:00:29.320 forced to pay billions of dollars every year to support the liberal CBC, but
00:00:34.080 even now the non-government-owned mainstream media are on the take,
00:00:37.560 receiving hundreds of millions of dollars every year in a massive taxpayer-funded
00:00:42.640 bailout. This means that even those few bright spots of independence and free
00:00:47.080 thinking in the media are now on the government dole and cannot speak out for
00:00:51.080 fear that the government could pull their funding at any time. There are still a
00:00:55.280 few great journalists in the non-government-owned media, but they
00:00:57.700 mostly work for large corporate interests that are owned and operated
00:01:01.120 out of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Western voices, voices that speak up for the
00:01:06.280 West without fear of what their bosses in Toronto will say, are far and few
00:01:10.240 between. The West needs strong and independent voices that it is willing to
00:01:15.220 take on the issues facing our people. This is why we brought back the Western 1.00
00:01:19.240 Standard in 2019. Since relaunching, the Western Standard has burst onto the scene
00:01:25.360 and shaken up the Western Canadian media landscape. With a small budget and
00:01:29.620 dedicated team of reporters and opinion columnists, we have quickly become the
00:01:33.520 third most read online news platform in Western Canada, with an average monthly
00:01:37.900 readership of 1.5 to 2 million page views. Our news team is made up of credible
00:01:43.780 reporters recruited from the mainstream media, but who focus on issues that are
00:01:47.440 all too often ignored by the old big players. Our opinion columnists take on
00:01:52.180 controversial issues that most of the old players are too afraid to touch
00:01:55.720 directly. In our first year of operations, the Western Standard has lived up to our
00:02:00.280 mission statement, to be the independent voice of the New West. We're making a big
00:02:05.260 difference, and we are giving Westerners a homegrown alternative to the big
00:02:09.000 government-owned and government-funded media. We're changing the conversation. We
00:02:14.500 refuse to accept a penny of the big media bailout. We don't have deep pockets from
00:02:19.180 special interest groups. That is why we need you, the reader, to step up and become
00:02:23.900 a member of the Western Standard. You've become a Standard member for just $10 a
00:02:28.300 month with unlimited access, much cheaper than a subscription to one of the big
00:02:32.260 government-funded newspapers. If you can't afford that much, you can also do a
00:02:36.740 cheaper $5 basic membership, giving you access to 20 articles a month. For our first
00:02:42.160 year, we've had no paywall whatsoever, and I know that some of you wish that it
00:02:45.160 would remain so, but this is the price of having a media left in this country that
00:02:49.780 aren't on the government take. If you want there to be any independent Western
00:02:54.400 media left, we need you to step up and support the Western Standard. We've built
00:02:58.780 something great here in a short period of time, and we're making a big
00:03:02.080 difference. Together, we can make sure that we have a voice that speaks for the
00:03:06.160 West that is strong and free. Thank you.
00:03:36.160 Thank you.