Western Standard - October 05, 2023


CRTC plans to register streaming hosts

Topics
CRTC streaming regulations
Mentioned
Howard Stern Bill C-63 Trudeau
Cory Morgan Show. Trudeau plans to crush free podcasting. The importance of protecting free media

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

184.66

Word count

1,210

Sentence count

83

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the early 2000s, Howard Stern was one of the most popular shock jocks in the United States. But when he moved to Canada in the late 90s, he found himself in hot water with the Canadian Radio-Television and Communications Commission (CRTC) over his use of profanity.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 going to talk about what used to be one of my favorite radio hosts, Howard Stern.
00:00:04.640 Howard Stern's show, it was a radio powerhouse in the 1990s.
00:00:08.520 I mean, he gored sacred cows in the United States in his shock-jock style of performing.
00:00:13.560 I mean, it changed the way radio morning shows were done all the way around the world.
00:00:17.720 I mean, while opponents were trying their hardest to cancel him in the U.S.,
00:00:20.380 it only brought him more attention and made his brand even more powerful.
00:00:23.780 He crushed competing DJs across the U.S.A., and his show syndication seemed unstoppable.
00:00:28.740 He would just absorb fines for profanity from the SEC, and he'd just keep expanding his reach.
00:00:35.500 Things changed, though, when he brought his show to Canada.
00:00:39.180 Yes, in 1997, some people might not remember it, particularly out west,
00:00:42.520 but two radio stations in Canada, one in Montreal and one in Toronto,
00:00:45.860 picked up his show and started broadcasting it.
00:00:48.320 And Stern's brand of humor, which included everything from, yeah, fart jokes 0.87
00:00:51.280 to having women simulate orgasms over the air, was welcomed by many listeners and reviled by many others.
00:00:57.380 But, I mean, it did work.
00:00:59.040 The ratings and market share for both of those Canadian stations expanded quickly.
00:01:02.500 People wanted something fresh in radio, and he brought it.
00:01:05.880 But then Stern committed Canadian blasphemy.
00:01:09.640 He made fun of Quebec.
00:01:11.320 That was it.
00:01:12.100 He crossed the line.
00:01:13.260 That was too far.
00:01:14.120 It doesn't matter how many dildos or odd things you might want to talk about on his show.
00:01:18.300 You don't criticize Quebec.
00:01:20.200 So the reaction was immediate.
00:01:22.600 Complaints from thin-skinned Quebecers flooded into the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council
00:01:27.260 and, of course, further to the CRTC, the Canadian Radio Television Commission.
00:01:32.680 Stern was threatened with a cancellation, of course, if he didn't back down.
00:01:36.060 And in typical Stern fashion at the time, he offered a middle finger to the Canadian regulators in response.
00:01:41.600 So despite the high ratings on the radio stations hosting his show,
00:01:44.820 they were forced to drop him under threats of CRTC action.
00:01:47.840 He didn't last very long north of the border.
00:01:50.520 See, in Canada, the concept of letting consumers decide what they want to watch or hear all by themselves
00:01:55.220 isn't considered a right.
00:01:57.060 The Canadian way is to have the state carefully cultivate and control what our eyes and ears are exposed to,
00:02:02.180 and the CRTC is the enforcement arm of that.
00:02:05.760 The CRTC, see, they didn't go after Stern himself.
00:02:08.360 Stern didn't care.
00:02:09.160 He would have told them to get stuffed.
00:02:11.140 They would have targeted the platforms that hosted him.
00:02:13.840 They couldn't make Stern shut up,
00:02:15.080 but they could pull the broadcast licenses for the stations that gave him airtime.
00:02:18.520 Does that sound familiar yet?
00:02:20.500 Yeah.
00:02:21.160 The CRTC, they've long wanted to control the internet.
00:02:24.100 It's driven them mad for a long time.
00:02:25.800 I mean, the organization is authoritarian by nature.
00:02:28.780 As the digital world of communication has expanded,
00:02:31.180 the CRTC has desperately wanted to find a way to get the internet under its grasp.
00:02:36.180 Well, Bill C-11 from the Trudeau Liberals has finally given the CRTC that tool they seek.
00:02:40.220 Now, the CRTC is a dinosaur of an institution, but it did learn some things.
00:02:44.760 It learned from past experiences.
00:02:46.460 Canada has tens of thousands of content creators,
00:02:48.680 and many of them are saying things that the government would rather they didn't, like me.
00:02:53.200 It'd be impossible, though, to try and register and chase down every one of those podcasters, streamers,
00:02:58.560 and so on, those creators out there.
00:02:59.980 So what the CRTC is doing is the next best thing.
00:03:02.280 They're going after the service providers.
00:03:05.540 You see, podcast audiences for the individuals can range anywhere from a few dozen listeners and viewers to millions of people.
00:03:11.240 But one common analogy among the podcasters is they have their content hosted by large internet service providers.
00:03:17.780 It's the only way, really, to attain broad reach,
00:03:19.800 and the content creator doesn't have to do the technical investment of self-hosting
00:03:23.960 and trying to get the algorithms and get out there.
00:03:25.940 So basically, the CRTC is doing the equivalent of what they did with Stern.
00:03:29.920 They're going after the hosts.
00:03:32.200 And if the host gets pulled and a podcaster loses hosting services, the podcast dies on the vine.
00:03:37.880 Liberal apologists are dismissing the latest regulations from the CRTC, you know,
00:03:41.760 to register streaming hosts and saying it's irrelevant because it only applies to hosts with over $10 million in revenue.
00:03:50.720 That's true.
00:03:51.380 The problem is, though, almost every podcaster is dependent on being hosted by providers who have over $10 million in revenue.
00:03:59.820 If the provider is later compelled to regulate the content to the creators,
00:04:03.600 there would be little that either party is going to be able to do to stop it.
00:04:06.880 I mean, if the platform has its license pulled in Canada, it can be blocked from broadcasting in the country.
00:04:10.940 If the creator, of course, loses their platform, they're out of luck, too.
00:04:14.420 So that broadcast is done.
00:04:15.780 My show is already under the CRTC regulations, as we're broadcast on a couple of cable channels.
00:04:20.840 But a large portion of our audience finds the show, of course, through streaming services such as Spotify, Rumble, iTunes, etc.
00:04:27.180 If the Western Standard lost the ability to put content on those platforms, this show is finished.
00:04:31.460 I mean, how do I get to you?
00:04:32.740 The new regulations from the CRTC put streaming services under their thumb and puts the job of policing the content into the lap of the platforms.
00:04:40.720 It's an insidious backdoor way to control content.
00:04:43.800 And what problem is being solved with these new regulations, anyways?
00:04:47.680 How have unregulated podcasters and streamers disrupted society so much that we needed new legislation for government to control their content?
00:04:56.420 Of course, independent content pursuers haven't disrupted society.
00:05:00.380 They have been a thorn in the government's side, though,
00:05:02.860 as they'll focus on issues that the subsidized, cowardly legacy media outlets are afraid to touch.
00:05:08.060 The government can't buy the love of independent media as it has with legacy media,
00:05:12.240 so it's resorting to try and control it instead.
00:05:15.280 The government's attempt to shake down Meta and Google with Bill C-18 backfired,
00:05:19.460 and it harmed Canadian media, at least independent media.
00:05:21.460 They're just going to subsidize the rest of them otherwise. 0.98
00:05:23.800 Their attempts to control content through C-11 and the CRTC, though, might succeed,
00:05:27.660 and the loss of freedom is going to be immeasurable.
00:05:30.100 The Trudeau liberals have always had an authoritarian streak, and this move isn't surprising.
00:05:34.020 It's terribly dangerous, though.
00:05:35.360 These kind of controls can be difficult to remove even when governments change.
00:05:40.020 The next one coming in might kind of like having that control over what people can say or can't say when they get in there.
00:05:45.080 We can't let this sort of thing entrench itself.
00:05:47.200 The earlier we fight this, the better.
00:05:49.120 Canadians need to stand up to this creeping control of their ability to communicate while they still can,
00:05:54.420 because, of course, the harder it gets to communicate, the harder it gets to organize against it.
00:05:58.960 And rest assured, the registry, as with firearms, is just the beginning.
00:06:03.180 We'll be right back.