Western Standard - February 01, 2022


FILDEBRANDT： Mainstream media coverage of convoy disgracefully lopsided


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

151.84534

Word count

1,440

Sentence count

60

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In the wake of the Freedom Convoy, a group of anti-Vaxxers took to the streets of Canada's capital, Ottawa, demanding an end to the government's anti-vaccination policies. The mainstream media, however, couldn't seem to get a grip on the situation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Music
00:00:00.520 Truckers and an assortment of other protesters wanting an end to lockdowns and mandates
00:00:25.740 descended on Ottawa over the weekend to make themselves heard.
00:00:29.400 Parliament Hill and the area surrounding it is not a novel new place to hold a protest.
00:00:33.960 The main lawn in front of Parliament building has a protest on it nearly every day of the year.
00:00:38.840 Bigger protests regularly spill into the streets, but to hear it from the mainstream legacy media
00:00:43.560 outlets, this one is a catastrophe unprecedented in Canadian history. The media's coverage of the
00:00:50.520 last weeks and continuing events will go down as a black mark on their credibility and objectivity.
00:00:56.840 If further proof was required that direct government funding of the media would compromise
00:01:01.560 their integrity, well, their coverage of the convoy was it. Let's start with the beginning
00:01:08.520 of the convoy. The mainstream media made little to no effort to understand what these people were
00:01:14.440 upset about. It prolonged this, but let's try. Cross-border truckers who drive alone for days
00:01:20.360 at a time are possibly the least COVID-19 transmissible employees in North America.
00:01:26.600 Despite the facts, unvaccinated cross-border truckers have been banned from their own jobs
00:01:31.800 for the stroke of Trudeau Jr's pen. Most of the media were entirely unsympathetic.
00:01:39.800 Truckers should have done more to prepare for vaccine mandates, experts say, read the story
00:01:44.200 from the Canadian Presswire service published across most of Canada's media outlets.
00:01:48.840 Quote, illogical for truck convoy to claim freedom threatened by vaccine mandate, say experts, read the CBC headline.
00:01:57.160 The attitude of the mainstream media could be summed up as, these yokels deserve to lose their jobs if they don't comply. 0.99
00:02:03.980 To them, they're just dumb, working class nobodies who didn't get the memo. 0.95
00:02:09.500 As things got rolling, one of the organizers put together a GoFundMe campaign page. 0.99
00:02:14.400 While Trudeau dismissed the convoy as a fringe minority, the media was horrified when the facts began to prove otherwise.
00:02:21.340 Quickly, the campaign began to rack up millions of dollars in donations.
00:02:26.440 The media claimed the GoFundMe campaign was frozen, strongly implying that there was financial malfeasance.
00:02:32.960 In reality, it is standard practice for GoFundMe to withhold the release of funds when large sums are donated until a plan is presented as to how the money will be spent.
00:02:41.480 Not a word of this was mentioned by the Canadian press story that ran on the CBC and most other media outlets.
00:02:50.120 The most extreme disinformation came directly from the government-owned CBC.
00:02:54.820 Without a shred of evidence, the network's anchor, Neil Coxell, suggested that the entire convoy was orchestrated by Vladimir Putin's Russia.
00:03:03.420 she said quote i do ask that because given canada's support of ukraine is this current
00:03:11.180 crisis with russia i don't know if it's far-fetched to ask but there is concern that
00:03:16.100 russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows perhaps even instigating it
00:03:22.360 from the outset unquote concerns from whom from coxel from her boss her mom coxel doesn't cite
00:03:33.080 a single report. Coxell doesn't cite a single expert. Coxell doesn't even cite something she
00:03:39.320 read on a blog somewhere. She invented it out of thin air. The GoFundMe campaign, as of this
00:03:47.180 column's publishing, has raised $9.3 million from more than 114,700 donors. Some fringe minority.
00:03:55.580 That is, unless you believe that they are Russian bots chipping in to foil Canada's
00:03:59.260 instagram campaign to save ukraine where the mainstream media hasn't outright invented fake
00:04:05.020 news they have often done their best to slant coverage implicitly it's hard to find any example
00:04:10.540 in the mainstream media where they do not put the name freedom convoy in quotation marks
00:04:15.260 strongly implying that these people aren't really concerned with freedom but instead with darker
00:04:19.820 more sinister motives this is an exception made for the freedom convoy and not protest movements
00:04:27.100 favored by the government funded media when the mainstream media report on black lives matter they
00:04:32.380 do not write black lives matter when they report on extinction rebellion they do not write extinction
00:04:39.260 rebellion both of these contemporary examples are decentralized movements like the freedom convoy
00:04:45.820 but they do not have their sincerity questioned by having their names put in quotation marks by the
00:04:50.620 the media. Mainstream media confidently predicted the convoy was a prelude to violent insurrection,
00:04:57.760 setting the expectation that they were launching a January 6th Capitol Hill-style riot.
00:05:03.680 Quote, calling Ottawa protests peaceful downplays non-violent dangers, critics say,
00:05:08.700 read one Canadian press story that ran on CTV and most of the other mainstream outlets.
00:05:13.380 Without a hint of shame in their eyes, the media's disappointment at predictions of civil war coming
00:05:18.520 to not turn towards whataboutism you see even though there was not been a single reported case
00:05:24.600 of violence the mean truckers words are violence and these hurt feelings make them so very sad
00:05:32.760 as would be expected with any large gathering of people angry at the government there were
00:05:36.760 bound to be a few bad actors along for the ride one such actor whom we can't tell was a man or
00:05:42.440 a woman because he or she was wearing a full face mask carried a modified confederate flag
00:05:48.520 Now, no one could tell if he or she was actually a part of the protest or not, but the person was
00:05:53.240 roundly booed and pushed out by those in attendance. The mainstream media, however, only ever reported
00:05:59.880 that there were Confederate flags, that's plural flags, despite it being a single flag carried by
00:06:06.540 an unknown masked man in a crowd without a single face mask in sight, to the horror of the reporters
00:06:12.320 there. There was not a mention of the person being hounded out of there by those in attendance.
00:06:19.160 Even more concerning was a report of Nazi flags, again plural, flags plural, despite it being a
00:06:26.720 single flag carried by yet another unknown fully face-masked person and event where the only face
00:06:33.160 masks in sight were the person carrying the confederate flag, that's flag not plural, and the
00:06:38.920 media. Now this incident raised a few more red flags, pun intended. Only two images are known
00:06:46.720 to exist of this person, both of which gave little to no idea of what he or she looks like
00:06:51.540 and nowhere near the main protest. It's impossible to say if this brown shirt wannabe was in fact a
00:06:57.400 misguided and hateful protester or someone hoping to discredit those in attendance.
00:07:02.980 Candace Malcolm at True North did a good job summing up what we know about the incident
00:07:06.560 and has offered a $1,000 cash reward to anyone who will make a positive identification of the
00:07:11.240 flag wielder. Soon after, the Western Standard matched that with another $1,000, and Alberta
00:07:15.780 businessman Brett Wilson topped it up with $3,000 of his own. Malcolm says that others have also
00:07:21.440 come forward to chip in. So with $6,500 on the table, there hasn't been a single person in
00:07:28.660 attendance at the protest who has been able to identify this person. It's newsworthy that someone
00:07:34.400 would fly a swastika at a high profile event but the mainstream media have done their best twisting
00:07:39.520 themselves into pretzels to portray that single unknown man or woman as representative of a darker
00:07:45.600 motive behind the freedom rally but you know as peer polliver told parliament today just because
00:07:51.840 the prime minister justin trudeau wears racist blackface that doesn't make all liberals racists
00:07:58.800 there's much more i can say about this by now but you probably get the point
00:08:03.200 There has always been slanted, partisan media.
00:08:06.740 It's not a new thing.
00:08:08.180 But the legacy media once held it as their duty to at least present the appearance of fair and balanced reporting.
00:08:13.700 They tried to at least give the impression that they didn't have a dog in the fight.
00:08:17.740 Now, they're a little better than entertainment wrestling fight promoters.
00:08:22.940 Like cigarette cartons, it's time we put a warning label on government-funded media.
00:08:27.360 It's bad for the health of a free society.
00:08:29.420 Algodex is owned by Algonata.
00:08:34.040 This is great new technology just coming online now in the digital currency world.
00:08:39.520 Algodex is a great way for you to use the digital currency Algorand in your day-to-day transactions.
00:08:46.880 Can you imagine a world where you don't have to buy a cup of coffee using a federal dollar?
00:08:52.260 And you don't even have to use the American federal dollar.
00:08:54.540 You don't have to use the euro or the pound sterling.
00:08:57.000 You can use real money, digital currencies that are not at the beck and call of governments and inflation.
00:09:03.600 Algodax is making digital currencies usable in a day-to-day basis.
00:09:27.000 You