Western Standard - February 01, 2022


FILDEBRANDT： Mainstream media coverage of convoy disgracefully lopsided

Mentioned
Candace Malcolm Trudeau Jr. Vladimir Putin Justin Trudeau Brett Wilson Neil Coxell Algodax
LIVE： Alberta border blockade drama Triggered： Truckers for Freedom convoy needs an end game

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

151.85

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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.
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