Western Standard - March 09, 2022


FILDEBRANDT： Trudeau’s media approval board agree, the Western Standard are ‘qualified journalists’

Topics
federal media bailout application
Mentioned
James Finkbeiner Justin Trudeau Melanie Rizdin
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Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

146.05

Word count

1,230

Sentence count

65

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

It's official, Justin Trudeau's Official Media Approval Board agrees that the Western Standard is a qualified Canadian journalism organization. You read that right, but let me explain a little bit for you. The Liberal government's $600 million Big Media Bailout Program has a hand-picked board of journalists and publishers. That panel includes several openly liberal supporters and the publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, who awarded his own paper a pile of taxpayers' cash. This board is charged with determining which media are worthy of the federal media bailout money. The first step for looters trying to get in on the cash is to apply for the official Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization status. That sounds creepy because it is. The federal government through the Canada Revenue Agency gets to determine who are real journalists and who are not.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 It's official, Justin Trudeau's Official Media Approval Board agrees that the Western
00:00:25.300 Standard is in fact a qualified Canadian journalism organization. You read that right, but let me
00:00:31.940 explain a little bit for you. The Liberal government's $600 million Big Media Bailout
00:00:37.520 Program has a hand-picked board of journalists and publishers. That panel includes several
00:00:43.080 openly liberal supporters and the publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, who awarded his own paper
00:00:49.260 a pile of taxpayers' cash. This board is charged with determining which media are worthy of the
00:00:54.900 federal media bailout money. The first step for looters trying to get in on the cash is to apply
00:01:00.860 for the official Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization status. That sounds creepy, because
00:01:08.180 it is. The federal government through the Canada Revenue Agency gets to determine which media
00:01:13.820 companies in Canada are real journalists and which are not. I've always been clear that the
00:01:18.400 Western Standard will never accept media bailout bribes. That position has not changed. In fact,
00:01:25.500 93% of our surveyed members told us that our refusal to take the cash is either very important or somewhat
00:01:31.680 important to them. And it's important to our team as well. But just for fun, I decided to submit an
00:01:38.300 application to the federal government's board that decides who are real journalists and who are not.
00:01:43.920 Let me emphasize, I just did this for kicks. In the final phase of our application, a nice woman 1.00
00:01:50.960 working for the Canada Revenue Agency informed me that everything looked to be in order and that our
00:01:55.520 application was headed for clear approval. Then she asked me if I would like any help with the next step
00:02:01.060 applications for the bailouts that would now be available to us. I politely declined. She asked why.
00:02:07.880 I said that the Western Standard does not accept government media bailouts. She asked me why I would
00:02:14.100 go through this drawn out process just to do nothing with our privileged new status. I said that I was
00:02:20.380 just doing it to see what they would do. She was not amused. Fast forward to today and the federal
00:02:26.760 government's official letter confirming our privileged new status arrived in the mail. Well, I called our
00:02:33.080 director of operations, James Finkbeiner, into my office so that we could read it together. And boy,
00:02:38.500 it didn't disappoint. Firstly, we got to relish a group of government-sanctioned journalists
00:02:44.000 being forced to admit in an official government document that the Western Standard, in all our
00:02:49.680 self-righteous anti-billout fury, is a qualified Canadian journalism organization.
00:02:56.060 It's not a feather in our cap that means anything to us, but we sure got a chuckle out of knowing
00:03:00.820 that it's the official position of the government of Canada. But we know it must have been painful
00:03:07.060 for them to write the words, so they had to get their shots in at us. We met every single one of
00:03:12.240 their silly, government-imposed criterion that determines if we're a legitimate media or not,
00:03:17.240 but they had to point out why they didn't like us. Let me go through just a few of their missives.
00:03:22.660 Quote, however, the board has serious concerns with the organization's, that is the Western
00:03:30.660 Standards, journalistic process and principles, particularly with regard to its coverage of the
00:03:36.200 COVID-19 pandemic. Well, in the letter, the government goes on to cite a number of stories
00:03:41.200 produced by Western Standard reporters quoting people who are experts in virology and respected
00:03:46.500 doctors facing termination of their jobs for refusing mandatory vaccination. The government
00:03:52.360 claimed that these stories were incorrect or misleading. That is, of course, bollocks. Let's go
00:03:59.320 through a few of the official government condemnations point by point. The government
00:04:05.000 medial approval board expressed its disapproval of the Western Standard for quoting an Alberta doctor
00:04:09.880 who rejects the, quote, forcing of experimental mRNA vaccines on the public.
00:04:16.500 As incorrect or misleading. This is a valid opinion expressed by a doctor clearly marked in quotation
00:04:23.140 marks by our reporter, Melanie Rizdin. In fact, the government of Alberta and every major government
00:04:29.520 in Canada has forced vaccinations on the public through mandates, job terminations, and passports.
00:04:37.480 The federal government's view that these measures somehow don't constitute forcing is a matter of
00:04:42.860 opinion. And it's a bad one at that. The federal media approval board also took issue with the
00:04:48.520 Western Standard quoting a University of Alberta public health professor who said that his studies
00:04:53.400 showed that vaccinated Albertans were contracting the COVID-19 Delta variant as often as the unvaccinated.
00:05:00.140 They claimed that this was incorrect or misleading. But since this report was published on September 29th of 2021,
00:05:07.820 this has become established fact and even accepted, however grudgingly, by the federal government.
00:05:15.080 COVID-19 vaccination is still proven to lessen the severity of COVID-19, but the Delta and Omicron
00:05:21.080 variants are just as transmissible through the vaccinated as through the unvaccinated. This is no
00:05:26.700 longer a controversial statement. But the Western Standard quoted a doctor saying it before it was cool
00:05:32.440 and became the opinion of the government itself. But after publishing that story, the government
00:05:38.160 of Alberta belatedly responded to earlier requests for comment from our reporter, claiming that the
00:05:44.320 public health professor's study was nonsense. Well, the federal media approval board claims that this
00:05:51.660 late response from the government of Alberta meant that the Western Standard should have retracted or
00:05:56.860 rewritten the entire story instead of including the government official's response in that story.
00:06:02.440 In effect, the federal government told us that if the government says something is contrary to what
00:06:08.340 anyone else says, we must always assume that the government is correct. This is a terrifyingly
00:06:15.720 authoritarian statement. The federal media approval board also took issues with the Western Standard
00:06:21.220 publishing stories that rely upon sources from other media outlets. Now, this is good stuff if you're
00:06:26.820 still with me at this point. The most common complaint from the federal media approval board is that the
00:06:33.000 Western Standard publishes stories originating from Black Locks reporter. For those not aware, including the
00:06:39.380 federal government who is suing Black Locks reporter for stealing their content, ironically, Black Locks is an
00:06:45.640 independent wire service. In fact, they cited as their first example of a story that they did not approve of,
00:06:52.620 a report on November 15, 2021, headlined, newspaper chain took bailout cash, but fired staff anyway.
00:07:01.960 Media companies like the Western Standard pay an annual fee to Black Locks reporter for the right to use
00:07:07.600 their excellent investigative journalism in our stories. In fact, the federal government itself does this
00:07:14.040 every single day when the CBC runs copy, a news copy produced by the Canadian press, Associated Press,
00:07:21.640 Reuters, and other mainstream wire services. It goes on and on from there. The federal media approval board
00:07:28.820 has no choice but to approve our phony application. We clearly met their phony criterion to be considered
00:07:35.760 a Canadian qualified journalism organization, but they're just not very happy about it. For our part,
00:07:42.460 this vainglorious approval form will go into my file cabinet and slowly collect dust. The Western
00:07:48.540 Standard will not be applying for the bailout subsidies that we are now eligible for. Instead
00:07:53.480 of spending my time filling out subsidy applications like some Bombardier bureaucrat, I'll spend my time
00:07:58.840 continuing to build the Western Standard into a market disruptor, aiming to become the new mainstream.
00:08:12.460 new