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Media

CTV News caught splicing misleading clip of Poilievre

Published

2 months ago

7 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By AnthonyMurdoch

CTV News has since apologized for airing the doctored footage, but claimed it was the result of a ‘misunderstanding’ during the editing process. The Conservatives have since hit back saying they are ‘boycotting’ the outlet until it is admitted the footage was intentionally manipulated.

Canada’s Conservative Party is livid after one of the nation’s largest corporate media outlets, which gets funding from the Trudeau government, was caught splicing a video clip to make it appear party leader Pierre Poilievre said something he did not.  

On Monday, Sebastian Skamski, media relations person for Poilievre, took to X to explain that mainstream media news outlet CTV News ran a doctored video clip of the Conservative leader on television misleading viewers, accusing the news outlet of “propagating” the “Trudeau Liberals’ narrative.”

Skamski explained, and proved, that the news outlet had spliced video of Poilievre talking to make it seem as though he was calling for an election because he opposed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s dental plan, when the real footage was about the Conservative leader’s opposition to the carbon tax.

“Today @CTVNews was caught splicing a clip of @PierrePoilievre to propagate the Liberals’ narrative. This is not only a total fabrication designed to deceive Canadians but also a major breach of journalistic ethics,” wrote Skamski on X.

“CTV must apologize for their flagrant use of disinformation.” 

Skamski then shared a clip of the original video footage, compared to the doctored CTV footage. 

“Not only is @PierrePoilievre’s quote clearly about the carbon tax (cut from CTV’s broadcast), @CTVNews bizarrely manipulated it,” he wrote. 

The real quote by Poilievre was, “That’s why it’s time to put forward a motion for a carbon tax election.”  

The incident drew immediate backlash from Conservative MPs.

“@CTVNews, you spliced three parts of different sentences together to create a new one that Pierre never said. That’s not a misunderstanding during editing, that’s fabricating disinformation. Where is your apology for that?,” wrote Conservative MP Chris Warkentin on X Monday.  

Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman ripped CTV News as untrustworthy and an outlet that “pumps” out “disinformation” to protect Trudeau.

“CTV gets caught pumping disinformation to protect the Prime Minister who subsidizes them,” she wrote on X Monday. 

After the backlash, CTV News issued an “apology” for the altered news clip, admitting that the clip was presented in an “out of context” manner, claiming the debacle was the result of a “misunderstanding during the editing process.” 

“Last night in a report on this broadcast, we presented a comment by the Official Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre that was taken out of context,” said CTV.  

“It left viewers with the impression the Conservative non confidence motion was to defeat the Liberals’ dental care program. In fact, the Conservatives have made it clear the motion is based on a long list of issues with the Liberal government including the carbon tax. A misunderstanding during the editing process resulted in this misrepresentation. We unreservedly apologize to Mr. Poilievre and the Conservative Party of Canada. We regret this report went to air in the manner it did.”

The Conservatives did not buy the apology, however, announcing Tuesday that the party will refuse to engage with CTV News reporters until “they explicitly acknowledge their malicious editing & omission of context to undermine” Poilievre.

The Liberal federal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pumped billions into propping up the mostly state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as well as large payouts for legacy media outlets including CTV, ahead of the 2025 federal election. In total, the subsidies are expected to cost taxpayers $129 million over the next five years.   

Tomorrow, the Conservatives will be voting on a motion of non-confidence in the House of Commons. If successful, it would trigger an election.

The motion is likely to fail, as even though NDP leader Singh pulled his official support for Trudeau’s Liberals two weeks ago, in recent days he has been mum on whether he will vote for or against the Liberals when a vote occurs. 

As for the Trudeau Liberals, it is widely accepted that they are floundering, having lost two recent byelections, one in Quebec and the other in Ontario, in what were considered “safe” Liberal ridings. 

The most recent loss suggests that Trudeau’s Liberal government is indeed hanging on by a thread, as all recent polls show that Poilievre’s Conservative Party is set to win big when the next federal election takes place.

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Business

CBC’s business model is trapped in a very dark place

Published on November 21, 2024

By

The Audit

 

 David Clinton

I Testified Before a Senate Committee About the CBC

I recently testified before the Senate Committee for Transport and Communications. You can view that session here. Even though the official topic was CBC’s local programming in Ontario, everyone quickly shifted the discussion to CBC’s big-picture problems and how their existential struggles were urgent and immediate. The idea that deep and fundamental changes within the corporation were unavoidable seemed to enjoy complete agreement.

I’ll use this post as background to some of the points I raised during the hearing.

You might recall how my recent post on CBC funding described a corporation shedding audience share like dandruff while spending hundreds of millions of dollars producing drama and comedy programming few Canadians consume. There are so few viewers left that I suspect they’re now identified by first name rather than as a percentage of the population.

Since then I’ve learned a lot more about CBC performance and about the broadcast industry in general.

For instance, it’ll surprise exactly no one to learn that fewer Canadians get their audio from traditional radio broadcasters. But how steep is the decline? According to the CRTC’s Annual Highlights of the Broadcasting Sector 2022-2023, since 2015, “hours spent listening to traditional broadcasting has decreased at a CAGR of 4.8 percent”. CAGR, by the way, stands for compound annual growth rate.

Dropping 4.8 percent each year means audience numbers aren’t just “falling”; they’re not even “falling off the edge of a cliff”; they’re already close enough to the bottom of the cliff to smell the trees. Looking for context? Between English and French-language radio, the CBC spends around $240 million each year.

Those listeners aren’t just disappearing without a trace. the CRTC also tells us that Canadians are increasingly migrating to Digital Media Broadcasting Units (DMBUs) – with numbers growing by more than nine percent annually since 2015.

The CBC’s problem here is that they’re not a serious player in the DMBU world, so they’re simply losing digital listeners. For example, of the top 200 Spotify podcasts ranked by popularity in Canada, only four are from the CBC.

Another interesting data point I ran into related to that billion dollar plus annual parliamentary allocation CBC enjoys. It turns out that that’s not the whole story. You may recall how the government added another $42 million in their most recent budget.

But wait! That’s not all! Between CBC and SRC, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) ponied up another $97 million for fiscal 2023-2024 to cover specific programming production budgets.

Technically, Canada Media Fund grants target individual projects planned by independent production companies. But those projects are usually associated with the “envelope” of one of the big broadcasters – of which CBC is by far the largest. 2023-2024 CMF funding totaled $786 million, and CBC’s take was nearly double that of their nearest competitor (Bell).

But there’s more! Back in 2016, the federal budget included an extra $150 million each year as a “new investment in Canadian arts and culture”. It’s entirely possible that no one turned off the tap and that extra government cheque is still showing up each year in the CBC’s mailbox. There was also a $93 million item for infrastructure and technological upgrades back in the 2017-2018 fiscal year. Who knows whether that one wasn’t also carried over.

So CBC’s share of government funding keeps growing while its share of Canadian media consumers shrinks. How do you suppose that’ll end?

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Internet

Canada’s Censorship Crusade Targets Tech Giants in a Push for “Disinformation” Control

Published on November 18, 2024

By

Over the last four years, Canada’s Liberal government headed by Justin Trudeau got itself heavily aligned with the neighbor to the south on several key but also very contentious issues – such as restrictive Covid measures, various forms of pressure on tech companies, and “disinformation” censorship.

A flurry of controversial bills in Canada, some of which became law, serve to cement this impression.

Now, as President Trump prepares to start his second term in office in the US, Canada’s “orphaned” ruling class continues with the “disinformation” narrative – either as a sign of long-term commitment or looking for new “disinformation partners” elsewhere in the world – or simply as a sign of inertia.

Time will tell, and it will be interesting to see, but for the moment, news out of Canada speaks about a report compiled by the House of Commons Heritage Committee, titled, “Tech Giants’ Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Globally.”

How about the tactics deployed in Canada – and globally – using all manner of intimidation and subversion to evade citizens’ right to free speech?

Maybe another day, by another ruling coalition.

Right now, the Liberals, the New Democratic Party, and Bloc Québécois stand behind statements such as this one, found in the cumbersomely-named report:

“The Government of Canada notes some individuals and groups create disinformation to promote political ideologies including extremist views and conspiracy theories or simply to make money.”

This looks like a call to combine (yet more) censorship with (yet more) deplatforming. And the ones to “fix” things for Canada’s current government are companies behind major social platforms, like Meta and Google.

It’s always fascinating to see that even today, there are still those willing to claim that these giants could possibly “do more” (censorship, that is) than they have been earnestly doing, for years.

But the group of Canada’s MPs behind the report believes so.

They want mechanisms put in place “to detect undesirable or questionable content that may be the product of disinformation or foreign interference and that these platforms be required to promptly identify such content and report it to users.”

Does Canadian parliament’s pressure on US tech companies not count as “foreign interference”? Unclear. Another thing that’s unclear –  as in, undefined in the report – is what its authors have in mind when they mention “disinformation” and, “conspiracy theories.”

It’s as if these terms have become “art for art’s sake.”

Whatever that may be, Canada’s ruling parliamentarians want specific actions against these undefined phenomena to be enforced by tech companies.

“Failure to do so should result in penalties,” reads the document.

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