Season 1, Episode 3: Sourcing Quality News

with Regan Boychuk

In this episode, Regan Boychuk and Mark Dorin discuss the critical role of media in shaping public perception and the importance of discerning trustworthy news sources. We explore the systemic biases in mainstream media, particularly in the context of Alberta’s oil and gas industry, and how these biases impact public understanding and policy. Our guest, Regan Boychuk, an independent researcher with extensive experience in political science and journalism, shares his insights on media analysis and the importance of good faith in journalism. The need for independent research and the role of alternative media in providing accurate and unbiased information is discussed.

Introduction to Regan Boychuk and Oil and Gas Liabilities

Alex:

Welcome to The Gravity Well, where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle in our work and at play. We seek the wisdom of the elders, individuals, and communities that share our knowledge and care for our water, air, land, life, and resource needs. Caring for our homeland will be our guide.

Jenny:

Awesome. Thank you, Alex. Okay, we’ll start with an update on what we’ve been doing. A couple of weeks ago, Alex and I did episode one of The Gravity Well, where we talked about why we’re doing this. We see that people are in crisis. Either it’s a social crisis, having health issues or a belonging issue, or they’re feeling they’ve been displaced because there’s flooding in their community or a fire, things like that. Or financially just pinched and not feeling safe, let’s say because you’re financially stressed. We’re trying to be a place for people in that space. We took a course together. Alex and I took a complex decision-making course. It was a five-week course, but it helped us have a framework to have discussions so that we could have at least a similar style to a topic.

It’s easier for people to take in small bits of heavy information and be able to say, okay, that was okay. Right? Build like a muscle. The idea is that we want people to learn how to use these skills. When I think about news how we intake information and how we know what is for our benefit when we read something, how do we know that it is serving us not only today, but in the long run that it’s a good thing to be doing? How do we know that? And it’s difficult right now. Regan and I have been working together since last spring, and we met online on Twitter. I saw, well, actually to be fair, I saw you talk on Ryan Jasper’s show Real Talk, and I was like, oh my God, I need to speak to this person because we have a very similar understanding of the liability problem in Alberta.

Jenny:

Liability, the oil and gas sites that need to be cleaned up in our province. There are only so many people who understand the problem because it’s one of those things that it’s like Fight Club. We don’t want to talk about liability. Nobody talks about liability. It’s one of these things that’s not talked about, but it’s a massive problem. Regan has been working on this for years, and I don’t want to go too far down that path, but that is to say that we will be talking to Regan a lot throughout the year. This conversation is to help me understand the research you’ve done along with this and how long you’ve been at it, we’ll get you to start there. Help us know that amount of effort, already. And then we’ll just walk through some questions about how you look to information and help decipher [the truth]. And we’re going to share how we do it too as we speak so that there’s a flavour of how I break down the same challenge, how I would do it or things like that. I think you understand, right? Does that work?

Regan:

Yeah, sure. My name’s Regan Boychuk. I’m an independent researcher. I have a graduate degree in political science and have been studying Alberta’s oil patch for 20 years. I went to journalism school. That’s when I started to get, I didn’t go to university straight out of high school. I wasn’t interested, but when I started reading newspapers and getting more interested in things. That’s how I started by reading the newspaper, learning about current events and then trying to make sense of them. And that leads me further astray to longer, to magazines, to books, et cetera, trying to make sense of events, but always had a strong base in journalism, been reading a lot of newspapers for a lot of years on a daily basis, and that sort of basic filtering that might be kind of the foundation of all of my research on whatever the topic is, just that wide-ranging, constant reading. And it wasn’t that strange in 1998 when I started studying journalism at sat in Calgary, but today I don’t know anyone, I don’t have any friends. I don’t know anyone who reads the paper, let alone reads a bunch of newspapers carefully. I’m at a bit of a loss for how folks these days get their information.

I started during the 2007 Royalty Review in Alberta, I started working with the Parkline Institute, volunteering analysis and data, trying to make sense of it. I was working in the oil patch doing research and studying the royalty review very closely. And that was kind of my first epiphany into the mystery of Alberta, Alberta. It’s really hard to make sense of Alberta. When I started guilty, it was such a disconnect from reality, from the public debate, and academic study, I still had trouble reconciling the reality of the data with the media and the academic narrative.

Media Analysis via Media Lens

Jenny:

Yeah, a hundred per cent. Okay. What we’re going to try and do is we’re going to talk through three different sources that we used and we’re going to use them to talk through how we analyze these or what we’re using these sources for. The first is a source called Media Lens. This was something that Regan brought forward to us and the media. I’m going to stop talking and let you explain to us what media lens, why you brought it forward, what it’s used for, how it’s different, et cetera. Just give us a little bit of colour around it. And then Alex has done some research on it. He’s going to ask you a few questions. Once you’re done doing that, that’ll be our first thing. Thanks.

Regan:

Sure. My curiosity in journalism was sparked by Herman and Chomsky’s book, Manufacturing Consent, their analysis, and their political economy analysis of the media. I went to journalism school with a very skeptical eye. I’d begun studying the Middle East, and the newspaper narrative was quite a bit different than the factual record, and it’s that disconnect that I first saw Herman and Chomsky make sense of. Then Media Lens is two British activists inspired by that work, take that analysis and apply it on an ongoing daily basis to the British media. They’ve been doing it for 20 years. They’ve written three or four books, have a library, a whole community. Dave and Dave have been doing very serious current events, and media analysis for 20 years, and it’s been incredibly insightful. Having a framework of understanding how the institution works, and applying it constantly, I think is the biggest insight, the biggest benefit, and the biggest recommendation I have is that’s the reason there are daily newspapers and not just books. There’s a big benefit to this constant surveillance of regular repeating. It’s all flawed to one extent or the other, but there’s a huge benefit from the repeated constant measurement, checking things slip through, there’s mistakes and media lens, A big part of its value is the wisdom and insight from applying this for so long and they’re very calm, very patient.

Jenny:

You cut a little bit. I’m going to offer something if you don’t mind for a second, which is just one takeaway I had from it. I read the FAQs and Alex dove into them, he’s going to take off from here is, what I read, what they understand is that the increasingly centralized corporate nature of the media means that it acts as a de facto propaganda system for corporate and other establishment interests. It is, in my view, when I hear that, and this is what I’ll tip to you when I hear that, oh, Naomi, thank you for joining us. Yeah, welcome. When I hear, and I’m just going to back up for a second and repeat what I just offered just that Naomi has a little bit of context. I was just describing the Media Lens.

Regan was explaining that it’s two British people who have been at this for 20 years. They analyze news and they look at it through this lens. I’m going to offer my sort of take on what I understand this to mean, which they say they see the increasingly centralized corporate nature of media means that it acts as a de facto propaganda system for corporate and other establishment interests. When I read that, I understood that to mean that there is a centralization happening of media. This means that it is intended to collapse upon itself in a sense, it gets narrow over time, meaning that the view, as you’re saying, Regan, for this information system to be understood. It’s like a breakdown of the information system for a corporate interest because it’s not aiming for human interest. That’s how I read this, is that the system isn’t centralized on human interest, it’s centralized on corporate interest. It’s almost like a proxy for human interest and it’s not sufficient. I read this as this media source understands that that is what we’re trying to work against with media. Is that a good explanation of what I read when I read that? Does that make sense?

Regan:

It does to me.

Jenny:

Okay, Alex, go ahead with some of your thoughts on this. Thank you. And please introduce yourself as well. Thank you.

Alex:

My name’s Alex. I studied fine arts at the Alberta College of Art and Design and minored in the humanities. And then ever since I’ve been working in heavy-duty construction and private security, I’ve always been kind of an auto dac. I love doing research. I never really thought that I could make a go of it or make something of it. And it turns out that after I met Jenny, we took the analytics course at Del Texas University in the Netherlands. I had a real gift for it, I’ve been kind of diving into it ever since. That’s me. As I was reading the FAQs from the media lens, I noticed there were a few things that touched on me value-wise where I think we’re very similar. The question was, are you aiming to convince mainstream editors or journalists to be more honest and or give more space to dissidents and their arguments?

And the answer was, our deeper aim though is to draw public attention to the systemic problems afflicting modern journalism. The key point is that structural forces operating on or within corporate media, for example, their legal obligation to maximize profits for shareholders, and their dependence on advertising on subsidized state and corporate news constantly work against the production of honest and challenging journalism. And to add a caveat to that, a previous answer from what the Media Lens does is say we analyze print and broadcast media mostly in the UK but also the US and I would imagine Canada and worldwide as well. And I had lived there. And then we email regular free media alerts that discuss important examples of media bias. We invite readers to compare the mainstream version of events with alternative perspectives supplied by credible academics, dissident journalists, non-governmental organizations, the United Nations and so on. At the end of such an alert, we include suggested action by providing the email addresses of such journalists and editors. We encourage readers to send polite challenges. We strongly discourage sending impolite and abusive emails. It seems like they very much encourage people to do their independent investigation and then contribute in whatever way they can as long as they do it in a polite fashion. And I think we have a similar objective at The Gravity. Well, in terms of these types of conversations,

Jenny:

Please offer your thoughts on that, Regan.

Regan:

Yeah, I think people can learn a lot from it. It’s not something we’re exposed to, but I think everyone has a pretty good sense of how bad the media is. But reading stuff like that, even when it doesn’t analyze Canada, the Canadian media, we see the similarities. And what it helps us do is the most important part of this is to learn how to think for ourselves. Because as much whatever we learned in social studies in high school or whatever we might hope a nice democratic society might be, that’s not the place we live in. And the folks that have shaped our society and our education and our media and our academia didn’t have the public interest of the 99% in the front of their mind at every moment. And it’s not reflected in every law and every institution we have. That’s what we all want.

If we stop assuming that we have it and we test it, we find out it’s not quite as much as we’d like it to be. And then communities like Media Lens, are trying to encourage the sort of democratic media that every society needs to have a meaningful democracy where there’s public is engaged, informed, and involved in critical debates. And when you come back to Alberta and the big issues here, you understand how very, very far alien that ideal is. There’s nothing of the source, there’s no public debate about these issues. There’s no back and forth. There are no two sides in the media, especially when you get to oil and gas.

Jenny:

Yeah, I love that.

Regan:

And it’s not supposed to be like that.

Jenny:

I’m just going to, sorry. Sorry to cut you off there, Regan. You got me excited because it’s true how such massive decisions are being made with few people even understanding the problem. And we’re not aware of it because it’s just been a part of what’s been our lifeblood. People say it’s the heart of our industry. It’s almost like we’re having to break up, right? There’s a balancing and biased news analysis that was done by IOP Science. I brought this one into this conversation. This was the original thing, and I’m glad you brought Media Lens forward. Thank you for this discussion, Regan, because to me, that helps us understand, okay, we’re trying to be objective to this system that is operating in terms of the media. We need to understand that it’s not out for our best interest, it’s out for this proxy, this corporate interest, and it’s not representing us accurately.

News Accuracy Study by IOP Science

Jenny:

I really liked this article, and I’m just going to say my takeaway from it, and I’ll offer back to you, Regan for your comments. But there is a table that summarizes what this analysis did. From the years 2005 to 2019, they looked at 17 different news organizations across five Western countries, and they ranked them for accuracy. Now, this is all based on science and climate change. We have to remember that 199 countries have agreed that we need to move off fossil fuels because of climate change that we have caused, humans have caused this. This is an agreed thing on a world stage. The analysis that they did looked at the discourse, and the difference between scientific discourse and newspaper discourse. How factual is the news? How well is it representing scientific information, analysis, and evidence?

Okay. When you talk about there is no right, thank you so much for saying that because Naomi was in the audience, and I had an amazing conversation last week about this because it’s not about finding left or right, it is, we are far off kilter, as you’re saying, Regan, we’re close together and not seeing the problem at all. And it’s because of our news. When you look at where the National Post, which used to be, by the way, used to be on par with the Globe and Mail in terms of accuracy, that was true, but it’s not anymore. If you look, at the way they measure it, and I think they do a good job of doing it, there are four different levels of description in terms of the category of climate change. The first category is anthropogenic, that’s human-caused, global warming only contributes to climate change.

That means climate change isn’t happening from the day-to-day events or the El Nino cycles that would be saying that it’s just, that’s the only thing that’s impacting us. No newspapers have been reporting in that category because I mean, to me, I’ve never heard that concept. To me, it’s both. We’ve always known that it’s climate changes over the long term and the short term, and both of those impact how we experience change on the planet. And then the next category is acknowledging where there is human impact and it is the majority of the problem. And then the third category is that anthropogenic, global warming and natural variability equally contribute to climate change. It’s saying both are contributing equally. And in that category, the National Post, that’s where it starts to divert from everything else. The National Post starts saying that it’s equal, or actually no, it doesn’t have any impact. That’s category four, no other. It has a massive jump in that category compared to all of its peers. Aside from in the United Kingdom, the Daily Mail and mail are close to the same problem as what we have in Canada. What we’re saying, what this data says to me is that those two news sources are so far from serving us in the public. It’s not information that is valid or should be considered. It’s not a left or right thing. It is a false misleading thing. Is that a fair statement?

Regan:

Absolutely.

Jenny:

Yeah. We don’t have this fairness that people are being perceived to think that we have. I’m glad we backed up the conversation and talked about media lens because we have to look to organizations that do this work, this scientific work that has been backed up by peer review studies that tell us that our media is not giving us the accurate information and that is keeping us safe, quite frankly. And it’s not in line with, like you said, the reality of the world. And like you said, Regan, once you realize that, that’s why I’m not in the industry anymore, because I know once you know that this thing is bigger than just the industry, our media isn’t also under understanding this problem and neither is our government. And maybe I’ll stop there. Thanks.

Alex:

Jenny, may I just add to that? There was a very similar question in your IOP science paper in the lens, and the question was phrased sort of as a side, a comment when someone said, but surely our major authoritative media such as the BBC are more or less neutral in the reporting and analysis. The answer was, “We believe that media that claims neutrality is a deception that serves to hide the systematic corporate bias. Neutrality often means impartiality in reporting dominant establishment views while ignoring marginalizing dissent. In reality, it is not possible for journalists to be neutral regardless of whether they do not overtly express their personal opinions. That opinion is always reflected in the facts we choose or choose to highlight or ignore.” I thought they touched on that question pretty well, that there’s always going to be a slight inherent bias when it comes to how individuals select information and how corporations choose to select information. What I think we’re all trying to get to the bottom of is how can we effectively and in the most objective way root through the information to get the closest to the root cause and the available root facts.

Seek Actors Operating in Good Faith

Regan:

I’ve recently come to a realization that’s so simple. It seems ridiculous, but I think there’s something to it, and I think it’s reflected in the media and how reliable it is or used to be or some kinds of, it can still be, but new media isn’t. And it all relates to what I think is the absolute essence and prerequisite, the foundation of society, civil society, decent society is good faith and it’s a pretty foreign concept these days, but there’s good faith and bad faith, and the law assumes that citizens operate in good faith, in honest, in their dealings. They’re not trying to screw everybody all the time. Nothing would work if everybody was always doing that. And that sort of accountability was reflected in the media through libel law. There are editors, there are serious institutions, and there are serious checks on the accuracy of information and newspapers.

There’s always bias, sometimes horrifically, but those standards are useful over time. It’s a filter for the good. Something big happened in 1996, the law was changed where two times, one of the Fox News cases was about lying in the media and they challenged it in court and one that, yes, it’s okay to lie now. You used to have to give fair responses, and equal time to somebody to reply if you said something about them. And Ronald Regan removed that didn’t have the right to reply in the media anymore, but after 1996, there were no liable controls for new media that would eventually become social media, everything online websites. Now there’s no liability. Now there are no consequences to lying about people. Now you’re allowed to lie and you’re allowed to lie about people. And that’s why there’s no good faith in the media, in the new media.

Alex:

That’s the missing piece. That’s the section two 30 provision where as long as you’re not officially a publisher.

Alex:

And you’re protected under those laws.

Regan:

That’s the kernel that allows Musk to turn Twitter into a shit hole with $60 billion worth of borrowed money that it’s a cesspool now. And much of the media is like that. That’s because there’s no more space for institutions to enforce good faith. And I think that’s how we know you’re the 99% or the 1% because that’s the important distinction. You can’t make sense of the world unless you understand that 1% are different from us.

Jenny:

A hundred per cent.

Regan:

They’re not just like us. They don’t have the same interests, they’re not out for the same things. And you know what? They don’t give a shit about us. We mistakenly project ourselves onto them. But if we understand their interests are different, then something I just, I’m a political scientist, but I just realised this because class is missing from education, from academia, from analysis. It’s older than Marx. It’s not a communist thing. Adam Smith talked about class. It’s essential for understanding. And once you understand class, you bring that into the modern-day democracy. What does that mean? That means as a rule, as a necessity, 1000% of the time, the politics of the 1% are going to be dishonest. They have to be, their interests aren’t ours. If they’re going to get anything, they have to do it by crook, by hook some way. They cannot, by definition be honest. And if we don’t recognise that, if we project our good selves and our warm feelings about how we care about our children, we’re all in this together. It’s all a household sort of thing. We cannot understand what’s going on. But that’s the difference. It’s good faith in the media. It’s harder to find. But when you find sources that have good faith and are doing important hard things, the best journalists aren’t raging activists.

Jenny:

No, they’re human.

Regan:

They support both sides. You can sort through it, and use your own mind. All of us are capable of it. No one is going to be honest. No one is going to lay it on a platter for you, especially in a newspaper sold by advertisements, you’re never going to find it there. You can’t get your bearing there. You can’t take your lead from them. They’re all trying to trick you by necessity. That’s the world. They don’t tell you that. But eventually, you’ll come to understand it. Start banging, start testing the waters, tugging on your leash, and you’ll see the propaganda model of the media, Herman and Chomsky, that’s 1988. By the end of the 1980s, it was probably the best-supported social science theory. In social science. There was so much evidence. And you just mentioned the most recent study about climate change. It all reflects that. It reflects power. When citizens want to have a democracy, you build institutions that insulate them, defend the public interest, and enforce good faith. That’s the trick. That’s the trick to the one per cent’s politics is enforcing good faith. If you don’t have good faith,

Jenny:

Let us help because I a hundred per cent agree. Let’s say it in, I think Alex and I could offer in some different words how we see it too. I’m going to say the system expects us to feed wealth, and that wealth doesn’t serve us. That’s that corporate interest. It’s not that human interest. It’s not good for us to invest in that system anymore at all. There’s so much evidence to tell us that that system is failing us. We need to stop working towards the corporate interest, and we need to work towards not only human interests but the interests of the planet. We have to help them go in a different direction. They’re not going to move us in the right direction. We, as a 99% world have to align and help them move towards safety, essentially, is how I’d describe it. Alex, do you want to say it in some other words?

Alex:

Sure. I think the aim is just to encourage people to do their independent research, and help to provide reputable sources so they can make up their own minds. And if they’re willing, choose to challenge editors, journalists, and reporters who work for the status quo mass propaganda tool that is elite corporate media, just to present facts in a calm and respectful manner and to encourage others to do the same. I think that’s really what we outsiders are just trying to do and trying to figure out how to do and learn from each other.

Regan:

As someone who’s written a lot of letters to the editor who’s followed the newspapers, who knows every reporter that’s ever written about oil field cleanup in Canada and has pitched stories to them, regardless of how well the system works or how representative the institutions are, they’re still human and they’re still subject to embarrassment and they still have self-respect. And it doesn’t always take many people. These aren’t responsive institutions. They’re not used to getting a bunch of letters. 10 letters can be off the charts. It can spark things. A professor I used to work with had this story in his book about a student he had assigned something and they had to phone around the bureaucracy trying to get a straight answer about something. And he got bounced around so many times that it resulted in so many phone calls that the bureaucracy got scared and changed the policy. They thought something was up and it was just his student phoning around. You never know what effect your letter might have, but it’s all, it’s a grain of sand on the scales for the public interest, and it all adds up over time. Someone else might read it, and be inspired, you never know, but we want those institutions,

Alex:

Politicians see one letter as a thousand votes. If you write 10, that’s 10,000 votes. You write a hundred, guess what? It adds up. The more people write letters, the more votes politicians see it as. And if they do what those letters are requesting, they’re going to think they look so good and stand at the podium and take all the credit. But letters do count for something.

Massaging the Message, Regan and Blair Fix’s Media Comparisons

Jenny:

Yeah. Okay, let’s talk about your work, Regan, you did a piece with a friend, and I’m going to try and say what it was, and then you can correct where I err. But what I learned, I think, is that you guys used AI to do similarly to what this IOP Science did in terms of trying to measure against a reputable source. Thank you, Naomi. I think Regan helped our conversation earlier when he was talking about if you can find the source, like a group of people that are giving good news, listen to them, help ’em. They’re honest people trying to do good work, they need our support. The Narwhal to me is one of those news sources. And Regan, I hope I’m not wrong in your view, but to me, they give reputable news. I think [Mike DeSouza], you can correct me, worked for the Post?

Their work was used in this tool that you and your partner did to analyze how the news reported compared to their scientific information. They’re presenting scientific information. Sure, it’s written in stories. Yes, it’s written to draw people in because it’s from a story of somebody who’s working on something meaningful. Yes, it’s stories, and those stories are very clear with scientific information. They measured against three sources. One in the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal, and the Calgary Herald. Now, of course, we would know that there would be leanings in those. One would be toward government in Ottawa and oil and gas in Alberta. I’m going to stop and let you walk through if you can, Regan, and I can, if you’d prefer, just let me know. But just a summary of those findings. I went through the images and I have just some takeaways that I took from the images. Either you can explain them or I can, it’s up to you, but go ahead.

Regan:

Sure. I’ll just give a little bit of background. I used to read six Canadian newspapers a day. I’d read some Toronto newspapers, and then I’d work my way back. Mike DeSouza, who’s the managing editor at the Narwhal and Canada’s best investigative reporter, used to work for the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and their chain of newspapers. I followed his work closely and I noticed a pattern where his stories would be on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen and they’d be buried somewhere inside the Edmonton Journal, and they wouldn’t appear in the Calgary Herald. And over time, I noticed this trend over time. I can talk about it, but then I found a scientific way to measure it, to follow his stories across the country as they get closer to the center of power of the oil patch here in Calgary, as the propaganda model would suggest, the stories would get smaller, less prominent, less evocative language the closer they got to Calgary.

I collected all these stories and did a rudimentary analysis of them, but then my friend Blair Fix did the math and did a textual analysis of the themes, emphasized and dramatic, incredible, hundreds and hundreds of steps along the way for all these stories. And every single time they fit the propaganda model, every step closer to Calgary, the story gets shorter and deeper inside the newspaper or it just doesn’t appear at all. And then what Blair fixed did was the textual analysis of all the stories and the words that they cut as they got closer to Calgary, what those words meant, and what their theme was. And it was an amazing correlation of the power of the oil patch in Calgary. I had been reading all these newspapers for a long time. I’d seen the bias. It just drips every day, even what is reported, let alone what isn’t reported. But we found a way to measure it, and it’s just mind-boggling off the chart how biased the media is when it comes to these oil and gas issues.

Jenny:

I’m going to walk through, thank you. That was awesome for the background, and I of course, didn’t I undersold the amount of work that went into that Regan, I apologies, I’m looking at, there’s two figures, figure two and figure three. And what’s interesting first is how much less was reported by all three actually, Ottawa Citizen Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald. They’re not, again, we’re pointing to that, not in our best interest stuff. They’re not telling us as much as the scientists want them to. In order, the Ottawa citizen is posting less, the Edmonton Journal less and the Calgary Herald less. This is just articles published. They only picked up, a few of them. And then figure three talks about the number of words used. Post Media used 13,000 words. I guess that would be that storytelling aspect, quite frankly.

And the Ottawa Citizen, and possibly I shouldn’t be outright about that. And then the Ottawa Citizen, Edmonton Journal, and Calgary Herald in that order, again, were fewer words. Down to 5,300 words with the Ottawa Citizen, the Edmonton Journal being 4,800, and the Calgary Herald at 4,300. Again, fewer words going through that. And then the next image I highlighted was figure four, where you walked through the page count. The Ottawa Citizen put this information upfront for people in the first seven pages. The imaging journal would be the first 18th, it looks like pages. And the Calgary Herald did not post before page five and went all the way down to page 45. Moving the information out of the sight, the view, of the public, and as somebody who is from the oil and gas industry, a little background on me, you rely on those news sources and you don’t go deeper like you do Regan.

I can offer a couple of others. I mean, I’m just going to try to be quicker with these, but the other ones are talking about, and I’ll put these in the link after I stop talking here. Then it’s the frequency of keywords. This is now, and maybe Regan, I’ll let you take this part if you don’t mind, can you talk a little bit about the frequency of the words and the meaning of the words? I was trying to explain this to Naomi and I didn’t do a good job, which is how many, and which words are important for getting the information through. And which words didn’t represent or blurred the information is how I understood it, which is why it wasn’t unsuccessful in explaining it. You go, thanks.

Regan:

What Blair did was he’d been doing some textual analysis for his economic work. We were working with 20 stories that Mike Desouza, the 20 best stories of Mike Desouza’s career shortly after he was fired, the 10 biggest stories all based on freedom of information requests, very prominent stuff. We had this body of all this text, and he went through word by word analyzing the words that were cut and the words that were replaced at every step across the country. And what he’s able to do is to show each word taken out and inserted, how do each of those words relate? How common are they? Are they taking out more common words and putting in less common words? It shows an extra bias. And then he groups those words with different themes. And you see with the editors, you see the work of the editors, what they’re emphasizing, what they’re de-emphasizing, the words they’re cutting along mentions of first nations of the sort are almost non-existent in the Calgary press.

Things like that. The editors reveal themselves with the words they’re cutting and pasting, and it’s just, it’s shocking. It’s off the charts how bad this bias is, how utterly amazing it is. And on an earlier version of this story, Blair Fix used AI for all the words that got cut on the floor by the editors. He used AI to pick them all up and then to tell a story or all the words that the editors would insert that are less common, showing their bias. What’s the character of those words? He gathered up all those words and gave them to AI and asked them to write something. And it’s frightening. I assume that’s how half the newspapers are written today. Journalists are not required. You hand them this handful of words that editors insert or cut out, and that handful of words, the word cloud, give to AI, and they’ll pretty much write the story that it came from. It’s frightening, and it might be one of the main uses of AI, how it was developed, but it’s never could have imagined the bias would be this strong, consistent, shockingly strong evidence of how biased the media is, particularly on these oil and gas issues.

Alex:

I just think that’s A, funny, B, terrifying and C fascinating. I’m tempted to try that out just for giggles. You know what I mean?

Jenny:

Yes. It’s all of those three things. Yes.

Alex:

Yeah.

Media Has a Crucial Role to Play

Jenny:

And that’s where I joke that the most interesting thing happening in the world is what’s happening in the world. It’s no longer what’s in the entertainment industry.

Alex:

They can’t write that stuff. I mean, it’s like, my God, they would make some exceptional movies if they just did this and reported what’s going on in the real world.

Jenny:

Well, anis is the role that we think it has to play. We’ve talked about this, right? Alex and I have had an offline conversation, we need all industries to be focused on liability. Hey Regan, this is how important this is.

Regan:

Absolutely. And there have been ebbs and flows of the media. Alberta has been moa re democratic place and a less democratic place over the last century, depending on the governments and what’s going on. I went to journalism school in the late nineties, at the end of 20 years of the peak of democracy in Alberta. The media was horrific under manning, but under law heed, it got better. There was lots of good stuff. There was real journalism. And the old guys that were running state journalism programs then were from that age that there was what journalism was supposed to be. There was a lot more of it. It’s been rubbed out in the 25 years since to an extent. But the media is a reflection of society. We demand better of it and we can get it. And it’s one of the essential ingredients to whatever it is we want just to maintain what we have or to achieve anything better.

A decent media is essential to that. And we’ve had better It is possible, and it’s crucial. You can’t make progress on any issue without understanding the media. Progress is going to be difficult unless we make strides into expanding independent media and better informing and engaging people because they’re left ripe for folks like Tucker Carlson, and that’s what they’re there for. They’re there to fill the void. We’re told it’s stupidity. That’s just another brand of stupidity. But if people had a better appreciation, they wouldn’t, he’d be insignificant If we had a real analysis that gave people real insight into their lives and produced real results and improvements, we wouldn’t have to worry about folks like that, but they just filled the void to the solutions we need a

Jenny:

A hundred per cent. Let’s start walking through some of the how-tos here. We spent a lot of time doing an analysis today, which was kind of fun. Thank you, Regan. This has been helpful. Let’s walk through some of the other, let’s make sure we’ve gone through the six Ws here. We’ve talked about “who” well. We know that we’ve got media, big media is not looking out for our best interests. It’s looking towards corporations. The corporations don’t serve us. What’s working or what has worked for the 1% doesn’t serve us, and we need to stop contributing to that. Everyone the 1% as well. Now it’s where it’s big media, it’s social media. We have to look at sourcing. We’ve talked about scientific facts and making sure we’re looking at sourcing funding. Again, we talked about there is advertising motivation.

We’ve got to look at where, again, this is in the corporate best interest. Yeah, that’s big media. And look to studies, make sure that is, this is something that Naomi’s always brought forward to me, are we have to make sure we always know that there a scientific basis in the background and peer-reviewed studies behind the information we’re looking at. Then let’s talk about where, and where you go for trustworthy venues. We talked about that a little bit, and I’ll let somebody else go if I miss just unmute and I’ll stop talking, but where we’re talking about newspapers, we have to make sure that we look to journals that are offering honest news, that is respectful and they are logical, and there’s a lot of scientific bases. Again, we said in those even email subscriptions, I do a lot of email subscriptions, most of them free. And that’s again, another good sign that it’s somebody who’s just genuinely, honestly trying to give good data. And I usually start paying after I realize they’re a decent source of information. I try and give them what I can to keep them afloat or whatever. And podcasts, I listen to podcasts from people that I know and trust, like Markham Hislop, The Breakdown, Nate Pike and Real Talk Ryan, some people that I go to that I know that I can find. Sorry, I’ll stop talking. Go ahead, Alex.

Alex:

I just want to give a shout-out to Whitney Webb, if you have never listened to Whitney Webb’s podcast, this woman is brilliant. She’s able to make connections to absolutely every organization, how their money goes together, who’s directly tied to who. And she goes way back in the nineties, and she’s able, I think she’s slightly autistic, she’s able to retain this information off the head with no script, make any connection to answer any question on the fly. Whitney Webb, definitely check out her podcast. I’m sure you’ll all enjoy it.

Jenny:

I haven’t heard of it. Regan, I don’t know if you have.

Regan:

No. She’s a very serious alternative journalist who’s done enormous amounts of work on lots of taboo subjects. She’s fairly apolitical, but she helps shed light. That’s my, I read a wide, wide range of left, right? One of the most valuable. And I spent too many years reading the newspapers, not paying attention to the business section. They are as ideological as the craziest communists in the street corner, but they also run the show. And the guys in charge need to have a reasonable understanding of reality. And you learn the most from the business pages. Once you cut through the BS, you get a sense of what’s going on, and you’ll have to make sense for yourself. But when you read a wide range, you’ll pick up the tidbits. You’ll see what people live out and what they do on purpose or not. But you’ll need a wide range to put it together for yourself.

But at the end of the day, despite what the professors or the journalists who are all too often, not very well-informed and not overly honest, not exactly in the good faith category, both those folks. But despite what they might tell you, it doesn’t take anything more than common sense to come to the conclusions, to do the analysis. When you’re presented with the right facts, the meaningful facts of the issue, it’s not that complicated. That’s why democracy’s possible, and it doesn’t work so well if we don’t have those. But I’m a political scientist, trust me, they don’t teach you whatever I thought you might learn at school, the things, they don’t teach you those things. But you don’t need, need a PhD. You don’t need to be a political scientist. And you certainly don’t need to be an economist, despite what everyone will tell you, they are the worst.

But your common sense with the facts and that’s all it takes effort, define the facts. But once you find them, you’ll recognize them and they start informing your analysis, and they help you cut through the BS because you have to know there’s a lot of BS, there’s a lot of dishonesty, and there’s a lot more than the media spectrum than what you see. Even if you go outside to the edges. There’s a lot more than that, let alone the history, let alone the international aspects of things. But you have to keep that in the back of your mind that this isn’t the whole picture. And everyone here has an agenda. And if you appreciate their interests and how they’re different and whose interests are reflected in the media and whose interests are reflected in those professors and those law professors and the lawyers and the suits that you see in the media, those interests, well, with that understanding, you can start to see things clearly. You can be a roofer and you can come to a lot better political analysis than you’re going to find in the newspaper or on television. I think that the most important thing, is the people have the confidence to.

Jenny:

And the people that care. I just want to back up a second. Thank you. Oh, I see Mark joined us, and I thought maybe he was going to speak. Oh, he’s there. Mark, I see you on stage. If you want to unmic and introduce yourself, you go ahead and do so, and if you have any questions, please offer comments for that matter.

Mark:

Oh, hi guys. I don’t think, I am not that much of a media person like you guys are. But I have gone with a, of journalists, especially in the oil gas thing and New York Times, CTV, and W5 in particular, and spent literally days with reporters and was shocked when the story came out, how selective they were or the approach that they took, et cetera. I don’t know a lot about media, and I don’t read a lot of news, but I have interacted with some of the major news outlets. And just last week, I mean, CTV interviewed me at length about a story that was coming out, and they didn’t use one word of it in their story. Some of that just baffles me.

Jenny:

It’s incredible. Mark. Yeah. Mark, Regan, and I work together in a group called the Polluter Pay Federation. We’re working to help landowners make sure they get their sites taken care of. As Regan’s been explaining through this, there are a lot of sites that need to be cleaned up, and it’s a big problem and it needs to start, quite frankly. We are very aware of that at the p Polluter Pay Federation. What we’re trying to do is build public awareness and work with other landowners, helping them represent properly what is happening on their land and what their legal rights are. There’s nobody I know more in the province than what Mark knows in terms of legal, the laws of the land, if you will. Next week, we’re meeting a friend, his name’s Colin Smith, and we’re talking about the laws of the land.

Upcoming Episodes on the Laws of the Land

Jenny:

Next week we’re going to be talking about the ecological system, the system that runs underneath what we’re working on in our corporate best interests, and start talking about which direction we need to go. Restoring our environment and caring for people. We were talking about this human-centered or life-centered economy. That’s what we’re going to start talking about. But Mark and Regan will, I’m hoping Mark at least one at a time, or some others from the Pluto Pay Federation might talk throughout the year. I’m picturing six. This is one of six conversations throughout the year just talking about the laws of the land. But from the different W, if you will, in the six Ws, we add how and to the six Ws. I’m going to stop talking, Alex, if there’s anything you want to add right now?

Alex:

Yeah, just first off, to thank everyone for contributing. And then I’d also like to send an open invite if you’re not doing anything on Valentine’s Day. The Bow River Basin Council is having a make wetlands year, Valentine Day on Valentine’s Day this year. It’s a full-day digital webinar where they’re going to break down all the different wetlands that need help and need encouragement and our presence. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about basins and what we’re trying to do to purify the water and make sure the watershed is top-notch and ready for spring and summer, I encourage you to go to bbc.com and register for this webinar that’s happening on Valentine’s Day. Other than that, once again, I want to thank you on behalf of The Gravity Well, I hope you all have an amazing evening, and I look forward to future conversations.

Jenny:

Amazing. I just need to cut in because we have no benefit to that, please, because this is such a great way to talk about, we’re talking about trustworthiness and news and

Alex:

Everything. Yeah, sorry, it’s a shameful plug.

Jenny:

It’s just people, just to remind anybody who would listen to this in the replays that we are just, well-intentioned people trying to look out for our community, and this is a watershed group, this is a group that’ll educate, help us understand our ecological system better. This is the people that are doing this work, this work that the scientific work that’s happening in the background that we just don’t even think about because it’s all just been operating so well. Anyway, I’m just going to offer some takeaways, and then I’ll let you, Regan and Mark, offer yours. Thank you so much for this, Regan. This was fantastic. And yeah, obviously any input you guys have, we want to hear it. I’m just going to say my key takeaways are that, yeah, we should take, what’s the word, solace in knowing that the newspapers, the big newspapers, the media, the marketing, et cetera, is not working in our best interests. It’s working towards corporate best interests, and we know that the model that our media uses is the problem. It’s the design of this centralization over time that is the problem. And we need to move away from that centralized corporate interest idea. And I guess, yeah. Anyway, that’s a thought to carry forward. That’s the key takeaways that I have. I’ll just stop there. I don’t know, Alex, if you want to add anything before you hand it over to Regan.

Alex:

Yeah, I just think it’s really important after this conversation that we have that consensus that the media is not working in our best interests, and it’s working at the behest of power. Power doesn’t want to relinquish any, so they would prefer a society that would be ill-informed, confused, and bifurcated because then they get to take what they want. They get to keep it all for themselves, but an educated and well-informed society is a threat to that power, which is precisely why they’re trying to censor us and squash us. Let’s get out there and get some real information. And that was my takeaway from the whole conversation.

Key Takeaways

Regan:

I think that’s great because these aren’t academic issues. These aren’t abstract theories. This is the Alberta we live in. This is how bad the media is. This is the water we’re swimming in, trying to make see-through to make sense of, and it has big, big consequences. In 1861, when the US was about to start the Civil War, they almost invaded Canada. Instead, the vice president went to the White House with the New York Times reporter in tow. The front page of the New York Times was being held for his proposal that let’s invade Canada. Instead of fighting the slave owners, Lincoln decided to fight the slave owners first, and then they focused on Canada later. But that’s what the media is like when it comes to these issues. From 1920 to 1935 in Alberta, the United Farmers ran a government that was a local democracy.

That wasn’t the liberals who created Alberta and installed the first premier. And the farmers were real grassroots, and that’s when we had proportional representation and some decent media. But in 1935, the Calgary Harald and the Edmonton Journal ran four pages a day of scandalous stories all made up about the united farmers, and played a major role in the farmer’s government tumbling in 1935, installing Bible Bill Earhart and Earnest Manning. The media in Alberta’s bad, and it’s really important, and we can have better. We have had better. And I think it’s really valuable to help people navigate the media landscape these days. I think it’s foundational to all the work we’re trying to do, and appreciate you guys having a conversation about this so soon. Your first couple of episodes have been right in the bullseye and welcome additions to this work.

Jenny:

Oh, what an endorsement. Thank you so much, Regan. That’s fantastic. Mark, do you have anything to add? Thank you so much for joining us. I’m sorry to put you on the spot.

Mark:

Oh, no problem. I did remember the three things. They were to educate landowners, mount a counter lobby to the powerful lobby of industry and start a litigation fund for landowners. I would add that the narwhal and the reporter Regan mentioned have done some excellent work, especially during Covid, on the amount of lobbying that took place between industry and the government, the industry, how much they lobbied government during covid and some of the just unbelievable things that they lobbied for, for example, to stop the ability of anyone including but primarily landowners, to be able to file a statement of concern in objection to any application that industry made. And let’s be clear that that was the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the biggest lobby in the country. And let’s be clear that any government employee or minister who listened to a lobby like that should have thrown that lobbyist out into the street never to return. Landowners have rights they can’t be trampled on, but that’s what the industry’s proposing in this province. That’s how bad is. But that story barely saw the light of day. And so, I dunno, in terms of news media, I think we’re in a transition period, and I think it’s up to people to find their own ways to get their stories out now. And I’ve been experimenting with that and trying to figure out how to use YouTube and make videos and how to get your message out.

Jenny:

That’s what we’re doing here.

Mark:

Yeah, I think we have to use the new methods.

Jenny:

Amazing.

Mark:

That’s all I have to say, and thanks very much, guys. I didn’t know you were doing this, but I just happened to see it. This new app popped up online somehow with that we’re on and tried to figure it out. It took a little while to figure it out, but I managed to do it.

Jenny:

I love it. Thank you so much for being flexible. Let me just say the reason why I chose, sorry, why I chose this site, and Merrill can say this. Just to introduce you, Regan and Mark, too, this is Naomi, my best friend is in the audience, and Meryl is, he attends an 8:00 AM clubhouse room that we do with my friend Angie, and Naomi knows Angie as well. We work together. Angie’s incredible. She does coaching and she’s my coach. She uses this platform as it’s a safe place to talk about big things. You don’t have to come on a screen. I had a friend say, I don’t want to do that, Jen. I don’t want to be on video. I’m like, no, it’s not on video. It removes barriers for people. This is why, at least at the beginning, Alex is probably hating that I’m even talking about it.

But for the first while, we’re just trying to make sure that people are comfortable with what we’re doing and that we’re not doing it wrong. Alex has this great analogy that we want to lay that first brick, right? And we’ve been always saying that, no, Jenny, we got to lay that brick just right. I’m like, yep, no, for sure. We’ve been trying to make sure that we’re this right. We’re going to fully launch in April is our goal, but this is the kind of three months we gave ourselves to just get our feet under us and have meaningful conversations with the people we know and trust because we have to start from a place of reality. Both Regan and I, that’s the other thing we’ll add. Meryl, you wouldn’t know this yet. Regan ran in the election as well. Regan ran for the Green Party and he worked with me despite the fact that I was wearing a different colour.

I ran for the Alberta party, but we were aligned in our thinking enough to know what this problem was. Like he said, this 99% versus 1% problem. We have been working together ever since. It’s just been phenomenal. I feel like I always say when I talk about Regan and Mark, that these are the best people I know in the province. It’s nice to be working with you guys and thank you for doing this with us tonight. And with that, unless anybody else has anything to add, we can close the room. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a good night.

About Regan Boychuk

Regan is an independent researcher. He holds a graduate degree in political science and has been studying the Alberta oil patch (the oil and gas industry) for 20 years, beginning with the industry’s royalties. To learn more about Regan’s political and oil patch research, check out his work. Regan entered journalism school with a sceptical eye a few years out of high school after his passion for newspapers, magazines, and books led him to the book Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. The book is a stark criticism of the media’s record in serving the public interest. Regan points me to a favourite quote from Noam Chomsky’s, book Interventions (Penguin Books, London, 2007), where Chomsky succinctly explains the ideological underpinning of ‘mainstream’ news coverage:

“In the discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that “we are good” – “we” being the government, on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one. “We” are benevolent, seeking peace and justice, though there may be errors in practice. “We” are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.”