Ryerson School of Journalism’s new interim co-chairs, Asma Malik and Gavin Adamson, overhauled its curriculum—dropping core skills like research and fieldwork for equity-focused courses on race, Indigenous issues, queer media, and faith-based content. Meanwhile, mainstream outlets like CBC and CTV hire graduates, while Rebel News thrives despite YouTube demonetizing $400K annually, exposing media’s crisis: prioritizing grievance over truth. Biden’s evasive press conference, dodging pandemic or Iran questions while facing softball queries, contrasts sharply with Trump’s relentless scrutiny, revealing a double standard that fuels public distrust in journalism’s role as watchdog. [Automatically generated summary]
That's the official newspaper, the Ryerson School of Journalism.
I can barely read it without getting exhausted and cranky.
Imagine living it.
I'll take you through that because I want to show you the next crop of official journalists that are just ready to take up a perch at the CBC or the Globe and Mail.
It's incredible.
But before I do, let me invite you to become a subscriber to what we call Rebel News Plus.
It's eight bucks a month.
You get the video version of the show.
You get shows by Sheila Gunnery, David Menzies, Andrew Chapatos.
And that eight bucks a month, well, it really counts because, as you know, YouTube cut us off.
They've demonetized us.
That's going to kick about $400,000 a year out of us.
So that $8 a month that you would get by being a subscriber really counts these days.
Please go to RebelNews.com and just click subscribe.
Thanks very much for that.
Here's today's show.
Tonight, let me show you what they're doing at Canada's journalism schools.
It's bad.
March 26th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're the biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is government.
But why publish?
It is because it's my bloody right to do so.
You know, I think the only person in our whole company who has a journalism degree is David Menzies.
But of course, his real talents and skills are not taught in schools.
It's street smarts and intuition and a friendly way with people, never losing his cool, a stubbornness that you don't even really realize is happening because it's done with a smile.
It's a clever approach.
Reminds me a bit of Colombo.
Oh, one other thing.
In regard to your practice of recording people's comments after the screening, what is it?
Like a question and answer period?
I mean, the people in the audience, they raise their hands and they ask questions and you stand up there on the stage and answer them.
No, usually we meet in the lobby.
We discuss the film there and I record their comments.
That's all.
Oh, you do it in the lobby?
Yes.
Oh, fine.
Gina, that's peculiar.
What is peculiar?
No, it's peculiar that you would walk into the lobby.
I see a man who was lying on the floor.
He just got shot in the middle of all that excitement.
Turn on a tape recorder.
Alberta Premier Ralph Klein had the same style.
The journalist Joe Warmington does too.
My point is, David's our only J school grad, and his strengths as a journalist didn't come from there.
And even then, it was a quarter century ago.
Oh boy, are journalism schools different today.
You know, we're hiring here at Rebel News, looking for a few journalists.
And I wouldn't discriminate against someone who went to journalism school, but if they had a journalism degree, I'd sure check them out to make sure they weren't just brainwashed from it because that's what it's like these days.
If you doubt me, think back to the insane struggle session the National Post had where dozens of their own young woke staff tried to get Rex Murphy fired for the sin of writing a column saying that most Canadians are not racist.
I mean, seriously, why would you have a paid subscription to such a newspaper if you call yourself a conservative?
Anyways, I've just got to show you the news today out of Ryerson's School of Journalism.
It's incredible.
But I want to show you just one more thing first.
Just a reminder of the state of the journalism industry in Canada today.
And by industry, I mean the jobs.
If you're going to journalism school, presumably it's because you want a journalism job.
Not sure why you'd want that.
Well, look at this.
Just in the past few months, closing of Huffington Post Canada, abrupt and devastating, editor says.
Midday announcement and decision to immediately stop publishing caught staff off guard.
Yeah, I bet it did.
I don't know if you saw that, but the entire Huffington Post organization in Canada, which had been around for years, had published thousands, tens of thousands of stories.
It was just deleted by their own owners.
The site literally was erased.
Everyone was fired in Canada.
And the staff, it's not funny, it's sad.
They learned about it by going on the internet and seeing literally nothing where their website once stood.
Their own owners did that to them.
That's amazing to me.
And this is just from a few weeks before that.
Bell Media lays off 210 employees in Toronto area, half from newsrooms, says Union.
The union representing some Bell Media workers says a total of 210 employees in the Toronto area are being laid off, with most of the notifications taking place today.
So that's just from the last month, those two stories.
Here's more.
This is a story by the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newspapers with layoffs.
And here's more.
This is a headline that George Orwell would love.
I'm serious.
Take a look at this.
I don't even understand this headline.
Niagara newspaper offices to be shuttered as commitment to local journalism continues.
What?
You know, that would be like saying, you know, after World War II, the Axis powers came in second place while the Allies came in next to last.
That's just quite a headline about a newspaper shutting down to serve you better.
My point is, journalism as an industry is in a terrible crisis in Canada.
Although there's never been more demand for news, there's never been a bigger supply of news.
There's never been more ways to get news.
Something's not a fit.
Journalism's Insane Asylum00:07:36
And let me now take you for a walk through Ryerson's Journalism School, which is truly like taking a walk through an insane asylum 100 years ago before those things were shut down.
It's sheer madness.
I think my insane asylum analogy is strong.
It feels like they're cooking up mental illness in these places.
This is from the Ryersonian, which is the official in-house news publication of the journalism school there.
So this is where they practice being who they want to be.
This is where they show what they think leading journalism is.
This is the best of the next crop of journalists.
Ryerson School of Journalism's new leaders say there's a lot of work to be done.
All right, I agree.
But it's not what you think.
Ryerson School of Journalism's newly appointed interim co-chairs, Asma Malik and Gavin Adamson, have released a list of five measurements to guide the school's renewed commitment to meeting students' needs.
Okay, getting a little nervous.
I think student needs at a journalism school are, you know, they need to be taught.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Here's what they have to say.
In an email sent to the program's faculty and students last Wednesday, Malik and Adamson outlined five measures intended to rebuild trust among students with the support of Ryerson School of Journalism's newly appointed transformation lead, Professor Kamal Al-Salali.
The school will focus on the fundamental role of equity and inclusion in the future of journalism education.
I see the transformation plan as a lot more than just a curriculum change, but where students don't have to advocate for their humanity or their worth to the administration, says Al-Salali.
That seems a little bit odd to me.
I haven't gotten into the learning journalism part yet.
Let's go a little deeper.
These five measures have been introduced in response to outcry from students and alumni expressing concerns with the school's leadership.
In particular, they say the school has not provided effective support for black, indigenous, people of color, and the LGBTQ2IA plus community.
I'm XXL, if you're wondering.
Following the resignation of former chair Janice Neal and Associate Chair Lisa Taylor, a call to action was made through an open letter by Ryerson Journalism students addressing concerns that the school has contributed to an unsafe learning environment.
Unsafe.
They don't mean like an open manhole cover or asbestos or no fire alarms.
They mean unsafe words and feelings.
The School of Journalism is not yet a safe place for paper-thin skinned political pouters who think and talk of nothing else other than their grievances and their race and their gender and their sexuality and just being quarrelsome orcs.
Who cares about your skin color and this sexuality?
Do you want to learn how to do journalism or not?
The first priority on the list of commitments provided by Malika and Adamson is a permanent student equity task force.
According to them, this task force will consist of four elected members from both undergraduate and graduate students.
Members will be collaborating with students and faculty on initiatives to address critical equity concerns inside and outside the classroom.
Just to be clear, this isn't about how they learn.
This is about how they quarrel.
It's like an internal human rights commission, a perpetual internal struggle session, a permanent war of all against all, LGBT2QIA7B63- versus Aboriginal folks versus black folks, whatever.
I'm not sure if they even allow straight white men in at all anymore.
I'd have to check.
But then they quote one of the new bosses of the school, that Kamal Al-Salele guy.
He says the administration needs to focus on conversations that are being had between faculty and students.
Journalism schools need to do a better job of making sure students are understanding the way free speech is not applied equally, Al-Salele says.
And the ways in which some students' words are seen as acceptable while others are not based on their race or sexual orientation.
What?
Now, this isn't even good journalism that I'm reading you, is it?
They don't actually quote the man.
They don't explain what that means.
Did Al-Salely actually say that about free speech?
Did they just interpret that that way?
I don't know.
Good journalism would probably put his words in quotes, what he actually said, and explain it.
Now, I'm not going to go through it all.
It's just so fuzzy and weird.
And none of it, as you may have noticed, has anything to do with the world and reporting and getting a job.
It's all just a big psychotherapy session for people who live in one of the freest best countries in the world, Canada.
And many of these folks, frankly, just came here, but they prefer to demonize the country that's just given them freedom and prosperity.
Pretty gross, if you ask me, but let me read to you those five things the School of Journalism is going to focus on now.
Just to tell you, spelling, grammar, that's not what we're talking about.
Let me quickly go through the five of them.
Number one, supporting establishment of a permanent student equity task force.
I mentioned that already.
Number two, re-examining and redesigning our curriculum to incorporate critical content that draws from experiences of historically marginalized communities, including but not limited to queer, indigenous, and black communities, as well as faith communities who may be historically marginalized.
What's that got to do with can you cover City Hall?
Can you scrutinize government documents?
You just, you're navel-gazing.
Point four, providing journalism-focused equity training to faculty, staff, and instructors so that the teachers have to learn more.
Are the kids learning anything here?
And point five, offering more frequently existing Ryerson School of Journalism courses that take critical approaches to these issues, reporting on race, reporting on indigenous issues, reporting on religion and queer media.
Additions, alternatives to these courses will also be explored.
I'm exhausted just reading this, and I didn't even read all five of them.
These students are not learning journalism.
They're not learning how to research, how to write, how to think critically, how to physically go and get the news and report it, how to challenge political authority, challenge corporate authority, how to use modern tools like social media, how to make a living in a changing industry, how to survive when hundreds of working journalists are being laid off.
They're being taught how to grouse and gripe and bitch and complain and moan and think of themselves not based on talent or merit or character, but based on race and sex and sexuality and other irrelevant criteria that have nothing to do with reporting the news.
And they're a laugh and they're a joke and it's pitiful and most of them won't find work.
But they'll have debts and they'll be taught that that was someone else's fault.
But some of them actually will get hired by the CBC mainly because there's never a recession there.
But it's CTV and Global TV and Post Media and the Global Mail and the Toronto Star too.
And you're going to start seeing more and more of the world through their angry, racist, sexist eyes.
Biden Press Conference Critique00:14:49
It's already happening.
None of them have put together the thought that maybe their insane ideology is one reason why so many media of the left are dying and that alternative media like ours are growing.
But I want to let you know the future of our government journalists coming out of our government schools.
And it's bleak.
Stay with us for more.
Yamiche.
Thanks so much, Mr. President.
You've said over and over again that immigrants shouldn't come to this country right now.
This isn't the time to come.
That message is not being received.
Instead, the perception of you that got you elected as a moral, decent man is the reason why a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and entrusting you with unaccompanied minors.
How do you resolve that tension?
And how are you choosing which families can stay, which can go, given the fact that even though with Title 42, there are some families that are staying?
And is there a timeline for when we won't be seeing these overcrowded facilities run by CPB when it comes to unaccompanied minors?
Well, look, I guess I should be flattered.
People are coming because I'm the nice guy.
That's the reason why it's happening, that I'm a decent man or however it's phrased.
That's why they're coming because no Biden's a good guy.
That, my friends, is called accountability journalism in the era of Joe Biden.
Mr. President, people say you're amazing.
I just say you're terrific.
And these foreign migrants, they think you're the bee's knees.
What do you make of it?
I'm not even kidding.
It went on at some length that way.
Joe Biden's first press conference in over two months.
There were a few other moments where he seemed to have forgot where he was or what he was saying.
Here's a taste of that.
So the best way to get something done, if it holds near and dear to you, that you like to be able to.
Anyway.
We're ready to get a lot done.
Yeah, I'm not sure if this guy's ready for prime time.
Joining us out via Skype is our friend Joel Pollack, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart.com.
Joel, what did you make of Joe Biden's first press conference in two months?
I have to say it was unimpressive.
I don't think that he inspired a lot of confidence in his leadership.
He was rambling at times.
He went off on tangents.
He was brittle, irascible.
He doesn't like questions and never has.
And he said a lot of things that were simply untrue.
He claimed that Trump never stood up to China on human rights, for example, which is complete nonsense.
If anything, it's the reverse.
Joe Biden was pushing for China's inclusion in the WTO, regardless of its human rights record.
He has family business interests in China and all of that.
So I don't think it was good on substance.
He exceeded expectations only in that expectations for Joe Biden are so low because he really is not fully capable of being president, running the country.
So the fact that he could read from his notes and speak in more or less complete sentences, at least some of the time, meant that he surpassed expectations.
He didn't have a meltdown on camera, at least not too many of them.
There were a couple of hiccups where he lost his train of thought.
But I think the most disturbing part was when he said that the media ought to be satisfied with his promise that they could have access to the migrant detention facilities when his policies are in place, when he's satisfied with conditions.
In other words, you have to wait for Joe Biden to set up a Potemkin village, and then you can visit the Potemkin village and write about that as if that is what happened on the border.
And the media seem okay with this.
There was one question about it, but for the most part, we're not seeing any kind of pushback.
There's a couple of murmurs from journalists saying this isn't real transparency, but we're not seeing anything like the collective action that the White House press corps frequently took against President Trump when he used a phrase they didn't like, for example.
This is the media throwing itself at the feet of the new administration and undermining the public interest because we really ought to know what's going on at the border facilities and Biden doesn't want to let us see it.
So I think that it was overall a negative performance by Joe Biden.
He referred to his opponent as racist, even while claiming that he represents Republicans as well.
He even joked, if you can call it a joke, about the end of the Republican Party.
This is either a man who's not in full possession of his faculties, or this is a man who is every bit as nasty as he has been at times in his career without the other qualities he has occasionally shown in his career, the iconoclasm, the willingness to work with people on the other side.
He is performing poorly, and I don't think this was an inspiring press conference at all.
I think it actually hurt him more than it helped.
You know, it's fascinating that he says basically, guys, I can't show you what's going on on the border.
It's so bad.
Let me fix it first.
Like you say, a Potemkin village.
And the media say, okay, yeah.
I mean, it's, I think Biden's performance was weak.
I think he looked like he was not all there.
But it's the journalists' performance that I think is the most stunning.
I think they failed worse than he did.
Let me show you a tweet by Ari Fleischer.
He's a Republican, but I'd call him a moderate Republican.
I think he was George W. Bush's press secretary for a while.
And he points out that he has never seen a president of either stripe bring sort of scripted answers in a briefing book and work through that.
I mean, it looked like he was following a script calling on certain reporters.
He had their faces and their names written.
He looked like he was being helped through it.
Ari Fleischer, I think, is moderate enough that he would criticize Trump sometimes and praise Trump sometimes.
Like he's not a diehard.
And here he is saying this president was not actually there.
He's not actually able to answer questions in real time.
Not that he even allowed questions.
I mean, it implied that the questions were just as scripted as the answers.
What do you make of that?
I don't know if the questions were scripted.
I do know that there has been reporting that the White House press office reviews the questions that are asked in some of these press briefings.
So it's entirely possible they knew what was coming.
And that's why he had to stick to the order of journalists.
But I do think some of it was impromptu.
Some of it was improvised and on the spot.
I don't think it's necessarily terrible for a president to have notes or something to refer to.
I do, however, think it's odd when he can't answer the question he is being asked and instead has to talk about whatever is in front of him.
That happened at one point.
I think it was a Bloomberg reporter asked Joe Biden a question about China, and he responded by continuing to talk about the border.
It was strange.
And that happened because he is overcoached.
He is not fully in charge of himself or his administration.
And you're right, the media were more embarrassing than the president.
Now, some of them did okay.
There was a reporter from ABC News who asked a very probing question about the migrants, basically saying that the crisis had reached proportions that were unacceptable.
And he got very upset about that.
He said he took umbrage at the suggestion that he found it acceptable.
But there were other reporters.
Yamish is one of them.
There were others who simply flattered the president.
Some completely wasted the opportunity to ask him a question.
There were too many questions about the filibuster.
There were questions about whether he's running in 2024.
Not one question about the pandemic.
Not one question about schools.
There were no questions about Iran and the Middle East.
There were just, I mean, if I'm looking at it from the left, there were no questions about climate change.
He got into climate change a little bit.
There were no questions about it.
There were no questions about the FDA not having an administrator.
I mean, there are so many things that the press just left out.
Now, they did ask, again, some good questions, but they missed opportunities for follow-up.
When he said that the filibuster, a procedural rule in the Senate, was a vestige of Jim Crow, the racist segregationist regime in the southern United States, nobody followed up and said, well, was it racist when you supported it?
Was it racist when Barack Obama supported it?
I mean, you can find the video footage of Obama and Biden defending the filibuster.
So are they Jim Crow racists?
These are obvious follow-ups that were not asked.
And I think what's so difficult about this is that the press aren't doing their job.
And those journalists who might do their job, such as the Breitbart White House correspondent or the Fox News White House correspondent, they were not allowed into the room.
It was a select group of journalists who were allowed in there.
And Biden, I mean, some of the gaps he made were funny.
I was laughing when a reporter from Univision asked him about migrants and what he would tell them or how he would prevent them from coming.
And his answer was, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
Now, what he meant was, we'll do it over the long term.
We want to fix these countries so people don't come right away.
But it was just so funny that he used that phrase because these migrants are literally taking a journey of a thousand miles on foot.
So, you know, there are just things he said and did that were hilarious and not in a good way.
It was interesting also, Donald Trump spoke to Laura Ingram later in the evening, commenting on the press conference, and Donald Trump said that the press had behaved entirely differently.
He's absolutely correct.
And Donald Trump actually criticized Joe Biden for the inhumane conditions in the migrant facilities.
And I think Joe Biden has given Trump that opportunity.
Trump can now turn that whole argument right around and say, you know what, Joe Biden, your policy is inhumane and your migrant facilities are inhumane.
And there's nothing Joe Biden can do because it's true and he won't allow the reporters to get in there.
Whereas Trump did, I went to one of the shelters that was opened and other people went to the Border Patrol facilities themselves.
So, you know, this administration is getting away with what no other administration could because the press are so happy it's not Donald Trump.
They're willing to help Joe Biden in almost any way possible.
Yeah, up here in Canada, I use the phrase the media party because they work as a team, they work as a clique, they're all in sync, and I think they're much more effective than the Democratic Party or up here, the Liberal Party, because they call them, they're the refs.
They're not the players, but they're the refs.
Well, they're players.
I mean, they're the refs.
They're refs who take one side, like that NHL ref who had to get fired recently for saying he wanted to penalize, I think it was the Nashville Predators.
But anyway, they're actually participants.
They're no longer referees.
And that's why Donald Trump called them the opposition party.
They provide the intellectual coherence, such as it is, for the Democratic Party.
The Democrats actually could not exist without the media.
It's unclear who controls who, or who controls whom.
But I think the Democrats are given their marching orders essentially by journalists, and they work very closely together.
And when journalists dare to question Democrats, Democrats act all insulted and betrayed.
But that's the reality.
You know, there's a Canadian named Daniel Dale who started in Toronto, and he would come up with absurd lists.
He would say, every time former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford lies, here's a hundred times, here's a thousand times.
And you'd look through it, and 99% of it was just, you know, a different opinion or a different spin on things.
They weren't lies, but he made sort of a cottage industry of saying, now it's up to 2,000 lies.
Now it's 3,000 lies.
Well, it wasn't long before he was hired away to the United States.
I think he went to CNN to count the number of lies that Donald Trump made.
And I say again, I mean, all politicians lie from time to time, but this was absolute, infinitesimally nitpicking.
So Daniel Dale, a Canadian, would nitpick any trivial phraseological inexactitude of Donald Trump and say, oh, we're up to 10,000 lies now.
And I say all this because where is that nitpicky, total scrutiny approach to Joe Biden?
It's impossible because it would everything he does is subject to, would be subject to such scrutiny, but it just hasn't been done by the media.
Maybe, actually, I can't name a single person who's done that to Joe Biden.
Yeah, Daniel Dale, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post, these are the fact-checkers who built their reputations attacking Donald Trump.
And upon Biden's assent to the Oval Office, they declared that he was not going to be as error-prone or as lie-prone as Donald Trump.
They declared that in advance.
And that's really declaring their own bias in advance.
And yes, the Washington Post, I think, once fact-checked Donald Trump saying that the Obamas had built a wall around their house.
They said, no, it's a fence on top of an existing wall.
That was the fact-check.
No engineer list applies.
So this fact-checking enterprise, I don't think anybody takes it seriously, because it's just become so blatant in its partisan bias.
But the fact-checking is really opinionating on behalf of Democrats.
And Mr. Dale has a difficult task because he has to justify his continued employment at CNN.
So once in a while, he has to fact-check Joe Biden, but it's clear he doesn't want to.
Yeah, incredible.
Hey, Joel, great to see you again.
Thanks for taking the time with us.
Thank you.
Have a great Passover holiday and keep up the fight down there.
Thank you.
All right, there you have it Joel Pollock Sr., editor-at-larger Breitbart.com.
He actually watched the whole Biden press conference and live tweeted it, which was quite a service to the rest of us who couldn't bear it.
Police Fines and Lockdown Frustrations00:01:23
Stay with us.
more ahead.
Hey, I want to tell you what's exciting right now.
We We have seven rebels going from our headquarters to Montreal to meet up with Yankee Pollock, who's our Montreal-based reporter.
And they're going to spend the weekend reporting on Canada's toughest lockdown.
I used to think Toronto was the toughest lockdown, and it's pretty bad here, but Montreal doesn't just have the lockdown.
They have a curfew.
And their police is vicious.
The police don't wear body cams, and they take advantage of that.
Their police have been ticketing our people.
In fact, last weekend, I think our team got, I don't know, $6,000 or $10,000 worth of fines for being out reporting on the lockdown, even though we're exempt under the lockdown laws.
So we're sending, we had five people on the ground last weekend.
We're going to have eight people on the ground this weekend.
To learn more about it, go to lockdownreports.com.
I love these guys.
They're doing a great job.
It's our new generation of rebels, Mocha and Yankee and Lincoln and Sid and others.
So go to lockdownreports.com.
That's where we're going to put those videos.
And we've already done some, I think, great work out there in Montreal.