Ezra Levant critiques CBC Radio’s "parallel universe" editorial bias, dismissing its coverage of a Russian missile attack on Ukraine, Amazon rainforest CO2 claims, and Donald Trump’s prosecutions as agenda-driven while ignoring Canadian struggles like inflation (5.9% in 2023), Trudeau’s carbon/nitrogen taxes, or crime spikes. Contrasting CBC with independent journalist Leroy Johnson—who details New York’s migrant crises (e.g., Russian, Venezuelan arrivals receiving free housing)—Levant argues CBC’s foreign focus and state funding alienate audiences, fueling distrust in media. Bell Canada’s ESG investments and alleged monopolistic telecom control further expose systemic favoritism, suggesting Musk’s potential entry could disrupt this model. Levant frames CBC’s decline as a symptom of its detachment from real Canadian concerns. [Automatically generated summary]
I made the mistake today of listening to CBC Radio, and I want to tell you what I thought of the experience.
It was like I was in a parallel universe.
So that's my monologue today.
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All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, I made the mistake of listening to CBC Radio this morning, and I feel like I visited an alternative universe.
It's August 8th, and this is the Ezra Levant show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Radio is not dead, but it is dying because radio requires you to submit to the editorial choices of the station, whether it's music or news or talk radio.
You are not in control.
Now, you can curate your own playlist on any number of apps instead.
And so many new cars are wired for the internet that way.
It's not even the technology that's the problem, like the old radio.
It's why would you let someone else choose the news and opinion for you when you can so easily choose it for yourself?
Well, because you're in a habit.
That's one reason.
Maybe you actually trust the news anchor.
So you believe they make better choices than you.
Or maybe you just want to hear what other people are listening to.
That's a reason for me.
Although when 11 million people listen to, say, Joe Rogan's podcast, that could be a better barometer of what the world is listening to than talking about than radio.
There are some personalities that are riveting.
The late Rush Limbaugh, people tuned in just to hear him.
I listen to CBC Radio maybe once a year out of curiosity, like you might have going to see a strange animal at the zoo.
To be candid, I do it once a year to see what the enemy is up to, because really, they truly are government journalists at the state broadcaster.
They're not on your side.
So this morning was my annual listen.
It was the 8 a.m. radio news in Toronto.
And I think I tuned in a minute or two late, so I think I missed the top item.
But here's what I did here.
First, Ukraine.
It was a story about how Russia had attacked a Ukrainian target.
And the CBC said it was a double tap.
That's the word they used.
Two strikes on the same target.
The second one, the CBC implied, was targeting rescue personnel.
The CBC then juxtaposed that with a peace conference, apparently, that Russia was not invited to, though, and tried to link the two stories, I think.
Then there was a story about what the CBC called extreme weather.
Apparently, it really rained hard in Philadelphia recently.
And I'm sure it did, that this was one of their top news stories in Canada, which I thought was a bit odd.
A bit later, they talked about the Amazon rainforest and how, they say, it now emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs.
I don't know how they do the math or if things really have changed, or rather, if it was just their methodology that changed.
I have trouble believing that the world's largest tropical rainforest has changed meaningfully in the past decade.
I think it's more likely that the scientists have changed how they measure things, or more likely yet, that agenda-driven journalists have changed things for reasons that they're hiding.
We weren't told how this change happened, but we were immediately told it was bad news and that governments down there were really committed to doing something about it.
But it was a clear one-two punch, maybe a double tap.
After the story about how much it rained in Philadelphia, this Amazon story, I'm not sure what the news peg was for the Amazon story other than they needed that little colorful comment about the rain story.
Anyways, then they switched to the good news from the CBC's point of view.
They went deep into the prosecution of Donald Trump and how he's a really, really bad dude and his lawyers are too, and how, and I know this is shocking to you, and how Trump and his lawyers want to talk about their case in the news, in the media, and argue against it and how they claim it's their First Amendment right.
The CBC didn't seem to agree with that.
But either way, the CBC was pretty excited about the whole thing.
Trump hasn't been president in three years, let me remind you.
But the CBC just can't stop thinking about him or talking about him.
It's a bit of an obsession for them, but I get it.
He's leading the polls, both to win the Republican presidential primary and then to beat Joe Biden.
So maybe they can take him out through a bunch of prosecutions.
When I say they, that would include the CBC, which thinks they're a player here.
Then they moved on to a perennial CBC campaign talking about defunding the police, this time in Halifax.
And the broadcast ended with a quirky story about an actor strike in the United States.
They tried to Canadianize it by saying how many actors it affects up here, but they quoted a clip from Fran Dresher, you know, and she talks like this.
It's about as American as can be.
Remember Fran Drescher?
That's Bobby Sherman.
What's that?
That's his hair.
Isn't he cute?
He's not really my type.
I'm torn between Barney and Ted Coppel.
Yeah, but Bobby could sing.
You should hear his records.
What's your record?
Just bury me.
Now, I later went to the CBC's website to try and catch the very first story of the day that I had just missed by a minute.
And I think it was their story about the CBC's own complaint, along with other media, to the Competition Bureau against Facebook.
The CBC is sort of suing Facebook, they announced, for stopping linking to them.
They want Facebook to link to them, of course, but Trudeau said Facebook has to pay media companies to link to them.
And Facebook said that's not how the internet works.
You don't have to pay to link to anybody.
CBC Sues Facebook00:09:30
That's not economical.
So no thank you if they have to pay to link to someone.
They just won't link to them anymore.
Trudeau said Facebook had been stealing content from journalists.
So Facebook stopped stealing that content.
And now Trudeau's CBC wants them to steal the content again.
It's quite a weird story.
And of course, the CBC is a player, not just a reporter.
It's quite something to hear the CBC, which has monopolistic power and state funding, complain about what they call a monopoly, Facebook.
I don't like Facebook much, but at least I'm not forced to support it with my taxes like I am the CBC.
Now, I listened and I thought, all these stories, I have just visited another parallel universe.
I mean, I know what the words mean that they used, Facebook, Trump, Ukraine, weather, police, rainforest, actors.
I know them like I know colors of paint, red, orange, yellow, green, blue.
But boy, did they paint a world I just can't recognize.
Like I say, fewer people than ever listen to CBC radio.
People with that old habit do it.
People who don't know how to use the internet to curate their own content.
People who want that Trudeau point of view.
There are some.
But fewer people than ever.
But boy, if you are one of those people, you live in a world that has a different colored sky than my world.
Let me give you some thoughts on these stories, if I may.
First of all, I mean, look, I think Ukraine is big news.
I don't know if it's top news every single day.
That's more of a drumbeat than anything.
A missile strike by Russia, I suppose that's news, though the war has raged on for 18 months, and I'm not sure if this two-missile attack warrants top-breaking news story.
I feel like there's a media campaign to keep the war on the top of our minds.
I do not like the war, and I do not like the killings, and I wish the war would end.
I certainly don't like attacks on civilians or civilian areas by Russia, or one last week, a drone attack on against the downtown business district in Moscow.
Yeah, I think the war should stop.
But look, that's a matter of editorial opinion how newsy that attack is.
The extreme weather event, though, in Philadelphia is in no way news.
I'm sorry, that's just not news.
That's the weather report, but that's in a different country.
In no way is it Canadian news.
In no way is it top news, breaking news.
You could argue that a Russian missile attack is top news.
You can't argue that rain in Philadelphia is.
It's part of a constant drumbeat, too, about global warming.
It's part of the fear campaign.
They replaced the fear of COVID with fear of global warming or extreme weather, as they called it.
Do you think heavy rain in Philadelphia is a top news item in Canada?
Isn't there somewhere in the world every day that has extreme weather?
I mean, isn't that the thing about living on a big planet?
You can always find something somewhere.
It's raining somewhere.
There's a tornado somewhere every day, really, by definition.
It's not even news other than you need the daily dose of global warming paranoia.
And if you're too stupid to get the CBC's not so subtle hint, they'll connect it to the Amazon rainforest story about how it's now emitting more carbon dioxide than it's absorbing.
Except that's not news either.
Even if it were true, which I'm skeptical, I mean, here's a story about this news item in the Guardian newspaper two years ago, not this morning.
Here's the BBC three and a half years ago.
Same story.
How is that news?
How's that top news today?
I'm a skeptic.
I don't believe we can accurately even measure CO2 emissions in the mighty Amazon rainforest.
Seriously, how do they measure it?
They don't.
They have computer models.
They're not measuring.
They're guessing in computer models designed by people, people who take grants from activist groups and governments.
And even if it were true, so what?
All life on earth depends on CO2.
It's what plants breathe.
How is CO2 in a forest in Brazil bad news?
How's it news at all?
Look, don't ask such silly questions, just like COVID.
The CBC will do all the thinking for you.
On Trump, it's so glorious.
You'll notice how many of these stories I've mentioned are American or foreign, by the way.
And that's for a reason it's easier to talk about Trump's scandals than Trudeau's scandals, especially if you're Trudeau's government journalists.
If you smear Trump, if you're obsessed with getting Trump, you're not going to get your funding cut by Trudeau.
You're not going to get angry phone calls from the prime minister's office.
In fact, you'll get a raise because you give this simulation of holding powerful politicians to account.
It's just that you're not holding your own country's powerful politicians to account.
You'll simulate being skeptical and critical and oppositional when, in fact, you're subservient and obedient and you're distracting.
Trump's charges are newsworthy.
Top Canadian news, I'm not so sure.
Hey, I checked, and for contrast, the CBC has done precisely two stories about Hunter Biden's laptop and the criminal activities found thereon and the corruption therein.
Just two stories.
One was a year ago, calling the story sordid, and one this year about how unfair it was that Republicans are weaponizing that story.
It's not Hunter that's the news, by the way.
It's Hunter being the son of Joe Biden and what Hunter Biden said about his father.
More news has come out on this in the past week that Joe Biden, Joe, the president, when he was vice president, was on at least 20 different phone calls with Hunter Biden and his business associates as Hunter Biden shook down companies for big payoffs.
No news from the CBC on that.
Better to talk about Trump.
They won't get in trouble that way.
The Halifax police defunding, just incredible.
There was no news peg for that.
The CBC had wanted some police records from Halifax.
They did the access to information requests, then they went to court.
Then they settled on the documents with the police, getting some more records.
I understand what that's like.
The CBC itself is covered by the same access to information laws, and they delay and hide and obfuscate and charge huge amounts of money to stop us from getting info about them because they're part of the liberal government.
That's what they do.
They're just as bad as Trudeau.
But they did get their documents that they wanted in the end.
I'm not sure if that's big news, the process story, I mean.
But then they pivoted at the end of the story about themselves asking for the documents to talk about defunding Halifax's police.
It had nothing to do with the documents.
They just wanted records and had a bit of hassle to get them.
I get it, fair enough.
But then to pivot to defunding the police, that was quite something.
Sort of like telling people about the Amazon rainforest turning evil right after a story about rain in Philadelphia.
That's not even news.
It's just some bizarre news artwork or something.
And then ending with news about the actor strike.
That was just the cherry on the cake.
Just perfect.
We're in a de facto recession in Canada.
It's only because they're bringing in massive immigration that it hides the GDP shrinkage, which is one measurement of recession.
Recession, inflation, high interest rates, poverty, crime, drug use, people can't afford to live.
Trudeau raising the carbon tax on everything, contemplating a nitrogen tax on farmers.
But the CBC doesn't care about them and their hardship.
By them, I mean you.
What about those poor actors in Hollywood who can't get by?
Will no one think about the Hollywood lovedies?
It was hilarious to see them try to Canadianize the story.
I wonder how many CBC listeners felt sorry for those wealthy Hollywood actors, including Fran Drescher.
I bet a lot did.
After all, the CBC wouldn't make it their top news item if it weren't super serious.
What was all that that's called CBC news?
What was it?
Most of it was not even news.
It was like the message track of the Liberal Party.
Trudeau's enemies were the CBC's enemies, Trudeau's plans, his schemes, or the CBC schemes.
Any criticism was reserved for foreign enemies, Trump, Russia, except for the police in Halifax, who need to be defunded because they didn't give the CBC what they wanted quick enough.
It was so U.S.-centric, as if those reporters were auditioning for jobs in the big leagues.
Sort of pitiful for a Canadian state broadcaster that obviously believes Canadians are just uninteresting and that our controversies obviously must be avoided to avoid upsetting Trudeau.
New York's Migrant Crisis00:11:35
It's pretty pitiful to do stories about rain in Philadelphia or an actor's strike in Hollywood.
Oh, well, now I know why the CBC is in decline and why Facebook really doesn't care about stopping linking to them and why the CBC is so desperate to get that traffic, any traffic back.
Stay with us for more.
Well, you know what they say about New York City.
It's a city that never sleeps, like to wake up in the city that never sleeps to find I'm king of the hill, top of the heap.
Well, that's one side of New York for sure, but these days there's another side to the city.
In some ways, it feels like it's going back in time to the bad old days to the 1970s where crime was rampant and people were afraid there was actually an exodus from New York.
Property values fell, if you can believe it.
Rudy Giuliani turned the city around by cracking down on big crime, like the mafia and little crime too.
His policies were maintained in large part by Mayor Bloomberg.
But in the years since, well, I have to say the city is regressing.
It's a pain to see it.
It hurts the heart.
Such a beautiful city.
Well, what am I talking about?
Well, here's one example.
Hundreds, thousands of migrants streaming into the United States illegally have just taken up to the camping, really, on the streets of New York or sometimes being put up in hotels.
I won't tell you the story to go to the streets of New York to have it told by someone who was right there, literally right now in his car.
We talked to Leroy Johnson, an independent journalist in New York.
And you can follow him as I do on Twitter, and we'll put his Twitter account on the screen.
Leroy, great to finally meet you.
I follow you on Twitter, so I feel like I know you.
You're always on the streets looking for the news in the Big Apple, aren't you?
Thanks for having me on, Ezra.
Yeah, I'm an independent reporter from New York City.
I stay local, and I try to look for any news in New York City, anywhere from crime to the migrant issue to protests.
And you're right.
New York City is starting to change a little bit, and it's getting a little more wilder.
And you're correct.
People have left New York in droves just because the way the streets are changing here and they're scared and the taxes and just the way New York is changing so drastically in the wrong direction.
Recently, I've been covering the migrant crisis and I'm like the migrant reporter from New York City.
And it's getting out of hand right now, completely out of hand.
You had hundreds and hundreds of migrants sleeping outside in the super hot weather overnight on the streets.
And God forbid, one of these guys died, and that'll be the end of us.
We would have riots if they died.
So yeah, like I'm an independent reporter from New York and anything New York, I cover.
And I follow you.
I mean, it really is interesting what goes on on the streets of that city.
And by the way, I find it depressing.
I mean, I remember New York City at its safest when it was the safest big city in America.
What a great pleasure.
And people were confident and happy and carefree.
And by the way, I think some of the crime wave that's sweeping New York is coming to Toronto and Vancouver and even other cities in Canada too, let alone other American cities.
Let me ask you, though, about the phenomenon you just described.
And I don't think that I would put being homeless or migrants on the street in the same category as some of the wild crimes we've been seeing lately.
But can you tell me a little bit about where these migrants came from?
Did they come in directly to New York?
Did they come in from the southern border and then make their way to New York City?
How did these, I think there's thousands of international migrants wind up in Manhattan?
Where did they, what was their route?
So a lot of them are from different countries around the world.
You have them from Russia, China, Africa, Venezuela, Mexico, all over the world.
What they do is a lot of them make their way to the southern border and then cross the southern border and either get on a plane and come here or get on a bus and come here.
So that's the route I've been getting for most of the migrants.
And some of them actually told me they walked for thousands of miles to get here.
And some of the stories that I hear, Ezra, is horrible, is horrible from these guys.
I mean, they may be telling the truth.
I mean, once they get to the southern border, to get a plane ticket costs some money and you need some ID to get on a plane.
Are some of these people being shipped to New York by, say, the governor of Texas or the governor of Florida?
I know they wanted to sort of put the problem at the doorstep of Democrat politicians because, you know, it's easy for a Democrat politician to say, I have a sanctuary city when they're a thousand miles away from the border.
So I think one of the moves by those border state Republicans was, all right, we'll test your commitment.
Here's a video clip that drives me nuts whenever I see it.
This is the mayor, I think, of Philadelphia celebrating the new sanctuary city status.
This was a few years ago.
He's literally doing a happy dance.
Here, take a quick peek at that.
A sanctuary city.
So it's easy for every mayor in a Democrat city, Washington, D.C., New York City, Philadelphia, to talk about a sanctuary city if there's no one in the sanctuary.
But you bus in or plane in a few hundred migrants, they panic like they did in Martha's Vineyard.
I've never seen people close the gates of a city faster than Martha's Vineyard.
What's the mayor, Mayor Adams of New York, have to say about it?
I think the mayor at this point had enough.
I think he's having buyer remorse with the sanctuary city thing.
And he's complaining about it.
He's saying we need to call a state of emergency.
We need to fix the border crisis.
And he's asking for more money from the federal government to help aid with the migrant crisis in New York City.
Eventually, this was going to come to a neighborhood near you.
Having someone embedded is a good start.
That came from the Secretary of Homeland Security.
We want to thank him.
But I've been very clear on what we need.
We need to control the border.
We need to call a state of emergency.
And we need to properly fund this national crisis.
Like I said, a lot of officials are, I think, I think they're having buyer remorse on the sanctuary city.
Reason being is they can't really handle the situation.
It's a city.
We've ran out of locations to house these migrants.
They're thinking about housing migrants in Central Park and building tents there like they're doing in other locations throughout New York City.
But yeah, they're pissed.
And like I said, I speak to a lot of them and they're not happy with the situation.
You know, I saw a video a few weeks ago from Washington, D.C. when, you know, I saw one of the fault lines here is that there's a move to treat these foreign migrants with free housing and food and cell phones and things like that.
But I saw some members of the African-American community saying, hang on, we're full.
We have our own poor.
We have our own homeless to take care of.
And I saw a bit of a fault line there with a community that traditionally is down the line Democrat.
Is there some friction between recent foreign migrants and how they're handled?
Like we see that in Canada too, by the way.
In the city I'm in, you have over a quarter million people using food banks, and yet immigration has never been higher.
It's a bit of a tension there between, quote, Canadian homeless and foreign homeless.
Is the same tension afoot there in the USA?
Oh, absolutely.
Residents are pissed.
The African community is pissed.
People in the communities where they're sticking the migrants in are pissed.
The homeless are pissed.
And I speak to homeless and I try to understand how they feel.
And like I said, I cover all sides of this.
I speak to the left, the right, the homeless, the migrants.
And the homeless are pissed.
And the residents are like, what about our own homeless people?
What about our own people that are sick?
Why are these migrants getting free housing, free food, free everything, free busing, free planes, anything they want, they get for free?
And people are pissed, Ezra.
And sooner or later, there's going to be some kind of, I believe, some kind of outcry.
There's already protests against migrants being housed in certain neighborhoods.
But I think it's going to grow a little bigger soon where we might have a little violence going on.
And I truly see that happening soon.
If I recall, the mayor once said, well, I got room in Gracie Mansion.
That's the mayor's official home.
And then he backed down.
He was basically saying, no, just kidding.
I was just trying to make a rhetorical point.
If I've got my story straight.
I mean, I find it, you know, liberals love saying, we got a sanctuary city.
Hey, I'll give up my home until someone says, oh, really?
Do you really mean it?
And then they say, well, no, I didn't really mean it.
I just want, I mean, that's literal.
That's the dictionary definition of virtue signaling.
At what point, though, do they have to actually put up or shut up?
What I mean by that is New York City voters voted Democrats.
They love calling themselves a sanctuary city.
The mayor loves it.
The liberal newspapers love it.
Are they going to get away with saying they love it?
Or at what point do they say we're going to rescind that?
We're going to deport people.
Or our voters are actually going to, I don't know, vote Republican, do something crazy like that.
Like so far, you're saying nobody's happy with this, but I don't think it's changed in the last month.
Like it's still happening.
It's still going on.
And yes, there's a lot of Democrat voters that are very disappointed in this.
And a lot of Democrat that were lifelong Democrats are changing to Republicans.
They're pissed.
They're pissed.
This is going to cost the Democratic Party a lot of votes.
That's what it seems like to me if this doesn't get fixed.
Like I said, I'm on the streets, Ezra.
I speak to everyone, right?
I speak to Republicans, Democrats, Radicals, the left, the right, the middle.
And they're all pissed about this.
They're completely pissed.
And it is going to cost people votes, unfortunately.
Well, Leroy, I'll continue to follow you on Twitter.
I love the updates.
I feel like I'm right there on the street.
And you're very fast.
I feel like it's a breaking news feed, sort of a TMZ.
But instead of celebrities, it's the news from the streets of New York.
Great to see you.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us again, live from the streets.
I really appreciate that.
Thank you, Ezra.
God bless you and your family and God bless the families.
I appreciate you having me on, brother.
Well, it's our pleasure and we'll have your Twitter handle on the screen so people can join me and follow you for the latest.
There you have it, Leroy Johnson talking to us from the streets of New York.
Stay with us.
More ahead.
Hey, welcome back.
Your letters to me.
Lesbian Yak.
Bell's Dominance and Competition Call00:02:19
5947 says if Bell could find 5% savings, that would be worth $1.4 billion, 14 times what they're asking of the poor taxpayers.
Problem solves.
Yeah, but you see, that requires hard work and entrepreneurship, which is how Bell started over a century ago.
I mean, named after Alexander Graham Bell, of course.
That's when Bell was innovative, inventive, entrepreneurial, disruptor, all those things.
Now they're more like a public utility and they're more and more government focused.
It was so gross that they had so much talk about ESG.
If you're wondering why everything's gone crazy lately, why so many companies are going full bud light, it's that they're all under this ESG, environmental social governance.
Really, it's a cult.
It's a political cult.
And anyone who gets investment from those massive funds like BlackRock, they have to subscribe to ESG.
They've really been colonized financially.
77DRIS says Bell destroyed the telecom system in Manitoba when they took over MTS.
Prices skyrocketed for internet and phone plans and service went down.
And because there's only one other company to compete with, Shaw, they also increased prices and decreased service quality.
The same thing is happening in Canada with many industries.
I showed you that study that literally in the whole world, like there's 200 countries in the world, we've got the worst cell phone plans in the world, not just bottom half or bottom quarter.
We are the worst.
How did that happen?
Well, government control, the oligopoly, the monopoly, really.
That's what the CRTC did.
And just what they did to radio, sorry, what they did to cell phones, they did to cable, what they did to radio and TV.
Now they want to control the internet.
It's atrocious.
Melody 8 says Bell needs a lot more competition.
We need Elon Musk to come into Canada with a new cell phone service.
Now you're talking, that guy's a real doer.
And who knows, maybe it'll happen.
There's a few pieces in the puzzle already.
He's got that satellite internet system and he's got the social media app.
Who knows?
Maybe he'll put a phone line in there.
I could picture it happening.
That's a great idea.
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters to you at home, good night.