Roasting the Press Episode 46 for Sunday, November 3rd, 2024
Tim Pool’s Business Troubles, The Tenet Media Catastrophe is a Psyop to Frighten All Media, Legacy Media Doesn’t Want to Talk about Chinese Election Interference & Combatting Media Lies
There were lots of technical issues with tonight’s episode, but Freedom Forum editor Chuck Black, independent media commentator Marie Anne and Mongo Minds Productions owner Richard Gagnon mostly held everything together.
For anything we missed, here’s the show notes.
Tim Pool’s Business Troubles
We start with the October 23rd, 2024 the Deep Dive post, “Tim Pool Throws in the Beanie, But Not Before Blaming the Employees For Him Quitting.”
According to the post:
Tim Pool, the beanie-clad YouTuber whose political commentary has garnered millions of followers, appears to be throwing in the towel—at least on his nightly Timcast IRL show. His announcement of a possible shutdown came with a flurry of grievances about lazy employees, personal burnout, and struggles with balancing work and life.
The post also discussed the recent challenges Pool has been facing with Tenet Media, accused by the US Justice Department of funding up approximately $10Mln dollars into a variety of independent media outlets including Pool’s “Timcast,” Matt Christiansen, Tayler Hansen, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern in exchange for pushing “pro-Kremlin narratives to US audiences under the guise of independent commentary.”
While some “far left” news outlets in the US don’t appreciate Pool’s commentary, calling his live-streams “a soapbox for the anti-democracy hard right,” they acknowledge that Pool is a popular public commentator who drives significant audience revenue from his efforts.
As outlined in the May 5th, 2022 Southern Poverty Law Center “Hatewatch” post, “YouTube Profiting From Timcast IRL, Study Finds:”
… Across 100 videos on the Timcast IRL channel from October 2020 to November 2021, the channel pulled in $219,416.22 through super chats, sending $65,824.86 to YouTube itself. Timcast IRL averages over $2,000 in Super Chat money per broadcast, the report found.
Timcast IRL doesn’t just derive money from YouTube live-streams. It also sells merchandise, promotes subscriber fees, accepts payment for speaking engagements, cultivates large “gift” donors and lots of other things typical of media outlets like the Deep Dive, the New York Times, The Globe and even the CBC.
It’s privately held so no one knows for sure, but Timcast also seems to employ somewhere between 12-20 people which suggests that Pool is running a two to five million dollar a year news operation.
It’s a good sized operation, driving significant revenue. But there are growing pains and business issues needing to be dealt with.
The new media is growing up. Tim Pool is dealing with growing pains of business expansion.
This brings us back to Tenet Media, founded by conservative Canadian commentator Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan (her husband) in 2022 as an independent, fund raising organization for new media commentators (including Pool).
But, as outlined in posts like the September 6th, 2024 CBC News post, “Meet the right-wing Canadian influencers accused of collaborating with an alleged Russian propaganda scheme,” Tenet was accused of allegedly taking funds from “pro-Moscow outlet,” and therefore had to shutter its doors.
CBC, mostly funded by the Canadian government and possessing a strong pro-Liberal party perspective, noted that “neither Chen, Donovan nor Southern (another Canadian media commentator affiliated with Tenet) are the subject of criminal charges, and none are named in the (US Justice Department) indictment.”
Tenet Media wasn’t even named in the indictment (the US District Court Southern District of NY sealed indictment), but most legacy media outlets like the CBC assumed, based on other data collected in the indictment, that Tenet was the unnamed company.
As a result of the allegation, Tenet and many of its partners have been scrubbed from social media.
But dig a little deeper, as was done in the September 25th, 2024 Upper Echelon on YouTube post, “The TENET Media Disaster,” and you begin to realize something quite peculiar.
Outside of legacy media outlets like CBC and the Washington Post, most media commentators concede that Tenet partners probably didn’t know where their funding came from and didn’t change their long-standing editorial focus, although owners Chen and Donovan probably knew what was going on.
Even worse, at least according to the Upper Echelon post, the structure of the US government indictment is set up seemingly to increase divisiveness and frighten the executives at all media outlets, not just the “right wing” ones.
The Upper Echelon post argues that the indictment was design to frighten media of all stripes, intentionally to make sure they don’t say too many things contrary to US foreign policy, especially as it relates to the Ukraine.
Media is still big business, even as the funding flows away from the legacy giants and into the new media challengers,, with the ability to topple governments and destroy political careers.
Political players want to make sure the media, new and old, doesn’t challenge its power.
In Tim Pool’s case, the unvalidated inference of some is that anti-Ukraine coverage was encouraged by Tenet Media funding and the loss of funding, caused by Tenet closing down in response to the indictment, is forcing Pool to downsize his operation.
Does funding influence media coverage? Of course it does. That’s why media outlets have traditionally separated editorial functions from fiscal.
Freedom Forum has noted this simple fact of life before, mostly in pieces about government media funding like the October 18th, 2024 Freedom Forum posts, “Canada's Government Media Funding Strategy is a Total Failure.”
But it applies to all funding.
This is a legitimate question to ask about all media outlets, if only because the controversies surrounding legacy and new media outlet have become election issues, both in the US and Canada.
For example, the September 10th, 2024 Press Progress post, “Canada’s Foreign Interference Inquiry Asked to Examine Far-Right Media Outlet Allegedly Funded by Russia,” discussed the Russian Canadian Democratic Alliance (RCDA), a Canadian based group supporting the Russian Canadian expatriate community.
RCDA wants Tenet investigated by Canada’s ongoing Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference, because Tenet founder Chen:
…was also creating content focused on Canada’s 2021 federal election at the same time as she was allegedly under contract with (RT), a Russian entity,”
RCDA source for this is the same US District Court Southern District of NY sealed indictment discussed above.
According to the Press Progress story:
Tenet Media’s founder had “written contract” to create “English-language social commentary content for ANO TV-Novosti, the parent company of RT. This “paid work” is alleged to include articles, videos and social media postings, some of which was apparently posted on the founder’s “personal accounts (without attribution to RT).”
The indictment indicates the contract to create content applied between March 2021 and February 2022 – a time period that overlaps with Canada’s federal election in September 2021.
Chen hosted an official PPC “Debate Debrief” livestream event with party leader Maxime Bernier following the 2021 federal leaders’ debate with David Freiheit, who runs the “Viva Frei,” YouTube channel.
Evidently, the RCDA doesn’t find it appropriate that media organization could hold contracts to promote contrasting viewpoints.
Taken to extremes, that sort of thinking suggests that newspapers shouldn’t run competing advertisements for contrasting political parties promoting different policies in the next election and Ford shouldn’t advertise in news outlets alongside GM.
The limits to this sort of thinking are not logical. They’re intended to instill fear and encourage passivity.
And it’s succeeding.
The Press Progress post goes on to demonize Lauren Southern, who seems to have received “the majority” of the Tenet funding. She’s a former Rebel Media personality known for “extreme views on race and immigration,” at least according to Press Progress.
The Press Progress post then moves on to note that both Katrina Panova, a Counter Signal personality who appeared in a video warning Canada is turning into the Soviet Union and Candice Malcolm, the Editor-in-Chief of True North, as being worthy of investigation by Canada’s political class.
Both Panova and Malcolm deny receiving funding from Tenet or RT but the stage has been set.
They should be watched inferred the post, as should Fox News, Blaze TV and the Daily Wire, far-right influencer Dave Rubin and the entire Peoples Party of Canada.
Another example of this is the October 29th, 2024 The Maple post, “An Outright Assault On Journalism,” which covered recent allegations from “former Conservative MP and Harper-era cabinet minister Christopher Alexander” and his “shocking allegations against a respected Canadian journalist.”
As outlined in the October 31st, 2024 Freedom Forum post, “BACK-END: Three Quick Comments on Recent Canadian Media Stories,” notes that:
During the October 24th meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security,
Alexander tabled documents that he claimed showed David Pugliese, a reporter with the Ottawa Citizen, was approached and recruited by the Soviet intelligence authorities, the KGB, in the 1980s - a claim that Pugliese categorically rejected as false and ridiculous.
The inference is that if you disagree with government policy (which Pugliese and the Ottawa Citizen often do), then you’re likely funded by foreigners, probably Russians and government agents can denounce you.
So the left accuses the right, the government funded accuse the independents, the Russians, or their “cutouts,” accuse the Chinese and the tall accuse the short.
Everyone hates everyone else. Reason and evidence have left the room.
The idea that the US governments indictment against what could (but might not) be Tenet Media was design to frighten all the other media outlets no matter what their political or editorial stance, seems a pretty solid explanation of what’s currently happening in Canada.
Legacy Media Doesn’t Want to Talk about Chinese Election Interference
Our second piece tonight is a free wheeling discussion about how the legacy media mostly doesn’t want to talk about Chinese foreign interference in Canadian Elections.
This reticence is in spite of the fact that Canada’s Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference, started up specifically because of leaked information from “anonymous” sources and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) documents outlining Chinese, not Russian of Indian interference in the 2019 and 2021 Federal elections.
We reference three stories:
The October 31st, 2024 CBC News post, “Trudeau says he has asked security agencies to share foreign interference information with Poilievre.”
The October 16th, 2024 Global News post, “Trudeau defends NSIA’s timeline of sharing Chinese interference documents.”
The October 28th, 2024 CPAC on YouTube post, “MP Kevin Vuong speaks with reporters about foreign interference – October 28, 2024.”
It goes down some pretty interesting rabbit holes that the Federal government might not want to talk about.
Hopefully Freedom Forum won’t need to respond to inquiries from Canadian government officials. They seem to infer that anyone who’s concerned over Chinese interference in Canadian elections is probably a Russian disinformation agent.
Dasvidaniya…
Combatting Media Lies
We finish up with an optimistic short video relating directly to everything discussed earlier in the show.
It’s the November 3rd, 2024 Mongo Minds on Bitchute post, “Switch the TV Off.”
“Roasting the Press,” is an open forum with new media journalists critiquing and complaining about our well funded competitors, the stories they create and the techniques they use.
For more information on the show, or to become a guest, please send an email to chuck.black@protonmail.com.
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