Thread by @Norlaine

I just watched this evening's "Blackballed" podcast with @jamesdifiore and guests, including David Wallace (@Pick61989) and Nathan Jacobson, Justin Ling and @ryanlindley. For the first time I got organized to watch it live. I have some observations. 1/25

To preface, there was a bit of Twitter hostility going on leading up to this podcast. Justin Ling had posted a thing where he appeared to be quite dismissive of the #KlondikePapers and the people involved in presenting the story. 2/25

KP enthusiasts were angry that this presumed goldmine was being dissed. Wallace was angry at what he identified as incorrect assertions in the post. Jacobson felt he had been misrepresented. Di fiore felt he was being dissed as some sort of shock jock. 3/25

The podcast was primed to be a powderkeg. And there was quite a lot of cross-talking that made it difficult at times to figure out what people were saying. There were some accusations flying around. Amazingly, in about 1.5 hours they did seem to arrive at a sort of détente. 4/25

One key takeaway was a message that Justin Ling made quite impressively. "Keep your powder dry". He cautioned against damaging the credibility of fully substantiated stories by making loud proclamations about stories that are not as easily verified. 5/25

It's very good advice. If you aren't familiar with Ling's work, he has a pretty impressive track record of investigative journalism. He created the CBC documentary series "The Village" about murder and mayhem in Toronto's gay community. He covered the convoy this winter. 6/25

His other work covers a wide range of issues going back quite a few years. I and others who have admired and respected his work were taken aback by his dismissive treatment of the Klondike dossier. In person on the podcast, he was much more eloquent about his reservations. 7/25

And what seems to have happened here is all this material got dumped into the hands of media, both main stream and independent. And some were doing due diligence, some were putting out articles fairly quickly on some of it, 8/25

and some were getting into shouting allegations that could not be substantiated, given the material publicly available. Close to 7,000 pages of random emails, bank statements, text messages, and recorded phone calls is daunting. And a lot of it seems to have no context. 9/25

The point was raised in the podcast that David Wallace probably has all the contexts in his head. What really needs to happen for this resource to be properly vetted, is for an investigative journalist, or a team of them, to sit down with Wallace & go through the material. 10/25

Then he could provide the context for each piece and the journalists could go out and try to verify that particular story. After the podcast, I was imagining that there are journalists looking at an email and going, "What's going on here? What's the story? 11/25

How does this connect to any of the rest of this?" And that seems to be a big problem. Both Ling and Di fiore referenced getting this pile of material and it was completely disorganized. That is a problem that can lead to delays and skepticism. 12/25

Other observations... Nathan Jacobson is a big personality. I also grew up in Winnipeg. I am more than a decade younger than Nathan, but Winnipeg at the time had a weirdly "small town" vibe. Way less than 6 degrees of separation in most cases. 13/25

So everyone you met in one part of your life knew people from some completely unrelated part of your life. Anyway, Nathan was someone people talked about. Even after he had left Winnipeg. So I recognized his name when he was introduced to this conversation. 14/25

He has some great stories and he likes to talk. I would recommend getting him on by himself to talk. When he is on with other guests he has that kind of personality that takes over the show. Admittedly a bit less this time than in previous podcasts. 15/25

I feel it does a disservice to what other guests might contribute to make them compete with him.

Another observation... Five guys trying to talk on a podcast is too many. I get why they did that, getting all the adversarial characters in the same place to hash it all out. 16/25

But it's hard for the viewer to hear what is being said and who is saying what.

Also, I recognize that this dudeism is what these podcaster do. But, guys, you could seriously use some female voices. I know you had that convoy-embedded woman on a couple of episodes ago. 17/25

And it looked pretty uncomfortable most of the time, especially when her bare knees became the focus. If you want to have women watch and enjoy your podcast, you need to be more inclusive. We have enough men in our lives telling us stuff. 18/25

If you don't care about female viewership, or if you can't think of any women who could add anything to the convo, then you will wind up with a primarily male audience. Just saying. We all get mansplained to all the f*cking time. We don't look for that in our rec time. 19/25

This particular subject is interesting enough to tune in for that specific topic, but I can't think of too many women who would just watch because they enjoy your opinions about everything. Just a bit of free advice. 20/25

Finally, I hope these podcasters follow their own advice. I hope David Wallace gets a copy of the Klondike Papers back into his possession and goes through them and puts together the narratives that link the evidence together to make cohesive stories. 21/25

That would be amazing. He is probably the only one that can connect all the disparate bits of evidence & explain what is going on in each case. There's 3 decades of material, potentially revealing a lot of malfeasance. But it's not useful as a disconnected pile of receipts. 22/25

So, tonight's podcast sorted out a lot of bad feelings and miscommunications around Justin Ling's post. It really revealed a lot of unfortunate aspects of how this material was presented. So, maybe there is explosive evidence in there, but MSM is struggling with it. 23/25

Stuff needs to be better compiled and explained before all credibility is lost. If the smoking guns are in there, get organized. Make sure the evidence is cohesive and backs up each story. This could be incredibly important for democracy in Canada. 24/25

But only if it is curated to present a cohesive narrative that is difficult or impossible to counter.

Finally, if Jason Ling has blocked me for some reason, someone please tell him I admire his work, & I better understand his perspective about this after this podcast. Tx. 25/25

*Justin Ling. Sorry. typo.