Postmedia APOLOGIZES for stealing Rebel News content

Postmedia, owners of Canada's largest newspaper chain, issued an apology to Rebel News after the company was caught stealing Rebel content.

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The largest newspaper company in Canada just apologized to Rebel News. Their letter reads:

Dear Ezra,

On behalf of Postmedia, I write to apologize to you, Rebel News, and Keean Bexte for inappropriately using your photo and video without properly crediting the source of the photo/video or payment, and for removing your logo from the video and replacing it with our logo. That was wrong and we are sorry. I have spoken with the senior editorial team to reiterate it is completely unacceptable to reproduce content from other media without proper acknowledgement.

Sincerely,

Lucinda Chodan,

Senior Vice President Editorial

Postmedia — which owns most of the daily newspapers in Canada — was stealing our Rebel News photos and videos. They just took our work without permission, without payment, and then they took unethical steps to hide it. They actually stripped off our Rebel News logo, and put their own company logo on our work. As if it was their work.

We caught them. We demanded they stop. They wouldn’t. So we sued them.

But that’s like a canoe suing a battleship. They’re the richest newspaper company in Canada. And they’re not even Canadian. Postmedia is owned by a giant New Jersey hedge fund called Chatham Asset Management, a vulture fund worth billions. They can afford to pay their own reporters to do their own work — they don’t need to steal ours and put their logo on it.

But the idea of a vulture fund is just what it sounds like: pay as little as possible. Wring out as much as possible. Get away with whatever you can. Never apologize, never explain — that’s their mindset.

Postmedia wasn’t always this way. I used to work there myself. They were once the closest thing Canada had to a conservative-leaning news company. But that was then, this is now. Today, they’re the number one recipient of Trudeau’s bail-out money. They take $140,000/week from Trudeau, and it shows.

And like Trudeau, they're as arrogant as they are rich. For two years, Postmedia refused to pay us for what they stole. They refused to acknowledge they even stole it — they claimed they had the right to use our work.

But this morning, two years after the fact, they admitted everything. What made them change their mind? Well, we finally got to court this morning. We had a special court mediation in front of Deputy Judge Carla Bocci. Postmedia brought out all their big guns — a senior in-house lawyer, a senior hired gun, and their Senior VP editorial. Three big guns to fight against us.

But they blinked. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Even the billionaire bullies sometimes admit they’re wrong. Read their apology for yourself. They were “inappropriate.” They were “wrong.” What they did was “completely unacceptable.”

So why did they apologize? Only they know for sure. But I think I know what it was. I think someone finally stood up to them, that’s what.

Look, we’re just a small news company run by citizen journalists. Normally, people like us get run over by billionaires like Trudeau’s Postmedia. They certainly did everything they could to delay today’s court date — they stretched it out for two years.

But when I made it clear to them that we weren’t going to back down — they did. There’s a lesson here: To all the David’s out there, keep fighting. Goliath looks mean, but if you show courage, you can sometimes win. And even get Goliath to apologize to you.

It’s funny; Postmedia mocks our journalism all the time. But they were secretly stealing it. Makes you think.

Read the official apology below:

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  • By Ezra Levant

Real Reporters

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