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(Quebec) The owner of Radio X is stepping up efforts to unmask the Coalition’s editors before the courts. In particular, the station wants to end the campaign targeting its advertisers, many of whom are “nervous” and “wary”.
The radio is asking to “stop harassing customers or making customers feel disgusted in good French,” according to words used by its general manager, Philippe Lefebvre, during a preliminary examination within the framework of the case.
The legal attack by RNC Media – which owns Radio X – comes as its critics redoubled efforts to damage the station’s reputation and business after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Remember that Radio X was the target of a massive boycott campaign in September 2020. Quebec City announced that it would stop advertising on the station as the antenna “sets up.”[ait] risk to public health.” The city has since reconsidered its position.
At the same time, the Get Out of the Trash Coalition radio stations ran the names of RNC bosses on its platforms.1 and a list of Radio X’s promoters. It invited people to write to advertisers asking them to stop buying ads there.
The RNC wants to stop these methods. So the media company sued Patrice Vachon and Julien Gaudreau.
The RNC thinks two Quebecers are behind the Chords les Radios-Pabelles website and that they animated its Facebook page and its Twitter account, which key interested parties deny.
It seeks a series of measures that could compel Sortons les radios-poubles to completely cease its activities, such as “ceasing the operation of any website, Facebook page or Twitter account dealing with the plaintiff or its administrators”.
The RNC is calling for an end to “all forms of harassment or disparagement” of Radio X, and wants to ban Sorden’s Radios-Trash from “any reference to executives” or “compiling a list of advertisers.”
The company demands $10,000 from both. “We lost a lot more money than that,” said Philippe Lefebvre, vice chairman of the RNC, who was dropped during the experiment for discovery. Some advertisers are “cold” or “nervous” and, according to him, are reluctant to do business with Radio X.
The RNC reserves the right to ask for more money “when the defendants’ implication and the true extent of their wrongdoing is better known.”
Facebook, Twitter, Lark
The case, filed in June 2021, has become more complicated. The RNC continues to deny that the two men are “malicious users” of the coalition. Pres An attorney for the duo was reached, but he declined to comment.
Julien Gaudreau and Patrice Vachon are being sued by the RNC because their names appear on the commercial register as administrators of the non-profit organization “Partner Contre la Radio Trash”, created in 2012 and later dissolved in 2019.
“They tell us it’s not them, but we don’t believe them,” said RNC attorney M.e Bruno Levesque appeared in a Quebec court on March 31.
In its defense, the RNC argues that the case is based on “rumors and hypothetical associations” and denounces a “fishing party” that aims above all to “force and compel the defendants to disclose information that they can detain—actual legal”-up”.
The case was shelved and thereafter the RNC Facebook filed five Norwich-style petitions to force Twitter and internet providers to identify the coalition’s site and social media operators.
When RNC attorneys have this information, they plan to reopen the investigation.
There is no right to anonymity in matters of opinion. What the confederation has been doing for years and wanting to take junk radios and hide it to express its views, this is not the right. In a free and democratic society, I would even say it should be strongly discouraged.
Me Bruno Levesque is a lawyer for RNC Media, which owns Radio X
An attempt to intimidate the RNC?
The threat hanging over the coalition worries the Quebec section of the Ligue des droits et libertés. “The alliance has chosen anonymity since its formation to survive attacks by the patrons of CHOI Radio X and their followers,” the league argues.
The case also worries Dominique Payet, the book’s author Bullies and the Bug: Junk Radio, Free Speech, and the Name-Shaming Trade. He recalled that the Alliance used its sites to archive many of the controversial comments made on the airwaves of Quebec’s talk radio stations.
“Radio stations are removing controversial comments from their websites. If you don’t have this archive it becomes very complicated,” he says. “I don’t know why the RNC is doing this to silence them,” said Mme Payet says Radio X’s critics have had “very painful moments” in the past.
Radio X had already sued an alliance executive in 2013. Jean-François Jacob and the station reached an amicable agreement, but the man said at the time that he lost his job and was forced to leave Quebec.
The coalition says the RNC, for example, has never tried to ask it to end its campaign with advertisers. “If they want to find a solution, let them contact us. But there they want to intimidate,” says Étienne Landier, a spokesman for the alliance, who went by a pseudonym. GerminalBy Emily Zola.
to put an end to all activities of the Alliance; What bothers them is that we can express ourselves.
Étienne Lantier (fictitious name), spokesman for the Coalition Let’s Get Out the Trash Radios
The High Court has yet to hear many Norwich-type movements. It is not known when this original initiative will begin.
The coalition’s website states that it “aims to mobilize the people of Quebec, raise awareness and inform people about hate speech expressed by junk radio and the impact it has on society.”
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