When a “social experiment” escapes the studio

Frances Widdowson and Lindsay Shepherd say they were set up for a reality show using fake interviews, fake premises and a fake talk show called Wake Up Canada.

One thing you need to know about television broadcasting, before I get into this is that news and entertainment are silos.

At broadcasters like CTV, CBC, Global, and APTN, or anywhere else where the news department is arm’s length from entertainment, marketing, and advertising. So much so that we could pass our colleagues on the street without knowing they work for the same outlet.

Occasionally, when a broadcaster is just about to launch a new show, someone from communications will ask the news if we want to cover it.

Sometimes we do. Mostly, curmudgeons that we are, we don’t.

It depends on whether anything is genuinely newsworthy: an actor making a comeback, a final season, a controversy. News is not a promo department, after all.

So this evening, I was at my desk, typing madly over a story from a press conference, trying to get my scripts done for Nation to Nation — already running late — already knowing I was late for dinner with my newly adopted cat and she was going to be furiously hangry… when a friend messaged me.

“What is this show?”

She sent tweets and said APTN was involved.

It is from the entertainment side, so everything I know at the moment is from social media posts, and what I have been able to late-night-fact-check.

Frances Widdowson, set-up by fake company called "Forge Media"

It starts with Frances Widdowson posting a live video on X yesterday.

Frances Widdowson is a former tenured associate professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, where she taught in the Department of Economics, Justice and Policy Studies from 2008 until December 2021.

The video, streamed from her cellphone, opens with a shot of a coffee table covered in shoes. Running shoes. Uggs. Sandals. Rubber boots. Like someone dumped a sales bin onto the table.

She pans to a man seated to her right, an oddly dressed man in a purplish suit and a yellow shirt. They are sitting on what appears to be a talk show set. There is a TV screen with a maple leaf logo and the words “Wake Up Canada.”

Widdowson begins narrating.

According to Widdowson, she thought she was part of a talk show that challenged wokeness, to discuss Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations, when two Indigenous people walked in, “glared” at her and dumped the shoes on the table.

If you follow Indigenous people at all, you know worn shoes have become symbolic of deceased or missing women and children.

And for more context, in case you don't know, Widdowson has not been popular with Indigenous people since she wrote Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation in 2008.

Debating the content of the book is a whole other blog post, but I think I could sum up my own opinion by saying it doesn't include all the sources I think it should, and if it did, I believe the facts would lead to a different conclusion.

More recently, Widdowson has been questioning whether or not the graves found near residential schools are really graves. Last year, she, rather provocatively, decided to try to make her point at a gathering of Indigenous residential school survivors and their families in Winnipeg, on September 30, Orange Shirt Day — at an event specifically meant to remember those lost and honour the survivors.

Fair to say she wasn’t being sensitive, nor was it even a remotely effective plan to make her point.

So, back to the video, Widdowson describes the production as an outfit doing a reality television show that wants to paint her, she says, “I guess as some kind of a racist or something, that they’re gonna post on social media.”

Then she points her phone at the host and starts questioning him.

He says his name is “Mike Smith,” he is from Missouri, and he works for the two Indigenous people who dumped the shoes.

“You’ve got it exactly right,” he tells her. “You’ve defined it precisely. Well, I wouldn’t say exactly right. This is a social experiment. And it’s on video, and I’m on YouTube,” he says, noting Widdowson's live stream, “So we’re on video together.”

When Widdowson asks if she is “a target,” he insists she is not. He repeats that she is participating in a “social experiment.”

When she asks what the social experiment is, he tells her, “You just experienced it.”

That is about as much clarity as she gets.

Widdowson keeps talking, partly to him, partly to the phone camera.

She says she thought the show she was invited to, called Wake Up, was supposed to be a “woke exposé.” She says she wishes she had done more research before falling for the setup.

“I’m an honest academic who is trying to understand Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations,” she says. But then she adds that it doesn't really matter if it was a setup, since she spoke honestly about her views.

“I thought it was a pretty good interview, actually,” she says, and laughs.

“Yeah, I agree,” the host says. “I think you did get to say a lot of things that you’ve been saying.”

“I’m happy for you to publish it widely and whatever,” she says. “But I don’t understand what the context is. Like, what is the program? Where is it gonna be released?”

The host does not give a clear answer. He tells her they can continue the conversation later, and says he is happy to call and talk to her.

Widdowson muses that she thought she was going to be an “honoured guest.” Then she adds, “I guess I sort of was.. It’s just a different context.”

Widdowson continues filming for a few more minutes, panning the studio and pointing out the large crew and expensive set, and the host walks her to her car.

Widdowson did not say how, but she later posted that she discovered the host is actually Igor Vamos.

The ‘host’ in the video does bear a striking resemblance to Vamos, an associate professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who is also one of the key members The Yes Men, performance activists who use parody and stunts to draw attention to social and political issues in videos.

Lindsay Shepherd: “..a setup in order to demonize Sir John A and smear me”

Today, Lindsay Shepherd, the Director of Communications and Engagement at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a right-wing think tank, posted on X that she had been punked too.

.

“I found out recently that I was deceived by social activists in an elaborate scheme dating back to January. A production group with what I now know has a fake name and fake identities gave me a friendly interview about my book A Day with Sir John A, and about Sir John A Macdonald, back in Feb.,” she wrote.

”They connected me with a fake company called Heritage Figures Canada with a fake website and "hired" me to perform consulting work for them. We had what I now know were fake meetings, fake documents, fake commercial shoot, fake prototype of a Sir John A collectible. Then, in a second filmed interview last week, they turned on me, and it was revealed to have all been a setup in order to demonize Sir John A and smear me.”

Sheppard also posted that she had traced the production to CBC and APTN, posting a screenshot of what she says is an email from CBC’s Director of PR, Katherine Wolfgang.

The mail indicated the production was in the early stages and was not being made in-house, but was being created by independent producers. Most TV entertainment is contracted out.

---

UPDATE: It seems the production is a project called COUNTING COUP by Northland tales. The phrase Counting Coup is an old one I haven’t heard in a while. It refers to warriors demonstrating bravery in battle by risking their lives to get close enough to a live enemy to touch them, and live to tell about it.

---

I don’t know about CBC, but APTN has done a social-experiment reality show before. Called First Contact, it was based on a similar Australian series and took six white participants who held stereotypes about Indigenous people — lazy, alcoholic, hopeless welfare cheats — into real Indigenous communities.

When it was first being filmed, I remember thinking: Well, this could go badly.

It didn’t. Or at least, not in the way I feared. I have since used clips from it while teaching reconciliation.

So, now, it seems I have been induced into writing a damn promo- and for a show I haven’t seen, and I don’t know if I will like, but it is likely I will watch, if it makes it to air.

For now, it sounds like the jig is up. I don't think they will catch anyone else unsuspecting. And it seems the public part of ‘this social experiment’ has already begun on X.