Front Burner - The year in opinion

Episode Date: December 28, 2018

"We must engage with people who don't agree with us," says Simi Sara host of The Simi Sara Show. She joins Buzzfeed's Elamin Abdelmahmoud and The Globe's Adrian Lee for a chat about the stories that generated the most discussion and opinion in 2018.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Here's a question.

What story do you think people cared about most this year? I know, care is subjective. I'll be more specific. Cared like the story that made them want to post, argue, discuss, call in, or tweet about. It probably depends on who you are, right? And where you get your news. Well, today we're going to try and tap into that by peering into a few different bubbles to look at the year in opinion. I'll be talking to The Globe and Mail's Adrienne Lee, Elamin Abdel-Mamoud from BuzzFeed News, and Simi Sara of Vancouver CKNW. That's coming up on FrontBurner. Hello, everyone. Oh, hello. Oh, everyone.

Oh, hello. Oh, hi. Hello. So what I want to do here is go through the stories that generated the most heat for you this year, the ones that really seem to tap into something that people care about. So, Simi, if we could start with you. You host a private radio show in Vancouver. You always put out a hot question of the day.

We do. So what was the story that generated the most reaction from your audience this year? I would say this year, BC has a couple of unique issues as well that generated a lot of discussion like money laundering and the opioid overdose crisis. But on a national perspective, I would say what we got the most traction on is definitely cannabis legalization. I mean, in BC, it's a bit different out here, right? We've been kind of living with a more mainstream view of cannabis for some time now. And in the city of Vancouver alone, we've had dozens of kind of recreational cannabis shops,

technically medicinal marijuana, but they were, you know, selling it quite openly for years. As far as I'm concerned, it's more or less already legal in Vancouver. So, you know, for years. As far as I'm concerned, it's more or less already legal in Vancouver. So, you know, I don't think it changes much here. And so the fact that that issue came to so dominate, I thought was very interesting. And it wasn't a matter of a lot of opposition to the story. It was a matter of let's hurry up and get this thing done. Where is my neighborhood pot shop? So it was a bit of a different kind of take on it. Some of the arguments we're hearing here in Ontario, though, is that they still don't trust the government to get them good quality weed. So they're sticking with their local dealer. Are you hearing the same thing up there?

Maybe I can believe that. I don't know. We had a lot of that. I had a lot of callers to my show saying exactly that, that, oh, it's going to be too expensive. Government doesn't know how to do this. I've been buying from the same guy for years now, and I'm just going to keep trusting this guy. And I thought, wait a minute, we decided to do this as a way of getting rid of gang influence in the drug industry as a way of making some more tax revenue. And you're saying that even though you got what you wanted, a legalized system, you're still going to buy from your drug dealer. And it just doesn't make sense.

And no matter what you told people about, just give it time, eventually you're going to start buying, you know, from the legal store, they just wouldn't buy it. And so I'm in the next year for 2019 going to be keeping my eye on that, just seeing the numbers,

how many people are switching to the legal system, and is there still this persistent kind of underground illegal cannabis system out there? I don't know, Simi. I mean, I feel like we don't take weed as seriously as people in BC do. And so we being Ontarians, just to put it lightly. Very lightly. But the thing is, like, we bungled the rollout of legal weed in this province. And so people just keep, you know, the wait times are out of control.

The number of stores that we're supposed to open has dropped by, like, almost a half. It's just generally a mess. Like, everyone's like, wait, my dealer was some guy that I emailed and he shows up with my weed 10 minutes later. Why would I ever change that system for a system that is like a broken Amazon of weed? But isn't that interesting, though, that that's what the government got wrong about that is that you heard about some provinces like Ontario playing it down being like, oh, this isn't a big deal. But clearly, the response from the public does not indicate that it was not a big deal. They want their legal weed. They want it. So that was Elamin before

talking about our broken weed system here in Ontario. Adrian, you now work at the Globe and Mail. I do. You are an opinion editor, an opinion editor there. I am. But for much of the year, you were the opinion editor at Maclean's. A little bit of an older audience than BuzzFeed. What were your readers saying about weed legalization in Canada? Yeah. One of the big pieces that Maclean's ran was a piece exploring just how much the government has struggled with that rollout. And I think that really resonated with a lot of folks. It's almost as if the government has not a great reputation of delivering services to its people. Stop me if you can stop me. I know it's a wild one. Hot take incoming.

Hot take. That's a pull quote from this panel. But, you know, that's something that resonates broadly, even if you don't smoke marijuana, right? Even if you, or, you know, consume it, I guess. There's so many other kinds of issues, right? There's issues of taxation. There's issues of the delivery system, as we're talking about. There's issues around medical marijuana users and how this impacts them. And also access, you know, whether or not there are simply enough for the demand, which the whole thing would go pitong if it wasn't.

So, yeah, I think that as far as legal weed, I think that's an issue. But I'm also struck by the fact that unusual. It's almost like people are never happy with anything. I'm starting to think that maybe people are mad. We just want to complain about something all the time. Yeah. I mean, you run the BuzzFeed Morning newsletter, and I know that it's focused on a U.S. audience, but I get it. And I think a lot of Canadians probably get it, too.

So what were the stories that your audience connected with the most? A couple of big stories for us. I think the biggest story has been this continuous sort of turmoil that Facebook has been in since, you know, forever. But really since February and March, the first scandal that they had was this Cambridge Analytica story where it turns out that, you know, Facebook had exposed the information of 87 million people. But it's estimated that more than 620,000 Canadians have had their information improperly shared. To this company, Cambridge Analytica, which then used it to build sort of a war chest of information for the Trump campaign. It didn't stop there. It only got worse for Facebook. So I think I've counted, by my last count, we've got eight scandals this year for data scandals for Facebook.

Not a great year for Mark Zuckerberg. Nope. No, he's having a terrible time. And you know what? He keeps just slightly missing the tone of people. It's going to take some time to work through all the changes we need to make. But I'm committed to getting this right. And that includes the basic responsibility of protecting people's information, which we failed to do with Cambridge Analytica. So, for example, Facebook tried to patent this new algorithm that tries to guess where you're going for the day.

So it's just, you know, predict based on all your habits where your day is going to go from point A to point B to point C. And I'm like, Facebook, read the room, right? Like people are deeply alarmed by the ways that you've encroached into their lives, all these privacy sort of overreaches. And they're like, no, we're not too, you know, I mean, they say they're concerned about it, but then their actions don't suggest the same thing. So in light of that has been like this massive sort of social media reckoning. People are having a moment of being like, should I be giving these platforms, you know, all my information? Now, I don't see a lot of people quitting those platforms. I just see a lot of people complaining about it. Yeah. But I would, you know, this is a weird thing to

say, but I'm a little bit delighted that this is happening. Obviously, it's horrible. But privacy has long been something that we have taken for granted, that it's an essential right that so many people have traded away for pennies on the dollar, not even pennies. If anything, you know, we look at things like Alexa or Google Home, and people are paying to give away their valuable data. And people are starting to realize that that is a huge issue. And as a person who works with opinion, it's been really hard to drive traffic, or it's really hard to drive interest in that stuff, because people have basically just said, well, I'd rather have convenience.

Simi, what are you hearing from your listeners when it comes to big tech companies? I agree with Adrian on this too. I have trouble with the outrage when it comes to these big tech companies because we are the ones who are handing over all this information. And we are the ones inviting these devices that are listening to everything we say into our homes, because apparently we don't want to get up and turn on a light switch by ourselves. We don't want to turn the TV on. We don't want to get up off the couch. We don't want to do anything. We want these devices to do it all for us. But don't tell us exactly how those devices are getting all that information. And we are going to get all upset about that. I don't want just like my information just being like sold out there and I don't know what

it's being used for. I saw this year a lot more people who said, I'm done with this. I'm done with, you know, being on Facebook all the time. I'm done with putting up all this information. And I think people are being a little bit more reticent about what it is that they are providing on their social media platforms. Do they need to put the picture of every single thing out there? And I don't know if that's an age group thing, if younger people still feel that way, but I am certainly seeing this year in particular, way more reluctance to engage in that level of social media that we have seen in the last few years. Let's move on to politics. Adrian, lots of politics in McLean's and The Globe. What were you hearing from readers this year? Well, I think without being explicit, obviously, the federal election is coming up and there's a lot of thinking about that.

There were the midterm elections in America. But I think, you know, this isn't necessarily explicitly political, but I think the way to think about it is, and that's actually part of the shift, which is climate change. So climate change has really infused the way we think about everything. being a good measure of whether or not something is captivating an audience. I actually think that the way we're talking about climate change now is really showing what actual impact is, which is to say we're looking at things through different lenses. We are looking of climate change as political. We are thinking of climate change affecting issues around migration. We're thinking about climate change affecting, you know, in France about issues of populism and protest and activism.

I think it's a broad topic that has always been something in the background. And this year, not only are people talking about it, but we're thinking of how it infuses our lives in a fundamental way. Are you finding that your readers are really engaging on this subject? Because climate stories have not always been the most popular stories for media organizations. Oh, my God, the most unpopular stories. Yes. Yeah. You know, I can't speak to – I can only speak to what I sort of saw anecdotally from McLean's.

But I can say that it certainly drove outrage. And I think that that's interesting unto itself, right? We are seeing climate change be something that people have firmed up their beliefs on, have in a way entrenched some of those opinions. That's a bad and a good thing. I think a lot of the times we see people have strong opinions, really provoke better debate. Not always. But as far as like specific and explicit volume, no, I can't say that necessarily climate change has. necessarily climate change has. But I do think the more lenses we see the issue through,

the more opportunities we have to get through different audiences and say, hey, this actually affects you in a way that's more specific and more direct than, look, the world's on fire. Simi, how about your position on this and the position of your listeners being from the West Coast? There are some specific issues playing out there. I think it's very different from what you hear and what you deal with in central Canada, because maybe people aren't clicking on those stories or reading them because you're talking about it in more broad terms. In BC, it's about oil. It's about pipelines. It's about our carbon tax that we've had for 10 years that, you know, is still going strong. All of those issues generate a ton of discussion here. And that is all linked to climate change. So it's very, I think, more personal for us here on the West Coast.

But I guess what I want to just jump in and say, Simi, is that what you're saying is that the political is personal. I think that that's that aligns with what I'm saying, right? That Western Canada is finds the climate change issue deeply personal. And I think increasingly we're finding that to also be true of central Canada or the world more broadly. And that's the value of these lenses. You're hitting people where they didn't think climate change was really going to affect them. Another takeaway for me here is that not only is BC ahead of us on weed, but also on climate change. weed, but also on climate change. So I want to deal with another massive story that played itself out this year. So the Me Too movement, you know, it started in October of 2017 with the New York

Times reporting on Harvey Weinstein. But throughout 2018, it really exploded, this idea that women were just fed up with treatment at the hands of men. But I want to talk about the pushback to that movement as well. In January of this year, Aziz Ansari, for example, was accused of sexual impropriety. A website published a detailed account of a young woman's night out with the actor, a date she described as, quote, the worst night of my life. That's when this conversation around Me Too also seemed to shift a little bit. We started to hear more of a pushback against the movement. And Alameen, I'm interested, you know, what was the reaction from your readers about the idea that Me Too may have gone too far? I think that because of our audience and their interests, that idea didn't fly.

There is always room to critique the way that Me Too movement is proceeding forward. But that has never been a question of like, has it outgrown its usefulness? Has it gone too far? So the Aziz Ansari story was like an interesting one in that it was like a more complicated narrative than, you know, say a Harvey Weinstein who's accused of like a laundry list of crimes. Whereas Aziz Ansari, some people were like, well, this sounds like it was just like a bad date. And then other people were like, no, this is clearly sort of an instance of rape. That opened up actually I think a more – a richer vein of discussion than we had before, which is to say like what is consent? And we were never very good at talking about consent.

But now we had sort of the solid example to dig into. Simi, thoughts on this story? What are you hearing from your listeners? Yeah, I think people are very interested. A lot of people have – they speak from personal experience on this. And I think the pushback is just part of the process. No matter what story you have, if you go too much in one direction, there's always going to be pushback on this. And I think the pushback is just part of the process. No matter what story you have, if you go too much in one direction,

there's always going to be pushback on that. And you eventually come to a better understanding of I think the issue as a whole. And I think that's the process that we're in right now when it comes to the Me Too movement. Initially, you will get people who just wanna, you know, be angry about it and sound off and say, well, I dealt with it and therefore everybody else

should be able to deal with it too. But I think that's part of the discussion, right? If you can bring people together to say, we understand that happened to you, but let's talk about why that was wrong. And it's okay to admit that was wrong. And so I think, again, this is not over by a long shot. I think there's a behavioral change that needs to happen. Clearly, a lot of people still need to learn how to modify and change their behavior for the better. So I think this is going to continue to be a story for the next few years. I want to talk about this concept of entrenchment, too, when it comes to opinions and people's opinions. The prevailing sentiment these days is that people are more divided than ever,

opinions. The prevailing sentiment these days is that people are more divided than ever and that they're more entrenched in their beliefs than ever. And I'm curious to know in your own jobs what you're seeing. Are people's opinions more extreme than ever? Adrian? I don't know if people's opinions are more extreme than ever. I think I would like to believe they're not. And there was an interesting study from a USC prof who says that neuroscience suggests that there's actually a physiological response to being challenged on things that are personal. And I worry that that's what we're at, that many people feel like they already know what an opinion has to say. And in that way, yes, opinion has become more entrenched. There is a belief that I subscribe to one opinion and that's my opinion. I'm not going to hear other kinds of facts. But the reality of facts are facts, right? Different kinds of lenses are

important and voices are important. I've been thinking about this, forgive my sort of pretension here, but I've been thinking about this Pablo Neruda quote, with a single life, I will not learn enough. With the light of many lives, many lives will live in my song. And I think that that's really what people should be trying to do. I'm hopeful. I don't know if I can hold on to that hope. Do you get the sense from your readers that people are trying to do that? It's hard to say. There's a lot of folks on social media where you know that they have not even read the piece, whether it's the fact that they're responding eight seconds after it was posted, implying that maybe they didn't read it. You sure? Or responding with a vitriolic response to something that was directly addressed in the piece. It suggests to me that no,

actually, people are deeply entrenched. However, I do think that the work that is being done of showing that opinion isn't just, oh, everyone's got one, but actually a matter of here's facts and what I've gleaned from it. I'd like to believe that there is the sort of silent majority of people who are interacting with those facts and going, oh, I never thought it that way. I don't change my mind, but I'm interested to hear that that is a life you have. Simi, what are your thoughts on this? What are you hearing from your listeners? Well, I don't have a Pablo Neruda quote for that. Yeah, that was like a real mic drop on this. Yeah. However, I do four hours of open line talk shows five days a week. So I engage and interact with people a lot. My favorite comment and call that I got

from someone in 2018 was a gentleman who called me and said, you know, sometimes when he's listening to me, he wants to pull his hair out and it just drives him crazy. And he disagrees with 90% of what I say. However, he still listens and he respects the opinion and he likes that I engage with him and that I'm not shouting him down and that we are still sharing. I listen to him when he calls, he emails me. And I thought that is kind of the guide that I try to go by now on my job. If we can engage with somebody, we have to, we must engage with people who don't agree with us. That has been the goal for me this year that I'm going to continue into 2019 because I think we're lost if

we can't actually have conversations with people who maybe we voted for somebody, you know, that we don't agree on. Maybe we disagree on some public policy, but we should still be able to have a decent conversation. Elamin, last word on this to you. Oh boy, last word. No pressure, my friend. Thanks a lot. Two things. The first thing is that hearing from people who read content online is already like a preselected sample of sometimes the angriest of the bunch. Right. Because most people probably aren't going to take the time to write you. Right. And you very rarely get an email that's like, hey, so I read the thing and it changed my mind.

Thank you. Have a good day. That is just like not the way that most people operate. And I've come to accept that. I've come to accept that that is where the silent majority are. Maybe they're not changing their minds about everything, but every once in a while something will hit. The other thing is that my wonderful colleague Craig Silverman sort of coined this phrase. It's about the flattening effect of social media.

effect of social media. So if you're scrolling Facebook and your buddy Matt from high school and the New York Times occupy the same visual plane on your feed, and that's nuts, right? Like that's patently wild that someone can just say something and it occupies visually the same authority that a well-researched article might. And so what that does is I think it's emboldened a few people to just say, no, no, no, no. I don't even need to read your thing. I know that it's incorrect because I have the same authority as every other news organization. I can just broadcast my opinion and it feels as substantial or as weighty. In reality, it's not. And I know my buddy Matt from high school doesn't know anything about anything. And that's fine. This is not about Matt.

This is entirely about the fact that we've lost our sort of center of authority. We've sort of lost this appeal to the people who know what they're talking about. And so if everything feels like opinion, then nothing matters. And that's sort of what makes me the most concerned. All right. Last question. If you were to guess what was CBC Opinion's

top story this year, what would it be? Elamin. Wasn't something about the carbon tax, was it? No. Oh, boy. I don't know.

Is it about baby, it's cold outside? Yes! I really can't stay. But baby, it's cold outside. Yes! I really can't stay. But baby, it's cold outside. How did you get that? It's hard to say. The most popular story on CBC Opinion's website is about the Christmas song, Baby, It's Cold Outside.

And the CBC's decision to pull it from two of its streams and multiple radio stations across Canada to pull it from the radio stations. And we did an entire front burner episode about this, which you can listen to. But Simi, does that surprise you? No, it doesn't surprise me because this goes to that, what we've been talking about, right? All throughout this episode is that people do love to get outraged. And people love to look for evidence of the world's going crazy. And they viewed that whole discussion as part of that, where I thought, oh, boy, just let this calm down here, everybody. And so when I got into discussions with people about that, I would say to them, well, have you actually read all of the lyrics?

And are you okay with all of the lyrics? And so it was just one of those things, I think, that is emblematic of everything we talked about today. It was easy for people to get outraged over. So it does not surprise me that that was number one. Guys, thanks so much for this conversation today. It was a lot of fun and really enlightening. And I hope that you'll come back.

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Great. Happy holidays. And to you. You too. That's it for us this week.

FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Chris Berube, Elaine Chao and Alina Ghosh, Shannon Higgins and Robert Parker, with sound design by Derek Vanderwyk. Our music is by Joseph Chabison and Boombox Sound. Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos. And I'm your host, Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back.

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