Ideas - What the Next 50 Years of Investigative Journalism Might Look Like

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

CBC's investigative documentary program, The Fifth Estate, turned 50 this year. To commemorate this golden anniversary, a panel of distinguished journalists take us behind the stories and to the current threats facing their profession. As the media landscape continues to shrink, who will hold the powerful to account?

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. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Good evening, everybody, and welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm really excited about this conversation about the current state, the future state of investigative journalism. But before we get going, can I just say... Elamin Abdelmahmoud is the host of the CBC program, Commotion. He moderated a special event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the CBC's flagship investigative TV program, The Fifth Estate. of the CBC's flagship investigative TV program, The Fifth Estate. 50 years is an astonishing run, considering the landscape journalists are operating in now.

Shrinking resources, torrents of disinformation and misinformation, distrust in institutions, including the media, and, in some cases, the very real risk of physical danger. some cases, the very real risk of physical danger. And yet, the Fifth Estate continues to uncover truths that powerful people and institutions would prefer to keep hidden. The Golden Anniversary discussion took place at the Bluma Appel Theatre at the Toronto Public Library in front of a sold-out crowd, and it featured a panel of accomplished investigative journalists who reflected on the state of the profession today and what the future may hold. She's going to go one by one, and then we'll get into it. So first we have Rihanna Croxford. She's an award-winning investigative correspondent with the BBC. You should absolutely find her

World of Secrets, the Abercrombie Guys investigation, Which dropped, I think it was a year ago, was it? Yeah, absolutely incredible work Next to her, Mark Kelly Mark Kelly, one of the hosts of the Fifth Estate He has won an International Emmy He has won so many Geminis Or ran out of Geminis, actually They had to rename the award

That's how many Geminis this guy has won They were like, we can't, we're out of Geminis We've got to introduce a new name. Next to him, a couple of males, Robin Doolittle, who has investigated so many paradigm-shifting investigations just in the last 10 years or so. We're talking about Unfounded, which changed

how people talk about sexual assault and policing in this country. We're talking about also Secret Canada, which I feel like we are going to get into tonight because there's so much of that happening here. And then next to her, of course, Stephen D'Souza. Stephen D'Souza is the newest co-host of Fifth Estate. He's a veteran reporter, two elections.

He's a Canadian Screen Award winner. Sorry, they didn't have Gemini's for you, pal. Mark took them all, but that's all right. Look, let me start by this. Mark, the thing that we talk about so often with investigative is people say it's expensive. People say it's time-consuming. And maybe it would be helpful to orient us a little bit

around what that means. So when we say a story takes years, what goes into that time? What we do and why we do it is for all of you who are here tonight. And we don't often get the opportunity doing what we do to spend time with the people who watch our program. I want to take this opportunity to say thank you, because there's no point in doing what we do if you're not watching what we do.

We are here for you. And I just want to say thank you that tonight you are here for us. But we really appreciate this very much. Because, as mentioned, we're at a time right now where we need your support. And I'm hoping we can count on your support. Because what we do, it does take so much time. It takes time, it takes money, it takes resources. And in a world of shrinking resources, we become a target.

A line item that we saw with W5 when they were recently cancelled, that Bell Media just looked at the cost and said, well, if we take that off the list, we save a bunch of money. But what do we lose with that? I mean, we lose so much of our public interest journalism. So while I want to thank you, I also want to thank the colleagues out here, because when we talk about the time that we spend, the hosts tend to eat up a lot of the oxygen in the room. I'll be very, very honest about that. But the people who are putting in the time are the people who you will not know.

Their names won't necessarily be familiar to you. The associate producers and the producers who work on this show, and the time and the dedication and effort, and yes, sometimes it takes years. Sometimes you've been given a tip that you want to follow up on, you know, the freedom of information requests. That can take months. That can take years. And this work is being done in the background to a point, we can bring it up to a point where the story gets green lit and we go out the door and start shooting our interviews with amazing videographers, amazing editors that bring it all to you. This is a time-consuming process in the name of public interest and in the name

of accountability. It's a team sport. And for all our team members, and I know many of them are out here past and present, thank you for all you do because you make us look so much better and you do such a great service for this country. And we need to keep fighting for the work that we do at the Fifth Estate. We need your support to do that. We need to band together as a team. We need to defend what we do

and we're entering a period right now where we're going to have to do that more than ever. And I don't want to have to tell you that we are important. I want to prove to you that what we do is important by the work we do. Thank you. I appreciated that

emotion and passion coming in terms of defending this field but I still want you to take me through the journey pal I still want you to sort of illustrate so we're talking about a story that goes from I think there's something there to getting it to the audience the idea that this could take months for example what goes into

those months? It's research, it's phone calls. I mean, it's boring. You know, like two things you don't want to see made, the hot dogs and television. I mean, there's just a lot of work that is taken just, you've got sources, you're working on sources, you've got a phone number that leads you to somebody else. Brianna can talk about that. I mean, that takes years. If you're piecing together, it's a bit of a puzzle. And you're convincing people who also to come on air and tell their story. And that

can be a hard thing when there are many forces trying to prevent people from coming on to tell their stories. So there's so much work that is actually done before you actually leave the building with a camera to go do your first interviews. We've got legal reviews of going by. We've got editorial reviews of going by.

You just don't appreciate the process. And the process will grind you down. And by the time that that story gets to air, you never want to watch it again. You've seen it over. And it's like, we have to change this. We've got to restructure that. We've got to rewrite this. You hate it. It's a hard grind. But it's so worth it in the end. And then when I can get home and turn on the TV and watch it, I have never, ever in my years said, you know, that wasn't worth it. There's just this incredible sense of satisfaction, of impact and of making a difference, and of giving a voice to the voiceless and standing up for these people and holding powerful people to account.

There's a deep, deep satisfaction, a professional satisfaction in doing that, and I am so, so proud to say I am a co-host of the Fifth Estate. Beautiful answer. Thank you. Mark, I'm glad you brought up impact because Robin, a project like Unfounded, 20-month investigation,

so much time goes into that. Reading the project, there are so many quotes where I think, I don't know how you get a source to tell you this painful thing that happened in their lives. And then you publish something like that. It goes out into the world.

And cases get re-reviewed. Cases get reopened. In some cases, convictions arrive. That's a really big deal. And I just wonder for you, as you look at a project that is that sprawling, how do you measure the success of something like that? How do you measure impact?

Well, first, I love the name, the Fifth Estate, can I just say, just quickly before I answer your question. And congratulations to the CBC and the Fifth Estate for 50 years, and I'm honoured to be asked to be on this panel today, and Canadians are just so lucky to have you. Measuring impact. I mean, this is the scariest thing as an investigative journalist,

is the truth is when you start doing something and you look at your bosses and say, I need a lot of time to do this, and I need a lot of money and resources to do this, you don't know what's going to happen. So Unfounded was an investigation that we did at the Globe in 2017, I think is when it was published. I started it in 2015. And it was my first big investigation that I did at the Globe and Mail on their investigative team. And again, it took like a year and a half. And it was looking at the ways

that police mishandle sexual assault cases. And through FOI, we looked at how across the country, and there are more than 1,100 different police jurisdictions in Canada, that they were dismissing, on average, about 20% of cases as fake or baseless. Not that we couldn't charge someone, that this is a made-up allegation. And it changed huge amounts of policy. It was a unicorn investigation in some ways in

that it found the perfect sources. We had video, which is not always, you know, happens in newspaper land. We had the data to back it up. But it also landed just before me too at a moment when the culture was really primed to hear that investigation if it had run five years earlier i can see a world where it just kind of goes away and i remember the night before we hit publish i was talking with the editor and we actually had a moment we were kind of looking at each other and going his name's dennis shuckhead and we're like i wonder if this is going to do anything and how do we justify 20 months of work and i think that that is the beauty of of what our news outlets do when they give us this space is you don't know but maybe it does change the country and unfounded did and you know i will if that's the first line

of my obituary i would be completely delighted so when i you know, I will, if that's the first line of my obituary, I would be completely delighted. So when I, you know, start doing a piece of investigative work, I think about, is this really important for the country? Is this something that's going to make my country better? Like that is truly at the heart of what I'm thinking of. And I am really lucky to work at the Globe and Mail, where that's what I view my mandate as being. I think the CBC is similar in that respect. But it's a huge risk. And that's why events like this is just really filling my cup up right now, guys. Because seeing a sold-out show to come nerd out on investigative journalism... Anyway, I don't know if I entirely answered your question there. But the truth is, anyway, I don't know if I entirely answered your question there, but the truth is, I don't know how you can manage impact. When you start, you just, you believe in the story, you know it's

important, and you swing. That's all you can do. And sometimes you miss. I've had things that have not run, that I spent months on. I have several 6,000 word investigations sitting in a folder somewhere that got murdered because it just didn't cross the finish line and that's the other thing is the bar has to be high you have to be prepared to say i don't got it it's not here and um it's it's risky it's soul crushing the highs are amazing the lows are devastating but um i think we're all just so lucky to know that this is our profession uh i want to know what all of those 6,000 word investigations are. They're good, they're good. But I've also learned not to ask

investigative reporters what they're working on. They say, not telling your pal. Rihanna, I want to talk about the Evercarmy guys because that's a project that began I think like talking about trusting your gut and saying, going to an editor and saying I think there's something here, I need to pursue it. That's a project that began with a chance phone call.

How do you train your instincts to say, there's something more here, I need to follow what's happening here? I think a few things happened. So to rewind, I did a story about the former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, Mike Jeffries, who, as a result of my reporting, was arrested and charged with sex trafficking in October. He was charged with running an international sex trafficking and prostitution business,

which I'm still kind of taking in because I spent a good two and a half years in the weeds, digging, not really knowing what the outcome would be. And now I'm sitting here with the understanding that there might be a trial next year. That began with a chance phone call back in 2021 and it was during the Covid lockdown which is a very long time ago and I'd been researching the fashion industry when I spotted a post on Instagram. It was a group of male models talking about how they felt abuse against men in the industry was being overlooked. I reached out to somebody who had commented and

we soon got talking on the phone for about an hour about a whole range of things. When he turned to me and he said, I feel like I couldn't trust you with something that I've never told anyone before. And he told me something which, at the time, when I told my editor, seemed a little bit outlandish. He told me about how a close friend of his had referred him to a middleman who seemingly had no nose and wore a snakeskin patch over it.

And he claimed that Jeffreys had been at the centre of a well-oiled machine one which not only involved this middleman but allegedly a whole network of recruiters he didn't have any evidence other than a diary entry from about 10 years prior when the alleged incident took place talking about the darkest time. So, look, my editor obviously didn't say, you know what, Rihanna, you go work on that story with those very few leads that you have and seemingly no documentary evidence to support

allegations against a man who is a multimillionaire who ran a billion-dollar corporation. But I thought there was truth in it, or something had gone on because of how highly organized it all sounded and largely through word of mouth and later through recovering documentary evidence from old iPads and old laptops I managed to piece together my own trail. It was very old school, knocking on doors, meeting with men who had never spoken before. And that was the other thing that struck me. I'd done a lot of stories in the sexual abuse space involving women, but so rarely do we hear stories like this from men. And so that was also why I thought there was merit looking into it.

And the more evidence I found, the more that I heard, the more I felt a moral imperative to pursue it. There was absolutely nothing in the public domain about it before we released our investigation last year. And that, again, was quite striking, because normally when I'm doing a story like all of us, we can find public records or newspaper archives, you know, threads to pull out. And I definitely felt like I had built a case from scratch, which was quite difficult. Yeah. Yeah. I love that answer. Stephen, look, you've covered natural disasters, you've covered US elections, you've covered mass protests.

disasters, you've covered US elections, you've covered mass protests. I think there's a lot of things that we can do in journalism with the questions of what happened here and whose interests are being served in this place. But I think an investigator maybe demands a different gear, which is to say, what are you not telling me? It sort of invites a different set of questions. What are you not telling me and in whose interest is it to sort of keep these things kind of hidden? How do you make the turn from the other types of reporting that you've done to investigative? Like, how does that change you as a reporter? Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time in New York covering, as you say, natural disasters, mass shootings. And, you know, you're always trying to feed the beast. You're trying to get the story on for that day. And you always come away with the feeling that, you know, there's more there. I know that there's more there. And if only I had the more time, I could ask that

extra question or I could read that extra report or dig a little bit deeper. And so when I came, when I came to the Fifth Estate two and a half years ago, I suddenly had that opportunity to step back from that daily grind and to ask those difficult questions. And suddenly, you know, if I get a phone call in the middle of the night from a source around the world, I had the time to develop that source over months and work into finding the information that that person had and turn it into stories.

So, for example, the first story I did for the Fifth Estate was about the Patel family who died crossing the border from Canada into the United States. And it was a story that was quite personal to me because my wife's family is from the same part of India. My parents came to Canada. And the first question I had, I think like everyone, was why would a family with two small children risk their lives to cross in the middle of winter to go into the United States when Canada has so much to offer and so you know like so many of us it always starts with a very simple question and from there it launches us into very different places and the phone call I got in the middle of the night was after we'd done our first documentary about the family

was from someone in India who had watched our story and said, I have more information for you. And so the question was, will that person trust me and can I trust them? And it was something that unfolded over a number of months, something you can't do when you're on a daily deadline because your editor's always saying, what do we get on the news tonight? And it's something you maybe have to put off to the side but you

know thankfully for a program program like the fifth estate having the amazing staff that we do having the time and the resources that we do we were able to take that single phone call and turn that into our second documentary where we were able to find the individual that Indian police accused of bringing that family to the border because that was another question we had was somebody brought that family to the border and pointed them in the middle of a blizzard across the field and said your freedom is on the other side and a family who'd probably never even seen winter before and so our question was who was that person and so you know we've gotten to a point where now we can say as closely as we can according to the information that we have that we believe

it's this individual and you know you speak you speak about the fear you have sometimes of the stories like do we have it right and that's one that right up until the moment that story went to air we're like are we are we certain that this is the guy? You know, because we're going to put somebody's life on TV and say that this person committed, you know, allegedly a pretty heinous act. Do we have the information right? And so these are the things that, you know, stick with us for so long. And this is why, you know, we value the work that we do and why we put so much work into it and why it takes so long, because you don't want to get it wrong because you know you are playing with people's lives and you know it's so important to get it right and you know just going back to your first question but why it takes so long sometimes it's not always up to us um for example we just aired a documentary recently

on uh the protesters in coots during the convoy and there were some individuals who had some extremist beliefs and we've been working on that for almost two and a half years and part of it was that these men were on trial and so we couldn't air a documentary in the middle of a trial because it would prejudice the judicial proceedings and so that was something that we had to keep working on and working on and sometimes it would go to the side and sometimes it would be front and center and when the trial was over, suddenly we had the information that we had to really tell the story in a way we wanted to.

And so this is the... You know, sometimes things just don't always go according to schedule, but, you know, we always put the work in that we can to be able to get to the final product. I think one of the things you're touching on, and I think it's really important to mention in the work that we do, is the notion of accountability. And that was in the first mission statement of this program.

You know, there's journalism that will tell you what happened. And then we try to explain why things happen. But ultimately what we want to do, and we want to be fierce about this, which is to hold people accountable. And we're living in an age now where trying to hold people accountable is getting more and more difficult because people protect themselves. They sue the journalists to stop us from doing our work. And it's very successful. There are very few organizations, news organizations in this country, and I hope that the Globe and Mail is one of them, along with the CBC, that will protect its journalists with lawyers, will protect its journalists from lawsuits, and will stand up to this form of intimidation. You know, it used to

be that you could sit down and do an interview with somebody, a corporate CEO, whatever person that may be. They'd be available. No, they're never available. Now you're going to get an emailed statement. You're literally chasing a person down a hallway to get them to answer your questions, because that's the only way you can reach them, because they will hide behind lawyers. They will hide behind the PR people. In 1991, there were 13,000 journalists and 23,000 public relations people, PR flacks as we like to call them. In 2021, there were 11,000 journalists, 160,000 PR people. And those PR people make it their job to keep information out of our hands,

to spin a narrative about the great work that's being done, to hide the truth. And that's the big thing that we're fighting against. We're fighting against information that won't be released. I know, Robin, you've spent a lot of time on that in the Globe and Mail with governments that are holding back what is public information from the public broadcaster and other journalists in this country. And you've got very well-trained, you know, PR, damaged PR firms that are protecting their clients, their well-paid clients, and a real lack of accountability. But that drives us, and that's driven us for years, and it drives us to great lengths to find the story, but that's something we can never, ever abandon. And in this age now, where we're talking of disinformation

and misinformation, I mean, that's the paradox of our times right now. We have never had more information available to us than ever before in our history. And yet, so many people are so badly informed. How can that be? And that is a function of the disinformation and the misinformation. And that's also the obstacles that we're up against as we try to tell the stories we do, hold people accountable, and get it right. on U.S. Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus, Thank you. by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted from CBC's Personally, available now. The Fifth Estate turned 50 this year. And to commemorate this remarkable milestone, CBC host Elamin Abdelmahmoud moderated a panel on the state of investigative journalism today. He was joined by the BBC's Rihanna Croxford, the Globe and Mail's Robin Doolittle, and the Fifth Estate's Mark Kelly and Stephen D'Souza.

In an age when information is at your fingertips, what does it mean when accessing crucial information has become so tough for Canadian journalists? Here's Elamin Abdelmahmoud. I want to go a little bit more into that from two angles. One is this idea of this more information than ever before, but then people are not necessarily engaging with that information or not necessarily engaging with the correct information. But also, Robin, the Secret Canada investigation was an investigation about the freedom of information infrastructure

in this country and the ways that it has changed. And it has gotten much worse. That is one of the things that your investigation found, is that this country is a little bit better at keeping secrets than it used to be. and and as a result like we as journalists are are not served by that until the people are not served by that what i want to talk about is the relevance of investigations versus the importance of investigations because i think those are two different things

if you sit down across from somebody who does not engage in reading the news very often and you say to them i'm working on an investigation about freedom of information requests, it's not going to sound like the sexiest sentence on the planet. No. No. It is so deeply, deeply important because it shapes the entirety of the information that you end up consuming as a newsreader. So how do you thread that needle of relevance and importance? Because I think those are two, sometimes we talk about them

though they're from different planets, but they're clearly not. Well, first out, my reporting partner, Tom Cardoso, is in the audience somewhere from the Globe who we did Secret Canada with, and there was a big team at the Globe. Hey, Tom.

Secret Canada was an investigation at the Globe and it's open to everybody you can go to secretcanada.com and it is a repository of freedom of information requests that have been completed from hundreds of institutions across the country Tom and I in the early days of that spent a lot of time discussing

how are we going to one pitch the most boring sounding investigation of all time to our bosses. Two, convince them to make a searchable database website as a tool for Canadians outside of the Globe and Mail and accessible to everyone outside the paywall so that it wouldn't be viewed as just a globe thing. And then three, get Canadians to care about access to information. Again, sounds so dry. And we decided to just lean into the boring and just embrace it. And whenever we would talk about it,

the pitch is it's the most boring investigation of all time, it's actually the most important. And I think that, you know, what I love about talking about this issue, I'm assuming that this particular crowd knows a lot about FOI, and you don't need the spiel, but in general, this is the process by which we as Canadians have the ability to access our records, we have a ability to access our records. We have a right to understand how our leaders are governing, how our money is being spent, etc. And Canada is just horrific at releasing our own documents to us.

And it's gone on forever and it's getting worse. And successive governments keep making it worse and worse. And what I love about this issue is that it should be a completely non-partisan issue. To me, this is like utter populism. This is, I want to know what my tax dollars are doing. And I think something, like the biggest threat to journalists right now is that, you know, Mark, you mentioned that we have to defend ourselves. And I totally agree.

But unfortunately, like those interviews when you're trying to chase someone because they are dodging you, even though they are a public servant and they absolutely, you pay their salary, they have to answer to you. They won't. And then you go to them for comment and it is spun against you

as they're the political opposition. I remember growing up and having the Fifth Estate and the CBC on at night in my home. And that was, they're doing it for us, for the citizens of this country. On your behalf. The journalists are asking the questions for you. The newspaper, they're asking the questions.

I don't have time to be there at this press conference. I'm feeding my family. It's going to work. And many Canadians don't view that as the situation anymore. It's the elites. It's them. It's the other. Nevermind like what the situation anymore. It's the elites. It's them. It's the other.

Never mind, like, what the reality is. That's the narrative. And so I swear I'm coming back to secret Canada here, but, like, that is the thing that keeps me up at night for us is we need to win back the hearts and minds of the public. And I think thinking through, like, I think about this a lot. Like, what are the things that you can do that are really value add for people in this country? And so Secret Canada, again, it is something that everyone can access.

And you know what I love the most is journalists across the country are using it. Students are using it. University students are using it. And I think that it's opening their eyes to this thing that they never thought about before. Like, why is the government keeping secrets from us? And why is it so hard to investigate things in this country? It's because we uniquely have these stupid laws. So that's where we're at right now.

I appreciate this because when you talk to U.S. journalists... Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, give me a little applause for access information. When you talk to U.S. journalists and you tell them about our freedom of information infrastructure here, they do look at you like you're a little bit crazy. And I say this about the U.S. Not a particularly open country, but compared to us.

The U.S.? Yeah. The U.S. is so much more open. Sorry, I'll stop talking in a second. Yeah, no, but that's what I mean. I had to investigate. You know the Champlain Towers, the condo that fell down. Very tragic.

Hundreds of people died in the middle of the night. Created by Canadian developers. Natural investigation for the Globe's investigative team. Did they build anything here? What are the state of those buildings? Very basic investigation. The U.S. leg of that investigation took something like three days. Okay, because you can in Florida Florida, go on a website,

look up what a developer has built. You can look up the companies that have created those buildings. You can look up the directors. You can look up the directors from related companies and just very easily establish a web of buildings. You can then look up the building permits. You can look up the lawsuits easily. You can check the criminal courts, et cetera. Three days. In Canada, there is no way to do any of that at all. Long story short, we ended up trying to find the buildings that were built by those developers by using the names found in U.S. records and then going to the Globe archives and reading page by page classified ads from the 1960s,

just by eyeballing, looking, because you can't search them, eyeballing, looking for the names, there's one, and then we can send it off to the archives, pay thousands of dollars to get those property records back. It's a joke. Was that a sidebar that was not useful? But anyway, so no, the United States is like utopia compared to us, that Canadians have no idea how ridiculous this country is with respect to us. And they complain about their court system. There's a system called PACER, which you can access federal court records, and Americans hate it, and they have to pay fees to get the 10 cents a page, and they hate it. And for me, I love it because I'm like,

I can access an indictment the day after somebody's arrested. I can see exactly what the federal case is against them, whereas here I have no idea, and we have to go to court to fight to get the ITOs and to get all these documents related to arrests, and we may never ever see them. But there, it's all laid out. And yeah, they complained about it quite a bit.

But one thing I just want to mention is the tool you created, when we talk about the future of investigative journalism, I think one thing that's so important is empowering everyone to have the tools that we have. So the tool that you have, the public can use, other journalists use it. Even within the CBC, having people from the Fifth Estate talking to our local reporters, giving everyone the tools to be able to do

the same kind of work that we do, so that it's not a mystery, that it's not this, you know, magical elixir that only the Fifth Estate can do. It's like, no, every single reporter should have these tools so that they can do. It's like, no, every single reporter should have these tools so that they can do the same kind of work because that's the skills needed

from the person covering City Hall to the people on this stage so that they can find the stories that are important to everyone and dig as deep as they can. Because, you know, as newsrooms shrink, people get more, the workload grows and people are under more pressure to produce. So we have to be able to empower everyone to have the skills to be able to investigate.

And so that's one thing I think is really important, is to pull back the veil and to empower our colleagues to do the work that we do as well. I have so many more questions. And maybe an uncomfortable one, Mark, if you don't mind. I have so many more questions. And maybe an uncomfortable one, Mark, if you don't mind. Can I ask you, we say this thing about saying that investigative journalism is important. We also acknowledge that the number of people who are watching it is down.

How do we reconcile those two things? Look, there's no two ways that traditional terrestrial TV is evaporating, where everybody's getting their information or watching their programming on streaming services. But I look at the programming that we do, the Fifth Estate, which has made it available on YouTube, and the numbers that we've been getting on YouTube, they're fantastic. There is an appetite for what we do.

I mean, is there a disconnect now on the delivery service? Absolutely. Do I wish I could figure it out? I really do. And I have dark days where I think, you know, we're having a hard time finding an audience. But then I have these other days where I look at the reaction that we're getting online, our digital publications, when we'll take our investigations and put them on cbc.ca. The interest, I mean, yeah, on your traditional TV, we're having a hard time with those audiences as everyone else is. But not the content. Our content is king. And we still have that.

That is an asset, and that's something that we want to be proud of. And I'm sick and tired when I hear the people who want to attack us. It's like, oh, you know, CBC doesn't matter anymore. That's bullshit. That is just not true. It matters to Canadians.

It may not matter to certain people who would like to see us shut down or defunded, but it matters to Canadians. And we're finding different ways to reach Canadians, whether it's online, whether it's on radio, whether it's on television, whether it's on YouTube. We're going to great lengths to be able to bring our journalism to you because it's yours. You know, we're doing this program this year where we're calling it Reacted to News Deserts.

The fact that there have been a lot of closures in the media. I think it's since 1991 there have been about 500 media outlets that have shuttered. And so we put a call out to our viewers and said, hey, what are some stories that you think aren't being properly covered? I think it's since 1991 there have been about 500 media outlets that have shuttered. And so we put a call out to our viewers and said, hey, what are some stories that you think aren't being properly covered? And we got so much reaction from people, and then we acted on some of these stories. And we wanted to say, we investigate for you. And that's not a gimmick.

That's a promise. And that's a promise that we intend to keep. Yeah. Listen, we will take all the applause breaks that we can because I think that's a really important point to make. Rihanna, I take seriously the idea that if people are not watching content on traditional outlets and traditional ways, you do an investigation like yours and you do it as a film, but also you do it as a

podcast and you do it as a series, as an online series. So you're sort of able to get at people from a bunch of different ways. But also, we know that if people are not necessarily watching the content directly, they're watching TikToks about it, right? They're watching news influencers who say, hey, did you hear the big

story? And by the way, those influencers never give credit to where that story came from. But there's a real question. It's like, how do you get the audience back? How do you watch an influencer explain the investigation that you did, that you put years into, and say, did you hear this thing that just happened? You're like, yeah, I did, man.

I put it together. That was actually me. Maybe you could mention my name somewhere in there. How do you get that audience back, do you think? i go into the comment box no right thank you you can watch the documentary here and you can listen to the podcast here um but no i think the the kind of broader you know point is that we can't be complacent with our audiences we can't keep expecting them to come to us we also need to go to where they are. And at the BBC, you know, my team and I sometimes talk about the dreaded rollout, which is you've done the investigation, which could take weeks, months.

With Abercrombie, it took two years. And then you've got to repackage that story into a million different formats for so many different programmes and different audiences. And that really is where the value add is as well you know I'm making tiktoks I'm doing it for linear telly for radio I did an hour-long documentary an 11-part podcast series and you know I actually also think about when I do stories where else can I plug this and sometimes that is reaching out to influencers or to massive social media accounts where I know that audiences who I know are going to be interested in this

and saying, hey, look, would you mind promoting this? Because I think we've got a mutual audience here and there is actually public interest in getting this out to a broader audience. So I think it's also sort of working with people who have massive platforms that sit outside mainstream media. And I think one of the funny things from doing the Abercrombie story is so many people write in to me saying, I'm so glad you pursued that, you know, mainstream media would never do that.

I'm so glad you pursued that story, you know, like just, and I'm like, I am mainstream media, you know like just and I'm like I am mainstream media you know and we are fortunate at the BBC to have the time and resources to to kind of invest in investigative journalism you know and do so impartially do so where we give you the facts we we show our workings we're transparent and we ask you to make up your minds about what we're, you know, doing. But, yeah, I just feel like there's a broader question in terms of how do we change this perception of journalists, where I feel like in recent years, you know, we've definitely come under a lot of pressure and we are sometimes seen as this monolith,

people to attack, as opposed to sort of humans who are out here serving you, wanting to help tell stories and you know and cover issues that are important to the public but at some point I mean it used to be that journalists were were under attack but now I think we live in a time where journalism is is under attack and that's that's the very broader issue that that we have to deal with and in a lot of that which has originated south of the border, is trickling up to Canada.

We just, I was last week in Alberta, and we're showing up to do a story about libraries, by the way, which are under attack right now. And the town council had held a closed-door meeting and passed a motion that said that the mayor and the town councillors and the library board people shall not talk to the media, which was us, the Fifth Estate, because there's no other media in town. I mean, they passed this motion that said you can't talk to us about a public library being paid for by public taxes in this community that the public is fighting for.

And they did this. And I said, I walked into this town hall. I said, you can't do that. And they said, well, we did it, and we're not going to talk to you. And I'm standing there, and I'm fuming. And then this woman comes up to me. She says, are you Mark Kelly from the Fifth Estate? I said, yeah, I am. She said, I saw that story you did a couple of weeks ago on Dawson Creek, and it was really good. Keep up the good work. I said, tell your boss that, would you? Or tell the mayor that. But that creates part of that disconnect as well, and the difficulty in telling our stories and reaching those audiences. I just want to bring up one comment we had on TikTok. We did a documentary recently about the impact of the war on Gaza on the US election, and the CBC social team had condensed it down to a short TikTok video, and one of the comments was, CBC would never air this.

And so thankfully for our social team, the official account replied to this individual and said, actually, this was just on TV, and you can stream it right now on CBC Gem and on CBC YouTube. And for me, the biggest fear I always have is silence, right? You put a story out there and then there's just silence and nothing happens. And that's the biggest fear for me when we put a story out. And so to have people talking, I guess, in whatever form it is, you know, I guess we'll take that as a win. But you still want people to see the work that you do. I'm going to ask my last question, and it's going to be to Robin. It's going to be, I think, a quick one. Okay, you can bring up the

hook. We can do this quickly. Look, I think, like, the thing that everybody's trying to get at with those answers is that trust in journalism is also down quite a bit. And that is something that we have to reckon with as a field. There's something different that happens with investigative. I think there's something different about the relationship that people have with investigative, which is to say, hey, can someone spend some time looking into this thing because I'm really worried about it or it's a big deal to me. So I just wonder what your take is on the role of investigative in restoring the trust that people have in journalism. I mean, the public loves investigative journalism.

Our movies, our books, they're all investigative journalists as the main character. You inherently understand what it is. People get behind it. So when we do it, as you know, you're talking about Rihanna, like you, you put it, I think in the old days when I was starting 20 years ago, you'd put out a story and that would kind of be it. And you let it off and

onto the next one. Now there's like, needs to be like an ad campaign after almost. You need to go out and promote your work. You need to now hustle and get eyeballs on it and talk to, do panels and talk to the public. Go do interviews on shows. I mean, this is, this is something when I was doing the Rob Ford investigation that I really, really learned. That it's not enough to just publish something and leave it. And so I think that the journalism is going to speak for itself and the diligence that journalists do. You see so many more of those behind the story pieces that accompany it of how we did it. Being transparent, being open, being accountable to readers.

We hold the powerful accountable and then we need to be held accountable. And I actually don't mind getting yelled at on social media, honestly. Like truly, because I have this giant pen that I have my say and put it out in the paper and I'm okay with being held accountable and I've learned some things from readers and reactions so I think it's just being really transparent with readers being available and it's a it's a

conversation and just unapologetically promoting the importance of journalism as a non-partisan way to hold the powerful to account uh no that sums it all up um we're now going to open this up we so one audience question right over here okay okay what was the worst and most harrowing experience while doing a story? All of you. All right, let's try to do this quickly. Corrections are always the worst. Truly, especially, you know, like in your early days when you have not yet developed all of your skill set to catch mistakes before they run. all of your skill set to catch mistakes before they run,

when you get a notice that you've got something wrong in a story, and just the horrid shame you feel, like truly you want to die. And then the correction runs in the newspaper the next day. So you feel that shame for the whole day that follows. And I mean, you do learn the most from those experiences, but there is nothing worse than a correction. A correction. A correction is the scariest.

It keeps her up at night now, you know? Does anybody else want to share a scary experience? Rihanna? So while I was doing the story into the Abercrombie and Fitch story, as part of the fact-checking process, but also in terms of the right-of-reply process, I had to go and approach this middleman, this guy with a snakeskin patch on his nose who I had identified through property records and phone records to this rural home in Wisconsin. phone records to this rural home in Wisconsin. I knew he was a gun owner. I knew he had never been confronted about this before. And for saying this to Mark earlier, but I also, I do not like snakes. And your mind really goes to strange places when you're under a lot of stress. And so I was just thinking to myself myself I've got to go knock on his door I need to actually talk to him I can't just put a camera in his face and be like

what do you have to say about this I actually was still in evidence gathering mode like I needed him to talk um but I was terrified that he would open the door and invite us in and that would be like a rattlesnake somewhere in his apartment or something. Fortunately, that didn't happen. But that was quite a nerve-wracking moment because I guess you have moments where you realise we actually do dangerous things at times and actually holding people to account can be terrifying. And also you just never know how somebody is going to react

when you are telling somebody that you are about to name them and put out allegations, which now amount to criminal charges of sex trafficking. And I met this man, James Jacobson, and I guess I saw him in court as well, as he pled not guilty a couple of weeks ago to charges of sex trafficking but that was terrifying um fortunately nothing happened but that and i think is also just similar to the correction you just never want to get things wrong you know these stories that we do very often involve brave whistleblowers people who are really vulnerable and you know we have a responsibility to make sure that we also do their their stories justice

and we get our facts straight. So a roundabout way of answering that. I was covering the Arab Spring in Cairo, and the government was saying that foreign journalists were actually Israeli spies. And we had gone out doing a story, and we were trying to get back to the hotel, and there was a mob on the bridge. We were trying to get across the Nile back to our hotel,

and suddenly the mob was looking around and saw these white foreigners in a car, and they attacked our car. And I thought we were going to die. And it was our fixer, this woman, who she got out of the car and she was shouting, wailing in Arabic, which I do not speak.

And the crowd stopped. And then they helped us. Our car was stuck because we were trying to escape. And they helped get our car back on the road. And we got back to not our hotel, but somewhere safe. And I asked the woman, I said, what did you say to them? And she said, you know, it's the Arab Spring at this time. And what have we become?

Why are we turning on these people? But that was one of those moments when the mob came for the car, and they started shaking the car, and they were trying to bash the windows in. And journalists had been attacked and brutalized. There had been some terrible things that had happened there. And that was probably my darkest moment as a journalist. And I'll add one thing. I said, I'd like to do a story on it for television, but we didn't have any pictures. And I turned to my cameraman

and he had his cell phone. And he says, I got the whole thing on camera. And we turned that into a story. And I said, if I'm going to put my life on the line, you better goddamn well get it on TV.

Stephen, do you want anything? I mean, there was one time before I joined the Fifth Estate where we were in the Middle East and doing a story in the north of Israel about a gas station where the Jewish owners had hid their Palestinian workers because a group of extremists had come and were just out for blood and looking for anyone sort of you know the mob mentality is similar to what Mark experienced and as we were interviewing the owner of the gas station we could feel sort

of a presence behind us and a guy had come up and it turned out to be one of the individuals who was part of that mob that had come to the spot and he started sort of yelling at us and talking to us and luckily we had security with us. And he started sort of yelling at us and talking to us. And luckily we had security with us. And so he was able to clear it out. And again, it was one of those situations where we were able to get it on camera and use it as part of our story.

But it sort of brings up a larger issue, which is now that so much of the work we do requires security. Sometimes even when we're doing stories within Canada, things I would never think of now, it's like like oh we we have to have an extra layer of planning and security with us because the environment is so hostile for journalists so it's it's sad to think that we've come to that state now but it's it's sort of the reality of what we do that you know we have to have that extra layer of planning and safety considerations not not going to a war zone, but going perhaps to a

rural town in small town Canada. I have to own up to something, which is that I took up too much time, and now there's no more time for more audience questions, which means the only real question that came from the audience is, hey, when were you scared?

And I hope that after those stories you also feel extra grateful for the work that investigative journalists do. I want to thank these panelists again Thank you so much for your time Stephen D'Souza, Robin Doolittle, Mark Kelly, Deanna Croxford. Thanks again, you guys. Really appreciate it. You were listening to a panel discussion held to mark the 50th anniversary of CBC TV's flagship investigative program,

The Fifth Estate. The panelists were Mark Kelly and Stephen D'Souza, both co-hosts on The Fifth Estate, as well as BBC News investigative correspondent Rihanna Croxford and Globe and Mail reporter Robin Doolittle. It was moderated by Elamin Abdelmahmoud, who is, of course, the host of CBC Radio's Commotion. The panel was produced by Raj Alawalia,

Alia Davidson and Emmanuel Marchand. If you'd like to see this discussion, you can find it on YouTube or watch it on News Network on December 26th. This episode for Ideas was the handiwork of Debbie Pacheco. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed. Thank you. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.