The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Drama, You Want Drama?

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

Thanks for subscribing and for submitting a rating and review! * TWITTER @petermansbridge | INSTAGRAM @thepetermansbridge ** https://www.thepetermansbridge.com/ *** Producer: Manscorp Media Services

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the mid-November edition of The Bridge, your late Friday night, early Saturday morning, your weekend edition of The Bridge. Some thoughts, my ramblings on about a few things, that perhaps you'll give some thought to this weekend. Some consideration of these and see how you feel. And then, if you wish, send me an email, let me know. Thanks to those of you who wrote last weekend, after we talked about the power of the word,

the power of the phrase, the power of the image. You notice, of course, they were pushing that whole bribery line just like we talked about a week ago that they probably would. They wanted to get off quid pro quo. They talked bribery, even Nancy Pelosi just yesterday, saying it's all about bribery. Anyway, that was last week. This is this week.

A week where I did, you know, some traveling. I was giving a number of speeches this week in both Ottawa and Montreal. Just back in Toronto heading to Winnipeg. Winterpeg tomorrow for a weekend. Montreal was great fun. Talked to a lot of teachers in Montreal. One of the teachers' conventions was being held in Montreal yesterday and I had a chance to do a workshop there and also give a keynote speech last night.

And in Ottawa, talking to a group of CEOs, some thoughts with them about the media and about them and about trust, the issue of trust. Anyway, here's what I want to talk about for a little bit here today. This article came out on NBC News online. On, I think, Wednesday, right after day one of the impeachment hearings. And it's had a lot of attention, a lot of discussion.

And any article that produces discussion and debate and a degree of controversy, that's good. It gets people talking. And this is why, because this was the headline, plenty of substance, but little drama on the first day of the impeachment hearings. Think about that. Plenty of substance, but little drama on the first day of impeachment hearings. As Jonathan Allen wrote this piece for NBC News, Jonathan Allen is a great reporter, and you see him often on MSNBC. Anyway, he wrote this piece.

It kind of starts, I'll just read the first couple of lines. It was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic. Substantive, but not dramatic. So I don't know. Like, what do you want? Do you want substance or do you want drama? And Jonathan kind of threw it out there. You choose.

The implication was people want drama, they don't want substance. I don't think he meant that. But clearly, it caused a lot of discussion and debate because a lot of people went after them, went after NBC for writing that, saying, what are you talking about? We always argue about substance. There you had substance.

You had two of the top diplomats in the U.S. government speaking with substantive claims about the issues that had unfolded on this whole issue of quid pro quo. Anyway, there was substance. But they were your classic bureaucrat. There was no drama in the way they talked. A little bit near the end when Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador for the U.S. and Ukraine right now, dropped this bit of news about how a conversation had been overheard,

a telephone conversation involving the president. That was a little bit of drama. But plenty of substance. Substance there was. There was a lot of detail building the case for impeachment with the Republican opposition building the case for throwing the case of impeachment out. But what it did that article and the discussion that followed was once again bring to the core

to the forefront this whole issue of what is news. What do people want in their news? Do they want substance? Do they want to be told through reporting what's important for them to know? Or do they want some form of drama, infotainment, lots of bells and whistles. And what do they want?

Do they want an impeachment hearing where it's like going to a Raptors game where every time there's a whistle blown, the cheerleaders come out, the men and women of the Raptor cheerleader team, and they're jumping up and down? Do they want a mascot roaming around in the audience? Is that what they want? I don't think so.

But would more drama have been a help for day one of the impeachment hearings? That becomes sort of the question that some people are asking. Clearly that's what Jonathan put out there for people to talk about. So, oddly enough, this came up, not that article, but this whole issue of news came up in a couple of the speeches that I gave.

It came up with CEOs, and it came up in the workshop with the teachers yesterday in Montreal. Because like a lot of different professions, journalism is going through some challenging times. The landscape about news is changing considerably. How people get their news, how they consume it, whether they read it or watch it or listen to it,

whether it's all about what they see on social media. Is it what they see on television? Television ratings are going down in conventional television. They're down. Everybody is down. Some more than others, but everybody's down. Now, is it simply because the landscape's changed and there's different ways of consuming news?

Or is it because people are questioning their loyalty to journalism? That they're not sure they trust journalists anymore. Now, in the speech that I gave, I ran a couple of items from the past year. I won't bother telling you what they were because it's not important. What is important is the challenge was there for the audience to say, that was good journalism or it was bad journalism. And if it was good or bad, why?

What was it about it that you liked or disliked? And so I did that with both audiences, and I found two things. One, audiences could be split. You know, different people saw it different ways, and that's good. You know, that's okay. Not everybody said, oh, that was great. Not everybody said, oh, that was great. Not everybody said, oh, that was terrible. But it did lead to this broader discussion about journalism

and what they see as the problem with journalism today. And this was coming from people, even people who admire journalism today, still have basic faith in it, trust in journalism. Because not everybody does right now. But it's funny, ask them, give me one word, just one word that describes how you feel about journalism today

in terms of what you think is wrong with it. One word. And it didn't take long. And with both audiences, and they were both actually quite similar, even though they're very different in terms of their makeup, the CEOs and the teachers. So here's some of the words. You think about it. I've given you a few moments. You've thought of your word. You know, maybe write it down in front of you. See where it comes up here. And some of them kind of stretch one word into two words

and said, oh, no, there's a hyphen in there. So it's really only one word. Bias. A lot of people see bias. Sensationalism. It's wrong. It's simply wrong. It's depressing.

It's boring. It's one-sided, another way of looking at bias. A lack of transparency in the way we went around telling stories, like how did the journalists get the information they got? This especially comes up when you're dealing with stories where there's a sense of, you know, we've had to protect the names of certain people. And they want to, viewers want to understand, well, why did you have to say that?

How often do you do that? What's the criteria for doing that? And when you don't name sources, how many sources do you need before you go to where? And how do you know those sources aren't simply grinding their own axe? So that came up, the lack of transparency. I said boring, irrelevant, fake, it's like wrong, fake news.

Two activists, this sort of fits also in this kind of biased area, the one-sided area, but the journalist is taking an activist role in telling the story. Or simply, it's not important. That story wasn't important. Why am I going to waste two minutes of my time watching that?

Because it doesn't impact my life. So those are kind of the key words. And often it would come around to that last one. You know, how important was that really? How does that impact my life when there are so many stories that in fact do that you don't cover? And this is one of the things we learned in the election campaign. Again, that we're somehow disconnected from real people. That we're not talking

and neither are politicians about the issues they're talking about. How do you get around that? How do you deal with that? So these were really good discussions and got quite, well, you know sometimes when you get into a room and you say, let's talk about this, give me some ideas, and there's sort of silence. Nobody wants to be first. Nobody wants to talk at all.

That wasn't the case in either one of these situations. People started like right away. And they got into it. And there was a lot of good kind of back and forth. And it's important, and I'm not sure how, you know, for all the money that's pissed away in news organizations on focus groups and studies and this, that, and the other, I'm not sure how often they're doing simply this kind of thing.

You know, what's the problem? What's the fix? How do you get trust back? You know, I showed some stats from a recent survey about how people see certain professions in Canada, sort of the likability level. And historically up at the top have been nurses and doctors, in Canada. Sort of the likability level. And historically up at the top of being

nurses and doctors, and they're still up at the top. Kind of the middle and the bottom get shuffled around. Politicians are at the bottom right now. Car sales people used to be at the bottom. They're creeping way up. They're way bottom. They're creeping way up. They're way up.

They're not way up. They're on their way up. They were third from the bottom in this survey. Journalists are kind of in the middle. Teachers, by the way, are up there close to nurses and doctors. But journalists, news people, are not doing so well. They're in the kind of high 50s, low 60s. That's not good. Not when your whole profession is built on the belief that people trust you to tell them the truth.

And if less than two-thirds are feeling positive about you, you know you've got some work to do. So there are issues around journalism, as there are in a lot of professions right now. But, you know, obviously I'm partial to journalism, and so obviously are you. You wouldn't be listening to this podcast. So let me know what you think. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. That's the email address. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. That's the email address.

TheMansbridgePodcast at gmail.com. Now, I've got a couple of other little things to mention to you as well before we go. Other things that happened this week. But first, one of those nice little musical breaks. I like that piece of music. You know, a number of people have asked about the music through the history of the bridge once we started at the beginning of the election campaign. And because this podcast is done with no resources,

I just went to the free music sites on the internet where you can use the music for nothing. Because you can't, you know, if you're going to use, like, music that you'd recognize because it's famous for whatever, you can do that, but you've got to pay for it. And I thought I would try and keep costs down. And besides, there's a whole library of free music. There's lots of it, lots of it out there.

And the opening and closing for the bridge is one of them. And so was that little one right there. What else was I going to tell you about that happened? You know, to me this week, I've got a Nexus card. And I'm sure some of you do. And, you know, you get a Nexus card by applying for one at the airport through, you know, the Canadian Border Agency and the U.S. Customs. And you go through their various tests, and you have fingerprints taken, and this, that, and the other thing. And you end up getting a little card that's good for two or three years before you have to have it renewed.

And that allows you to bypass the regular line at the airport and go into sort of the fast, not the priority line, which is fast, but this is the sort of extra cleared line, because you've got a Nexus card and you've been through all this, you know, pre-screening. And so you're supposed to go through quite fast. And usually you do. But here's what frustrates me about, you know, listen. I understand why we have security at the airports,

and we're lucky we do. And I'm sure over time it saved some horrible stories from happening. But there are also inconsistencies in the way these places operate. You know, you can get through some lines much easier than others. Some lines, you don't have to take your belt off. You don't have to take your shoes off. And other lines, or at other times, in the same line, you do have to take your belt off.

You do have to take your shoes off. Well, this morning I was flying out of Montreal. It was early, but there were a lot of people at the airport, as there often are on Fridays. And it was, I don't know, 6.30, 7 o'clock. And I went through, you know, there's a huge lineup at the regular security line, not so much at the priority line and even less then at the Nexus line. So I go through the Nexus line, but as soon as I got inside the doors to the, you know, x-ray machine area, man, it was slow. Suddenly it was like really slow.

And you use these pop-up trays now, put stuff in, and I put all my stuff in the trays properly. And at the very end, I'd flown from, I don't know, last flight I'd taken was Toronto to Ottawa. I drove from Ottawa to Montreal, but Toronto to Ottawa, and I hadn't taken my shoes off,

and I went through the line fine. The guy said, no, you can leave those on. They were kind of like moccasins, not moccasins, but almost moccasins. They're kind of like moccasins, not moccasins, but that, almost moccasins. They're very light shoes. Not heavy boots, no steel toes, none of that stuff. So

I'm wearing them this morning in Montreal and the guy says, you better take your shoes off. And I said, well, actually, I just went through, lying out of Toronto, out of Pearson, and they said I didn't have to take my shoes off. You're not supposed to do that. They look at you like, hey, you want to be wearing an orange jumpsuit?

Get the shoes off, buddy. So I smiled and took my shoes off, put them in a tray all by themselves. This is after filling a tray with my briefcase, took my laptop out of it, had my suitcase with my clothes in, had my overcoat in another tray and my sports jacket in another tray. So I had a whole bunch of trays.

And the very last one were the shoes. So I go around, go through the thing, nothing beeps, I'm free to go and pick up my bags, I get there, and all the buckets come through except the last one, except the shoes. Everything else is fine. All the stuff with all my stuff in my backpack, suit, you know, kind of briefcase thing. Lots of junk in there, right? Things you find in your backpack that you've forgotten you'd put in there six months ago,

but anyway, it was full of stuff. No problem. Suitcase, full of overnight stuff, no problem. Belt, jacket, coat, no problem. The last bucket is my shoes, those kind of moccasin-type shoes. They go through, and beep, get sent off into a different lane. And then you've got to wait 15 minutes until they get around to your bucket because they're working on other people's things. And I'm thinking, really? Those shoes, those shoes that I walked through another place with? It's the inconsistency that drives you crazy, right? Anyway, the guy says to me, what are you waiting for? And I said, shoes. He said, okay.

He goes back. He finds the bucket with the shoes. He brings it over. He says, well, this didn't need to be stopped. And I said, right. But it was. Your computer, like, stopped it. And now I wasn't going to get in an argument with him because that's a real no-no.

The guy next to me was in an argument with the female security guard about his briefcase and the papers in it. He was steaming because he was going to miss his flight, and she was saying, hey, this is my job. Do you want to talk to my supervisor? And the guy's saying no. And he was within, you know, a centimeter of being hands on the wall, buddy.

Anyway, he eventually got through, and so did I with my shoes. So all I'm saying is there's still something not right about that system for all the people they have there. You've seen it. You know it if you fly. There's lots of people. Most of them are standing around

watching the other people do their job. There's lots of them. But today, it was my shoes. Got me in trouble. Can't have that. All right. Enough already. I'm hoping you're going to have a great weekend.

We're, you know, obviously we're getting closer to real winter. The weather's been cold. The snow's on the ground. Certainly is around Stratford, hometown, and even in Toronto. We got a little bit of snow. Tomorrow, looking forward to seeing what Winnipeg will be like on Saturday and Sunday. So have a great weekend. If you have time, drop me a line, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com.

In the meantime, thanks for listening. And you know, have a great weekend. Thank you.