The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Encore Presentation - Moore-Butts #8 -- The Politics of The Lie

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

Today an encore presentation of an episode that originally aired on May 15th. Our two political heavyweights, Conservative James Moore and Liberal Gerry Butts, move their latest non-partisan discussion to the question of lies and their growing place in modern politics.  Like it or not the lie is in the toolbox of politics and Donald Trump isn't the only one using it.  How did that happen and where does it lead?  Those are the questions we tackle in Moore-Butts #8.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, and the latest episode of The Bridge is a wonderful Wednesday Encore Edition. This week we go back almost a year to last spring, May the 15th, and it's a More Butts conversation. This is kind of a hint that next week we'll have a new More Butts episode next tuesday so look forward to that but today we're going back as i said to last spring may the 15th when the episode more butts number eight was about the politics of the lie so enjoy this encore edition and hello there peter mansbridge here you are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. The topic today, the politics of the lie. The Moore Butts conversation takes that subject head on today. And hello there, welcome to New Week. Peter Mansbridge here in Toronto for this day.

And it's Moore-Butts conversation number eight today. And you know, it's amazing that we've got to number eight. When I first started this off, you know, sometime last year, the whole idea was to put these two, you these two political heavyweights, if you will, together in a room and let them talk about subjects and hope they wouldn't go over that partisan line, but stay in an information line so we could try to understand whatever the particular issue of the day was. Well, it worked, and it keeps working. And today in conversation number eight, I think we may well have the best one that we've done so far, although they've all

been pretty good. James Moore, the former Conservative cabinet minister in the Harper government, had a number of different portfolios. And today he's a senior policy advisor for the Denton's Group and also works for Edelman as well, with similar kind of advice to that big, huge international public relations firm. As for Jerry Butts, Jerry Butts is a former principal advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He's a liberal, of course. He is now the vice chair of the Eurasia Group, which advises governments and businesses around the world

on questions of foreign policy and others. Climate change. He's a climate change expert himself. Anyway, so there you go. That's kind of the setup. The conversation this week is on the politics of the lie. We've all watched, you know, when some of us feel, oh, well, there's always been lying in politics. Well, yeah, to a degree, to some extent, but nothing like it is today.

And we tend to point at one person for being responsible for this, but there's more than that. Although there's certainly enough grist for the talk mill in talking about that one person, and you know who I'm talking about when I say that. So enough from me. Let's get to our conversation because I find this one really, really good. There's some very good moments in this conversation. So here we go. The Moore-Butts conversation, number eight. All right, gentlemen, I want to start with your basic reaction to what we witnessed on Thursday night on CNN with Donald Trump.

James is actually on the record with his Thursday night tweet. This is what it said. Trump tonight refused to call Putin a war criminal, continued to fuel insurrection-inducing lies about the 2020 election, laughed about sexual abuse, promised to pardon january 6 rioters and claimed he finished the wall the disgrace never ends got anything to add to that today james uh it wasn't just the spectacle of donald trump that was upsetting that actually the most upsetting part was him uh dismissing and continuing to um abuse the character of a woman who was found to have told the truth that donald trump sexually assaulted her there was a it was a unanimous jury decision that found of donald trump's peers who who decided

that donald trump did sexually uh assault a woman and that he defamed her in his efforts to defend himself. And about that conversation, there were people in the audience who laughed and thought it was really funny in the way in which Donald Trump continued to insult this victim of sexual assault. I think that was kind of the nadir of it. On the other hand, I don't agree with those

who have said that CNN should not have platformed him. Donald Trump is the former president of the United States. Donald Trump is the likely nominee for the Republican Party. Donald Trump has the support of over 40% of Americans who want this kind of stuff back into the White House. It's shocking to say, but the truth is the truth. Donald Trump and the reputation that he's built around his economic policy, and I'm using air quotes with my fingers, his economic policy and the perception of what it is, which is, you know, pro-business and tough and fiscally responsible and all that. None of that is true. It's all a meme. But his economic policies and the perception of them are far more popular in public opinion polling than are Joe Biden's.

And there's also the perception of a genuine border crisis now with Mexico. If the Mexican border crisis continues to emerge and gets exploited and gets torqued up and the economy continues to be an issue, if America does slip into a recession later this year and Joe Biden continues to underperform donald trump could very well uh and it's absolutely plausible that he'd be the president united states again so those are the two most shocking things to me is the substance of what donald trump said yes but the audience reaction to it and then the fact that people are talking and criticizing cnn for platforming a guy people who are opposed to to Donald Trump better start getting serious and honest with themselves about the fact that there is a large number of Americans, a massive cohort

of Americans, almost half of Americans, like what they saw, like what they see, and want him back in the White House. And people need to be honest about that. How do you, and I hear you on that, but how does that square with your last line, the disgrace never ends? Well, a lot of people like disgraceful things. Politics is not about politics is about the choices in front of you. Right. And it is what it is. And for a lot of Americans, because of the polarization of American politics, Donald Trump represents a lot of things that they like, which is that he's an outsider. He breaks the mold. The Bushes, the Obamas, the Clintons, the Bidens, the media and Hollywood all hate him. And just therefore, you know, ipso facto, he must represent them because he hates all of the establishment because their lives aren't going well. They're not happy with

the way the world works. And if they hate him, he must be my guy. So so in spite of all that and also, you know, both political parties have spent generations smearing politics, tearing down politics, saying the other side are a bunch of corrupt liars. You know, Bill Clinton was responsible for, you know, for for sexual assault. Clarence Thomas is a rapist. Bill Clinton is a sexual assaulter. Bill Clinton was responsible for the death of his friend who committed suicide in a park just near the Pentagon. We've spent many, many years, many decades tearing down and destroying the reputation of politics and government and politicians. So when a guy like Donald Trump actually comes along, who tries to incite an insurrection, has actually now been found guilty of of sexual assault who has um who has been twice been impeached who has 34 indictments against him

in new york for business fraud people just go yeah i know well they're all kind of scumbags aren't they and it's like this is where we are and it's been it's and it's shocking. Jerry. Well, it's hard to follow that, James. I certainly agree with almost everything you said, though. And it's in particular this last point of the long term. I've used this analogy many times, that it's like the public square has been flooded slowly with toxic sludge. And it's happening here, too, at a much lower velocity, but in the United States, it's impossible to overstate how corrupt your average American thinks your average politician is. And once you establish that as a base rate,

it's very difficult to, um, there's, there are a lot of cliches about this and fairy tales and lessons from, um, uh, history, but this is a boy who cried wolf situation about American politics as a whole. There actually is a wolf in the public square now, and nobody can recognize it, or at least 40 percent of the American public is not recognizing it. And I, you know, I've been banging this drum for a little bit, Peter, but I think presentation of those two men side by side is not going to favor the Democrats in the election. You're talking about the age factor? I mean, it's not like Trump. I'm talking about everything, everything about it, you know, that I used to say when I was in active politics that the people who win the pictures usually win the campaign. Right. And building momentum is about creating a consistent visual narrative that tells a story that paints a picture of a community of people that you want to belong to. And that's true in business. It's true in politics. It's true in business it's true in politics it's true just about everything and

Biden's got no energy and I know people make fun of the way Trump uses that all the time that he's low energy but like most of the um memes that and Donald Trump is nothing else if not a meme factory every time he opens his mouth most of the memes that he has generated, there's a kernel of truth to them. And I really worry about what that looks like side by side, because we forget the 2020 campaign was a very unusual campaign. Joe Biden could get away with not campaigning because we were all in our basements, right? Famously.

And the Trump campaign tried to make an issue of that and when trump did start to develop some momentum at the end of the campaign was when he said screw it i'm gonna go do these rallies anyway right and tens of thousands of people saw donald trump and those pictures got broadcast on the national news and all around the social media, various social media platforms. And it created this sense of momentum. And I think that we really underestimate the, we've kind of lived through this peaceful interregnum, right? Where we've had a couple of years of Joe Biden

and the United States has almost felt normal. If you're in Canada or in the United States is doing a bunch of things that we expect the United States to do. It's alliance building. It's facing down Russia. It's leading the charge against climate change. It's doing a bunch of stuff that a lot of people, especially Canadians, would prefer to see the United States doing.

But that structural polarization that James mentioned is still very present. And it could return with a vengeance if the campaign breaks in the wrong way. The point Jerry just made about the 2020 campaign, because, you know, you talk to and I've talked to many Democrats in the United States, they say, well, everything is easier the second time Biden beat him the first time and it's easier the second time and now trump has been indicted and so so therefore like there's just there's just too big of a gap there's no way and i and it i it's so foolish for people to think that you know joe biden will be four years older than he has been um the the cycle of the economy is trending in the wrong direction the immigration crisis that i that I just said is a

reality as well. And also the dynamics of 2020, like every single election campaign in Canada, every single election campaign in the United States, it's a science of single instances, which is to say it's no science at all. They are all, it's a moment in time influenced by a constellation of issues around that particular date on the calendar that are unique to each circumstance and the covet point that jerry makes is an important one and and i think thoughtful observers who now that we have some distance from november 2020 thoughtful observers have all said you know joe didn't win by actually that much there's about 80 000 net votes in three swing states that were the difference between him and donald trump getting a second term uh and so and if you take covet out of it and the entire narrative because that was peak covet right the

the the vaccines were just coming in we were starting to get back up we were starting glimpse into 21 but but summer and fall of 20 was peak covet in terms of the accumulated deaths and the accumulated lies about covet that were then being spilled by the Trump administration about, you know, about, you know, Invermectin and all this sort of nonsense. And this is no big deal. It'll go away in a year. And all that stuff was catching up. So he was caught in a lie that had massive public consequence that ultimately a million, more than a million Americans have died of COVID. There was a real public policy failure that had, it wasn't just a matter of opinion, like all that's going to be gone. donald trump looks vibrant and young and energetic and thoughtful and and articulate

against you know joe biden at this point in in his life and that's a in terms of energy and going forward and and you know everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. Like, I think you can say in a pure marketing analysis, like the strengths of Donald Trump in the moment, he is he looks strong. He presents as tough. He presents as jingoistic. He does habitually present himself as America first. And I'm going to have America's back. Like people, if you're looking through the lens and you want to believe that message, he looks like a consistent and firm and clear messenger to the audience that he's trying to appeal to. It's very hard to say that about Joe Biden. All right. Let me, I could sidetrack and go into a debate about how articulate he looks, but I'll ignore that and stay on.

His audience. Yeah. To his audience, perhaps. But let's stay on the focus. To his audience. Yeah, to his audience, perhaps. But let's stay on the focus that we were trying to achieve here, and that is this whole question of the lie. I mean, Jerry mentioned a few moments ago that there's a kernel of truth in a lot of what Trump says. Yeah, there's also kind of an avalanche of lies that tends to blow up that kernel. But I want to try to understand how we got to this point, because, I mean, there's no doubt that Thursday, the basis of his performance was the lie. I mean, he told it repeatedly,

time after time after time. It's not a surprise. We've known Trump as a liar for years. I can recall days after the inauguration, I called him a liar on the air, and I got kind of taken to the woodshed by not only my colleagues, but CBC management at that time said, well, you can't use the L word.

And a lot of people had that same theory in the American networks. But now it's common, like everybody calls him a liar all the time. There's no hesitation in using the L word. How has it come to this where lying seems to have become, and it's not just Trump, but he's the most obvious target when you go this way. But how has it become an accepted part of the political toolbox, if you wish? Jerry, you start us here. I think Trump is a special case.

There are other liars in politics, but it's sort of like comparing when people compare someone to Hitler. Right. There's only one Hitler. There's only one Donald Trump. And nobody has created as big and successful a political career out of constantly lying quite like Trump. And I think it gets back to, as much as I hate to say this, it's part of his personal brand. And it always has been. I remember when I was a kid, my dad used to read what he called the papers every weekend. And those were the Globe and the Star. And I don't mean the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star and the National Enquirer. And we would get them at the grocery store every weekend and he would read them and he would pass them

around to his friends. And this is a retired coal coal miner right so put put yourself in that picture and many of us including some of his kids used to scratch our heads at it but it was entertainment for him he never confused it with news right he was also a huge fan of yours Peter and he watched you religiously and he loved public affairs. But somewhere along the line, we've lost the ability to differentiate streams of information. And this gets back to the analogy of flooding the public square with toxic sludge. Donald Trump has been part of that from the very beginning. So when the Democrats tried to tell Americans in 2016 that Donald Trump was a bad guy, Americans already knew that. They had seen him in the pages of the National Enquirer for 30 years. They had seen him in the middle of the ring in WWF and then WWE for 20 years. He had made himself

part of the lifeblood of popular American culture in a more intimate way, I would argue, than anybody who'd ever run for president successfully. So there was nothing you could tell the average American in Ohio about Donald Trump that he or she didn't already know. And they bought into the spectacle. So the lying was part of the brand, but it was never the point. And I think people are willing to overlook it. The people who love him and are part of his tribe, they just expect it. And for people like us to stand back and say, oh, how can they believe that? They look at us and say, well well we've known that about this guy all along but he's our guy right he's our guy and that of course is the big lie because he couldn't be more the opposite

right um but he's created this almost unbreakable brand for himself that is impervious to any individual action he takes or individual statement he utters. James. There's also, I agree with all that. Also this context, because, because you, you frame the question sort of, we're at today. We have had now, you know, about 15 years, it's hard to pick a date on it, but sort of collapsing trust in major institutions that have led people to sort of say, well,

you're asking me, like, don't let the lie, you're asking me to trust. It's like, well, what? What? I remember the most trusted man in American politics, Colonel Colin Powell, who became General Colin Powell, who became Secretary of State Colin Powell. I remember him going to the floor of the United Nations and making the argument for wmd iraq i remember that i i remember i remember and it's not even just on a large scale like that and you say well you know so i can't trust we could never trust politicians but but colin powell was at one point the most respected man in the united states he if he ran for president he'd win in a shuman and all that like and and he he did that and then you you look at other institutions and it's it's a collapse of institutions everywhere you think about um the national football league lying about what they knew about the ray rice incident knocking out his his his girlfriend in

an elevator and covering that up you think about the concussion crisis in football and them trying to cover the think about major league baseball lying about the steroid scandal you think about you know the year the year that donald trump won the nomination to be the republican nominee for president you know what movie won best picture that year in 2000 and and 16 or the 15 the year that he launched spotlight which is a movie about what collapse of trust in the catholic church and the covering up of the sexual abuse and torture of children collapse of trust and you can go institution after it's the 2008 economic crisis the collapse of trust. And you can go institution after institution, the 2008 economic crisis, the collapse of trust in institutions, banking and regulations and

protecting people and their assets, their homes, and the financial structure about the most important economic decision of your life and the collapse and the hundreds of thousands of people who lost all of their life savings. So no matter where you went, sports, football, military, the treatment of our veterans, our most trusted people in public life, it was just a collapse of trust everywhere. So Donald Trump comes along and he's a liar. Well, yeah, well, whatever. What isn't lying to me these days? And the tectonic shift that was the economic crisis and the collapse of trust and everything around it.

And people say, well, look at Donald Trump. He's lying. He's not really going to build a wall like Mexico is going to pay for it. Come on. They say, well, it's as good a lie as any other one out there and i i remember going to the 2016 um i was in i was in cleveland at the republican convention as observer doing some media and walking around the halls of that convention chatting with delegates there right and i would say you know and and it was interesting because they were they're kind of in two groups there were people sort of who were just trying to will their version of the world into reality and it is as I say there are people who it's like they believe that

professional wrestling is real and you think wow like I don't know where to start from with this argument but then there were other people and it was interesting because they were really cognizant of what they were seeing in front of them and they would say well I'd say why are you support Donald Trump because he's going to change he's going to shake everything up. He's going to build. And I said, but he's not really going to build a 25 foot wall all the way across the like, that's not real. And he said, no, no, he's going to build it. And I said, he's not really going to build it. And he goes, well, if anybody's going to build it, it'll be him. And he at least he's going to try. And and he's he's saying what I want to hear, because's good. Like, that's how it should be.

And at least he's going to try it and screw it. Like, let's just go for it. Like, what do we have to lose? Just go for it. And so they knew it was a lie. They knew it was a meme. They knew there was a skit going on. They were playing their part in the crowd.

But it was comforting to them to try to take a lie and turn a lie into reality through the force of will and bravado. And, you know, it's, is that toxic? Yes. But in some ways, for a lot of people that represented the hope to sort of surrender to a mistruth, and the hope that you could will it into existence, even though it's not quite true now. So there's a there's a psychology behind this in our democracy that I think we have to be aware of. This conversation is so good, but it's so depressing. I mean, you know, I'm... You seem to say that after my intervention.

You're both in sync on a lot of this stuff. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when a lie could be the basis or end up as a resignation you know that's not even on the on the charts anymore nobody even thinks about it um but the picture you both paint is like so ugly uh about now i mean, where's this heading? What does this lead to? This goes on like unchecked. So here here is the good news. And it's very good news. I'm not sure if it's good news in an absolute sense, but it's definitely good news in relative to the in relation to the immediately previous conversation. Jen O'Malley Dillon, who ran a Biden's campaign in 2016. I remember talking to her in 2020, talking to her in the run up to it. We were planning our own campaign in 2019.

And I said, so what's your message? And she said, Joe Biden's a good man and Donald Trump is a bad man. That is our message. And we think we can win the campaign on that because there are enough people in the United States who want a good person, not a bad person in the White House. And I immediately thought, I'm not so sure about that, but it's really simple and clear. And if you stick to that, maybe, and it's obviously true. So if it's simple, clear, and obviously true,

and you stick to it and paint the picture in compelling ways, you can probably win. And they did. Now, I still think that is true. But what has intervened in the meantime to mitigate that is, I think Biden, notwithstanding what his doctor's reports say, notwithstanding what is actually going on inside his anatomy, he looks old and frail. And generally Americans do not want someone in the white house who projects frailty. So I think it's going to be, as James said, it's 80,000 votes in a couple of, in a few States and they're going to be hard to reconstruct.

But I don't think I don't think we should take from the Donald Trump phenomenon the thought that all is lost about politics. There are very grave consequences, I think, that need to be managed and mitigated. If you're around the NATO table, if you're in the eu if you're in canada if you worry about nafta if you worry about a lot of things there are a lot of things that need to be managed and mitigated but i don't think we should come away from it with the nihilistic conclusion that therefore all is lost in public life good people can still do well you You agree with that, James? I do. I do agree with that. The lying eventually catches up with you and lying eventually catches

up with the country. You know, you can talk about, you know, the accumulation of lies in any jurisdiction. We're focusing on Trump here. I mean, you know, we can come home to Canada and talk about different political parties, you know, and, you know, we can put our, you know, we're parking our partisan hats here. But eventually you accumulate and eventually the public just says, I just, I'm listening to this person because I just don't trust them anymore. And you just sort of shut them out. What maybe is required in particularly in the United States is that there comes a point where a big lie doesn't just have consequences for Donald Trump and whether or not he has to pay a couple million dollars to somebody who he's been found guilty of sexually assaulting, you know, a couple decades

ago. But when a lie has a consequence for me, you know, when it was when Gordon or when Glenn Clark was seen to be lying about the benefits of fast ferries in British Columbia and cost the Treasury millions of dollars in a boondoggle project. Well, now that affects me. Politicians will lie, but when it affects me, you hope, though, that the lie doesn't result in, you know, a catastrophic public policy. The WMD Iraq cost thousands and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives unnecessarily, as it turns out. I think history is pretty clear on that. And then, of course, lost to the treasurer and all that. And the public said, wait a minute. So my I know a friend who lost a friend and another buddy of

mine who served is not being treated well. They never really recovered PTSD, et cetera, et cetera. So that lie is now why the Republican Party has only won the popular vote once in the last, I think, nine presidential elections. So the Republican Party has, which is among the reasons why the recorrection of the Republican Party now into an isolationist anti-war party in its own way, is because they have to overcorrect to try to scrub that, that they're not the party that will go into useless wars. Actually won't even back, you know, appropriate military action in places like Ukraine, because they were so stung by the overcorrection of the public against their party being in favor of wars that they don't need to be. So the overcorrection in that direction.

So, so I think when the lies accumulate and have public consequence, that's when everybody sort of retreats back and there'll be a counterbalance to Jerry's point though is that you know the the um you know there are very good people and honest decent people but but i just think it's very very hard now because noise and heat is what is rewarded in politics not reason and substance and accomplishment and you know the other day for this this passport issue in canada which you talked about on your podcast this week, I know, Peter, about the symbols and all that.

I was literally standing in line at Starbucks and I saw people rattling around on Twitter about how Terry Fox and Vimy Ridge are taking that. So I put forward a tweet and I just said, wait a minute, they've scrubbed Terry Fox and the Vimy Ridge Memorial from the passport? Who approved that? That's crazy.

And I literally put that tweet out and it's had like 5,000 or or six thousand likes and retweets and there are literally 10 or 20 streams of conversations going on going on about how this is this is how the Nazis got started it's like whoa like like like we've spiraled it's like holy cow who wants to who wants to put their hand up and their family into the grinder of this public square at this time? That's genuinely depressing things. But anyways, I hope that there's social learning and people realize that there's consequence that politics cannot just be about incitement. It has to be actually about problem solving and governing.

Yeah. And I think you make a really important point in here, James, which is there's you like to think in a kind of cosmic way that lies always have consequences for the liars. But. You know, often they don't have many consequences for anybody else. And the difference between a lie that hurts somebody in your family and one that is just seen to be grist, the Daily Mill of politics. There's a big gulf between those two things. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that Donald Trump lost in 2020, largely because of COVID. I think that is what you were inferring earlier, James. And there's a lie that cost people their lives, right? And in the most profound and traumatic way, left an indelible scar on families, millions of them in the United States. So in a way, I think that I don't want to say there's something hopeful about that, but maybe there's something reassuring about it that you can you can basically lie until the lies have consequences for real people in real ways. And then they kind of stop listening to you or they turn away from you.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break. I want to bring the other element into the story, which is the media, how it plays things now and how it's got to reconsider, if at all, how it's going to play things in the future as a result of the politics of the law. That when we come back. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Monday episode of Moore Butts. This is conversation number eight. James Moore, the former Conservative cabinet minister, and Gerry Butts, the former top Liberal aide to the Prime Minister,

both in new jobs, away from Parliament Hill these days, but giving us their thoughts on the issues of the day. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Okay, I want to talk about the media, because after Thursday night, CNN is in the crosshairs for giving an exposed liar, a twice-impeached, multi-indicted, convicted sexual abuser, a platform. Where are you on the media's role in this?

James, you start. I mean, as harsh, if not more harsh, because the media, quote, quote, it's a difficult thing and it's a hard thing to analyze because people talk about the media, quote. But I often think to say let's have a conversation about media is like saying let's have a conversation about sport. What sport? Hockey? Baseball? Olympic? Amateur?

Professional? Collegiate? Kids? What? So media is a massive umbrella that constitutes a lot of things. Those who chronicle what has happened and put it and try to synthesize it and put it out for information conversation and to keep the public informed. That's one form of media, but that's a shrinking island. And it's being overwhelmed by people who think that that's what they're getting. But what they're actually getting are people who are running businesses and they're feeding people the substance that they want want and you see it on the right of course you see it on the left of course

you see it in both fronts the right tends to get scrutinized more which says more about uh you know the the nature of the ideological composition of those who go into journalism but it happens everywhere and i think a lot of people into jerry said earlier don't often have they don't seem to disseminate between them all and they think that one is the other and and and the other which is essentially essentially feeding the audience what they want to hear uh and and placating their their base instincts and ideologies and biases for for the sake of the audience's comfort and who pretend that that's actually sort of informed objective here's what actually happened news i mean those are the bad actors but it's hard to smoke them out tucker carlson you know has been smoked out but he's welcomed onto a platform he's going to be

making a lot more money on twitter uh because he's um he's cultivating an audience and he's running a business and he's not actually in the media and news environment and um so you know the the media are broadly speaking quote quote uh are very culpable because they don't govern themselves we see this frankly the press gallery in ottawa and it's been going on for why is you know you know why are some of the clear bad actors members of the press gallery like frank magazine isn't are members of the press gallery and have magazine isn't are members of the press gallery and have been for years some of the independent journalists who are clearly just activists for on ec and on either end are credentialed members of the press gallery who go to the press gallery

dinner who spend their evenings on laptops trying to destroy people for for no other reason but fun and sport rather than actually being so so you, where is the self-government amongst journalism to to have an honest conversation about their own profession? You know, I think that's something that's very much missing in Canada and missing in other jurisdictions around the world as well. Jerry. Well, I find myself saying this a lot. I agree with James entirely. The thing I would add to it is there's no ballast in the ship anymore. It used to be that there were kind of out there media outlets in Canada, but overall, they were kind conspiracy, but a few key outlets that you could count on to kind of tell the truth over time and that they were more interested in getting the public square righted than they were in selling newspapers or in this day and age driving clicks. And I just

don't see that anymore. I was talking to a friend who works at CBC, not in front of a camera, but she was telling me about how at CBC headquarters these days, the walls are filled with screens telling you what's moving and what's not right. That's, it's kind of like you're in an old style stock exchange where you're looking at price fluctuations over seconds, minutes, and hours. If that's all you're focused on, and this is certainly true of the Globe and Mail and the way they run their business now, if all you're focused on is which stories are moving fastest and what's attracting the most attention, then there's no way you're going to be focused on telling the news over time. And, you know, I've been a harsh critic of the Globe

and Mail. I've been a harsh critic of other media outlets, but I think I've been a harsh critic of the global mail. I've been a harsh critic of other media outlets, but I think I've been a fair one. I think they're following a business model and not the public interest. And the ones that I worry about aren't the ones that you expected from the far reaches of the left and right. It's the ones that used to be in the center that are behaving in the same way that you would have expected yellow journalism to behave in yesteryear. Okay, let me... But what do you think, Peter? You always ask us questions.

You have a lot more experience in this than we do. Can I get Peter Mansbridge on record about Canadian journalism and where it's going? I've actually said a few things lately, even about my old employer, the CBC, which hasn't put me in good stead with some of them. But let me pull the two of you back to the issue of the lie and the liar. How do you cover an unrepentant liar? That was part of the debate surrounding last Thursday, right? Why did they ever give him a platform?

Why didn't they challenge him more? Although I thought Caitlin Collins did a hell of a job, all things considered. But how do you cover that person, whether it's Trump or whether it's somebody else you're convinced is constantly putting out lies, conspiracy theories, what have you. How do you cover that? Well, I think, again, I'm not a journalist, but I think that the way to cover is to describe the connection between the lie and what kind of

effect it has for the audience, right? That it's not just that Donald Trump is lying about COVID. It's that COVID is now affecting millions more people than it would have had he been truthful about it in the beginning. And I think that that's, it's a difficult connection to make, but I think it's the most important connection to make. Otherwise, it all just sounds like talk. I don't think you should let lies go unchallenged, that's for sure. Yeah. And I think one of the saving graces of a lot of this is the fact that the tools are out

there for citizen journalists and people just to sort of expose people, right? And there's a law of averages, you know, even the best communicator, you know, the worst communicator will drop the ball in one out of every five media interviews that they do. And then eventually the party, you know, Canada party just said, well, let's go ahead and not put that person on a panel anymore. Or let's have them, you know, not go out and scrum after question period. You know, great communicators will drop one in every 10,000 interviews, but eventually you will hit your mark. Eventually your law of averages catches up with everybody.

And the ability of the public now to sort of talk about this and put it out there and say, look, this is just a fact counterfact. This is just eventually over time, there's just an accumulation of weight of evidence on a person. And you never know what is going to be the one lie or the one circumstance that's eventually going to catch up with people and again you know keeping it contemporary i mean it's you know the what what did justin trudeau know about um china in 2001 with michael chong like is it plausible that ceases did their homework presented it to pco justin trudeau either saw it and ignored it or didn't see it or like, like it eventually, like if that's the thing that you think is the most important to you, because maybe, maybe you're a member of the Chinese Canadian diaspora and you have real

concern about the government and the way in which they're handling this. Maybe that's the thing in which you just say, you know what, I just can't vote liberal anymore because I just don't believe them in this circumstance because this has a material impact to me. Or, you know, to be to be fair and to be cross-partisan, like if somebody says, you know, I've invested 20 years of my life into scientific discovery. And the idea that I have to go through the prime minister's communications shop to decide whether or not the weather report that I'm going to put out there that will have an impact on aquaculture on the west coast of British Columbia, that has to go through the minister's office before I have to say, okay, to do an interview in a regional paper about the shifting tides and the concerns that I have for the next 20 years. And that has to be okayed by a political office. That's just wrong. So people now have tools at their disposal to talk about these things and put evidence on the table and the public can choose to dismiss them or not that's the biggest biggest anxiety that i have but the tools with which people have to actually expose truth and to put it in in front of the sunlight for for its for its effect have

have never been more manifest i'll i'll give you a counterpoint to that though peter which is um the technology that is currently in rapid development to mislead people into believing lies i.e misinformation and disinformation generated by artificial intelligence is truly terrifying and we will soon be able to video still very hard, but we will soon see images that we cannot distinguish from the real thing, but they're generated by malign actors using high compute power. And that's in this environment, the one that we're describing, that's something to be truly worried about. And in closed media environments, whether it's Russia, China, North Korea,

you know, like you start, imagine these tools in the hands of someone like Ceausescu or where you can close off your borders and you can control the printing presses and the radio waves and so on. And you can control what people see in their television, radio, and in print. You know, we have seen that world before when you extend it to digital. And when there's just mass public confusion about what's real and what's not. That is a very toxic, toxic dynamic.

So therefore, the need, the fundamental need for us to have clear, transparent, verifiable, peer reviewed silos or pipelines of objective truth of what's actually happening. You know, the Leafs lose to the Florida Panthers. Like, we know who scored. We know the score. We know it's verifiable. It's a factual, it's a data point. What was in the federal budget? How much money was pledged?

How much money was spent? What's going to come up? You know, what are they expecting in terms of interest rates? What's their forecast for deficits? And so, like, it's an objective truth. Like people who want to establish platforms of objective, clear truth. I think the public is craving for that

because outside of whatever our biases, the public just, you know, part of the reason why we flick on whatever websites or pick up a paper or turn into whatever station. See, I just want to know what the hell happened. There was a boom and there was a boom in the distance. What happened? Like there's a noise.

Did a train derail? Did something blow up? Was it just a firework? Like what happened over there? Did I pick up my phone? And what platform do I go to to find out what the hell is happening around me? Small scale, large scale. There's frankly money to be made, an economic model there for people who can establish a platform

of verifiable objective truth that the public can tap into so that again that's maybe my silver lining counterbalance to jerry is that he's right about the threat but i think there's opportunity out there because the public at the end of the day you know it's it's a darwinian impulse we look for patterns we look for consistency we look onto the horizon to see where the dangers are and that has to be informed by objective truth. We are wired biologically through our Darwinian impulse to look for risk on the horizon, and we need to be informed by truth. And so I think in time, the avenues for people to believe in something that is genuinely true and objectifiably true will present itself. In other words, free markets work. I just want the record to show, Peter, that it was James who raised the Leafs' defeat at the end.

I was willing to let it go for the whole podcast. He went a bridge. And we're all feeling for you and the Leafs. He went a bridge too far on that one, I must say. Listen, we're out of time, but I want to stretch it by a minute to each of you with this last question. You know, we like to think as Canadians

that we're either pure from all this or we're close to being pure from all this. Trump makes it look like his use of lying makes him a winner, and, you know, success is contagious. How does the system prevent that from infecting Canada with the same, the same situation? So a minute to each of you, Jerry first. I think our, our, our greatest and most important antibody or inoculation against that is our public school

system, frankly. I think that the fact that I grew up in a relatively poor town in eastern Nova Scotia and had all the same opportunities as people who grew up in Rosedale is largely due to the fact that we had strong public schools and that's why i kind of spent first half of my career on that issue but i think i think as long as we have that where there's going to be a baseline of uh inoculation against it what i think is going to be problematic is just the the technological advancement coupled with a chaotic media environment is making it very difficult for people to sort what's real and what's not. And it, um, the ability to find like-minded people has been weaponized by some of the most technologically advanced communications platforms in the world to give you the same

belonging to override your rational judgment of what's true and false. And that's really hard. And Canada has no border against that. All right. James, you got the final word. Yeah, well, I think two antidotes. Your question was, how do we not go down the rabbit hole of what they have in the United States? I think we have two antidotes in Canada that are actually helpful.

One is actually our system. In the United States, they don't have a question period. We malign question period and attack question period. But there actually is an infrastructure in Canada and an expectation that the political parties will face each other live on television, live in front of the world and square off and have a debate and hold each other accountable. Sometimes, obviously, it's ugly and blustery and irresponsible. The United States, like Donald Trump is apparently going to run for the nomination and he's not going to debate his opponent and there's talk that joe biden will be the democratic nominee and he's not going to debate donald trump because why bother why and

why take the risk of exposing you know his energy versus donald trump's and all that but the united states you have competing press conferences and competing rallies and and so on you don't actually have a direct head-to-head collision on a consistent basis where people hold each other accountable. Yes, I know sometimes it's ugly, but in our system, we actually do do that. And it's actually a very important mechanism for people to sort of see because real recognizes real. People can smell BS a mile away. And you can kind of say, well, that argument is not, no, no, no. I see what you're trying to do.

That's not quite true. And just the fact of the exposure of the actors in an environment that forces accountability, a very healthy thing. And then the second one is the one that I just referred to is that I think it's not just economics. I think we have a I think we have an impulse of biological Darwinian need for clarity and to mitigate risk for the survival of our communities and ourselves. And that requires us to have an input of truth and data that is clear and verifiable. And we want that. We seek that out with weather, with sports, with stock markets. We seek it out with regard to the safety of our vehicles, with regard to the safety of our parks and all. We need it.

We need it. And we need it with government. And we need it with what's going on in the world and we and as soon as a news outlet breaks that trust uh they're no longer trusted and so and so the i think the market force of the public expecting and needing clarity and certainty in what's happening around them will will will cause platforms to emerge that have the trust of the public. All right. I seem to say this after each one of our conversations, and that is that it was fascinating. And this truly was, I think, of the eight we've done now. I think this may well be the best one.

The audience will determine that, and I'm sure we'll hear from them, as we often do. And we'll try and squeeze in another one before we take our summer breaks at the end of June. So, gentlemen, thanks so much for this. Really enjoyed it. Always a pleasure, Peter. Thank you.

Well, there you go. The Moore-Butts conversation number eight. James Moore was in Vancouver. Jerry Butts was in Ottawa. And as I said, I look forward to hearing from you, from those of you who actually listen to the conversation. Every once in a while, I'll get stuff, whether it's on our YouTube channel or to the podcast, which is clearly shots that are being taken by people who haven't even listened to the program, right?

They look at the title and then they react accordingly. I just toss those. But the vast majority of you do have thoughtful comments about the discussions that we have, including on the More Butts conversation, in this case, number eight, the politics of the lie. So if you want to drop me a line, please do. It's themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. So that's it for this day. Thanks so much for listening. Really, really enjoyed today's conversation.

Hope you did as well. We'll talk to you again. And that's this week's encore edition of the More Butts Conversation number eight. it's from last May, May the 15th of 2023. Next week, we'll have a new edition of the More Butts Conversation on Tuesday. So look forward to that. And look forward to tomorrow's episode of The Bridge. It's the Your Turn edition. And we'll be answering with your answers the question if you could change one thing about

the way we communicate with each other as canadians what would that change be in an era of polarization how could we get along better and talk better to each other that's coming up tomorrow i'm peter vansbridge thanks for listening on this day we'll talk again in 24 hours