The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Encore: The Media and the US Election -- Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Encore Episode: So how did the media do during the most consequential election of our time? Lots of different opinions on that but today we focus on the views of one person, someone who has a great deal of expertise on this issue. Bill Fox is a former senior reporter, a top political advisor to a former prime minister, and a former executive for major companies. He's also an author specializing in discussion about the media. Today he's our guest. 

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, and this episode is an encore edition for this Wednesday. We go back almost a month to November the 12th. Bill Fox was our guest shortly after the U.S. presidential election. The topic was how did the media do in covering this election campaign? Bill is a former reporter himself, former top aide to a former conservative prime minister in Brian Mulroney, is a former reporter himself, former top aide to a former conservative prime minister in Brian Mulroney, and a former business executive. So Bill's got the credentials to have this conversation, and we sure did do just that. Here's our Encore Edition for this week. And hello there, welcome to Tuesday, Peter Mansbridge here. You know, I'm always amazed, every week.

On Mondays we announce the question of the week, for Thursdays your turn. And almost right away, literally, within the first hour after the program is over, I'm getting responses emailed from different parts of the country and sometimes outside of the country on that question. Well, this week's question is pretty straightforward. Governments of the day. It could be provincial. it could be federal, it could be a current government, or there could be a government or a party that expects to be government in the next year. Everybody talks about, you know what, the deficit is too high. The national debt is very high. We got to do something about it.

And that means cuts or tax increases. Well, nobody wants to do tax increases, especially in the months before an election campaign. Nobody's going to say, we believe more taxes. They may be already running on taxes. Do I hear the word carbon tax? No, usually what they talk about are cuts, right? So that's the question of the week. The question of the week is, if you were making the decisions,

what government program or government service would you cut? Well, we've already got lots of answers to that question, and we expect lots more coming today and tomorrow before 6 p.m. Wednesday. That's the cutoff time. So send your answer in, include your name, the location you're writing from, and keep it relatively short. Okay? There's your question of the week for this week. And you write to the Mansbridge Podcast

at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. Okay, let's get to today's program. And the basic premise of today's program is that question, how did the media perform in its coverage of, in this case, the U.S. election 2024. Were you happy with the kind of news you were receiving from news organizations, whether they be print or television or radio or online? Were you happy with what you saw?

Did you notice a change in the way the media is operating in this campaign compared with past election campaigns. Could be in the States, could be in Canada. Because the odds are what happened in the United States over these past months, there are going to be lessons learned, one assumes, by Canadian news organizations and Canadian political parties about media coverage.

So it didn't take me long to figure out who I should talk to about this. He's an old friend. In fact, we both used to work in the Ottawa Press Gallery a few years ago. Well, quite a few years ago. His name's William Fox, Bill Fox. Bill was known in his journalistic days working for the Toronto Star. He was the Washington Bureau Chief at one point. He was the Ottawa Bureau Chief at another point.

He's written books, very successful books, two of them. And they both talk about the media in a very smart way. His most recent book is Trump, Trudeau, Tweets, Truth, A Conversation. And his earlier book was Spin Wars, Politics and News media. Bill also was the Director of Communications for Brian Mulroney when Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister. He's worked at a number of executive level jobs

in Canada since his time in politics. Worked at Bell Canada, Bombardier, CN. So Bill's been around. He's seen the media from all kinds of different ways, from inside the media, from outside on the political front, and from outside on the big business front.

So I've learned a lot from Bill over the years. I'm going to learn a lot more today, and I'm going to share that knowledge with you. So let's get started. Let's listen to what Bill Fox has to say on that question about the media and the 24 U.S. presidential campaign. So Bill, I'm not sure, you know, exactly where to start this because, you know, the campaigns are, they're not like what we used to see when we were out there. But they've changed very kind of rapidly. And I want to talk about a number of the elements we witnessed in this

campaign that we haven't really seen before. But before I get to specifics, in general terms, in trying to answer this question, how did the media do in covering the U.S. election this time? And I mean generally the media, you know, whether it's American, Canadian, Brits, whomever. Generally, how did the media do? Well, I don't think they were terrible. And I'll come back to that in a second, why I say that. But there's no question that, as you point out, campaigns, political discourse, public debate, and media coverage of same have changed so dramatically

in the last while that the universe that we're contemplating today didn't exist very few years ago you know so we've got a circumstance when people are doing their postmortems where you know elon musk is saying you know the legacy media has been exposed as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. He's saying legacy media is finished. He's telling people who are on his site X, you're the media now, and that citizen journalism is the future. Well, you know, citizen journalism, A, is not a new thing. And B, I'm reminded of the comment from the legendary Canadian television journalist Morley Safer when he was at

CBS. When asked what he thought about citizen journalism, responded, I think about citizen journalists the same way I think about citizen surgeons. Yes, he did have a way with words, didn't he? So I still think there's a role for media. I put myself in the camp of Frank Bruni at the New York Times. You know, the legacy media are less important than they think they are, and they speak to a significantly smaller segment of the electorate

than they once did. And for that reason, they've got a product that I would argue is sort of stale dated. It's a product that, you know, is still a vestige of the old top-down one-to-many model that was the media model for years, and hasn't adjusted to this new model where a Joe Rogan, as Bruni points out, is more important than the New York Times. But he's in a fundamentally different business.

And I think that the mainstream media, if it's going to be relevant going forward, has to get in a different business. And what do I mean by that? First of all, there's too much stenography in today's journalism. There's too much, you know, in my view, there's too many stories that where the first paragraph still ends with the words said yesterday. Well, thanks to social media, I know what they said yesterday. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something that's further up the value chain. And I think that's where media has to go. And, you know, there's a fellow at

Harvard named Alex Jones, not the social media Alex Jones, a former Pulitzer Prize winner. And I think he put it very well when he said, you know, that basically the media has to get in the truth business. And as obvious as that sounds, that was sort of not the way we looked at it when you and I first started in this business many years ago. The conventional wisdom then was, we can't establish what truth is. So what we're going to do is be accurate.

And we're going to faithfully record what people say. Well, people like Donald Trump figured that out. And they figured out that they could say the most outrageous things, and that the mainstream media would report it verbatim, and in encyclopedic detail and losing sight about whether or not it on any basis in fact a reality so so that's why i think first it's got to get in the truth business secondly i think it's it's it's loyalty has to be to the citizen. And I think that legacy media has lost sight of that.

You know, that's what's behind all the conversations around insider baseball, around a media that talks down to people, around a media that's not inclusive of so many segments of our population. You know, if you're a kind of a communications person, you know, there is this tendency to think of it as a bridge, but as a one-way bridge where we'll send information out to the electorate. And we've lost sight of the fact that we should be onboarding information from the electorate, that the bridge has to work two ways. I think we've lost sight of that.

And then the final thing is I think the essence of media going forward has got to be around verification. You know, we've all heard all the conversations about misinformation, disinformation, foreign interference in the form of bots and all the rest of it. And so, you know, we have to have some place where somebody is actually trying to establish something towards truth. And a final thought on truth, Peter. Truth is, you know, Borden Spear is a former editor of the Toronto Star,

they put it best. But he said, truth is cumulative. Truth is not a one story thing. Truth is built over time with coverage that extends beyond the act itself, the declaration itself, the event itself. And instead of using the event as the end of the process, I think they've got to start using it as the beginning of a process.

Where does it lead? Where do you go from here? And how do you get more people involved? And how do you get them involved in a way that they can relate to? And I've got some specific examples of what I mean by that. And we'll get to them. I mean, man, that was a great opening. You've given us a lot to think of there, and you've given me a number of off-ramps I can take to try and probe a little bit on them. So in no particular order, let me pick up on some of the things you said. At one point you said that the legacy media, the established kind of old guard of the media, in trying to reestablish itself as an important element in the telling of the story, you said they've got to find a way of going firmly up the value chain.

Now, what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, they have to actually establish some something matter expertise, and they have to start producing a product that people are going to be prepared to pay for. And I say that for two reasons. One, as is blindingly obvious, the advertising underpinning of media traditionally is not only gone it is never coming back and so the only way forward is going to be through some subscription-based model and that can't be you know government handouts forever in a day and and and the subscription-based model is going to be predicated on a product

that's worth paying for. You know, I'm not going to pay you extra. And I'll use, you know, newspapers as an example, because I come from there, as you know. I'm not going to pay the Toronto Star extra to tell me something that I already saw on a clip on X 24 hours earlier. I'm looking to the Toronto Star to tell me something else. And the irony of that is nothing that that's not particularly new. Sports coverage, by example, they've been doing that for years. You and I know the score of the Jets game. We know the score of the Leafs game.

When we pick up a media story after that, what we want to know is kind of, okay, take me from there. You know, what all went on? What was the background? What does it mean going forward? You know, and so the irony is sports writers have been doing it for a long time all i'm saying is you know maybe maybe political reporters have to start doing and we got to start doing it in a way that doesn't exclude people from the conversation so don't talk about tariffs you know unless you're talking about it in the context of a T-shirt being sold at Walmart or Costco.

You know, like, like, help me understand how it connects to my life. As you know, I'm an alum of the Toronto Star. And way back in the day, you know, every story that the staff generated for the Toronto Star set out to answer one fundamental question. What does it mean to the people who live in metropolitan Toronto? And everybody used to ridicule us for that and laugh at us. And, you know, every time you'd have an assignment, you'd get on the press bus and somebody would look over at you and say, Foxy, what does it mean to Metro? Har, har, har.

But there was genius in it because it allowed people to connect to the story in a way that connected to their lives. And so that's, when I say you've got to move up the value chain, you know, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. And I'll give you an example from, you know, quite recently in the last few days. You know, there's a really compelling column carried in the Globe and Mail, co-written by people we know well. Ed Greenspon, former editor of the Globe and the head of the Public Policy Forum. Drew Fagan, you know, the foreign policy background and the journalism background, and Janice Stein.

And it talked about, you know, seize the initiative with the United States, but took it a step further and talked about, you know, the potential to develop things in the Arctic around foreign policy. And, like, that's the kind of piece that I want to read, and that's the kind of piece that I want to read, and that's the kind of piece that I'll pay for. Because otherwise, as I say, why would I pay you to, so I can read a quote, you know, from Trump that I saw on X 24 hours earlier? You know, you mentioned verification, too, and that kind of flows with, you know, it's easy to dump on Trump because the whole issue of, you know, Trump's basically lying has been an issue for the last eight years.

But now he's not the only one who does that. There are a lot of people who are doing that now, because they saw how he was getting away with it. Well, and the other thing is, you know, sometimes, and the lie can be in the eye of the beholder, right? Right. I mean, sometimes it's, you know, like, you know, truth can be a prism, and everybody looks at it through a different panel. And that's why I say, you know, truth is cumulative. Because if you roll back the tape, right, when I first started selling newspapers on the street, newspapers were the information vehicle of choice. Then it morphed and it became television, probably starting with the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

But certainly by the time you and I were in the business in the early 70s, television was absolutely dominant. I mean, I think the statistic is something crazy like, you know, 72 percent of the television sets that were turned on during the supper hour in America every night were turned turned on to one of ABC, NBC, or CBS News. Correct. Tremendous reach. You know, even when I started to work in politics, I remember very clearly the Reagan White House used to tell me that if they had a big policy initiative that they wanted to get kind of launched, they would start on a Thursday and they could do it by basically talking to 12 people. 12. The three networks, major networks, the three news magazines, Newsweek, Time and the

U.S. News and World Report, the washington post new york times wall street journal and then depending on what the specific goes whatever the big industry paper was so if it was a space thing it was the houston post if it was an entertainment oriented thing it was the la times and they could they could do background briefings with them on thursday roll it out on a friday do the president's radio message on a Saturday, and completely dominate the talk show, the Sunday morning talk shows. 12 people. Well, that world, in fact, it started to change even then, because to give the Reagan White House credit, they saw the technology was moving.

What was one of the things that started to emerge in the early 80s? Talk radio. They figured out any day at 5 o'clock, there were literally millions of people stuck in traffic jams, especially in California. And so they would take the most senior people in their government, Secretary of State George Shultz, and they put him on talk radio. So he was talking to people sitting in cars. Well, fast forward, you know, we get into the Internet and social media and all of that, and, you, and the famous sort of echo chambers that V.O. Key wrote about in the 60s, just exploded in terms of number, but even more fundamentally,

exploded in terms of the size of the audiences within them. So, you know, whatever the circulation of the new york times is there are influencers that have three times as many followers and so and so you know that's the reality today and so and so you know it's harder to connect and for the mainstream media i think the way you have to be part of that conversation is you're not, you're never going to get to 6 million followers. So you have to try and shape what the conversations is. Okay. Let me, I want to take the path you just offered up, which is the,

what we call for lack of a better term, the alternative media, which is now the dominant media, whether it's Joe Rogan or whomever. But let me just go back to this truth issue, because I think it's the thing that really threw me in this campaign watching it. Because Trump made a decision at some point that he didn't need all the stuff, whether it was the debates, whether it was the 60 Minutes interview, whether it was interviews of any kind on traditional media, legacy media. He just didn't need it. he didn't want it and um he didn't want to be fact check while he was giving his his stick in those you know in the debates you know he did he did what he did one debate against kamala harris

he did one debate against joe biden he got the success he needed in the in the biden one in terms of winning the debate he probably wanted too it too much because it kicked Biden out of the race. But he decided at some point that I don't need these. I don't need them. I can go to Joe Rogan or half a dozen other different podcasts that he went to before he went to Joe Rogan to sort of get in the path of those kind of programs. Is that just a Trump thing, or is that now changed, like you said before, certain elements that we witnessed through this campaign have changed media forever?

Yeah, and I mean, it's not just a Trump thing, first of all. And the fact-checking, let me offer kind of a contrarian view of that. I know there's a school of thought out there that says, so you wrote all these stories about Trump, and you wrote about him as a fraudster, and you wrote about him as a, you know, this and that, and it didn't have any impact. So you had no impact at all.

So I have a very different take on that. And my take is media is important, not because it tells you what to think. But as Bernard Cohen told us many moons ago, media matters because it tells us what to think about. So if I'm media and I've done, you know, the New York Times research on Trump's business empires, if I've covered the trials around the allegations of sexual assault, if I've recorded the bankruptcies, then in my mind, I've done my job. And then you as a voter, you can decide whether or not those issues are determinate, or whether the price of eggs is actually more important than any of that. But to me, what the media has to do is to make sure that as much of

that information as is possible to be made available is made available, including fact checks. Now, you know, so again, you know, the critics will say, oh, well, you know, CNN has fact checkers and, you know, that never seems to have any impact. Well, I would argue that it is a factor in the decision that I, as an elector, come to. So whether or not I decide that's determinant or not, in my mind, is not the issue. The issue is, did I know about it? And that's the role for media for me. Well, you know, the counter to that, to a degree, is that a good chunk of the audience, somewhere around 50, maybe more, percent, doesn't trust the media on those kind of issues, doesn't believe what they're saying. just that they think about it. It's because they don't think about it because they've dismissed it because they don't believe it.

Yeah. And there's lots of reasons why that might be the case. You know, I mean, I'm not defending, you know, all of the past practices of mainstream media. Right. You know, there are phenomenon that you and I have not defending, you know, all of the past practices of mainstream media. Right. You know, there are phenomenon that you and I have witnessed many, many times around, you know, congenial truths and conventional wisdom and, you know, credibility issues. I mean, you know, you've got to chuckle when you take the current context of the recent U.S. election where, you know, for weeks I'm watching pundits go on at some exhaustive length, telling me how Trump can't win.

And then between commercial breaks on election night, the same people are sitting there telling me how we won. Well, sorry. And part of it is, you know, we do have a lot of opinion we have less reporting less fact that's not necessarily the fault of legacy media everybody's got fewer resources everybody's got you know uh significant budgetary constraint i mean I don't want to sound like somebody whining about the old six-team NHL, but when you and I were active journalists, we covered stories. We didn't write about things that we hadn't reported on. We were on the ground. A lot of journalists today

don't have that luxury. And so what happens? So they become almost hostage themselves to outside sources, which often tends to be, you know, things like public opinion research. Because you're not out there talking to people. So you've got to try and get a sense of what's going on out there. And unfortunately, when you do do that you can exclude all kinds of people from the conversation and and so if you're not talking to them you know how do you know what they're saying so to so use your example of joe rogan so legacy media should have people assigned to cover that, to cover Joe Rogan. They should never be surprised by anything that's said there. It's just a beat like everything else.

We used to go to City Hall. We used to go to the legislature. Well, how many people go to the legislature to cover it anymore? Almost nobody. Right? So you've got to start kind of thinking about doing things differently, in my mind. One of the things you've got to do is cover those platforms.

I've got to take a break in a minute, but just before I leave the Joe Rogan thing, you know, I'm assuming all our listeners know who Joe Rogan is. I mean, he's the most influential podcaster, certainly in North America, if not the world. He's got like 40 million listeners. And he gets big guests. He had Trump on for, what, three hours?

Like he was on the show for three hours. He never got Harris on. Now, whether that was because Harris didn't want to go on or whether they couldn't make an arrangement or whatever it was, it was pretty well conceded that it was a mistake for Harris not to find a way to get on there. Yes. But how did Joe Rogan become Joe Rogan?

And I don't mean that from the personal basis of him, but that podcast has become such an integral part of the American political scene and the social scene, the entertainment scene, you name it. But certainly through this campaign, in terms of the political impact of it. How did that happen? Well, it comes directly from the conversations that occur in places where we're not used to having them happen. So that was what, you know, the platforms that the Internet created allowed people who typically are excluded from conversation to be part of.

Because historically, you know, mainstream media always marginalized people, right? Like, again, I'll use, because I live in Toronto, I'll use Toronto for illustrative purposes. Back in the day, if you lived in the suburbs of Toronto, you never got in the paper. Unless there was a murder or something. But people who lived in the suburbs never saw themselves reflected in the paper. Women were marginalized. Racialized Canadians were marginalized. So what the Internet did was this explode the number of platforms and opportunities for people to have this conversation and compounded by the tendency of elites. You know, of which I'd be included, I suppose.

To kind of, with jargon, exclude people from conversations. So if I, even things that are worthy and good causes, but, you know, the whole debate around pronouns, you know, a lot of people are just so uncomfortable, they just won't engage in it. Well, okay, that means we don't know what they think. We have no idea what they think, because they feel that they don't have the right to be part of that conversation. And so what I'm saying is the legacy media has got to figure out ways

to make sure that they become part of the conversation, as do academics, as do business leaders. You know, you can't disqualify somebody because, you know, they're not aware that it's now, you know, and I'll probably get it wrong, you know, LGBTQ2S+. Well, okay, if I'm not absolutely current in terms of the latest thinking on a university campus somewhere, then I'm probably going to be offside on that. And rather than run that risk, I'm just not going to engage. In my view, you can't have that.

You've got to figure out ways to get those people back in conversations. And it's not i mean i take your point if you go through the surveys trump voters you know tend not to get their uh information from newspapers they tend not to get it from legacy media they get a lot of it from you that youtube they get a lot of it from uh cable tv and a lot of them just don't follow political news that closely. But having said that, that's not to say they don't have political views. And part of the challenge that the media and the progressives, quote unquote,

is they can lose sight of some, literally some fundamental communications theories that have been around for literally 100 years. You know, Walter Lippin, 100 years ago, said to us, you need to remember and realize that not everybody hears the same words the same way and you know you say that you say okay well what do you what do you mean by that well let me give you a specific illustration here in canada you know we had a case where the canadian human rights

tribunal decided that there had been systemic discrimination against young First Nations peoples because of chronic underfunding. The government, you know, basically was instructed to do something about that. The courts upheld the Human Rights Tribunal's ruling. The government did something about that. So if you're in the government, you're in the land of, that's good news. I've committed to spending tens of billions of dollars to improve health delivery, health services deliveries to First Nations people and children in particular.

All good. Except when you make that announcement, you need to remember that in all kinds of places in Canada, people don't have access to health care. There are no primary providers. People don't have a family doctor. And so you need to think about those people when you're having that first conversation, as opposed to just, you know, kind of walking around feeling terrific because you did something important, which you did. Let me be very clear about that.

But having said that, you have to be mindful that unless at some point you've got to speak to everybody else, it feels left out. It feels marginalized. It feels, well, I don't have a doctor. You know, what did I do wrong? And so, you know, that's what I say it's incumbent on political leadership and on thought leaders particularly in the media to make sure that those people are considered and heard

okay we're going to take a quick break and we come back and a couple of last thoughts on this and how it may impact things on this side of the border. We'll be back right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to the Tuesday episode of The Bridge.

I'm Peter Mansbridge. Bill Fox is our guest today. We're talking about the media and what, if anything, we learned about how the media operates, good or bad, through the U.S. election. You're listening on Sirius XM,

Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. Bill, it's been a fascinating conversation. What I want to do is close out, I guess, in terms of, you know, at some point in the next 12 months, there's going to be an election in Canada. What should we be ready for in terms of the kind of coverage we're going to get given what we've just witnessed south of the border? Well, I hope that the leadership of the mainstream media

take the time to reflect on kind of lessons learned, to come to a more fulsome understanding about where the disconnect occurred in the United States and how did legacy media lose touch with literally half the population. I mean, that's a pretty staggering number. And then come to understand about all these other conversations that are going on, because they're going on here as well. You know, it's not just Joe Rogan and Joe, and a lot of people here are listening to Joe Rogan. So you, you know,

you've got to understand in the same way that, you know, in an earlier time, people, you know, watch CBS evening news. These, these platforms are, are of significance. And, you know, Peter, just to pick up on a point you made about Joe Rogan, yes, people tend to know about him, but I saw a clip the other day of a person that is said to be a candidate to be the Attorney General. And he was being interviewed by an influencer named Benny Johnson.

And Benny Johnson, you know, has had to leave two news organizations because of issues around plagiarism. So for old timers in, you know, the mainstream media business, they kind of have a tendency to dismiss him. Except he's got six million followers on three platforms. So he's not Joe Rogan, but he's a force. And so the progressives need to kind of understand that

they've been hostage to this old model of one-to-many, top-down, I'll tell you what's good for you, with a kind of a subtext of I know better. Right? There was always that kind of hint of, you know, trust me because I know what I'm doing. Well, earn my trust. Engage with me. Listen to what my concern is. Understand why I might see something slightly differently. Understand why I might not think your priority is necessarily

my priority. And I think if we don't see that, then we may just see kind of a repeat. And stories change. Again, let me use climate change. Pierre Pogliev, as opposition leader, has succeeded in establishing that story as a tax story. It's about the tax.

So then he has his slogan, tax the tax. And that's got the magic of simplicity. And it's also got the further magic of being relatively easy to determine whether or not he delivered on his promise. Right? So it's working for him at this point. But climate's about to become an economic story. Big time. People that own homes in certain areas are going to find out they're not going to get fire insurance.

People who own homes in certain areas have already found out they can't get flood insurance. People are going to find out that, you know, the blueberries don't come from northern Ontario anymore. They come from Peru. You know, so that tax slogan that works so well in the current context won't work in that new context. And my argument is, so the legacy media needs to get out in front of that and figure out what's coming as opposed to what happened. Good advice. Good advice.

I hope they're listening. Bill, it's been a treat. It's always a treat to talk to you on this kind of stuff and to talk to you on this kind of stuff. And to talk to you about hockey as well. But this has been good. Thanks so much for doing this. Take care.

Peter, thank you for having me. I enjoyed the chat. Bill Fox with us here on the bridge. For this day on an interesting, as always, conversation with Bill, but on this one in particular, in relationship to what we've witnessed over the past few months in terms of the media's focus on the U.S. election, how it did, where it failed, where it perhaps actually taught us some lessons. And they're all good for us to be thinking about, because we're looking at the same situation over the next year. There's going to be an election in Canada, and the media will play its role in trying to cover it, and trying to encourage you to learn more about the issues at play.

And they'll only be able to do that if they learn the lessons of the past, the recent past. We'll see how that works out. And that was our encore edition for this week on the bridge. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll be back tomorrow with your turn. Music .