The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Good Talk - What Should We Learn From The CBS "60 Minutes" Disaster?

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

First up this week, Prime Minister Carney summed up a critical week in the Canada-US trade discussions with the phrase, "some progress." So what does that mean? Plus the AI strategy. Then both Bruce Anderson and Chantal Hebert discuss the fall of an iconic broadcast network - CBS, and the "60 Minutes" debacle. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Are you ready for good talk? And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, along with Chantelle-A-Barre and Bruce Anderson. It's your regular Friday Good Talk. You know, last week, I don't know what came over me. It was something at the beginning of the show. For some reason, I didn't do the normal, Are You Ready for Good Talk? And I just said something else, and I didn't think about it again,

until the letters started coming in. Now, I don't want to overstate things. but there were a few saying you can't do this the program starts are you ready for good talk clearly both Bruce and Chantel looked puzzled as to why that was

not normal disappointed it was just got off the wrong foot well some of the writers were disappointed Eric ought a guy from Winnipeg who I don't know but he sent a letter saying my friends and I rely on that opening.

Because some of us record it and send it to each other. Are you ready? And we ship the program around. So I thought, I better not do that again. We can't afford to lose anybody. And so that's why we're back to,

Are You Ready, after a one week absence? I bet you're both so happy to hear that. That feels right. I can see it. We totally noticed we were off our game for 50 minutes after that. So not ready for that change. No consultation, as usual.

Yeah, I know. It was an ad lib change. But you'll be happy to know that Eric, the now famous Eric Ott from Winnipeg, also joins the throng that says, Chantel is a national treasure. Oh, give me a break. I know.

That's the way I wrote back to him. I said, break. We're, you know, we're tired of this. Yeah, good answer. Okay. One of the many things that you two have taught me over the years is to be cautious about assuming too much based on a very scant amount of information. So I'm being cautious and I'm just going to throw this open to your interpretation of what, if anything, we should think about it. Trade talks were kind of bad. on this week, at least the pre-trade talks, the latest pre-trade talks. And the prime minister said yesterday that there was some progress in these talks.

What should we make of that, Bruce? Well, look, I think that there's a discussion about when will the formal trade talks start? And it's quite natural, I think, that there's a lot of focus on, well, Mexico conversation is starting, where's the Canadian conversation? The implication sometimes in that kind of coverage of this issue is that absent those formal negotiations, there's really been no conversation between U.S. and Canadian officials, no work being done to isolate and try to find solutions to the irritants, which are relatively few in number and have been articulated by the Prime

minister, and I think to some degree by the Americans as well. But I don't think that's been the case. I think there have been conversations. There have been interactions. They don't look like the start of formal negotiations. So people quite logically say, well, when will those start? But I think when the prime minister says there's some progress being made and more work to do, he is sending a signal that he does want people to understand that it's not radio silence between the two countries, that the number of issues has been kind of isolated, identified, narrowed down, and that there's an effort being made to find common ground. In the past, he hasn't, he's been reluctant, I think, to send that kind of signal if there was

no reason to feel that it was, that there was something going on on the part of Canadian's, but I think that so I do think it was meaningful, but I think he was careful also to say what we've all observed, which is you can't tell how the United States as an administration is going to approach this, this conversation with Canada, because the formal rules of engagement have been ignored repeatedly, not just towards Canada, but towards lots of other countries, including with the imposition of some new tariff. just last week, which I guess don't apply to Canada, but which have something to do with the use of forced labor.

So the inconsistency in terms of how the U.S. is going to approach these things formally has made it harder for any Canadian government to say this is what the process is going to be. These will be the milestones that we're going to try to achieve. And I think that's the world that we live in now. So, yeah, I think we should take some. something from it, but also be cognizant of the fact that the Prime Minister said there's more work to do. Chantelle.

I'm not really there. I think that sometimes movement has described as progress. I think this week was a case in point. So, movement minister LeBlanc met in person for the first time in a few months with us vis-à-vis in the U.S. As for progress, well, movement was mostly on the Canadian side, by the way. and in what amounts to a major concession, again, on the part of Canada, this time on the instructing the CRTC to back off on its decision to impose a 15% tax on Canadian revenues to benefit Canadian productions. And while the government has portrayed that as an affordability measure and thrown in $600 million, which in clear, let's be clear, means the federal government is giving content producers in this country $600 million that they actually

need, but it is coming out of our pockets in lieu of coming out of the profits of Netflix and others. And why was that a concession? Because we have all known, let's be serious here, we have all known for a month or a year and a half, or even since the Biden administration, that these measures on digital platforms were a major irritant between Canada and two US administrations. And when people talk about who has the ear of the president, I would argue that people who did not want this to happen, the digital platform owners have a lot more audience with President Trump than, for instance, the people in the US who want to do with supply management, do away with supply management in Canada.

So the calculation obviously is that the message is going to be. Canada is making a move. Now you make a move. But the fig leaf was the affordability matter. The rationale the government put forward to say, hey, this is good news and we are taking care of your pocketbook, was that if they let this happen, all of us would pay more for our Netflix,

prime whatever subscriptions. Well, first, that has not been the case in the countries that have applied similar legislation. Why? Because it's a competitive market. And domestic and U.S. platforms compete against each other on price. But two, I spent the week trying to think about my basic needs in a time when affordability is an issue. So housing, sure. Food.

Sure. Ah, he think, certainly. You know, my digital subscriptions came way down the list of needs and did not actually make the cut for basic needs. So if I were going to use $600 million to help Canadians with their pocketbooks, I probably would be aiming at something other than subscriptions. But the real question at the end of the week is whether this is not the first Canadian concession. We have made steps towards the U.S. administration signals that we wanted to negotiate and were willing to drop baggage along the way. So far over the past year, none of those have resulted in what could be qualified as progress. One last point.

I have noted in interviews given my people who are part of the U.S. Canada Trade Council. Those are the people who are kind of a sounding board for Prime Minister Mark Carney on this issue. John Chari for one, but I saw others, hint that on the list of demands now from the U.S. administration prior to engaging in serious discussions is the notion that we bring alcohol, U.S. alcohol, wine, beer, etc., back on the shelves in Canada. And to me, both the fig leaf wrapping of the measures on digital subscriptions and this call illustrates both the strength and the weakness of Mark Carney's position domestically. The strength is Canadians are behind him when he's not giving up a lot. But they are not behind him or the premiers if they are looking like you're making concessions.

I would predict living in a province that's going in a place that's going in election that if Premier Freschette were asked to bring American alcohol back on the shelves of the SAQ tomorrow and did so, she would lose votes because this is driven by voters, not by premiers or the prime minister. So I don't think we're ending the week in a great place. And we're also not ending the year in a great place on Canada-U.S. trade. I think what Mark Carney is going for him is that most Canadians at this point are not blaming him for that, because his bruises, rightly points out, we are talking with people whose game plan does not involve a win-win solution or even them winning. As long as we lose, they're okay to lose. So in that context, I have found

everyone I talked to, I found less optimism at the end of this week than at any time over the past year. Okay. Perhaps the Quebec Premier should take a word from the Manitoba Premier. who had the line of the week again this week or the like no Coosma no boozma Bruce I saw you I think you were frantically writing down some of what Chantelle was saying what do you want to counter this

As always when I hear Chantelle's argument I hear merit in it I don't agree with her on a number of the points about the CRTC decision and I generally do feel more optimistic about our situation relative to the United States rather than less optimistic at the end of the week. Not so much because of that particular initiative or the conversation about alcohol,

but because I think that the U.S. political marketplace is changing in a way that is likely to produce a more productive conversation between our two countries. on the I don't want to get into a long rebuttal on the content side of things, but for the sake of presenting a counterpoint,

I do think that You don't have to, you know. Fair enough. Okay, I don't have to. I do think for some people what they pay for content is an important part of what they consider to be value in their lives.

On the list of priorities of basic needs and then affordability, crisis, where would you rank that in your budget? No, no, for me, look, it's not, I'm just saying I wouldn't use myself as the, as the only arbiter of that, but I also feel like the, it was likely in our market that those streaming companies would pass that on. And the government basically decided to decouple the money that is needed to support Canadian producers from the revenue stream of streamers, because the disjunctive.

between how we used to raise that money by handing out broadcast licenses and relying on broadcasters to provide those funds, that broke down. So it was a legitimate question of whether or not the new model should be resembled, should resemble the old model or not. Anyway, we don't need to get into that if we don't. But I said Chantal will probably want to come to that. I live in the province where these issues, because of culture being a number one issue, is hotly debated. 600 million is a payoff to try to tamper down the protest. It's not necessarily renewable. You're basically arguing we're going to replace capable revenues with taxpayer money.

And I don't really think that that was the plan. Why spend three years trying to pass legislation to get to this result? If not, because at some point, something had to give. And this was an easy give to tell you the truth. I don't believe that we will be talking about this give beyond this weekend. So that's the good news for the government. My test on this is not this is a terrible measure, although I think you should take voters for adults.

If you have $600 million, you should not tell them it's to spare them an increase in subscription because of an affordability crisis that makes a mockery of people who are struggling to put food on the table or a roof over their head. But the test on this is this is not the first concession we make. We dropped counter tariffs. We dropped legislation. We are backing off on this. The administration is happy we're doing it.

Will that be followed by what could be qualified as progress rather than movement? It's my only question. Okay. And we don't know that today. No, we don't. We don't. Under that affordability umbrella, there is also the realization that for a lot of Canadians should take a very hard look at their subscriptions. Because there are people, you know, and I see it, people write about it to me about how they've got suckered into so many subscriptions over time on different, different things.

And we're not just talking about the major streaming services, but all kinds of different subscriptions. that they don't even realize until they look at their credit card how much they're spending each month that's automatically being deducted because they haven't canceled something or what have you. Anyway, that's a side issue in a sense. Sounds like you just did a little bit of housekeeping on your own. I try to stay ahead of it and I'm surprised sometimes.

I go, I don't even remember subscribing to this. I certainly don't remember saying, oh yeah, just take it off me every month. Anyway, you know, I'm getting ahead of myself. But it doesn't know, but I see your point because in the old days you'd get one bill and you say, this is costing me too much. And it makes no sense. I'm not using these.

I never go to these stations now. It's all spread between small amounts. So one at the time it doesn't take or make a real dent until you take the time to do what you describe them, then you think, wow. This is quite beyond. It is. And it's also, these rates have gone up tremendously since they initiated at bargain placement places to get you hooked.

And now they're, you know, triple figure numbers for some of these subscriptions. Anyway, in terms of concessions, this once again, I'm not stating anything. I'm just asking here. Was it a concession on the, in a way, the. environmental front. It was something Elizabeth May has been pushing for that everybody agrees that getting projects going, especially major projects in Canada, takes a long time because of all the different hurdles you've got to jump, some of which are environmental, some of which deal with dealing with First Nations on certain things.

And there's been a push to relax some of those rules. And the government appeared to be, or didn't just appear said it was going to relax. some of them. And they were just nailing down exactly which ones. But they're now indicating that they're going to not necessarily cancel those, but pause the look at them longer to see what impact they're having. Now, is that a concession to Canadian companies or is that part of the overall concessions or concession that's being made right now on the trade front? I think the initial timeline was too short. Separate from any leverage negotiation, trying to make people happy in Canada while they're somehow what unhappy about other things, Stephen Gidgill. I think

just realistically, two things. The timeline was too short to convince Canadians that due process had been in the works on both. How you speed up projects. There were two different, relaxing, some environmental rules, but also speeding up the process. So to extend until July 22nd kind of makes sense, especially since not only was the timeline so short, but it was supposed to be followed up by legislation right away. And it's really hard to argue that you would be listening to what people are signed and come up with legislation before the House rises, which was virtually never going to happen. So basically, the government is rightly, and with support I noticed from the Alberta Petroleum Association,

from the business side of this, not just the environmental side, more time to try to get it right. And I believe they have to because as Stephen Harper discovered, and as others will discover going forward, it is one thing to have legislation on the books, and it is another for it to survive challenges in the courts. and challenges will come. So if you're going to go with a, and Stephen Gilgoehan legislation overturned by the courts. So it's not just Stephen Harper. So on both sides, you really need to find a balance that will survive

the inevitable test of court challenges. And in some cases, take endangered species, for instance, and relaxing some rules once in a while, if a project deems it important. We have international commitments on these issues. So you need to find a way to make sure that you're not going to be blindsided by walking all over your international commitments. So I never found the first timeline realistic. It just looked like a pro forma.

We consulted you for a few weeks and here we are. And I think if the exercise is going to sustain. itself in legislation. It makes a lot of sense. Also, I guess, allows the federal government to push off any legislation until after the Alberta plebiscite and the Quebec election. Calling it a plebiscite now. I have to call it something. It's a referendum on a referendum, but it's got ten questions. Think of this. This is not, people think there is one question on that ballot. There are ten questions, nine of which deal with stuff you and I spent too long talking about in the 90s during the constitutional wars.

Sure. Bruce. I agree with Chantelle on a lot of what she said there. I think the, you know, the government initially wanted to express its ambition or its aspiration, which is that decisions could be made more quickly and that cabinet would have the authority to make decisions in the national interest. where they determined that that should be the overriding choice. At the same time, I think it's a good decision for the government to take more time, to let the consultation expand, deepen, be more fully developed before putting the legislation

in place and having it debated in the fall. I hadn't really thought about the timing relative to the plebiscites or the plebiscite and the possible one. But there's probably some politics around that that makes sense too. I don't think that adding a little bit more time is going to make project proponents feel like, okay, well, Canada is turning back from the direction that Carney has suggested. I think it's going to make them understand that he, like every prime minister, before him, I suppose, is it lives within the social license structure of Canada, which is that if you try to do some things too quickly, you will get pushed back. And that pushback can sometimes

be materially important in achieving the ambition. And so, you know, good for the government to give it a little bit more time. And it does feel to me like the conversation in the country is more about how do we accelerate rather than should we accelerate. And I think that's really where the government probably wants this to be in any event. Okay. We're going to take our break. First break of the program. We're coming back.

We're going to talk about AI. And the government's move on that this week. We'll do that right after this. And welcome back. You're listening and watching our podcast, Good Talk, with Sean Tilly Bear and Bruce Anderson. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform, or you're watching us on our YouTube channel. Glad to have you with us. So the long-awaited, I don't know, we say long-awaited. I guess in many ways it's long-awaited. The government's, the liberal governments first move on artificial intelligence in terms of trying to set some kind of boundaries for how the government looks at this.

It was in 2017 when nobody was really talking about AI. It's come a long way since then, but the strategy and the regulations, if we want to call it that, clearly had to be updated to a new age. So we started to see some form of that this week. And the initial debate over what was dropped by the government is sort of what has been,

is the basic fear of a lot of people, which is, will jobs created match jobs lost as a result of artificial intelligence? And we saw that debate play out again over the last 48 hours. People with their various views on this. What is your sense of how the government

handled this? I'm trying to decide who to say... Well, I'm choking, so go to Bruce. Okay. I mean, look, I think this is, you know, arguably the most single most complicated area of policy development of any that I can think of, even infinitely more complicated than the climate conversation in a way. And so, you know, expecting that any government is going to table a blueprint that's going to solve the problems of the year after next, I think is kind of a mistake of expectations. what do I think the government did? I think the government identified the things that it was most preoccupied with,

sovereignty, jobs, safety, and trust. I think those are important subjects. I think Canada is going to be a player in the world of AI, but it isn't going to be the driving force that settles the landscape of AI regulation. I think it establishes the government as relative to the NDP and the conservatives is as in favor of both our involvement as a country in AI from an economic standpoint, but also in favor of regulatory parameters, guardrails, to make sure that it works in the public interest.

The conservatives tend to be a lot less interested in AI. They don't really have a critic for it. The critic that notionally has that is kind of a critical. critic. And they're generally less interested in Canada playing a big role in that sector. And the NDP, on the other hand, is pretty much a lot in the zone of we should hit pause on everything until we can figure out how to make it safe and safe for workers, too. So, you know, broadly speaking, there are some choices out there. And the government has kind of put its own position forward. I think, Peter, that you identified the jobs issue and the displacement issue as a central one.

I think there are a number of them. I think they're really, really big and complicated issues. I think that on AI itself, there's the what will happen to work in the future and how will work be done and who will be affected and how will they be helped and all of that. There's also this big question of what will be the impact of AI on human civilized? which sounds bigger than I should make it, but I think it was only yesterday that the CEO of one of the big AI company said, we need a brake pedal, not just a gas here, because the challenges that could lie ahead for civilization are not insignificant. And then if you move away from AI towards the data center's conversation, which is inextricably linked in terms of how it works, you've got big challenges in terms of water.

you've got big challenges in terms of energy. Where is the energy going to come from? And the government in its policy laid out how much more electricity is going to be needed, which again goes to the electricity strategy that the country will need to accommodate that. There are interesting innovations to try to deal with some of these impacts. Microsoft is looking at or is working on a – kind of an internal cooling system where they say that they can imagine a situation where data centers end up using about the same amount of water as a restaurant would, which would be a big relief for people who are very worried about the amount of water that's currently being demanded or expected as these data centers expand.

There are lots of new energy projects coming on stream or going to be put on stream. A lot of them nuclear that can solve some of that energy demand. but in the meantime, I think that yesterday, Seattle was the latest and the largest of more than 300 communities in America that have said we're going to stop data center development until we know more about what's going to happen to energy prices, sound pollution. So there's a lot of resistance that's built up. But interestingly, in U.S., Republicans and Democrats, both are uncomfortable. with the development of data centers. So the social license for all of this hugely complicated, and it won't be one policy announcement by the government of Canada this week

or even this year that will resolve that. But the government has laid out a sense of where it thinks the country should go, and I think it's useful and it's a good debate for people to chew into. You know, one of the things, just before we get to Chantal on this, is that surprise me this week. It's been waiting a long time for this announcement by the PM and Evan Solomon, the AI minister. But it seemed to kind of hit the water with very few ripples.

There wasn't a lot of post-discussion about it all. If this is as big, and I believe it is just as you outlined it, Bruce, this is huge. Like this is the biggest thing to hit the work. the population of the world, you know, since the industrial revolution. I mean, it's huge. And one assumes that everybody's going to want a piece of the discussion here. But it didn't seem to happen this week.

I'm not quite sure why. Was that a fault of those of us who cover it or the fault of the fact that some other politicians aren't particularly interested in dealing with this? I don't know, it was a puzzle to me, Chantan. Well, perhaps because the point this week was to lay down some basic foundations. It's just the federal government entering the conversation on a more serious basis. Going beyond the AI is important and all of the things that we can say to each other. but at this point, Canadians are seeing it from the outside,

but the practical consequences are, you know, they're not going to be on your daily radar at this point for most people, and that makes a lot of sense, and that is also true of news coverage. There are more tangible issues to deal with. Now, I noticed that the AI community in this country believed that it was a good start. And since they have been having that conversation while we were not, I tend to take my cue from experts rather than from how many headlines, whatever, generates. And the cautious response was, this is good. Like, we like what we see here.

It's a good beginning. The notion that you can hit pause is can't be a political position. Why? Because the world will move on. So you can hit pause, but your pause button is not. connected to it to reality. It makes you feel good, fine. It's like honking in the middle of nowhere. Great. If that's what turns you on, who knows? The data center issue is a serious issue because of the energy consequences. By the way, there is a silver lining to this data center hugging all

that energy and electricity. The U.S. has been going big on data centers. But while they're doing that, they are not really able to put in place or give the power that they need to produce aluminum at the cost that would be Canadian prices, for instance. I believe, and I know nothing about technology, I just say this based on everything that I've seen over the years. I believe the issues related to power, heat, noise of data centers will be resolved because they depend on technology. logical solutions and those will happen. So it's probably a good idea not to rush into wanting to have a lot of today's data centers and maybe wait to see where the technology brings you. But I do believe that over time these issues are the easy issues to resolve.

The job issues, I thought something interesting in the government's proposal was to give Canadians a chance to become more familiar with. AI and how it can be used or should be used and not used in their lives. Because a lot of people are actually getting connected to AI in all kinds of ways, but they are walking, they're blindfolded. They don't know what they're walking into because there's no, we never went to school and most people who are working never went to school in an era where there's AI. So yes, I can do the science fiction thing. It is really scary. many, many, many jobs, including the one that we do, will be impacted or changed by AI in the same

way that our jobs were transformed by the Internet. But I'm not thinking at this point that AI means job disappearance rather than job changes and modifying the way we approach issues. But I think there is a lot of public education that needs to be done. I'll give you an example. RADU Canada today. I happen to know this because two of the hosts that I listen or work with are away having a one-day training seminar on AI.

I spent part of the early morning thinking, I only wish that they would invite me to spend today to do this. Because where else would I get the knowledge that I need to know how to make use of this? So we are way beyond just a concept here. And the government is trying to connect, you know, where we are all going on learning about this to where Canada wants to position itself. This is only a beginning. Bruce is right. You're not going to see compelling legislation that addresses all those issues between now and probably the end of Mark Carney's term.

I know Bruce wants to get back in here, but the thing that we've got to keep in mind and we're seeing evidence of it, and we've talked about it before, that, you know, different convocations across the continent where young people, you know, the leaders and voters of tomorrow, you know, are standing not all of them, but significant numbers,

are standing up and booing whenever AI is mentioned in a convocation speech. This, the age group in many ways is most affected. All age groups are going to be affected, but this is their full future. and how they react to what they saw the other day or what you were both suggesting that there's a long way to go on this,

a long way to go. Bruce, you wanted to say some. Yeah, I did. And I'm glad you brought that point up because one of the things that is apparent to me in the public opinion and especially the opinion of younger parts of the population is that, you know, COVID contributed to this,

but it was only part of the development of a condition that makes people feel that they should fear the worst rather than imagine the best and feel powerless rather than powerful. And AI as a subject is perfectly built for grabbing those elements and making them worse, that people can say, oh, look at all the things that could go wrong and also how powerless you feel relative to the tech bro trillionaires who are. putting this all in place whether or not we like it. And while they're doing it, wandering around the world,

occasionally saying things that sound pretty alarming about what would happen to the world. I mean, yesterday the two CEOs of the two major companies announced that they had an agreement that they wanted governments around the world, I guess, to adopt, which is to prevent AI from making a bio weapon that could be synthesized through AI. So that's useful, but it's scary that they had to have that conversation. And to know that having that conversation is two companies that are based in the United States governed by somebody who will be extremely unlikely to take up that challenge in any meaningful or useful way. If you were someone whose experience of the world in the last 10 years as a younger person has been a series of disruptions, a series of things going wrong, a feeling that the system is. is rigged against you and that you're powerless, this is going to feed.

AI is going to feed those feelings. But I do think that to Chantel's point about the usefulness of government, sort of finding ways to let people absorb, learn, become more proficient at what the potential of AI means for them is really, really important. It's not just a nice to do. It's a need to do. But the upside is tremendous. number of situations where people can become entrepreneurs more quickly and more successfully

by using these tools, I think is unbelievably large. I mean, I know I use it to do the things that I like to do because it makes the work that I do better and take less time. But that's me at my, at this stage I'm at in my career, where I'm not particularly worried about whether somebody will take my job or technology will displace my job, I can just look at it as a tool that makes me a little bit better and quicker at doing the work that I love to do. So it's easy for me to spot that entrepreneurial set of opportunities. I think it's out there, but I do think it's important for government to kindle,

support, illuminate those opportunities. I think that is part of what Evan Solomon and the prime minister have been talking about as well. Okay. Let me take a break and we'll come back for our final segment which will be a little bit different than the normal but anyway we'll give it a try right after this

And welcome back final segment of good talk for this week Chantelle Bruce Peter all here for you You know one of the you know Journalistic organizations that I've always been have always admired You know, obviously the BBC, the CBC for obvious reasons. But in the States, it was always CBS for me,

whether it was, you know, the history of the way CBS covered the Second World War, the great names of the past, Edward Armaro, Charles Collingwood, the beginning of the career of Walter Cronkite through that time. And then Cronkite, obviously, through his period as the anchor CBS News, and then the variety of others, including Dan Rather, who made names from themselves, and CBS became this, you know, icon of broadcast standards and Cronkite being the most trusted man in America and everything.

And we've witnessed over the last, I don't know, six, eight months, CBS basically cratering around new ownership and new direction for its journalists to the point where many of the journalists, of the journalists had finally had it and rebelled, led by Scott Pelly, who was a former anchor himself, correspondent on 60 Minutes, and basically said this new direction by the appointed editorial leadership, clearly right-wing and satisfying, at least Donald Trump, was murdering 60 minutes, It's the most successful program in television journalism history

and one of the most successful television programs, period. So you watch all this happen, you see the other things that are happening in American broadcasters and the power that the White House seems to have over them and this struggle to still do responsible journalism on the part of some. And you go, wow, you know, like, could this ever happen? happen here. Does it happen here? So I just want your thoughts on what we've witnessed there and what it may or may not mean for us. Chantelle, do you want?

Okay, you want the optimistic vision. It's easier to have the optimistic vision on this when you live in an environment that is dominant, where the dominant language is French and where culture matters. It would be very, very hard to see something like this happen on the French side of broadcasting in this country, because it would be really hard for anyone who tried it to get away with it in the ballot box. And just ask Stephen Harper about those minor culture cuts and how they prevented him from securing a majority. He should have secured the no weight, and I had to wait until 2011 to secure. So that's one section, but it is important

because it keeps part of the national fabric of broadcasting in this country more immune to those influences in the sense, for instance, even Pierre Puehliv, when he was telling you that if he became prime minister, he would shut down the CBC, kept trying to say that he would maintain Radio Canada, which, as you know, I know, is impossible. You cannot maintain Reduc Canada without the infrastructure outside Quebec of the CBC. But moving on to the larger English language broadcasting scene, we are a different country, not just for the two languages.

We are a different country when it comes to the way that we look. And in large part, because we have had a public broadcaster for so long in our history, very few people alive in this country, ever can even think of a time. They would think of a time with no TV, but they wouldn't think of a time with no national broadcaster. And I will remind you that there was an attempt,

not that long ago, to launch something that would have become Fox North, some TV, and that it failed because it could not find its audience. It couldn't make

money. And that makes us really different I'm not saying there was no audience for the Fox style approach. I'm just saying when you strip it of all the discourse, there was not enough of an audience to make it a viable proposition. While in the U.S., there are apparently people who aren't the business of making money who believe that if you strip down journalism from CBS, you will still be making money and you will be making more money.

I'm not sure you're kind of splitting your market here. Fox is a successful venture in the U.S. Sun news has gone. And plans, there were briefly plans to try to have Sun News in French, and no one ever talks about this anymore, and you don't hear anyone saying, let's resuscitate some news or some equivalent, because this time we would be more successful. So I would argue that Canadians, you know, the kind of success, in English of hated rivalry in this country, speaks to if you do good stuff and it's Canadian people do,

will actually come to it and know that it's Canadian. It doesn't always happen. In the case of the experience in Quebec, Prime TV has been running a series called Vitreurie Joyale. And the audience is so massive that they believe that by the end of soon, 80% or plus of their experience, subscribers who speak French will have watched it, which is, and this is a minority of subscribers, but for a number of weeks, the first three, four weeks, that show was number one

in Canada on Prime. So it's difficult sometimes to see the difference between the US and Canada. The language is the same. Your journalism references more than mine are related to 60 minutes, which I also watched for decades. But we are a different market on both sides, English and French, from the Americans. And I don't believe that it would be easy to be successful at breaking down journalism. You can dislike the National Post,

but on most given days, it also does journalism. And you can dislike their editorial stance in the columns, that come from them. But in the same way, you're allowed to dislike the editorial stance of the Toronto Star, but it makes for a healthy market rather than one dominated by a panse unique that we should all think in the same way. But I say that coming from a market where we have a mix of more sovereign-ist inclined and more federalist-inclined media, and it's a successful media scene.

Bruce I think that we have our own version of the problem when I think about Southern News and what it was to journalism versus post-media I do think that has been a

downward trend and not just because of the economics of the business but because there's just something unseemly from my standpoint about having such a strong

editorial bias that creeps into to the selection of news stories, the influence in the way that those stories are covered. So it's not just the columnists, which are almost uniformly, you know, so clearly coming from one vantage point. I think something's been lost in the Canadian media landscape, at least insofar as what we think of as the print media, even though it's mostly digital now and outside of Quebec for sure. but on your point about what to make of the 60 minutes thing, Peter, I think that something big is being lost in the United States. I was listening to an interesting podcast this morning, Tina Brown being interviewed by Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell on their podcast leading.

And she is an incredible track record of involvement in the media and was married to a very high profile and successful media leader. And so I recommend this podcast. Anybody wants to sort of understand that perspective on it. But she talked about how Rupert Murdoch had over the course of five or six decades, I think she put it, done so much to destroy journalism in three continents. And she lays a lot of it at his feet. But now what she's describing, and we all see, is the role of these extraordinarily wealthy people. who decide that they want to own media enterprises, she says, because their motivation seems to be

because if they didn't, they just end up sounding like boring, rich people. And she's talking about Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. But the instinct to own these media enterprises doesn't come from how do we make money or how do we make journalism better. It's how do we have fun with these toys that influence democracies and societies in a, in an outsized way and around which the amount of money that we're putting into them is immaterial to us. It couldn't matter a whit, I'm sure, to the Ellicence, whether CBS makes money or loses money.

So the economics of 60 minutes would not be an argument for them against changing it because it would be a rounding error for them in terms of the scale of their wealth. I think that's a dangerous situation. And we can say, well, it always was the case that wealthy people owned me to enterprises and had a no-sized voice. I think that's true.

But I think the scale of wealth of these people is different from what we've seen in the past. And the powerlessness of the market to push back and change it is also somewhat unprecedented. And we should all be concerned. Well, I'm glad that finally Bruce has given me one reason to praise the demise of the print media and of mainstream television. Because yes, you're right about everything you say. The good news is, I guess, that in both cases, these are products in decline. So it's not as much fun to own something like that in terms of influence as it was when Power Corp owned La Price in Quebec, for instance. We're going to have to leave it at that.

But this is a really interesting conversation to have on a while. scale. I'm not to think of the way to do that. Because I think, as you said, like this is really important. This is a fundamental piece of democracy. And if it's cratering the way we're starting to watch in some areas,

then that's bad for the big picture as well. We're going to have to leave it at that for this week. Thanks to Chantal, thanks to Bruce. Everybody out there, have a great week. your day tomorrow can start with the buzz at 7 a.m. in your own box at 7 a.m. Eastern time, you can't subscribe.

Can't get the words out. National Newswatch.com slash newsletter. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening and watching this week. Have a great weekend. Take care, you guys. Bye.