The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Smoke Mirrors and The Truth -- Where is The Truth?

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

Are the gloves coming off between the provinces and Ottawa on vaccine distribution and who is telling the truth?  Bruce Anderson and I go at it on that, plus a hard look at journalism -- is it doing its job on the pandemic?  And some thoughts about Naheed Nenshi as he steps down from the stage.

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, and that means Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson. And good morning. Yes, it's Wednesday. We love Wednesdays and we love Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson's with us. He's in Ottawa. I'm in Stratford. What's on your mind this day, young man? Peter, I think that we should, maybe we should have done this before,

but I was kind of thinking the Masters is this weekend and you and I love the Masters. Maybe we should have used that little pinkly music that CBS has used for all those years instead ofly music that CBS has used for all those years instead of the music that we're using. So maybe in post-production you can sub in a little bit of that music. And are you going to cough up the money that for copyright that we've got to pay CBS?

No, if you get sued though, I will, I will be a character witness. I will say he didn't mean to steal your music. He just did it because I told him to. But no, what's on my mind, Peter, is, you know, I was reading, as you were, about Mayor Nenshi of Calgary and his decision not to continue in politics. And I had these reactions to it, which were, on the one hand i completely understand why you know politics is such a grueling grinding thing and i think he happens to be one of those people who got in it for all the right reasons and tried to make a lot of good decisions for the people of his city and and participated in national debates as well in a positive and constructive way but it's grinding It's a tough life.

And maybe it has to be. Maybe that's the way that kind of the market should work, that it applies that discipline to people. But sometimes I think it's harder than is actually healthy. And that's true for politicians at all levels. So I was disappointed on one hand to see him leave because I feel like when he came in, he was a little bit of a signal to people who weren't involved in politics before,

who felt it was kind of maybe too big a reach or a stretch or an unwelcome place for them, that they could get involved and that they could run and they could win. And they could win against the expectations of who could win an election and i'm as i think we talked about in past podcasts i've been spending a lot of time about what this period means in the lives and the collective psychology of young people and i'm quite worried about that and so all of those things are kind of mixing together and i was a little bit disappointed but very much understood the decision that mayor nenshi took and but um also um a young woman i know uh mizan zuby has decided she's going to run for the ndp

and uh in a riding in ontario and most people won't know who she is but um she's a very bright very committed young person and that gave me a little bit of hope too things that i've been thinking about a little bit you know i was thinking when i read the uh ned nancy news um that i was in calgary the day he won his first election and it was a surprise it made news headlines around the world right alberta city yeah a lux person of color as mayor which seemed like a surprise to so many people but wow that could happen in calgary um but i was there i was i was in calgary giving a speech that night uh which i guess was really the day after he won election because it was a fascinating night, election night.

And so the next morning, everybody wanted to talk to this guy. Who is this guy and how did he win? And I'd landed in Calgary that morning and I made a call over to his office, campaign office, campaign office. And he immediately responded, yes, I'd love to do the interview. And, you know, I listened to CBC. I've listened to CBC since I was a kid. And it would be great to meet Peter Mansbridge and blah, blah, blah, all this stuff.

And so I went over there and we had a great talk for, you know, 20 minutes, half an hour. And we've maintained a degree of friendship since then he's been here to Stratford he's been a guest of the Stratford Festival has done a number of things here not not not on stage in in one of the plays but in terms of some of the discussion forums that they have here in Stratford and he's been a very popular guest whenever he comes and it's always great to touch base with him but like you he was the kind of person that you got excited about getting into politics not the traditional route into politics that he took and he was a different kind of politician he was controversial at times he was spectacular at times. He was spectacular at times. I remember during the Calgary floods, he was quite the dominant force as mayor. It would be, you know, it's hard for me to imagine that that's it in terms of public service, that he doesn't have any other plans.

He's often been rumored to be running, you know, perhaps for the Liberals, perhaps for the Greens, who knows. But it would be a shame if he left the public stage. And it's hard to believe he will leave it. You know, perhaps he'll take a break and then find another entry. Here's hoping. Yeah, here's hoping. I think that's right. I think it would be good if he.

And I think people should be able to come in and out. I noticed that the other day in a column written by our friend Andrew Coyne, he was saying that nobody who's been a Supreme Court justice or a Bank of Canada governor should ever run for office in Canada. And I read it and I thought, well, you know, Andrew's very thoughtful guy. And but I just completely disagree with him about that. I don't know how I feel about the justice part, but I definitely think that if we put up too many barriers to what kind of background or qualification people can have in entering public life,

well, I don't know why that's in the public interest. And certainly somebody with a Nenshi background, very helpful to have in public life from my standpoint somebody with carney's background very helpful to have in public life i just think we need to do more to encourage more people to get involved and not feel like it's not for them or they can't succeed uh or here are 10 reasons why they shouldn't get in even before they've decided to get in makes you wonder wonder what the dinner table conversations must have been like in the young Andrew Coyne days when his dad, of course,

had been governor of the Bank of Canada, a very controversial governor. He'd got in a public fight with the prime minister of the day, John Diefenbaker. But whether they'd ever discussed at the dinner table, you know, dad, you should really run. You should run for, you know, go after them. You should run against the conservatives. It doesn't sound like it.

No, it doesn't sound like it, does it? Okay, there are a couple of topics I'd like to try and run through the smoke and mirrors and the truth, you know, washing machine here today. And the first one deals with the vaccine rollout. If you remember last week, and I know you remember because you were talking, but our listeners will remember that last week we discussed this issue of Doug Ford versus Justin Trudeau, that Ford kept taking shots at Trudeau

saying, you're not giving me enough vaccines. And Trudeau ducking, basically just not responding, not getting into it. And, you know, and arguing, you know, I promise this and this is what I'm delivering. Well, there's been a week more of the same kind of back and forth or back and no forth from Justin Trudeau until yesterday when it seemed like the gloves came off and Ottawa started saying, you know what, listen, buddy, you're not giving the people all the facts. We've been giving you vaccines up the yin-yang, and you're not using them so quit pointing

the finger at us so what do we know about what happened there in the last week because there's been a definite change of strategy there well look i think that you know to say that the gloves came off i mean in a way you know i know i understand your point and other people were saying well there's finger pointing going on and that sort of thing and to me this is the most polite version of a brawl i can ever imagine i mean if this is aggressive i hate to see what actual aggressive looks like in politics this this was um this was basically, I think, the federal government having committed itself to a strategy of trying to keep the lid on partisanship, trying to play a supportive role with the provinces, trying not to rise to debate, recognizing that most people don't want to see a political fight between politicians at different levels or of different stripes, understanding that people just want to know what should we do?

When are the vaccines coming? How are we going to get out of it? Can you protect me? Can you protect my job? And I think that the federal government has been quite disciplined about that for the most part. At the same time, I have no doubt whatsoever that in the last few weeks, the more times Doug Ford said, Trudeau's rollout of vaccines is a joke. We don't have enough vaccines. We have to keep stopping and starting our process. We can't take care of people here because he's not doing his job. Then eventually that gets to folks and they have to and they take a look at it and say, maybe we need to put some things on the record that are actually already on the record, but just they're not being covered because sometimes I think the media are strained for resources

and so they don't necessarily kind of go to the data and say, here's what the numbers are. But you could see developing a situation where Ford had maintained that he had built this capacity to deliver 150,000 vaccines a day, and he never got close to that number. And for a while, he could say, well, if I did that number, I might run out before the week is finished. Well, you know, he could maybe make that argument a little bit for a little period of time, but he was still underperforming against what most people would look at and say, well, you don't have to have that many in reserve. But last week, we hit

that kind of milestone phase, where the federal government had predicted that a lot more vaccine doses were coming into the province and into the country and which was really telegraphing to the provinces if you're going to ramp up if that's part of your plan do it now because this is when these doses are coming and basically what happened in Ontario is Hillier leaves, the doses arrive, the number of vaccinations some days actually went down rather than up. And I think people were looking at it from the federal standpoint and saying, well, we can't allow him to say every day that we're not delivering the doses. We just need to put on the record what those facts are, and then people can draw their own conclusions. And so I thought the comments from the federal government weren't particularly critical. They weren't personal.

They were really more just, here's the numbers. And if Ford needs some help, we'll help. And I think that's a fair point, because I do think that people are doing a little bit of analysis of this, Peter. I don't know if you feel the same way about this, but you're saying you've got to take these doses to workplaces. You've got to take them to hotspot neighborhoods where people might not have the means or the wherewithal to go on public transit and to go to where the doses are. Bring the doses to them and get more in arms as quickly as you can so what do you make

of what you saw yesterday i think you're being extremely generous on a number of fronts because i think the message was clear i think it was very clear you know you're going to keep saying this stuff we're going to we're going to put out the facts and the facts don't make you look good in a number of areas and i think he's been scrambling for it for the last week. He's been doing cartwheels trying to get ahead of this situation. Ontario's in a mess. So are some other areas of the country. And so are, you know, and some areas are doing fantastic,

especially in the land of Canada. But Ontario's in a mess. And he's gone in a couple of days from the so-called big lockdown of last Friday, which was a crock from the beginning. And it was what we said here on the bridge last Friday, was, you know, pull the emergency brake and all that stuff, meanwhile leaving all kinds of things open. Now he's having to, a couple of days later, reverse course again

and close down certain things that he'd left open last week well also if i can it sounds like today there's going to be another oh yeah tightening of the screws in terms of behavior right yeah and you know in schools and there's a lot of things going on where he's reversing um the vaccine numbers are the vaccine numbers they They are what they are. You also, I think, this will sound strange to you, you kind of made excuses up for the media. Oh, you know, they've got resource problems and this and that, and maybe they weren't able to check these things out. I mean, that too is a crock.

This is a pretty basic situation. You know, he says, you're not giving me enough. So you might want to ask the question well what are they giving you show me the numbers they're all available as you said so do the story do the story on what's there i ask you a question about that peter i don't want to distract you from your stream of consciousness so try to remember where you were going but i want to interject with this i never know where I'm going. Because I think that's a really interesting point.

I've been wondering why in these press conferences that Ford gives, that he gets away with saying those things and journalists don't say, no, no, no, no, no. You might have been able to say that two weeks ago, but the numbers don't add up. Why are you telling us that all of these doses are spoken for, and at the same time saying hundreds of thousands of people didn't show up for the appointments that they booked? Well, that's just some facts. They'll figure it out, right? I don't understand. And the most that I get back, and I don't know if you're

hearing this too, is journalists kind of saying, well, you know, the most that I get back, and I don't know if you're hearing this too, is journalists kind of saying, well, you know, the way that they structure the press conferences, we're not really allowed the flexibility to pick the questions that we want. And I'm like. Well, they can pick whatever questions they want, but whether they get picked to ask them or not is an issue. And it is an issue in the Ontario. I mean, in my view the best

journalist in the ontario press corps uh gallery you know the the covers queens park is mike crawley from cbc he's terrific yeah and as of i don't know whether this changed yesterday but up to yesterday they hadn't let him ask a question in a month isn't that essentially the same thing though is that they if you say i'm going to ask a question that you like then you'll get let him ask a question in a month. Isn't that essentially the same thing though? Is it they, if you say, I'm going to ask a question that you like, then you'll get picked to ask a question. And if you don't, then you won't. I'm not sure they haven't. I don't know enough to know whether they're screening the questions.

They just want to be on the list. And, and, and, and the, you know, these guys, there are no strangers at this. The, the Ford people, just like the Trudeau people aren't strange. They know, they know where, where the friendlyd people just like the trudeau people aren't strange they know they know where where the friendly questions come from and the unfriendly questions come from or they're or not necessarily friendly or unfriendly but the tougher questions come from yeah um anyway there's that there's the other thing you know we were told that astrazeneca they were in a push to get rid of astrazeneca vaccines because they were going to run out right that's how we caught, they were in a push to get rid of AstraZeneca vaccines because they were going to run out, right? That's how we caught them. Their best before date was gone. So I think we've

reached that date. So how many did we toss? How many did we throw out? Not just in Ontario, but anywhere. And why? Why didn't we get them into arms? Why is it not working in terms of distributing these to the people who desperately want them? And you look at the numbers right now and what's the most vulnerable group in terms of who's going into hospital and into ICUs? It's younger people. The older people successfully were vaccinated in most parts of the country. And that's why their numbers have come down considerably. But younger people are not doing so well.

And when I say younger, sort of like 30, around 30, 10 years either way of 30. And that's disastrous for the country. And how they're going to deal with that. I mean, there are, I mean, you said you didn't know where i was going on this and i don't know where i'm going on it but you know there are three levels of government in this country at least three federal provincial municipal or where where's the municipal voice you know i hear doug ford shouting and i hear hear Jason Kenney making his comments known and other premiers.

I hear the federal government. Not so much am I hearing from municipal politicians. You know, I think it's a bit hit and miss on that, though. I mean, I do hear John Tory sometimes pleading for certain, you know, things. And I hear Mayor Watson, Jim Watson in Ottawa, where I live, you know, saying, look, this decision that was made this way doesn't land that well. It doesn't make as much sense here, that sort of thing. But I do, you know, I also know that municipal governments in Ontario, anyway, are creatures of the province. They depend on the province in a different structural way.

And that may affect the politics involved in this because every municipality needs resources and needs to have a supportive government. And I know that at least in this community, people have been wondering whether or not some of the decisions made by the Ford government about where the vaccines go first have something to do with politics. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I know that Ford has been so political in his commentary, so partisan with his belly aching, that it does give rise to people saying, well, is he just letting these big box stores open because they lobbied him? Is he just putting vaccines in arms of people that he thinks either have voted for him or will vote for him? And he's going to do all of that before he

gets to anybody else. And so I don't know whether those criticisms are fair or not, but I know that they're starting to be trafficked and, and that he's probably done more than anybody else to create the opportunity for people to wonder whether or not his decision-making is, is tinged by that. I don't think it helps that he doesn't sound on any given day, like he really knows the details of what he's doing. And I don't think it makes any sense to a lot of people when he says, you know, we're probably going to need to do more five days from now.

Because, you know, like his comments about AstraZeneca, you know, off the cuff, well, maybe it makes sense to, you know, wait two or three months for Pfizer or Moderna than to roll the dice with AstraZeneca. And then to wonder why people aren't showing up for appointments to get an AstraZeneca vaccine. That's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And it feels like there's not really a strong opposition in Ontario holding them to account and it feels like the media are put in a kind of a box uh where they get some access to ask some questions but they don't really get to hold that government to account the way everybody expects the federal government to be held to account on this issue and should

frankly yeah and look i mean the the ill feelings towards, um, the way Ford has run things are matched at times by the ill feelings towards the way, um, the feds have, uh, have seemingly organized things as well. And, you know, I, I, I see a lot of mail and the, uh, the emails coming in are just as hard that I'm seeing on Trudeau as they are on Ford, which to me only underlines the fact thatists and journalists take on the feds on these things. They try to back up their arguments with numbers, and then the feds either respond or don't. Not so much on the provincial level. And I hear you on the municipal stuff. I can understand why a lot of mayors and reeves

and what have you across the provinces are reluctant to take on, especially the province, because there are going to be billions of dollars tossed around when this thing finally ends to try and get everything back in shape. And, you know, and they need to, they don't want to, you know, knock down all the bridges that they've got with the province. So, I mean, there's a lot of politics at play here, but I think your point about journalism, I mean, you know, that's kind of where I come from. I think they've just got to be much, they just got to be much they've got to be much stronger they can't sit and wait every day i mean nobody likes the kind of setups they've got on these news conferences whether they're in ottawa with the prime minister or whether they're

on the provincial level with the premiers where you're in remote locations and you know you wait for your turn to be recognized by some you know operator remotely placed somewhere and you know nobody's following each other there's no follow-ups and you know it's just not a good situation for an information flow and so you you you get away from those things you do your journalism outside of the the pre-scripted pre-arranged you know kind of phony news conferences where everybody's standing up there you know i mean some of the visuals of these things are are a joke can i can we just double click as they say on that for a minute like does that look as weird to you as it does to me like i don't get that where you have like six ministers all in masks standing, you know, arranged so that there's some sort of depth and range to it.

Like, I don't understand what the symbolism of that is meant to be. And I understand the symbolism that's used in setting up a press conference. I've done those kinds of things in the past. And, you know, what image, what visuals you're looking for and that sort of thing. But for the life of me, I don't get what that is. And I see it sometimes at the federal level too. So it's not, I just don't understand, like, what's the thought process?

I think it looked good at the beginning. I think it looked smart at the beginning that showed that they were, you know, they were all, whether they're in Ottawa or the provincial capitals, they were focused on the fight, on the fight against COVID. And they were a team and they were, you know, this, that, and the other. I think it looks silly, stupid now. I mean, there's so many better ways to do it. Why they've continued it on for, well, what, a year of doing this? It looks a joke, and some of them look really stupid. Yeah.

Anyway, it's the information. At the end of the day, if the information makes sense and helps people understand the situation and do what's needed to be done, then it's all good. But right now, it's not. It doesn't look right and it doesn't feel right and it clearly isn't working on the current level. Yeah, I think that's right. I was just looking at that CBC story that was about Minister Patty Hyde of the Federal Health Minister's comments andd's rebuttal of them and the and the

thing that was missing from that that we sort of became used to during the trump era was ford is quoted saying something that's manifestly not true about continuing to run out. He's never run out. And, you know, I almost want that line in there that says, this is not true. Now, I don't think we've got to that stage yet. I don't think Ford is that kind of comprehensive a liar as Trump was. But I do think your point about is journalism going to play that role as we kind of move through the back end of this, hopefully the back end of this pandemic.

It's on my mind too, for sure. Okay. We're going to quickly change topics here. We've gone from a good chunk about journalism, which was my area. I want to get into something that is often your area, and that is research analysis and polling. But first, let's take this quick break. Okay, two pieces of research that have come out in the last couple of days have really got me puzzled and trying to understand,

trying to make sense of some of these numbers, and it really is the world like this. There's two of them, and well, let's do the first one, which is on the states. There's one in Canada one, which is on the states. There's one in Canada, there's one in the states. And this is the U.S. one. And it's to deal with the, you know, not surprisingly, it once again has something to do with Trump.

But it was a poll last week, I think it was Ipsos, that said that 56% of Republicans believed that the January 6th insurrection was actually left-wingers trying to make Trump look bad. 56% of the Republicans who were surveyed, who clearly have seen what happened on the January 6th. They've seen the video. Who could not have seen it? But they believe it was all staged by left-wingers trying to make Trump look bad. Yeah. Now, how the heck can you come up with a number like that? You know, it's been a long time coming.

It's been building. And there's a number of things that i think have contributed to it some are double-edged swords so there's some good that came with some bad but let me let me just try to identify a couple of two three things that are kind of in my mind one of the things is i think that politics in north america anyway used to be run and dominated by elites by a small number of people who in many cases had money almost all were men um and uh made decisions on behalf of everybody else and not everybody else really participated in the process to the same degree except on election day that sort of thing and there were real downsides to that

but with a lot of the democratic reforms where we now kind of have a one party one member one vote election of leaders of parties where there's kind of the intermediation role that people who are members of party establishments played is gone and so we've gone from being there were people whose lives surround we're really consumed with being in charge of a political party and caring for it and steering it on a course that was going to be fairly steadying over the long haul. And now nobody's in charge. And so parties kind of lurch towards leaders who look in the moment like they might be popular and they don't really kind of, they're not stress test in the same way.

And the policies are not developed in the same way. So and then policies are not developed in the same way. And so we have these parties, which are kind of they don't have any muscle or bone, they're just masses of people who are kind of reacting to the sound of the moment. And I think that's been a bad thing on the whole, although the instinct to remove control exclusively from elites is very positive and very understandable. The second thing is the Internet looks to people like Peter Mansbridge looks to people, but it's not Peter Mansbridge. And what I mean by that is that if you consume Newsmax, one of these upstart news services in the United States. It's an internet news service. It looks like a news broadcast to you. It looks like a news channel, just like Fox kind of looks like a news channel. But if you look hard or even a little bit like carefully at the

information that's being trafficked, a lot of it isn't true. A lot of it is a misrepresentation of the way things are in order to create this kind of cl out in politics and i would have breakfast every day with i worked for a liberal member of parliament then before then going on to work for some conservatives but we would have breakfast with um our peers who worked on the other side and as we would approach an election i remember distinctly thinking, no, these guys, you know, we won the last one, they might win this one. If they do, it'll be a little disappointing. But the earth won't stop turning. Some things will change, but not everything will change. And now, the nature of partisanship is such that it almost requires you to believe that your opponent politically will destroy everything that you believe is important and that's true on both sides in the u.s um and so it allows people

the convenience of believing mistruths i was i said that was the last thing but i was listening to a story about jamie diamond who's the the head of uh one of, well, the biggest, I guess, U.S. or global bank. And every year he puts out a letter where he talks about, you know, the things that he's thinking about. And he, in this one, talked about the role of leaders really presenting inconvenient truths. Saying, look, here are the things that aren't going well and that we need to do better at. And I do think that that's an important role for leadership. But I think in many cases that the political momentum has created a situation where leaders seem like they're going to be more rewarded by presenting convenient mistruths and saying those

things back to their followers that make the followers feel like they've been right all along, even if the facts are a little bit kind of, but so I think we've been headed in some very, very disturbing directions for a long time. And those patterns allow things like this to turn into the modern day answer of, is Elvis still alive? Which I think the last time it was measured was like 2002 and 80% thought Elvis was still alive. But these are much bigger phenomena right now. Why are you laughing? You don't think he's still alive? I don't see the numbers working out for him, but you're entitled to a different view, obviously. So those are the things that come to mind for me, Peter.

What do you think is behind this? Well, first of all, do you remember a great correspondent we used to have by the name Patrick Brown? Terrific guy and a good friend. He lives in retirement now, happily, on the West Coast. But Patrick covered... Elvis Presley. He was in China for a long time. He was in China for a long time.

He covered the funeral of Elvis Presley in Memphis. And whenever this story would come up about Elvis is still alive, he would recount about how he went. What's the name of that place in? Graceland. Graceland. They had the funeral there, and they had Elvis was in an open coffin on Graceland. And so Patrick went up to the open coffin.

He got right there, and he stared right in to make sure that Elvis was there so he would be able to answer these questions in the future. Listen, on your basic thesis, I don't disagree with you. I don't want to be accused of a false equivalency here, but there are, you know, when you talk about some of the news channels in the U.S. that aren't news at all, like Fox, like the the others the newer ones that are coming on uh certainly aren't in the evening they're a straight up opinion but you know so to a major degree are some of the other news channels that put the other perspective out like msnbc and like yeah like cnn so they you know there is some um some common ground there on that.

Here's the other piece of research, and it's the Canadian one that I wanted to get into before we disappear for the week. It was a recent survey by the Canadian Journalism Foundation, which is a foundation that cares about journalism and tries to deal with some of the current issues that face journalism and isn't shy about pointing out things that they think Canadian journalists are doing wrong.

But anyway, a recent survey by the CJF found that 49% of Canadians polled think that journalists are purposefully trying to mislead them. Half of Canadians think that journalists are purposefully trying to mislead them. Half of Canadians think that way. Journalists aren't doing the job that they were meant to do, but they're deliberately trying to mislead Canadians on the facts. I guess it's the same kind of argument that you were just making

on the American one, but it's a staggering number. It's a staggering number, and I think a couple of things about it really stand out for me. One is that you and I, I think, have talked about this probably with Chantal before. The difference between columnists and reporters has never been more important in terms of the public being able to understand that on the one hand, they're getting somebody's personal worldview, opinion, political bias, and they're free to read it, consume it, decide whether they like it or agree with it or not. But it isn't journalism in the sense of journalism that we're talking about. And then there are reporters, and the role of reporters is to find facts, assemble facts, report facts and deliver the kind of the news that people need to know about in order to be informed citizens. And when you let opinion creep into the reporting, and sometimes that happens because reporters go on Twitter.

And the commentary that people put on Twitter, you know, it's very hard for people to resist putting their opinions into that mix. It feels like it's a giant magnet to pull out your opinions, even if you kind of know you probably shouldn't, because it might affect whether people think they can trust your reporting down the road. I think a lot of journalists or reporters, I should say, have struggled with it. And I suspect a lot of newsrooms, maybe you know this better than me, have struggled with the question of should we have our reporters become known on social media platforms because it builds our audience? Or is there more downside in doing that because then people will observe how they comment on things and say well maybe their coverage of the news can't be completely trusted because they have a different world view from me that sort of thing so i think that's a that's a very real conundrum and but but the other thing is that journalists love the idea that their job in society is to hold others to account.

And I do believe that is one of the functions of journalists. But I don't think that you were born, that journalism was born with that. I don't think it's an entitlement. I think it's something that you need to earn and continue to earn and prove that you're worthy of over time. And I think that one of the ways that different events are covered and say, that wasn't the best coverage. I mean, it didn't really kind of tell people what they needed to know or there was a tremendous bias in one direction or another. That never happens, or at least it almost never happens.

It's almost as though journalism is the one institution in our political discourse that is allowed to walk away from the scene of a mistake and there's no consequences. And instead, it wants to move on to the prosecution of the mistake of the politicians that's on offer the next day. And I think that that has created much greater distance between politicians and journalists than there used to be and much greater distance between the public and journalism than there used to be and that's that's what i see in those numbers too and i wish that our journalistic organizations were more determined to try to narrow that distance as and it looks to me like they're not it looks to me like they're heading in a different direction yeah i i wouldn't want to over generalize on the fact that journalists don't suffer consequences for for bad journalism and mistakes because good journalistic organizations do in fact hold their people to account and you look at like the new york times or the washington

post and there are lots of recent examples uh well not lots of but there are examples recently uh of when they've had to deal with um people on their own staffs who made bad decisions and it resulted in bad journalism however here's where i will agree with you. Absolutely. And that is the dangers and beyond just danger that social media has created for the perception of journalists and their ability to look at things from a standpoint of no bias. Now, first of all, you know, journalists and the media are non-monoliths. They, you know, the different people have different, you know, policies and guidelines and et cetera, et cetera. We've been through that before. But, you know, when you say, and quite correctly, that some news organizations think, you know, having their journalists on social media, on Twitter, TikTok, or Instagram, or what have you, increases their profile and does the news organization good in the long run. I don't agree with that. And I haven't seen the examples of where that makes the case.

I mean, look in Canada in television. Nobody uses social media more than certain elements of the CBC journalism class. And, you know, their numbers are not great. You know, they are not great and haven't been for a few years here. Some of the people on Global use social media a lot. A couple of Ottawa reporters, one in particular, uses it a lot.

I haven't seen the delivery on that yet. CTV, on the other hand, are not known for their social media profile for the most part. And when they use social media, they're using it, it seems to me,

distinctly for news value, not opinion value. And their numbers are fabulous. They're doing really well. So I think some people need to look a little harder at whether or not this process has been good for them or not good for them. The other thing is the biggest danger of relying on some of that social media platform is that you start to think that what you're hearing back on social media is what the public at large thinks. Right.

Which isn't the case. You know, you're hearing a lot from anonymous people. You don't know where it's coming from or how it's coming from. And most people don't use social media. You know, most people who care about what's going on in the country don't go there. Or if they go there, they're only going for it. I think that's right. Yeah.

They certainly don't use Twitter. And I've had that conversation with a number of politicians over the years, just kind of being that helpful reminder that the Twitterverse is somewhere between 12 and 20% of the Canadian public, and it's not necessarily a representative 12 or 20% of the public. And to be aware of what people are saying there is fine, but to recognize that it is a, it's a subsample of the population. It's not terribly representative and it's kind of highly charged in the way that it kind of engages on issues, I think is a really important discipline. I do see the value of it as a way to, and maybe this is more to your point about the CTV use of it. And I hadn't thought about it. I'm going going to look into i'm going to kind of stress test your assertion that they use it differently

and because it's very interesting point to me but as a way of promoting your work here's a piece i wrote about this uh or here's a piece i filed about this, I see the value. When it becomes, here are the things that I'm thinking about this weekend, and the various opinions that I have about things that are going on in society, I don't wish that people can't express their opinion, but I do think that if journalism wants to maintain that level of respect and trust by the public for its reporting, then that's a slippery slope. Okay. This has been a fascinating discussion. Gosh, we're good.

We have such great opinions. I don't know if anybody else loves hearing us talk to each other. It sounds like maybe some people do, but I always love talking with you, Peter, every Wednesday morning and Thursdays too, for that matter. Now, Thursday, tomorrow specifically, Good Talk is taking the week off. Chantel's out somewhere. I can't remember where she was. She was going to try and get some spring skiing or something in.

Sugar shack. Probably getting some maple syrup. Maybe it's too late for that. Well, no, probably not. It'll probably be good. Anyway, nevertheless, we're taking Good Talk. It's tomorrow off, just like most of the politicians, certainly in Ottawa, are taking the week off with a bit of an Easter break.

But Good Talk will be back next week. The Bridge will be back tomorrow, of course, on the Thursday regular potpourri edition, which is always fun, which is always good. But this, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson in Ottawa, Peter Mansbridge in Stratford. It's been great to have it for you.

If you have any comments, send them in to mansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, the mansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, and we will have those ready for the weekend special on Friday. So thanks, Bruce. Thank you out there. We'll talk to you again. Thank you, Peter.

Take care. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.