The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT: "America Is Going To Hell" Says Donald Trump, and Maybe He's Right.

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Its been a wild forty eight hours in the United States so how much did you watch?  Bruce puts the Smoke Mirrors and The Truth microscope on the media and the way its covered the Trump indictment.�� And then on the same theme, what is happening at "60 Minutes"?

And hello there, Peter Ransbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. Bruce Anderson is by with Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. So I'm looking at you on the screen and you look pretty happy today. I got to say, you got like a bit of a smile on your face. It's happy day. And I think I know what it is that's making you happy. Do you? Oh, do you?

I think I do. A lot of snow melted here yesterday, but today. That would make you happy. Here comes the freezing rain, like a foot of freezing rain or something like that. So it's tempered. It's a little tempered. You know, I'm. I like that there was lots of news yesterday. There was a lot of news. There was. Well, actually, there was a lot of coverage. There was a lot of coverage. There was a lot of coverage. and we're going to talk about the coverage. But first, I want to get to a news item that came across, I think, late last night.

It kind of broke here this morning, and I got a feeling you're probably pretty happy about it. And that is the fact that Buckingham Palace has announced that it'll no longer be Camilla Queen Consort. It's going to be Queen Camilla straight up. She's it. She is now the queen. And I figured if there's anybody who's going to be.

Is she going to stay with her name? Is she going to take another name? No. Apparently she's keeping it Queen Camilla. That's big news. I thought you were going to talk about Nicola Sturgeon's husband being arrested. I didn't see this Queen Camilla thing coming. Yeah, no, neither did I.

It came out of nowhere. The other one has been sort of, you're quite correct, it's happened finally this morning, he's been arrested. But it's been kind of hinted at for the last little while, right, over here that there was a lot more to the story about her resignation than we had first thought. And that is not proven yet, but clearly her husband is in a load of trouble. Well, for sure.

I think it's reasonable that if we had been hearing these rumors, she probably had been for quite some time before. So let's let the wheels of justice turn and see how that works out. But obviously a major development that shake again the SNP. The wheels of justice. That's for all of our listeners who are really for us to tell them the latest in the SNP situation, Scottish politics that we care so deeply about.

And maybe we should have a special show about that just for those few hundred listeners. This is the long way around getting to the, you know,who story. And whenever I do – Queen Camilla is an interesting thing. It is. Obviously, Charles feels like he had some sort of point that he needed to make

or debt to repay or something like that. But I don't know. I noticed that Joe Biden said he's not going to the – He's not. Queen Camilla, King Charles event. I don't like it, I'll be honest. You know, I guess if you had to had me up against the wall and said, are you a monarchist or not a monarchist?

I'm probably closer to being a monarchist, certainly than you are. Not as close, 100%. Certainly closer than you are. But I don't like this queen i don't like this queen camilla stuff i'm you know i just it doesn't feel right to me i just finished reading a great book called the traitor king which was about edward the eighth right it's a it's quite something about you know if half of it's true, it's quite something. Anyway, I digress.

I was teasing you with the Camilla story. The Camilla story is correct, but I was teasing about the, you must be happy today. We're getting around to that other guy. And every time I do this or we have this discussion about the other guy, I get, it's funny, I get a fair amount of mail saying, will you stop talking about Trump? We don't care about Trump.

Forget about Trump. I hate it when you talk about Trump. I switch it right off when you talk about Trump. And I read those. It's time to switch off now if you're that person. If you're that person, now is the time to switch off. But what I find odd is, and as you know, when we do talk about Trump, we get a lot of people listening. The numbers seem to reflect that people are, in fact,

in some manner, interested in this story. They can't pull themselves away from it, which is a problem we have at times. I've tried to pull myself away from certainly some of the television coverage this week, but nevertheless, it is a story that's out there. It's a story that's being watched around the world. America's going to hell.

That's the headline today, and it's one of the few times I've agreed with Trump. That's what he said last night when he got back to Mar-a-Lago and gave his little speech, which was covered by some networks, not by others, partially by some, not at all by others. But included in that diatribe about, you know, the judge and the lawyers and the prosecutors, Trump included the line, America's going to hell. And you know what? A lot of people would agree with him on that,

but not for the same reason he's saying it. What's your take on what we've witnessed in the last couple of days? Because, you know, on one hand, it's, you know, it's obviously a big story about justice, whether it's being handled correctly or not. It's also a big media story. Yeah, well, I wonder where you're at. I'm intrigued by the quote that you just alluded to, America's going to hell. And it reminded me that yesterday I was working on a release that my firm Spark Insight is going to put out next week,

where I did a little bit of probing on the question of, is Canada broken? And if it's broken, who broke it? And because, you know, we had that conversation in Canada a little while ago, and I wanted to kind of put my finger on what was bothering me about the way that discussion was being had. And it really does come down to what you just mentioned, which is that people might think something's broken, but might have completely different perspectives on what the problem is that caused the breach. Now in Canada, not very many people think Canada's broken. And the total number of people who think that it's broken by the left, which is an argument that conservatives make sometimes, is about 9%. And the total number of people who think it's been broken by the right,

which a lot of progressive people think, is about 8%. There's not very many people, but they, you know, and they're about equally matched in terms of size. America is a very different situation because of their highly polarized 50-50, you're a Republican or a Democrat, a blue or a red. And so we have this situation where so many of the issues just fall along party lines. And I actually do think that the bigger version of the story that we were consuming yesterday is about America. It's not really just about Trump. In fact, the case details, we can talk about them a little bit,

but it does feel like there was some material that was deposited. There will be months of litigation before it ever gets into a courtroom again. I'm not a lawyer. I don't really know whether the case was strong enough or not. I don't know whether other charges are coming in Mar-a-Lago or the Georgia telephone call. So I tended to kind of watch yesterday and look at it from the, what is it, what is this story and the way that it's being covered telling me about America today? And there are two parts to that. One is the media and how they're treating it. And I kind of watched what I thought was a circus. It reminded me of the O.J. Simpson trial,

which I was glued to for however long it was. It was a year or more probably, right? It was a couple of years. And the magnitude of that story was different than the magnitude of the coverage. It was arguably the first big thing that I can remember where you sense that the media just, they decided on the volume of coverage

based on the interest and the size of the audience rather than is there enough materiality to this, right? Because we heard an awful lot of stuff at panel shows every night. You and I used to talk about it all the time oh yeah we were we were hooked so i was watching these endless hour after hour here's a picture of you know tarmac here's a picture of the front of his apartment building in new york here's a picture of the of the six beefy policemen standing in front of the door. And it was boring, but it was also like, does it really require this much coverage

or is there something else going on there? And I think that the something else is the media don't know how to move away from a story like that for fear that their competitors won't. And if their competitors don't and they don't, then everybody is kind of forced to feast on this endless conversation among pundits who don't really have very much information about a thing that will or won't happen, will be big or won't be big, and we'll let you know later on. So the media part for me was a bit of a reminder that

American media really struggles. And I know we're going to talk about something else in that. But then the other thing, and I'll kind of stop here, because I really want to hear what you think about where America's at, is the I was reminded again, that in America, they elect prosecutors prosecutors and they elect judges. And two of the biggest that I was hearing about separate story about the election of a Supreme Court justice in Wisconsin and And Wisconsin was such an important state in the last presidential election. And I was thinking, wow, that's so different from our system and not different in a better way, I don't think.

And then the conversation about the prosecution of Trump and the charges was so much, well, this guy, Alvin Bragg, the prosecutor in Manhattan, he ran for that office and said, in effect, words that sounded like, vote for me and I'll get Trump. And it is reasonable, I think, for people to wonder whether or not people running for those offices should have overt political ideas, thoughts, agendas. But that's their system.

And so my takeaway is I think their system is broken. I think their system is messed up. I think that everything that is happening around Trump is a reminder that a lot of people used to think perhaps that was a really well-designed system of checks and balances has some really important flaws. And those flaws are becoming more obvious these days than I can ever remember them being before. Well, you know, if their system is broken and the biggest example right now is the justice system

in the in the states if it's broken then the media should in fact be all over it not necessarily in the way we've watched them in the last 48 hours but that's a hell of a story if you're going to claim that. And, you know, a number of people have been claiming that for some time. Conrad Black claimed that. That was his line. The American justice system is broken because of what happened to him. But, you know, watching these, I've got to say I'm having trouble trying to either defend

or prosecute the media on the way they've dealt with this over the last couple of days because they got clobbered, and rightly so, all of us in the media, but especially the American media in 2016 for basically giving Trump all the airtime he wanted when he was running for the Republican nomination. He got tons of airtime, way, way, way, way more than anybody else. And he got all the advantages of that airtime, including kind of glossing over some of the issues that surrounded him. Anyway, after it was over, after all the studies were done,

after all the university professors took their piece of flesh off the media with their studies, the American media said, you're right, we screwed up, it'll never happen again. So it happened less in 2020, but it still was kind of there because of the whole way Trump does his thing, does his campaigning and is out there and pre-programs everything he does, as we've witnessed these last two days.

But here we go on day one of this, on Monday, which was a pretty simple story. He's flying to New York to get ready the next day to appear in court. There's nothing else happening, right? But it's wall-to-wall. It's the OJ driving the car in Mar-a-Lago out to the airport. It's onto a plane. Helicopters watching the plane take off.

Helicopters watching the plane coming into New York OJ drive into New York City And they're all there, right? It's just like you said If one's doing it, the odds are they're all doing it Because they don't want to look like they're Not doing the story that everybody allegedly wants to see Well, as it turns out, the ratings on Monday were not that good for any of the networks.

They were higher than normal, but they weren't anything like they used to be. So there's a bit of a lesson there somewhere. People are kind of turned off by some of this stuff. It'll be interesting to see what the numbers will be like for yesterday, for the actual court appearance. Well, the amount of protein in yesterday's coverage was really, really thin. I was hearing somebody the other day say, never mind, it's a story about rabbits and protein.

I'll do that another day. Oh, no, you're going to leave us on the edge. Yeah, I know. It's a little longer story. But there was so little protein and there was so much carbs, fat, whatever, around it that maybe that was part of the problem but it could also be that um there are a lot of people for whom endless stress which is often what is in the news these days maybe it was always that but the news is coming at us in more ways more frequently more continuously And there is a reaction to that. And I think people have become more capable of saying there are some kinds of stress that I don't really, I'm not going to

think about consuming 12 hours of, you know, where's his plane now, Which of those cars is he in? And all so that he can go into a courtroom where we can maybe get a still shot afterwards and then have more hours of pundit saying, well, I think he looked mad. And others saying, well, I think he looked sad. And having this endless conversation about it. I thought he looked staged. Part of the breakdown that I see is this fascination with celebrity. I don't think we have the same fascination with celebrity. I just don't think that we kind of look at famous people as though that's the thing that we want to stare at all the time.

I'm not saying we're not interested in it. You want to talk about Queen Camilla. I don't think that we're the same. And every time I tune into American politics now, I am more and more reminded that we've got a lot of problems here, but I don't think that we have the same dimension or type of problems that they have. Oh, no, we don't.

We could. We are at times sliding that way. But let me get back to this observer status that we had watching all this stuff in the last couple of days. Is it firm in your mind what should have been done, how the media should have played that story over two days? You know, it's a good question, Peter. I mean, I think that the…

Because I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what the reality is that once we move from newspapers and news programs to 24-7 news channels, it's really hard for those who are running those operations to say, and now we're going to form a piece that we've been working on for several months that's about what's affecting food prices in the grocery stores or what's the latest on China vis-a-vis Taiwan. I think that what would be better for us all is that if the structured time on the news channels did allow for them to say, we're not going to have seven hours of panels or probably more like 18 hours of panels about Trump. We're going to do some other things along the way. But I don't think that they have, I think they're in a, just in a competitive tangle where nobody wants to make the first move between MSNBC and CNN and

Fox. And anybody that's generally interested in the news is probably going to have those, one of those or more of those channels on when something big like this happens. And if they're like me and maybe like you, find ourselves feeling, okay, that's an awful lot of hours without a lot of, as I said, protein. There was a bit of a difference between CNN and MSNBC yesterday. CNN covered his speech, looked like they were going to do the whole thing. They finally bailed out of it because he was sounding, as he often does, a bit unhinged and wasn't making a lot of sense in some of the way he was carrying on that speech. MSNBC didn't run it.

They checked out of it. They ran panels talking about it. They didn't of it. They ran panels talking about it. They didn't run it. You know, even that is a kind of an interesting question, don't you think now? Like I've been in favor of not carrying as much of his wackiness in the past. And I remember in the run up to 2020, we had a conversation about that. But the way that he responded after the judge apparently said, don't do this, he just went out and did it,

it does beg the question whether or not showing that is the right journalistic decision. Not to embarrass him, but because it's part of the news, right? So if you say, well, we don't want to do it because we're going to end up broadcasting things that have risk for people because he was naming some names, he was calling up, you know, he was basically, in some people's minds, he was saying, if you don't like the way I'm being treated here, the people who are responsible for it, right? And we know that there's some danger involved in that. But I don't know what the right answer is in terms of, it feels wrong to not cover that. On the other hand, it has felt wrong for many years now to give him as

much oxygen as he wants to take. So I can be critical, but without saying I know exactly what the answer is, it just feels to me like it's not what we're doing now. Yeah, I don't think what we're doing now is right, but I don't, you know, even with my background and my experience, I don't know what the answer is on this, because he is unlike anybody we've ever dealt with before. Yeah. And that's not a good thing. That's nothing in his favor.

It's just that it's a very strange position that the media is in because they're getting beaten by viewers and listeners and readers if they cover too much. And likewise, the same thing is happening if they don't, you know, from the other side. So here's a question for you. If you were running that program on CNN yesterday or MSNBC, I didn't watch them both all the time, but I didn't see anybody run a clip of Alvin Bragg saying what apparently enraged Trump and his supporters in the course of his campaign. And, you know, people will be surprised maybe to hear me say

this, but if he did campaign on a, I'm going to get Trump or, you know, ideas, words to that effect. I think it should be part of the coverage. I think that people should understand that, right? Not just to have Trump's defenders on the panel say, Alvin Bragg's a partisan. But they should present some of that evidence, I suppose, if there is that evidence there, and I assume there is, because nobody really challenged it. The only answer to that suggestion seemed to be, well, you know, he's got

facts in his submission, and so we'll see how it goes. So the answer ultimately is to try to be more diligent, even though I think that the scar tissue on the CNNs and the MSNBCs from years of pounding by Trump and his supporters is so thick that they don't really know how to get back to a place where they're saying, here's what these guys say, here's the evidence to support that, here's what these guys say. And here's the evidence to support that. But it did feel to me like I was watching a network or two networks that mostly held the same view as me. And they had a couple of people on panels that were Trump people, but the network coverage seemed to be more, isn't it great, he's finally getting charged with something. Yeah, there was a little too much giddiness on some of the stuff I saw for what was in fact playing out, which was an incredibly sad story about the state of American politics, the state of America, all of that right now.

For them to be yucking it up, as I saw on both those networks at times. But I guess if you're going to do wall-to-wall coverage over 48 hours, there are probably going to be those moments. But I circle back to what you said right out of the gate in today's episode, because I think that holds the explanation for a lot of these things, including Bragg. And whether he made those comments or not, I don't know either. It would be nice to actually see them. But it circles back to what you said, is that their system

is so different because they run for these offices. Judges run for offices. The district attorney runs for the office. The sheriffs run for the office. They all run for the office. They don't run for Supreme Court justices at the end of the day, but in fact, they kind of are doing it all through their careers up to that point. So it is very different, and therefore,

these issues can come up at a later date when you're doing the DA thing and it happens to be somebody from the other party in the dark. We're going to take a break, but we're going to stay on this theme because the theme is about media coverage. And we got something pretty interesting that you pointed out to me, but, you know, earlier in the weekend, you know, I think it's really worth exploring. I've got a new angle to it.

But let's take our break and we'll come back and explain what it is I'm babbling about right after this. And welcome back. You're listening to The Bridge, the Wednesday episode, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. Bruce Anderson's in Ottawa. And 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. And wherever you are and whichever method you're using to take in SMT today,

we're glad to have you with us. Okay, I'm going to start this one off by reading you a little story that's in today's Toronto Star. It's written by my friend Mark Bulgich, and Mark was the co-author with me on Extraordinary Canadians, and we're working on a new book that comes out this fall. I can't tell you anything about it yet, but hopefully you'll enjoy it. So obviously I have a lot of time for Mark.

Mark and I have worked together for a long time. He was at the CBC and was a producer with me and a writer with me and a lineup editor, and we had a long and good time together working at the Crown Corporation. So he has a piece in today's Toronto Star. Let me read you the first couple of paragraphs. On Tuesday, September 24th, 1968, I watched a brand new program on CBS called 60 Minutes. One of the anchors, Harry Reisner, called it a magazine

for television, a concept unheard of at that moment. It wasn't successful out of the gate, but it is now the longest continuously running program in American network primetime. It is not an overstatement to say that for many journalists, it came to be regarded as the standard of excellence in TV news, which is why this Sunday's episode was such a disappointment. 60 Minutes devoted its opening segment to Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican member of Congress from a district in northwest Georgia. There's nothing wrong with profiling a politician. It's been done hundreds of times over the years. But MTG, as she's called, is not an ordinary politician. She is vile. Even a cursory look at her record tells you that the word extreme does not begin to describe her. She has supported the execution of people like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and FBI agents.

She's made anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and homophobic statements. She called the school shooting at Sandy Hook a staged event, blamed the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on Black Lives Matter, and hasn't shied away from promoting violence as in the only way you get your freedom back is if it's earned with the price of blood. The treatment of MTG on Sunday night wasn't nearly tough enough. When she said all Democratic politicians, sorry, I just lost my way here,

were pedophiles, including President Joe Biden, and correspondent Leslie Stahl raised an eyebrow, said, wow, really? And moved on. When she said the U.S. government, it goes on and on. Basically, Mark's argument is, why are you giving this person a profile? Why are you giving her airtime?

She is, as he said, in one word, vile, and backs it up with all kinds of different examples. And this on 60 Minutes, right? Sort of the show that every journalist, not just in the U.S., but in North America, looks at as the program. So what do you make of that one? I mean, obviously I have a lot of time for Mark. Well, the reason I was hoping that we would talk about it is that I think Mark's right about this. I think that, you know, I've loved journalism

since I was about eight and I was living in Valleyfield delivering the Montreal Gazette in the morning and the Star in the evening. By the way, did you ever deliver newspapers? I did not. You didn't? No. Well, I guess you were like living in Singapore or something like that. Yeah, not Singapore, but Kuala Lumpur, not far away. So I remember, for me, journalism was a part of the conversation in our household. And my dad, who didn't have very much formal education, he didn't finish high school,

he was an avid reader of Time, and occasionally we would see newsweek as well but i remember time magazine he would read from cover to cover and every day he would read a newspaper and um and there would be a little bit of talk about politics or world events and that sort of and what i felt i saw the leslieahl interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene was the same thing I kind of feel when I look at Newsweek now and what it is and Time now and what it is which used to be the kind of the two defining those two magazines used to be kind of defining pillars of here's what's happening in the world that you need to know about and they're not that now.

They're far, far away from that. And basically, I think both went bankrupt at some point, but the brand still exists. And 60 Minutes for me was the broadcast version. I'm not saying CBC The National didn't become really important in my life as a iconic brand, but 60 Minutes was a kind of a global news brand with the same kind of sense of integrity and importance and reliability. And you always had these issues that would come up from time to time about how did they cover this issue?

Did they do a good enough job or not? And people would talk about that because it was like if 60 Minutes bends, then the rest of us are done for. If 60 Minutes chooses a course, an ethical course, a journalistically sound course, then that's what should be the guiding star. Now, you were in journalism, so maybe you didn't see it that way. But I think to people like me on the outside, 60 Minutes was always part of the conversation. And it was always a conversation about

protect that brand, make that thing be as important and consistent and reliable as it has been. And so when I saw that interview, I thought, well, there's a couple of things that people need to remember about that. One is that there would have been a negotiation before that interview happened, where 60 Minutes would have said, we want to interview Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Marjorie Taylor Greene would have said, hey, 60 Minutes, I'd like to be on your show. Now, I'm going to put the question to you rather than guess, which do you think it was? And then the second thing is, there would have been a discussion about what questions are we going to ask? And what's the tone that you intend to take in the interview?

And given the list of things that Mark wrote in the piece that you just read, it didn't feel to me like Leslie Stahl did what I would have expected a 60 minutes to do and say, you know, she did ask the question about why did you say that Democrats are all pedophiles, but there was a lot of other things that could have come at her that could have been part of that interview. And there was a reason that they weren't either.

They were asked and it was left on the cutting room floor or they weren't asked. And that to me is so shocking as Taylor Greene is to me. There's no point in me saying one more time, that's a horrible person. The issue for me is what is 60 Minutes doing? Why did they do this? Don't they owe us a little bit more explanation as people who've kind of trusted that brand? Anyway, what do you think went on in the background? Who asked for this interview?

And why didn't those questions emerge in it? Okay, well, obviously, I don't know the specific answers to those questions, but I can guess. You can guess. Knowing what I know about CBS and knowing what I know about 60 Minutes, although, you know, clearly things have changed. Don Hewitt, who was the executive producer for years and years and years, is gone now. But Leslie Stahl has been around as long as I've been around in journalism. You know, I can remember on foreign trips and summits and, you know, different places in the world, you know, sharing space with Leslie Stahl on a number of stories.

But here's my guess. First of all, it would have been a decision at 60 minutes. We want to profile this woman because, you know, most people think of her as just a nut job. She may be a nut job, but she's now a very influential nut job. You know, she's close to McCarthy, the Speaker. She has a profile position within the Republican Party where just a couple of years ago she was a nobody in the Republican Party. In fact, had basically been tossed out, but no longer.

So the decision about doing the thing would have been, I'm convinced, would have been 60 minutes and they would have approached her office. And, you know, they would have decided whatever to do it. Would certain things be out of bounds in the questioning? Is it part of a negotiation with Taylor Greene's people or her directly? No. But let me ask you a question on that before you go on. So if a journalistic organization approaches an interview subject and says, we'd like to do a profile piece

on you. Yeah. Aren't they automatically in a weak negotiating position when the conversation then turns to, well, we might do that, but let's talk about the nature of the interview. Who's saying, let's talk 60 minutes. Wouldn't you think that that, because they're asking for the interview they want the interview so marjorie taylor green then is like well i'm in a position to tell you in what circumstance i will do that interview so they've already surrendered some of their influence in the conversation about that and maybe you have to to get the interview done no i i i would be shocked if 60 Minutes gave up anything in the process. The only negotiation factors would be when are we doing this?

Where are we doing this? How much time are we going to need to do it? Those would be the basic facts. They sort of, well, we're going to ask questions around this area, but not around this area, not a chance. I've often said to people, the only time I've ever been asked for the questions I would ask in an interview, the only time in 50 years of doing interviews was Al Gore.

And when they made that request, I said, I'm not interested. You know, I think that's you. I think that's the CBC. I think that the reason I'm asking the question is this, is that I don't remember the last time I watched 60 Minutes. That's a good point. I mean, it's not like it used to be, but television isn't like it used to be.

No, but maybe what they're trying to do is figure out a way to get back into the conversation. And so if you're dealing with somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene, that's a very deliberate way to say we need to reach an audience that we're not reaching right now. Either people who are excited

about the cut and thrust of politics and she's right in the middle of it or people who share her point of view. But either way, it might explain a little bit about how you do an interview with her where the worst that she ever experiences at your hands as an interview is, wow. Yeah, that was, now we don't know, that was a cut interview, right? Which is all the 60-minute stuff is cut. I think there have been rare occasions where they've done a live interview in their program, but very rare.

So that was cut. We don't know what she said after wow. Right. Because there's a cut. You can see the cut right away. But that's kind of my point, too. If there was more, it got cut. Or the one thing I'll tell you about 60 Minutes is a heavily produced show.

Wouldn't you agree, though, that this was the best piece of media publicity that for people who aren't the Republican base, that this was the best piece of media publicity that Marjorie Taylor Greene has had? Well, simply by its reach, that's true. And simply by its reach beyond the normal suspects who would be watching something with her on Fox. But the content of it, right? I was reading the transcript again,

and it did not follow the normal pattern of her saying outrageous things and that sort of thing. It was more, here's somebody that you've heard is outrageous. And in the course of the interview, you might come away thinking, oh, that was exaggerated. I'm not saying you shared that view. But to me, if you're her people and you're saying, well, we wanted to reach an audience that thought she was outrageous and we wanted an interview, which she wasn't, you'd probably look at that and say, mission accomplished. That's possible. There was no Joe McCarthy moment, right?

Which is not a bad comparison With the type of interview And Joe McCarthy early 50s You know everybody was a communist As far as Joe McCarthy was concerned And he slagged them that way And so what happened CBS

Through its correspondent Edward R. Morrow Asked for a moment Asked for an interview with Joe McCarthy. And so they arranged the interview. I don't know whether it was live or not. It kind of looks live when you watch it. It's the best way to do something like this with somebody like that.

And then McCarthy must have agreed to do it, and his people must have agreed to do it because they felt this was an opportunity to do exactly what you're saying. Right? So they went on. And he spewed his bile about various people until the moment where Edward R. Murrow said, you have no shame. Right? And those become like some of the most famous words, and certainly until Woodward and Bernstein came along,

in American journalism. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think this is the... And that was the moment in that interview, right? It wasn't, wow. It was, do you have no shame? This is kind of what I'm concerned about a little bit, I guess, is that these big brands in journalism,

do they have the courage to resist the temptation to find some morsel of that base with their programming? Because when Leslie Stahl raised the point that mark bulgage noted about school shootings uh marjorie taylor green just basically said no no i never said that i don't think that they're very serious i would never joke about school shootings or it's not a joke or something like that maybe there was a follow-up that was left on the cutting room floor, but it would have been an opportunity to sort of show a clip of what she had said or challenge it, right? And so the amount of challenge on those kinds of things felt to me like that was deliberate by 60 minutes to say,

we're going to do a piece that for the people who really believe in this woman is going to feel like it's a reasonable piece. And if that's what you start with, is that a business agenda or is that a journalism agenda? I guess that's the question. And maybe that choice is indistinguishable these days. Yeah. All I can hope for at this point, because I think we're basically, the three of us, you know, you, me, Mark, are kind of in the same position here about the way we felt about that interview.

I would love to know whether there's been a broader discussion in the American media about what happened there or whether they got so caught up with Trump in the last couple of days people have sort of forgotten about it. But more importantly, is there been a kind of a conversation inside 60 Minutes? Like, I don't know, you know, your point is a good one about, you know, you can't remember the last time you watched.

Well, you know, neither can I. Now, part of that is television's changed so dramatically. It used to be a fixture, right? And it used to be the highest rated program every week on American television, all television. Yeah. I don't know where it is now. I think it's still up there quite high.

But it got famous this week, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. You know, it'll be interesting to see what fallout there is because the Murrow thing made journalism in the U.S. Everybody wanted to be Edward R. Murrow, just like 25 years later everybody wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein.

I'm not sure everybody wants to be you know Leslie Stahl now and I don't want to be unfair to her because I don't know what happened in that process in that editing process and she's got a distinguished career

but it'll be interesting to see what the fallout is at a time when journalism is really under the microscope in both our countries and in different parts of the world, that's one for, you know, for people who've given up, they just pass. But those who still

care, like Bulgich, like yourself, are saying what you're saying as a result of that. Yeah, we're going to, I'm going to keep watching the conversation. I think your suggestion is a good one about what are Americans saying? What are journalists saying? What are schools of journalism saying about Stahl interview? Because it is more, it, obviously it's about Marjorie Taylor green, but it didn't. Um, but the more interesting conversation for me right now is, um, is this the direction that we're going to go in? But everything that is supported by some number of people, um, is considered a, you know, kind of untouchable almost that you have to,

and you and I, before we started, I was telling you about a piece of research that I've got in the field right now that asks a pretty basic question about, should everybody have the same rights? Should every human being have the same rights or should some people have more rights than others and i'm always shocked when i ask a question like that how many people there are who say no actually some people should have more rights than other people and i think for journalism that's such that's become such an important political question that journalism ultimately needs to decide in the same way we need to decide whether we need to buy us in artificial intelligence models or what have you are we just going to accept that um the idea of i should have more rights than somebody of a different color we Do we treat that as kind of both sides-ism? Or do we say, no, no, that's not right? And I feel like that's a little bit the conversation

underneath the surface of this. Well, I'm really intrigued by this data you're in the field on now and look forward to hearing you share it with us. Looking forward also to tomorrow. I know it's Thursday. Usually it's your turn and the random renter, but we're giving them the week off as Easter approaches. We're going to do Good Talk tomorrow,

and it will repeat on Good Friday as well. But Chantel will join us tomorrow, and we'll figure out something to talk about because, as I say, we always do. Thanks for this. It's been really interesting. It's a different way to go about looking at the stories that have dominated the news headlines in the last couple of days. Okay.

Thanks, Bruce. We'll let you go and get your look for that. Are you going to get a Queen Camilla T-shirt or a hoodie or something like that? Yeah, I was thinking of that. I've got to get one of those. I'll go looking for one because I'm sure they'll be selling out in stores here in Scotland. That's right. Anyway, I'll let you go because I'm sure you're going to go ahead straight to your mailbox to see whether that invite has got in for the wedding yet. Yeah. No, it's not a wedding.

Oh, sorry. That's right. Wedding, coronation, royal. The big thing. A whole bit. All right. Take care. You too.

And thank you out there for listening and watching. It's been a treat as it always is. We'll be back with that special Thursday episode of Good Talk with Chantel and Bruce, and that is just 24 hours away. Take care.