The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - Analyzing The Media's Campaign Performance

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

This is another master class episode, this time on journalism in the midst of a campaign.  Bruce and I are joined by an old friend, Assistant Professor of Journalism Elly Alboim from the Carleton School of Journalism. If you care about journalism you'll want to hear this.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday. You know what that means. Smoke mirrors and the truth with Bruce Anderson. A can of pet food, where every ingredient matters. Some companies like to brag about their first ingredient, but the A Can of Pet Food team is proud of their entire bag. That's because every recipe has been thoughtfully sourced and carefully crafted with the highest quality ingredients, starting with quality animal ingredients, balanced with whole fruits and vegetables. Akana pet foods are rich in the protein and nutrients your dog or cat needs to feel and look their best. Available in grain-free, healthy grains, and singles for sensitive dogs.

Akana, go beyond the first ingredient. okay two days after it's all over it's all over now but the analyzing and today what we're going to be analyzing is the media and bruce you you know like i don't know how many times during the last five weeks that you've brought up this media question. So it's important that we get somebody other than the two of you. Let's not put it all on me. I'm not the only one that's raising questions about journalism. And Peter, honestly, you know how much I always love talking to you. I've been looking forward to it again, you know, 24 hours since the last time we talked i think but i'm so excited

today because when i started working in politics the smartest human being in canada in the media was ellie album and he's been the smartest human being about media in canada every year since then i don't think i know of anybody else who said, I guess there was a news anchor who had that kind of title for a long period of time, but we're not here to talk about him. We're so excited to have Ellie Albom as our guest this morning. I can't wait. So let's get going. Okay.

Let me say a couple of things about Ellie before we bring him inside here. And that is he was my boss for for many years so if you don't like me you don't like my journalism you don't like the things that i've done in my past it's not my fault it's ellie's fault on the other hand if you do you got to give some credit yes that's right ellie was the bureau chief at the cbc in ottawa before he branched off into consulting in the early 1990s and teaching at Carleton University where he's an associate professor of journalism at Carleton's extremely well-respected School of Journalism. Many of the top journalists in the country have come through that school

and under the tutelage in many cases of Ellie Alborn. So Ellie, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for all of the flattery. I really actually regard myself as one of the over the hill gang, not somebody immediately relevant, but thank you anyway. Oh, well, we're all a little bit of that. But, you know, listen, even the over the hill gang often has things to say that are that not only of interest but uh you know bits of wisdom that uh that others follow and that's why a lot of the younger journalists of uh our business still come to us and ask us questions about uh the way they're doing their job the way we think the job should be done, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, let's move on.

And, Todd, we want to talk about how the journalism unfolded in the media through these last five or six weeks. And I know that's difficult because the media is not a monolith. We've been through this before. A lot of people have used different policies and guidelines for how they operate. But overall, as we'll go through a number of specific areas, I'm sure, but overall, how do you grade the way this campaign was covered when you think of all the many campaigns that you've covered and watched over the years? Where does this one place? Well, I guess predictably.

I think there were significant difficulties in this one because of COVID. The normal kind of event cycle that leaders would put together on the leaders tours didn't exist. A lot of it was virtual. The reporters themselves traveled on a very limited basis. The degree to which they exposed themselves to voters was very limited because of COVID. So in many ways, this was less reporting than it was analysis and commentary. And there was an awful lot of that. And we got into the normal kind of symbiotic relationship between leaders and parties and media where everybody's trying to make news. Everybody's trying to make an impression. And you run into that consistent problem that we have always had in media and politics,

which is that an election campaign is really a process in public education. Politicians try to educate the public, try to bring them along on a policy basis, try to make them understand what they intend to do. And they do that incrementally, day by day by day. And reporters every day are looking for something different, looking for news every day. So you get the focus on conflict, which we all understand, and the focus on change and negative attack. And I must say, I heard more consistent negative characterizations by leaders in this election campaign than I've heard in a while. From the NDP through the conservatives to the liberals, virtually every day in the last two and a half to three weeks was negative

characterization of opponents. The platforms were forgotten, the policies were forgotten, and media cheerfully engaged in it because it made news every day. It is an easier story to tell when you're telling that story. But you noticed a difference between this campaign and past campaigns on that particular score, on the negativity, if you wish, of the leaders against the other leaders? Yeah, I don't want to be Pollyanna about this. We always get negative advertising in election campaigns, particularly towards the end. And we get negative commentary. But this one was unremitting.

I don't think Mr. Singh spoke about policies in any consistent way. For instance, his entire daily mantra was about an election that shouldn't have been called and Mr. Trudeau's failure to fulfill promises. And Mr. O'Toole was similar about the character of the prime minister. And then the prime minister went at the other leaders on vaccinations and their attitudes towards the election. I just found it unremittingly bleak day by day by day. Okay.

Peter, can I jump in? I want to ask Ellie, I have a lot of questions, but I'm going to try to kind of focus on the ones that I think about a lot and I don't know the answer to. And so they're really just questions. Ellie, I'm wondering, well, a two-parter. One is I want to get your view of the relative balance from journalists of opinion versus reporting. How has that changed and what do you make of the change that you see? And is there anything that

needs to be done within news organizations to change that balance going forward? A kind of a related question, but one that fascinates me is that I sometimes have the impression that journalists today, when they're questioning politicians, approach the politicians from a more cynical or suspicious or attack oriented place than perhaps used to be the case. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's my perception. And I sort of feel as well related to that, that the relationship between politicians and journalists, regardless of stripe, is worse because of, you know, that sense that a journalist asking a question is often putting a question in a kind of an attack or attacking or suspicious context. Is that true? Have you seen that change over time? And if so, what, if anything, should be done about it? Well, that's a lot of questions to sort out.

He's good at that. I think there's a there's a clash of cultures between politicians and journalists that that really can't be bridged. They have different responsibilities, different accountabilities, and they find it hard to put themselves in each other's shoes. Journalists really begin with a presumption of an adversarial relationship with politicians. And that kind of poisons or colors the way they do their job. I don't know whether it goes back to Watergate when it started or where it accelerated. But yes, I think that journalists take on an obligation onto themselves that no one actually confers to them,

which is to hold politicians and governments accountable. And, and they think of that as their primary responsibility rather than reporting events in a way that people can understand them and informing readership. I think most of them now believe their primary job is accountability. I think you saw that in the debates, where the questions were all around accountability, not trying to elicit information. And there was a fundamental tone of disrespect among many of those questions that I personally found quite troubling.

I think that journalists on the whole, you don't want to talk about individuals because obviously there are different attitudes and we're not monolithic, as Peter said, but I think there is a point of departure a cynicism a presumption of venality in the other side um uh that that really colors the relationships um and yeah i think it's been getting worse it's partly getting worse because of the ruthless competitive struggles to keep that industry alive. Their business cases are weakening. They have to assemble audiences. They have to show constant relevance to their audiences.

And in many ways, you know, empowering their audiences to make fun of politicians is a very interesting and successful way to position your product. I can't tell you how many journalists and organizations kind of make fun of the people they cover, kind of go on the attack on behalf of their readership. And, you know, sure, the model has changed over time. There are good journalists, there are excellent journalists, there are. The, the, the model has changed over time. There are good journalists or excellent journalists. There are people actually providing the information that's required,

but there's a lot of folks. This is a football game. Uh, you know, they're covering athletics. Um, uh, and they keep, all they care about is keeping score. What about this issue of, uh, because you raised it both, um, obviously Bruce did in his question, but also you raised it in your kind of preamble, which is, you know, the battle between reporting and opinion in pieces. You seem to suggest that the tilt is going towards more opinion and less kind of straight up reporting. Yeah, indisputably you know peter when you and i were working together uh you know we had a a journalistic policy book that that actually forbade

uh reporters and journalists from expressing opinion um and we had an ombudsman who would you know uh track down errant opinion that creeped its way into newscasts. That's changed. I think, again, as part of the competitive struggle, most journalistic organizations are beginning to de-emphasize straight reporting and prize opinion. Because opinion is sharper, more interesting to read. The National Post, for instance, is almost entirely opinion, right, by by design i'm not talking about its news columns i'm saying virtually everybody on that paper staff is an opinion

columnist that dabbles in the news um uh it's it's you know something that that american journalists have obviously um been doing on cable tv for a decade or two decades. It's slopped over here. Editors tell reporters and journalists, you've got to come to a conclusion. You've got to tell us what this is about. You can't simply say on the one hand, on the other hand, and expect people to be interested in it. So journalism is a culture of prizes. People coming down on one side or another as part of the accountability process. And yeah, it's almost impossible to read a straight up news story anymore.

Virtually every news story will have some level of opinion in it from the reporter himself rather than from third-party sources. And do you find that cuts across the different media organizations, you know, whether it's print or television or radio or online, that there's a part of that in all of those? Yeah, harder to do in radio, particularly radio news because it's so truncated, so short. They tend to be more factual and straight up. But certainly in print, it's hard to recall a piece, let's say, over the last five or six weeks that was just a matter-of-fact reporting

of what was said or the fact base. And there's another structural problem here that we haven't talked about, we should identify, is that there's this cross-feeding between media, right? Social media and normal media. So virtually every reporter becomes an analyst or a commentator on something somewhere, whether it's a podcast or social media or whether it's on a panel on television or radio. So all of these reporters are asked their opinions all the time and they express them.

And then they go out and they cover it, cover an event. But they've already been pre-shaped by the way their opinions are expressed on all of these panels and, and guests, uh, appearances. Um, so they really become actors in the drama because they've been asked to express opinion. Um, I find it very hard to believe that a reporter can at 10 o'clock go on a panel with and have sharp opinion and at two o'clock sit down and write

about the object of that opinion in a neutral and dispassionate way. I think that's very hard to do. Only Chantal, as far as I know, has been able to do that consistently over time. Ellie, I was struck by something in this campaign that kind of reminded me of a general worry that I have. I remember reading John Ibbotson's column in the Globe and Mail, where I'll probably paraphrase this a little bit unfairly or inaccurately, and I apologize in advance to him if I do, but it seemed the argument that he was making was that because there are people who hold the views that Max Bernier has on some very contentious issues in Canada, including the nature of immigration, that his argument was that some people's party member or candidate should be elected.

It would be good for the country to have those views represented in Parliament. And I accept and respect that that's his opinion, and that he's entitled to it, and the Globe is entitled to publish it. But it did make me wonder if, at the same time as we're having this ongoing debate about what social media platforms should consider to be fair comment and reasonable comment, we need to kind of think about that question in the context of the more traditional media. And the specific reference that got my attention was Mr. Ibbotson describing the disgruntled People's Party supporter as somebody who was angry about a bunch of things, including non-European immigration. And I don't know if you read that piece, but I had that kind of feeling

like there are certain comments that we know the impact that they have on our culture, and we tend to try to encourage social media platforms to prevent them from spreading far and wide that you know may or may not be in that category but anti-vax sentiment and misinformation about vaccination is another one and I just found myself wondering is anybody going to make the rules around this at some point in the future, or is it just going to become the Wild West or even more the Wild West? And I think a related thing for me is the ownership structure of the media enterprises that are in the private sector in Canada seems disproportionately to be kind of oriented towards the conservative point of view, whereas two thirds of Canadians are more progressive in their in their kind of orientation on values and public policy issues. And ultimately, does that resolve itself in time because a market

works that way? Or are we headed for more fragmentation where there are small kind of progressive boutique journalistic organizations? So there again're again sorry a lot but uh pull any thread that you want and tell me what you think um well let me start with ibbotson i yeah i'm aware of it i read the column and i read the controversy afterwards um uh i'm i'm less fussed about that, to be honest. He could have been more careful in his language. But, you know, the People's Party got 5% of the vote nationally. They got 6% in Ontario. They got 7% in Alberta.

They're a factor in the election. You have to be able to write about them in a way that describes what they're saying. I think that probably the way he wrote it mischaracterized to be generous.

Maybe the way he felt about the issue of non-white immigration. It's an incendiary topic, but I wouldn't preclude it from discussion. I'm a little different, I think, about the anti-vax stuff. To me, there are lines that you should not cross, given the role journalists have in trying to validate what's true and what's not, what's scientifically appropriate and what's not, to try to give people information that they really require. And in this case, on a life and death basis, I don't think that a balance of reporting that says the earth is round, the earth is flat, make your choice, is the way you proceed. I would not give much platform to the anti-vaxxers um and and the crackpot science they quote um uh i i think that we unfortunately have an issue on public education and public literacy about issues like that um you

know the people taking horse medication uh to deal with their infection uh reveals a kind of difficulty of informing people properly or what people are willing to believe these days in a world of weird journalism and information distribution. You have to be careful. So, yes, I agree with you. I think that there needs to be not a formal restriction, but a degree of censorship that says at certain points we have to accept the factual base and we cannot report the other side. You know, Peter, you remember the Ernst Zundel trials in the 1980s when he was tried for denying the holocaust and we had this bizarre circumstance in the

courtroom where we had people saying on the one hand this call cost existed on the other hand it didn't and journalists were forced to report this as a kind of co-equal argument right and so they finally were so repelled they didn't cover the trial um i i think that's an issue. What you can do about it, Bruce, I'm not sure. But let me say this. Journalism says it's a profession, says it has standards, has principles and objectives. It is the only profession that I know of that has not got a self-regulating authority or body nurses doctors dentists uh plumbers everybody involved in a trade or profession has some sort of a certification process and some sort of oversight in case of misdemeanors and some kind of a disciplinary procedures procedure journalists have defiantly rejected having professional standards codified and having any oversight bodies with any authority. Individual organizations do have ombudsmen like the CBC does, but that's not the same.

We don't have a way of sanctioning people go outside the lines. So, you know, a reporter for the rebel is as much a reporter as a reporter for the Globe and Mail. As absurd as that proposition is, on the face of it, it's nuts. They are not co-equivalent journalists. They're demanding the same privileges and rights of access. In fact, the rebel, you know, got a ruling in court giving them access to the debate coverage because nobody can define what a journalist is. Everybody bends over backwards to give it the most liberal definition because of the important role journalism plays in society. But in doing that, you know, we've allowed the Fox News perversion in the U.S. and the rebel news perversion here in Canada.

And I don't know how to discipline it. The profession will not discipline itself. On the issue of ownership, well, you know, welcome to a society where, you know, the power of the media, as Liebling said, is the power to own the press. So if you've got the capital to own the printing press, you can run a newspaper. The only thing stopping all of those organizations becoming full of propaganda arms is their need to assemble a large enough audience, as you say, in the marketplace,

bringing some marketplace discipline to it. If it just becomes a one-note pony, they speak only to their supporters, and they look at the audience by definition. Okay. I have a little follow-up. I'll let you follow that up, but I've got to take a quick pause here.

We'll be right back with Bruce's follow up and a couple of other points. This is really interesting. Thank you for doing it, Ellie. Quick pause. We'll be right back. This is The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge. all right back with smoke mirrors and the truth bruce anderson's in ottawa so uh is ellie albon who was also in ottawa assistant professor of journalism at calton university my former boss and a friend of both of ours for uh for many years bruce you wanted to do a quick follow-up because i also want to, you know, Ellie said that journalism is the only profession

that doesn't have, you know, a true kind of self-regulating body. And that may well be true. I think pollsters are close to that and polling will come up as a topic for us in a moment as well. But first of all, Bruce, you wanted to follow up on the earlier points.

Yeah, I think that's a great conversation to have about pollsters and happy to participate in it. And I don't know about you, Peter, but I'm just loving listening to Ellie's long answers and because they're long, but involved and interesting.

And so thank you as well, Ellie, for doing it. I agree with you, by the way, about Ibbotson that his piece was sort of, the way that it works is if you have money, and you can build an audience, you can run a journalism operation, it's very hard to build that audience from scratch, if you don't have the kind of incumbent legacy model, at least as a starting point. But it's not, it's not impossible.

One of the tools that has been used in recent years with some controversy is the idea of government providing a fund that allows small journalistic organizations to draw on it, to build some reporting capability, whether it's around a set of public issues or local community news or what have you. And I know that there are some who think this is a slippery slope where government gets to decide where the money for journalism goes. And I get that and I have some anxiety about it. On the other hand, I do think that we could find ourselves in a situation where the economics of the major media companies eventually break down. And and we're left with very, very little by way of news coverage. And I'm worried about that, too. What's your what's your take on the role of government or government funding in the area of journalism? You know, I've got very absolutist views about that. I worked for the public broadcaster for 23 years,

and 16 of them I was bureau chief for the CBC on Parliament Hill. And no one told me how to run that operation. And nobody told me what reporters should say. The governments do not interfere. The government does not interfere in public broadcasting and public broadcasting journals. That's the basis from which I come. And, you know, Peter was on point for a long time, and he can speak to his own experiences about political pressure, if any. But, Bruce, you know, this is the Andrew Coyne view of the world, and I absolutely categorically reject it. Journalism can't be portrayed as a public good

with public responsibilities and not be encouraged to survive in any way. And government has a responsibility, in my view, to ensure that there's quality journalism. That doesn't mean it has to control the journalism. It doesn't have to direct the journalism. But given the breakdown in the market, and it is a market failure, as you say, you have to have the money in order to create the organization. It's very tough. That's a market failure. We have market failures in lots of parts of our economy, and the government gets involved to correct the market failure. We have a market failure in the provision of information at the local, regional, and national level. And if you're going to have a democracy and a society that is well-informed and able to make its decisions, it requires quality journals.

And if it can't pay for it on an individual basis, because monetizing either the social media or printed media has become very hard to do in our society, then government has a responsibility to step in and repair the market failure. It can do it at an arm's length way. There are ways of making sure there's no political interference. But just as government had a responsibility to develop drug and vaccine capacity in Canada and pay for it, which is what it's doing, it has responsibility to ensure that Canadians from coast to coast get adequate information about how their country is operating. And if the marketplace can't provide it, government has to find a way to support it. You know, you gave me the invitation to say something about interference

in terms of our history with the CBC. I mean, I was there in a frontline role for decades, as were you, Ellie. The only time that I remember ever government interfering with basically directing what the CBC should do was before our time in senior roles. And that was the October crisis in 1970, where they definitely had their finger on the scale of what should be on the air. But that was the only time.

And the CBC has long since apologized for what happened there, at least the news department had. But I can never recall. You know, listen, everybody tries to influence everything about what's on the air, what's in the paper. That's kind of the normal part of the process. But in terms of a direct interference, I never saw it.

I never saw anything like that in my whole time at that level. Okay, let's touch on this issue of, of polls because Ellie, uh, you know, you, you have talked to often in the past about, you know, too much focus on the horse race and that's often guided by, you know, polls in the, in the discussions. There were a lot of polls this time, you know, uh, some daily polls, some every couple of days. From the new distance that I have, I seem to see less focus on it than in the past, but I could be wrong there. Where's your thought on the polling issue?

I'm not sure I agree with you. I think there is there was almost a daily fix it fixation with overnight polling there were a number of organizations doing it including Bruce's I

but I think Peter where maybe you're right is since all the polls for most of the polls began to triangulate around the same basic narrative, which is a tied ballgame. Right. Competitive around 33%. And that literally didn't change after the minor gap opened up in week two and then started to close beginning in week three. The story was the same every day, plus or minus 2%.

So it became less relevant. You couldn't keep reporting same numbers every day and saying same story every day. So the story began to get underneath about regional polling and regional differences. But to be fair, in my view, the polling framed the coverage. I don't think the policy set framed the coverage. I think two things framed the coverage. One is personal character, because the Prime Minister becoming a very polarizing figure, and Mr. O'Toole kind of wavering back and forth on policy basis. But the other thing was the framing of this as a horse race that was too exciting not to pay attention to and too close to

call. And every day we got validation of that storyline by all the polling companies. And it informed the way every journalist in the country did their job. I'm covering a horse race. I'm covering a really exciting horse race. I don't know the way it's going to end. And my job is to tell you who's winning and who's losing. You want to get in here, Bruce, as one of the aforementioned holsters? Yes, sure.

I'll throw a couple of thoughts on the fire. You know, I've long felt like, as much as I love being in the polling business, that polling can have too big an influence on the discussion about a campaign. And by that, I really mean it just crowds out the process that Ellie alluded to earlier as a public education effort. And I feel that more and more each passing year because I see evidence that people are paying less and less attention to critical public policy issues to try to set aside the coverage of the combat and push through an understanding of what really felt like, you know, media were doing

what they felt was the right thing, saying we've only got a 37 day campaign and then something must be happening. So let's look at the polls to tell us what's happening. And I felt like the polls were really telling us a lot of people weren't paying much attention. And so there was some apparent movement, but was it really as meaningful as the coverage suggested? Now, I think that happened to work out. And so by asking the question that way, clearly, I didn't think that it was that meaningful. But I also think, ironically, it ended up helping the Liberal campaign because it created an earlier phase where people then said,

oh, Erin O'Toole might be prime minister. What do we think about that? And if that hadn't happened for another three or four weeks, I kind of think that the Conservatives might have won this election campaign, to be honest. So there is this phenomena of polling interjecting itself in a way that pushes out other useful information and can create a dynamic which is um uh which creates its own kind of adversarial effect so i'm a little bit

worried about that i'm um i also understand the frustration that people sometimes have or express and somebody was expressing it to me on Twitter this morning that should a pollster have opinions or be completely free of opinions? And I can't answer for the rest of the profession, but I can't have been in this business for 40 years without having some opinion. So I try to make a delineation between what my analysis is of public opinion polls and what my personal preferences are. And I think I've tried to be fairly clear about that. But I understand that some people, especially in the wake of the controversy around the English language debate, wonder what is the right, what the boundary should be in terms of the public role of pollsters. And I

think that's a very valid question. And I'm glad I don't have that many more years of this to do it and that it's going to be resolved by people who aren't me. Can I add a couple of points, I guess? Sure. One following up on that. I, you know, there is a view, and I don't think entirely unwarranted, that some polling companies have developed tendencies over time, both in the way they question and the way they report that don't indicate necessarily an inherent bias, but, but do tend to favor, uh, bodies of opinion, body of thought. Um, uh, so the results tend to be more consistently on one side of the line, uh, or the other. Um, I don't think that that's generally true within the profession,

but I think there are some whose results are too consistently slightly off or slightly on one side or another to make you feel that there isn't some sort of unconscious process going on. Yeah, I agree with that. Secondly, and let me take the counterintuitive side about polling, whatever the ill effects of polling on an election campaign, and I think there are many as we've talked about, I think that the inherent right of Canadian voters to really understand what's going on in an election campaign is critically important. People have to have the right to vote strategically if they choose to do that. They need to understand what the parties are seeing in their polling in order to inform themselves about what part of the way to evaluate what parties are doing, what social media is saying, what the tactics are. I think if media and the public are blind on a polling level, then they're deprived of a tool to understand what political parties are doing

and why they're maneuvering the way they do. And I think that's a right we have. Political parties spend millions of dollars to understand public opinion. And they use that as a publicly subsidized dollars. Let's not forget. So I think that it's part of the journalistic responsibility and the polling industry's responsibility to provide alternate information or at least the same sort of information. So a voter can make an informed choice. I don't have any problem with polling during an election campaign. I think it's very important. It's the way it is analyzed and presented that becomes a problem.

And let me just add one more very quick dimension. It's like everything else. When you make a bet on anything, you take some ownership of that outcome. When you bet on a football game, you really want somebody to win, and you don't want to be wrong. The desire not to be wrong drives journalists, and it drives pollsters. Nobody wants to have to, at the end of the thing, stand up and say I was wrong. There's a lot of self-interest

that goes into the way pollsters describe their results because they're trying to protect themselves from going wrong or being publicly exposed. So they take a position, right? And some of them have an interest in a particular outcome because that's the one they predicted. I know I was, you know, I always refused to get involved in the office pools at the CBC because I knew that ultimately I was going to be part of the decision-making process, and I didn't want to have expressed myself publicly to my colleagues about who I thought was going to

win because I thought that would prejudice my decision-making process. Okay, we're going to have to leave it at that. On a very interesting last point that I'm sure you and Bruce could go back and forth on for a number of go-arounds, and we'll save that for another time because this was good. This was really good. It was, as I've said often about certain times with Chantal and Bruce, those were masterclasses in the way politics is covered, and this was a masterclass in trying to understand and thoughtfully go through the way the media has covered this particular campaign.

So, Ellie, we really appreciate your time on this one. It's really been fascinating to listen to you and we will do it again we'll find another opportunity to pick up on this discussion around polls and other things in terms of the way the media

operates in terms of covering politics. A quick last word from you Bruce in terms of Thank you Ellie that was interesting, and it was just everything I hoped that it would be, and I hope you'll do it with us again sometime. Great. Well, I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. All right. We're going to wrap this up. Tomorrow is your turn, so get those cards and letters coming in at themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, at the mansbridge podcast at gmail.com the

mansbridge podcast at gmail.com uh we'll talk to you again in 24 hours i'm peter mansbridge this has been the bridge thanks for listening talk to you soon