The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - How a Lack of Trust in Media and Government Relates to the Growth of Conspiracy Theories

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Bruce Anderson has the results of some new data on the relationship between people's trust, or lack of it, in media and government, and how it connects to the rapid growth in conspiracy theories.  Some of the data is shocking.  Plus some new thoughts on the unfolding story of the final days of the Trump administration.

And hello again, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's The Bridge on Wednesday. Bruce Anderson, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth is next. And welcome, Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson is in Toronto today. So it's good to join in with Bruce and talk about, well, we're going to talk about a number of things today. And I want to start this way. You've been real busy of late, you and your firm, Abacus Data, you and your pal, David Coletto, churning out all kinds of different studies on everything from conspiracy theories to trust in government, to trust in the media, and everything in between.

And there's been kind of a daily pumping out of this material and what i want to what i want to start with is i get a sense of why all these things connect because i think you do believe they connect or you wouldn't have done them all more or less at the same time so what's the connection with these different things yeah they peter the reason that i wanted us to do this work is that over the last several years, and I've been, as you know, in the polling business for almost 35 years, I guess now, is that I've been noticing that for many of the clients that I work for, when we study public opinion that relates to the issues that they're interested in or working on, reputations that they are trying to develop, more and more people seem to know less and less about the fundamentals of how our economy works, of the various issues that are at play in public policy terms. And at the same time, we've seen that certain public policy issues covet being one of them some of the issues around race relations being another feature a situation where people have kind of developed a

a belief system that doesn't have very much to do with facts and so we've got these two kind of competing things going on one where institutions in society that need to engage with people to make our democracy function are finding that it's harder and harder to do that. Because people just seem to be stepping away from that flow of facts and to some degree, as you say, mistrusting it. And at the same time, a rather shocking sized segment of the public is embracing non-facts as part of their belief system and this is compounding the challenges not just for politicians but for all kinds of civil society and business sector actors so we wanted to shine a light on it so we did a whole lot of research on it and rather than put it all out in one news release we decided that we were going to break it up into chunks

and tell a different part of the story each day we've got i think three releases out now and we probably got two or three more to go before we're finished with this series you know one of the things that um that immediately it came to my mind as i was reading this stuff is that we somehow were under the belief that those attitudes those beliefs um kind of stopped at the u.s canada border that was you know that would never happen here we wouldn't believe that stuff. But this pretty well proves it doesn't stop at the border. And I wonder why that is.

Well, it doesn't stop at the border in part because we, you know, if we sort of look at our culture and say, is it different? And if so, how different is it from that or the United States? We've always sort of taken a certain measure of, well, it's pretty different and it's pretty different in a number of important ways that relate to value systems and the idea of tolerance and that sort of thing. But we've been watching what's been happening in the united states and for many observers myself included i think you too we see that the united states is changing um we sense that the adoption of harsher cultural attitudes is more pronounced more obvious it's exacerbated by um some of the far right journalism i used the word journalism advisedly there the fox news vacation of america i'm not suggesting that the only problems that relate to conspiracy theories are on the on the right but more of them seem concentrated on the

right and we watched as america has changed and made it more difficult for mainstream conservative politicians mainstream republicans to build a constituency around mainstream what used to be mainstream republican issues like the economy and the size of government and the idea of free trade and that sort of thing so america has been changing and yes we're still different from america but we've been changing too and we have those media in canada that are trying to do the same kind of thing as we see happening in the united states which is to kind of ramp up anxieties about certain things foster or help push out theories that place blame for problems in society on other people. And so I've been feeling for some time that, you know, if we're going to cover politics and look just at things like the rise of the People's Party, that we shouldn't just look at it as,

oh, there's another horse that's gotten on the track and it seems to be moving at a reasonably brisk pace. And look at the conservative leadership campaigns the last two or three times have featured a pretty strong hand among the further right social conservative theological conservative movement. We need to kind of look at that and say, this isn't happening independent of public opinion. It's happening to some degree in parallel with public opinion. It's building that public opinion, and it's nurturing it, and it's benefiting from it. And so we can't just blame the politicians who we think are maybe causing these attitudes. We need to sort of say some of these attitudes are causing the politicians that we are seeing like maxine bernier tell me about the conspiracy theories um you've hinted at this uh with us a couple times in the last few weeks

the the numbers are well they're more than surprising They're kind of scary in some regards in terms of what Canadians believe in terms of conspiracy theories. What are you finding? our results out using percentages but we also translated those percentages into a description of how many millions of Canadians that means because sometimes if we said you know 19 percent of Canadians believe x other people might look at that number and say well 81 percent didn't but from my standpoint the fact that 19 percent which is the equivalent of 5.6 million Canadian adults, believe that COVID vaccines have killed many people, which has been covered up, that's a pretty shocking number. Five and a half million think that somehow some combination of government and media have kept from the public that many, many people have been killed by COVID vaccines. Now, you as somebody who sat in that chair at CBC News for those years and observed that there was journalism of record, not just at CBC, but there was a sense of there are are facts and there are facts that are going to be reported by news organizations and within those news organizations there's going to be a custodial

relationship of the relationship a custodial role in the relationship with the public to make sure that if ever you got the facts wrong you've corrected um and that built a sense of trust and expectation that that doesn't exist to the same degree now otherwise people wouldn't believe that and so 11 percent this if i just use the percent you might go well well bruce 89 don't believe this but 3.3 million people adults believe in our latest release that covid vaccines include secret chips designed to monitor and control behavior now i'm not an engineer but it makes no sense to me to believe that what you know what part of that makes any kind of sense physiologically let alone the idea that there could be this vast international conspiracy where governments decided that they were all

going to overlook the fact that these covid vaccines included microchips and they were still going to put them into people's bodies and that we would never kind of hear about that from the mainstream media that all of this would be covered up by physicians by health experts by governments by the media and and covid vaccines would come loaded with these these chips nine percent which is again 2.7 million people adults in canada think that it's definitely or probably true that covid was caused by the rollout of 5g wireless technology because the electromagnetic frequencies undermine people's immune system so i just look at those numbers and i think it's harder and harder for well-intentioned politicians and for thoughtful journalistic organizations to marshal a kind of a consensus around what are the issues that we need to deal with as a society and how are we going to make progress on them? If people start to believe these things in quantities like that, we're just kind of raising a flag and saying, this is part of the challenge that we all face.

And maybe it was always there to some degree, but it's bigger now. And it's probably going to get bigger unless we collectively figure out things to do to turn it around. So this is just a stuff on COVID, Peter, but we also put out stuff on replacement theory. How many people believe that there's a group in society that's trying to replace native-born Canadians

with immigrants who share their political views? And these are really big numbers, and they're really disturbing because they imply a level of, it's not necessarily even understood racism. People don't necessarily think about it as, I don't like that other group in society. They simply think of it as, oh did feel it does feel to me like white people are losing ground as minorities are gaining ground and we'll put out some more of that in the next few days and we'll also put it out stuff on whether people think the moon landing was a hoax or the royal family killed princess diana and we're getting a lot of reaction to it. And most of the reaction is a shock and dismay and disappointment. And frankly, I don't think we wanted to make people kind of head into the summer with some disturbing news.

But we do want people to reflect on it. That's one of the reasons that we're putting it out there. Okay, I want to try and get at the question of why. You know, you mentioned earlier that I used to do the National on the CBC for, you know, 30 years. It's been five years now after I left because I know very well that the numbers were starting to chip away on the trust factor, on the believability factor, whether it was news or government,

but especially news. That was my concern. There's always been this lack of trust in certain elements of government for decades. But the fact that it was chipping away at the media and journalistic organizations was becoming clear over the last 10 to 15 years and you know i'm constantly asked by different groups that i speak to or meet with why and you know I before I before I try to answer the question I'd prefer to hear your answer because you're looking at the data and I assume

in some of this stuff you get an opportunity whether it's in focus groups or what have you to to to try and get at that question of why. Why is this happening? Yeah, we are doing quite a bit of work to understand why. And there are two or three different ways to approach the question. One is, what are people consuming that's different from what they used to consume? And part of the answer to that is, i want to say this as carefully as i can because i've correctly been admonished by you and chantal um not to cast too broad a criticism of the media um so some media some days don't apply the same rigor to the information that they put into their news channels, news sources. And so it's possible that with the rise of opinion content, there's been less room for fact-based content.

And there's been a sense of, if i consume the nudity the news media these days i'm getting a lot of opinion um and i can form my own opinions and maybe they're going to be different from the ones in the media and overall i think that does erode a certain amount of trust i think the second thing that's happening is structurally the relationship that the media has with us as consumers is changing. When we ask people if they watch TV, it isn't the same question as it used to be. TV used to be TV. Now TV means I turned on a screen that was connected to the internet and I watched some show on Netflix or another streaming service or, you know, I watched YouTube. And so we need to understand that the consumption of a kind of a linear traditional source of news content is going down and consumption of all kinds of other news content delivered in all kinds of other ways is going up, often with an overlay of comment from your

friends, your followers, your family members, the people that you work with, the people that you are in a club with, the people whose political party you happen to share so the the filters and the structure of the content that gets to us is changing and it's changing very rapidly and i think a lot of people who kind of grew up in the era that you and i did you know tend to default to thinking well you know change is happening but it's not that sweeping well it's sweeping, and that's definitely part of it. Now, the last part of this is that some of these conspiracy theories, they don't really come out of thin air. They do from a place of what are the inherent biases that people have that can be nurtured by political actors or other stakeholders who see some sort of profit in nurturing those things. So we put out something about, you know, the other day, much of our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places.

41% of Canadians agree with that. That's a very big number to believe that much of our lives are controlled by plots hatched in secret places. Big events, wars, recessions, elections are controlled by small groups who are secretly working against the rest of us. 44% believe that. rest of us 44 believe that so why do they believe that not because it's true but because it it fills a need that has been kind of nurtured by i think mostly politicians um who want to profit from it and some of those organizations in the in the media environment that uh of think, you know what, if we keep on pushing this story, surprisingly, you know, decent numbers of people will believe it and

they'll want more of it. And so we see this as being part of a phenomenon where people have this kind of instinct to say, well, if I'm feeling a problem somebody else must be the cause of it not everybody has this but some people do and then politicians and certain news organizations sort of identify that and say we can work with that we can make a meal out of that and so if i'm critical of of you know far- U.S. media and to some degree that part of it which exists in Canada as well, it's because it plays to these fears, these anxieties, and it develops, nurtures, in some cases concocts theories that don't have any bearing in fact, but do satisfy an instinct that people have to imagine a conspiracy that's working against their interests um those theories as to why this is happening in terms of people's beliefs or non-beliefs um i think are both really very strong very good i mean i mean, the answer I normally give in some form is that over the last 15 to 20 years,

one of the fundamentals of the relationship between the consumer and news organizations has been that 20 years ago, you tended to have a sole trusted source of news. Whether it was a newspaper, a particular newspaper or a particular television station or a radio station, you tended to have one. You picked one that you believed in, you trusted and and it wasn't impacted by the couple of others and there there really were only a couple of others not that long ago uh but then suddenly through the 90s with everything the 500 channel universe the internet and then eventually you know cable news operations and and now streaming etc etc you have dozens if not hundreds of choices and as a result you don't tend to just watch or listen or read one you have this sort of

accumulation of stuff and they conflict with each other in terms of theories and reasons and and some of that's good you know some listen it's always good to have lots of different sources of information, I guess. But it's become so crowded and so not trustworthy in many cases that everything's been impacted. traditional, solid, believable organizations as well who've been scrambling to keep an audience and have, you know, drifted at times over the line of what's responsible journalism. And those combination of things have created this kind of mess out there for a lot of people, not all people, but a fair number that I assume in some way ends up with the kind of results that you're starting to get and you're starting to see, and those numbers just seem to keep piling up. it's a soup and it's uh you know and it's making it more difficult to collectively and this is not about government it's to collectively manage really serious problems um like um covet you

know for this many people i mean we all saw this convoy that came to ottawa the blockade illegal blockade and it came to ottawa and we noticed and i think sometimes because we're so generally polite as canadians we didn't really know how much emphasis that we wanted to put on in talking about it but we noticed that a fair number of the people who were in that blockade were, you know, possessed beliefs that didn't really make any sense. And they were in Ottawa because they felt that conspiracies were working against them. And, you know, some of the media definitely tried to cover that to say, look of these people are really they're kind of far out there they're disconnected from reality they've arrived believing things that aren't true but it kind of felt to me that every time we did that we also then said but we shouldn't

criticize them too much because they're anxious and they don't understand the science the same way that other people do and they're frustrated because you know covid has been a bad experience for them or they're worried about their economic well-being or they're fearful of needles or whatever and i understand that instinct and i'm not trying to be critical of it but i am saying that unless we collectively look at and address somehow this rise of um these conspiracy theories and this flow of ideas among people that are disconnected from reality we're going to have more problems we're putting something out in the next couple of days it shows a pretty significant number of people again a minority but think the you know the idea that ukraine is full of nazis and russia went in

there to vanquish the nazis and they believe that and it it almost doesn't matter now what issue comes up. There's going to be some idea, it seems, that's going to get infused into the political discourse. And a certain proportion of people are going to glom onto it. their lens that there are secret societies or hidden forces that are doing things that you're not going to really know about unless you're part of this group that is kind of united in its defense against the conspiracy um and so when i hear pierre poliev talk about gatekeepers. He's talking to people who have these feelings. And one of the things that we did in our analysis in each of our releases is we showed the difference between the voters who tend to think Jean Charest is the conservative leadership candidate whose values and ideas most reflect mine versus Pierre Paul-Eliette, those are two very different types of voter. The Paul-Eliette voter is far more likely to agree with some of these theories than

the Charest voter. And it tells us that there is a communications channel that's been established there. And, you know, I mean, Pierre Paul-Eluliev is entitled to campaign however he wants and he and he obviously will um but we should see the connection points between what max bernier has been doing uh because the people's party uh supporters are hugely absorbed by these conspiracy theories and we should see a certain parallel in what pierre pauliev is signaling when he talks about the way in which some of the um some of the covet measures have have uh have been developed and some of the ways in which gatekeepers uh try to try to influence people's uh freedoms and he talks about you know we should get to the freest country in the world,

that sort of thing. He's speaking a little bit to that. Somebody should ask Pierre Pellier of how exactly his, his beliefs and policies on, on things like COVID, but not just COVID, are different than Max Bernier.

Like, where is the actual difference between the two? And I'm sure he's been primed to be able to answer that question, but I'd like to hear what that answer is. Just before we leave this subject, take a quick break, I do want to say that, because I know I'll get letters, Bruce did not say that everybody who was at the convoy was a wacko that's not what he said he said some seem to be expressing ideas that were uh you know certainly against the the grain and uh and and and common belief. But he didn't say they all were.

And it's interesting because it seemed at times that the media was going after the clips of the wackos to put on there, which could have left the belief that everybody was. Now, listen, there were a lot of people who believed very strongly certain elements of COVID policy by governments in Canada, and specifically the federal government, were wrong.

And expressed those opinions in very sort of hard terms. But there were other people there who just simply felt that their ability to make decisions for their own was not happening. So keep that in mind. Did you want to say something? I'm glad you, I'm glad you clarified it, Peter. And I know that, you know, anytime you sort of raise it, anytime I raise these kinds of things or other people kind of say something that sounds similar, there are people who get offended by it.

And my point is not to give offense. It's simply to say there are theories out there that I consider to be wacko theories. And some people hold to those theories. Not everybody who showed up in the blockade, but some of them came believing that COVID vaccines were freighted with these kind of underlying design features, shall we say. And I guess I think that it's important to say that there's a quantum of these beliefs that society should be aware of and I think concerned about. But I'm sure that a lot of those people who share these beliefs think I'm the wacko. They think I'm the guy who doesn't understand that the 5G did cause this and that the COVID vaccines have the microchips. And I just think that's a kind of a weird situation that we find ourselves in and we need to kind of look at it, not with, uh, um, bemusement, uh, so much as a bit of alarm. I want to take a peek across the border at the latest stuff coming out of the January 6th committee and spend a couple of minutes on that before we say goodbye for this day.

But first of all, we've got to take a break. So here we go, back after this. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge in Stratford, Ontario. Bruce Anderson in Toronto today. You're listening to The Bridge, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth, the Wednesday episode right here on Sirius XM Canada, Channel 167 or on your favorite podcast platform. Okay, you mentioned Fox earlier. i try not to say fox news anymore

because it just you know i always used to make the excuse that listen i you know i have some friends who work at fox but they're they're actual journalists you only really see them during the daytime you certainly don't see them at night. That's full of opinion, as, you know, fairly, as is, as are, you know, networks like MSNBC, which is, you know, more progressive, more to the left, obviously, but they're full of opinion at night as well. However, it's some of the decisions that fox of late have been so brutal journalistically in my opinion that it's hard to call them a news channel anymore they're just not they're like a propaganda channel so you know some people have coined this kind of fox prop terminology to describe that

channel my favorite fox story so far during this you know january 6th committee hearings they decided on day one not to run any of them not to broadcast anything and kind of counter program um the committee hearings and just dump all over them and um then they found out that hey millions of people are watching these on the other channels so by day two of the of committee hearings they changed their strategy and they started airing the hearings so that's one kind of interesting fact the second one was that on that day too i was switching around so i was watching so i watched them come out on the first break of the hearings fox and the line was well there's nothing new there and i thought how could they say that there's nothing new there when they haven't shared with their audience anything so far?

How could it not be new if they were not aware of any of this stuff from before? But they continued on to trash it as they have. And it's always interesting to try and hear what the other side of the argument is, if there is such a thing. You know, what's coming out of Mar-a-Lago being pumped into the headphones of some of the Fox anchors, which has been proven in this case, and they're not arguing it,

that there was a relationship between the White House presidential office, the Oval Office, and Fox anchors who were feeding them information and suggestions on the positions they should be taking. This is all very interesting. You know, the right-wing crowd likes to claim that that's what happens with networks, you know, like the CBC, which is garbage, which I dealt with last week. But it actually does happen with them. Yeah. Anyway, what have you made of this? You know, to watch Fox News over the last few years is to watch what it would look like if a political party had built a

cable news channel and it was very successful because the programming reflects the interests of the political party it doesn't reflect the interests of the public it basically therefore when something like this happens it goes into the mode that political parties go into when an issue arises, which is that they defend, they deflect, they distract. They do all of those kinds of things that Fox was trying to do on the first day of these hearings. And maybe in a way, it was the most clear expression of this is effectively a political arm rather than an arm of the news media. It's a political entity that is trying to accomplish the same kinds of things that a political party would, except it looks like a news organization. But I would add one other thing, which is that one of the great features of these hearings right now, I think it's providing some kind of therapeutic relief for those of us who are kind of wondering if the entire Republican Party had kind of people were in meetings and walking out of meetings and going trump is kind of losing his marbles here he doesn't understand the facts he's

not believing the facts he's not accepting the facts what are we going to do about that how do we contain him how do we bottle up his trumpist behavior and so when I look at Fox and how it's behaved through this, it's even more evident to me that it has been more the Trump channel than the Republican channel. Because remember when Trump started, I think he started the term rhinos, Republicans in name only, you know, part of his effort to sort of say, if you don't support me, you're not a real Republican, which he continues to manifest as an idea in these primary campaigns where he picks certain candidates for the Republican nomination and says, these are my people, vote for them. And those are the people who don't like me, don't vote for them.

And Fox has been part of that. And I think Fox has been part of it because they know that their audience is more motivated and stimulated and attached to Trump than they are to the idea of a traditional Republican Party. caught in this situation where they're now showing um they're doing a reveal inadvertently and probably unhappily of the fact that it's not just liz cheney who didn't like donald trump and thought he was he was kind of nuts um it's a whole bunch of people including you know people who are very close to him and running his campaign and we were trying to say hey this doesn't make any sense bill barr his former attorney general and i think this is what's fascinating to people who aren't part of the kind of the republican audience or the trump audience um it's it's therapy to know that there were people in positions of authority who at least well they kept it to themselves or inside the tent had real reservations about what

was going on and express those reservations privately or within those circles. So it's better to know that that happened than to believe that it didn't happen. On the other hand, what the Republicans do with it, what Fox does with it, whether Trump does what he usually does, which is find some way to kind of bottle it and use it to his advantage, remains to be seen. But it's fascinating to watch, and it's fascinating to watch the evolution and the positioning of fox in this too yeah i don't i don't have as much admiration as i don't think admiration is necessarily the right word but that you have for some of these people who are now saying well you know at the time i was really upset about it and i was arguing

about it and i fought for the right thing to do uh but then I lost that fight, so I just went ahead and did everything that I was supposed to. Yeah, no, if it sounded like admiration, I'd take that part back. Yeah. It's not it. I just think they were cowards as opposed to crooks. I'm not quite sure whether you're supposed to like one more any more than the other. I am left at the, I mean, it's only been two hearings so far which is remarkable really because there's been so much stuff

new stuff come out it just it's mind-boggling when you consider it um but i'm left at the after two days you know know, more convinced than ever that Trump was a crook, con man, a fraud, you know, and still to this day bilking his supporters out of money that in some cases is used for personal reasons, a quarter of a billion dollars, a hundred million of it raised in the first week after the election, you know, to supposedly set up a defense fund, which turns out it wasn't. It paid for things like,

you know, his son's girlfriend's two-minute speech. Why can't we get speech fees like that 60 000 bucks for two minutes that's not bad um anyway what i'm left with feeling at the end of all this is okay we've we've proved it we've proved what you know that committee has proved what a lot of people have believed about trump but you're like so what like what's it do i believe he's to end up in jail in the, you know, the orange jumpsuit? No, I don't think he will. I think there's somehow, some way he's going to get out of this, just like he's got out of so many other things before,

not just in his political life, but in his business life. You know, this is the Trump story for the last 40 years. He always gets away with it somehow. And, you know, as much as I admire the dedication of those who are trying to do the work, and I'm not talking about the political figures. I mean, I think Liz Cheney is an incredibly courageous person. But I'm talking about the investigators, the lawyers who are drilling these people in the committee room and the hearings that they've been taking place, some of which have been in secret. I have a lot of respect for them.

But I just don't see the end game. I don't see an end game other than, you know, further tarnishing Trump's image in the eyes of some and further inflating it in the eyes of others. Yeah, look, I mean, there's two ways to look at Trump, I guess. One is to say that he's been remarkably successful. And the other is to say he's a six-time bankrupt. I think that's the number. And he was a one-term president. Twice impeached and a loser. Twice impeached, right?

And so if you were looking at that on his baseball card, you'd go, he didn't have that much of a career. He ruined a lot of businesses that he started and he sucked at politics. But he's got an audience for this kind of idea of himself as a super successful person, a rogue, maybe even a kind of a grifter, but almost like a movie figure of a grifter, right? Somebody that, you know, whose story you can watch because it's kind of amusing and it's epic and it's so colorful and it's so entertaining and i think this has been the i don't i wouldn't use the term genius but i can't think of another word to describe it it's the serendipity for trump that who he is and how his story tells itself kind of is to is the sort of movie that a lot of people like and if it's only a movie it's kind of harmless but if it's affecting the future of the world which yes it it has um it's not harmless and so

all of the people who are kind of looking at it going uh you know i don't it doesn't feel harmless. You know, a lot of us aren't American voters. And if we were, we'd be pulling out our hair because he continues to be an appealing figure to a lot of people who say, yeah, he's you know, he's out there. Politics needed somebody to shake things up and tell the truth and understand the role of free enterprise and freedom and hate on the Democrats and hate on the where politicians are picking up this idea of we need to tear down the institutional norms, go hard at the gatekeepers. And, you know, I don't think that we're near the last chapter of that story. Nor do I. Thank you. As usual, a good conversation. And hopefully it's, as we always try to do, get people energized in terms of their own thinking

on these subjects. And I'm sure... I hope people write in. I'd love to read some letters about this conspiracy theory work. Yeah. Well, I think they will. So we'll encourage them to do that.

The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. I'll be reading some of your letters on tomorrow's program, the kind of your turn mailbag edition of The Bridge. So if you're going to write, write today

so I can use it tomorrow. All right. Thanks, Bruce. And thank you for listening out there. You've been listening to The Bridge right here on SiriusXM Canada. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening.

And we'll talk to you again in 24 hours. Thank you.