The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - SMT - Was Democracy Served By The Fox Settlement?

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

Fox pays almost 800 million dollars to shut down a lawsuit against the news network for fabricating stories. No apologies, no firings -- Bruce wonders whether democracy was served by that decision.  Was the prime minister right or wrong to take a holiday in Jamaica at a wealthy friends resort?  And the latest on the CBC, all on this week's Smoke Mirrors and The Truth.

Hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors and the Truth with Bruce Anderson is next. And hello there, Wednesday, hump day, middle of the week day. Lots to talk about today. We'll talk a little bit about the CBC because we love talking about the CBC. We'll talk a little bit about the Prime Minister's vacation time in Jamaica and whether or not the arrangements were okay. And I don't mean, you know, where the beds turned down was the beach good.

I'm talking about whose place it was, how much it cost, Canadians, etc., etc. Is that a worthy story? Is that an important story? We'll talk about that. But we're going to start off talking about Fox. Fox News. And the decision on the part of Fox and the people who were suing Fox, Dominion, they're the ones with the voting machines, they had a billion, I think it was $1.7 billion lawsuit against Fox.

They settled at the last minute the lawyers were literally in their places in the courtroom with their mics on their lapels ready to go for it in a court case that would have probably gone on for four or six weeks but the judge announced there's been a settlement and the settlement is big bucks fox has to pay dominion almost $800 million. But no apologies. Nobody gets fired. And this is after Fox admitted that it knowingly told lies about the Dominion voting machines. So there's a lot of sort of trying to determine today

what all this means. Dominion's obviously happy. They've got a settlement. They've got an acknowledgement so that some of the things that were said about them were wrong. But no apologies. Nobody fired. Is that good enough?

Is it good enough for democracy? Is it good enough for what we expect from our journalistic organizations? Let's face it. These guys lied, knowingly lied, to beef up the Trump argument that he'd been cheated in the election. So that's our question to start things off, Mr. Anderson. What does it say about democracy in the United States, that you get a settlement on a decision like that? Well, I think that for a lot of people, myself probably included, Peter, there was kind of 10 minutes of feeling good about the result.

It was a big number, even for a company like Fox, even for a rich individual like Rupert Murdoch, followed by just feeling like it's a terrible sign of where we're at. I mean, this is a company that knew that it was lying when it was lying, that continued to lie even though it was being attacked from all corners, being criticized by everyone for the lies that it was putting out. And in the end, rather than have more exposition of the evidence that they were lying and that they knew that they were lying,

they wrote a check for almost a billion dollars. And essentially, you can look at that number and say that is the price to pay to continue lying, if that's what they want to do. They've just now established what the price is associated with telling lies to people about something really fundamental in their democracy. Now, does it mean that they're going to continue to do that? No, not necessarily. But to your point about there was no apology, not only was there no apology, there was a statement that the settlement was further evidence of the high standards that Fox holds itself to. And if you don't see any contrition in a situation like that,

it is reasonable to assume that the company says, well, we know what the cost of lying is now, and we also know now what the benefit is. I saw somebody tweeted quite accurately in a way that Trump now that we can see yesterday that Trump cost Fox almost a billion dollars, that you could kind of take this payment and say they ended up having to make it because they bought into the Trump line. Not that they believed it, but that they chose to repeat it. And I couldn't help but think that, yeah, maybe Trump did cost them that billion dollars, but how much did he make them?

How much more money did they make by covering him the way that they did for the period of time that they did? How many more eyeballs? How many more clicks? How many more advertisers? And I know that they're in the middle of renegotiating their cable deals right now, which is probably one of the reasons why they settled, because they wanted to make sure that they could establish to the cable companies that they're negotiating with that this matter is behind us and let's just renew. So there's been a lot of money made, not just cost, in the line that Fox has been part of. And I worry, and I think we all should worry, that all yesterday did was establish two things. One is that there's a price and if you can afford to pay it, then you can lie. And two is maybe everybody has just figured that lying, even by something that

portrays itself as a news organization, has become even more normalized. And those are both worrying ideas. I know some days I can sound a little dystopian about this and it's because I feel a little bit dystopian about it and I worry that the movie of democracy that's playing out in America is a pretty worrying version of democracy for all other democracies and we need to be vigilant about what's going on there.

Let me ask you how you feel about this question. And the question will basically come down to, do you think Fox has been in any way damaged by this settlement. And I say that for the following reason. Fox is the number one news channel, television news channel, in the United States. They're well ahead of MSNBC and CNN and all the other kind of pretenders in that area.

But that number is sort of like on a good night, it's around three, three and a half million viewers per minute. That's a country of what, almost 350 million now? So we're talking a pretty small percentage of people, right? Who are watching Fox. Who are watching news channels in total, like Adam altogether. I don't think it comes to 10 million. So not a lot of people.

But my assumption for me, but I ask you, my assumption is, it's not going to do any damage at all to Fox because the people who watch Fox, you know, bought into the lies. They still buy into the lies. I'd be surprised if this does them any harm on viewer numbers, maybe advertising. I don't know.

We'll see. They'll always have the pillow guy. But does it do them any damage? Are they damaged by this? No, I don't think so. I mean, I take your point about how many people watch cable news channels on a linear basis, which is a technical term for actually sit in front of a TV and watch the program as it's on.

And that number can be smaller and smaller and probably will be smaller and smaller in the years ahead. And it won't mean that their franchise is weakening. They've got 23 million, I just checked now, 23 million Twitter followers. And most of what's on their Twitter channel or their Twitter feed is clips from their various news programs. And so the number of times in which their content gets played and spread to others and the number of people who are affected by it is massive, bigger by far than the news properties I would hazard of ABC, CBS, and NBC, even though on the surface of it, I think those nightly news programs still get in the order of, I want to say, seven, eight, nine million people. They're not what they used to be, but none of linear TV is what it used to be in terms of audience participation that way. No, I actually think that Fox did the math of,

was it better to be distancing itself from Trump at some point? They made a choice to do that. I gather from some of the depositions that when they looked at what was happening to their viewership, when they put some distance between themselves and Trump over January 6th, viewers went to other right-wing news platforms. And I hate even to call them news platforms. They're not what you and I would think of when we think of news platforms, but OAN and Newsmax. And then Fox decided, well, we can't have that because really we're not in the news business. We're in the business of business. And so now if you sort of say, well, where's the evidence of contrition?

And you look at Tucker Carlson putting out content about, you know, America should liberate Canada from the dictator Trudeau. There's no evidence to me that they've decided, you know what, we got a spanking here and it was an expensive spanking and we should really take an important lesson and we should check our morality a little bit about this. And what is it that we're responsible for? And it's kind of strange to me that you hear journalists in the states talking about the the idea that these fox personalities have kind of wandered away from the idea of journalistic integrity when i don't know when i remember them ever having bought into it um they certainly don't care about it now they certainly don't seem troubled at all by the criticisms of those who say, well, what you did was a breach of journalistic integrity.

It's like they were seen walking out of the bank with bags of money and weapons at their side. And the journalists are saying, did you know that that's breaking the law? Well, yeah, of course they knew that it was breaking the law. They knew that they were lying, and they had basically all decided that the business that they were in made more money when they did that. I'm going to be interested to see whether there's another new another shoe to drop or whether Fox just has closed the books on this. They've decided, you know, I'm kind of surprised that they didn't settle like months ago.

You know, there would have been a lot less said because of the evidence that was put forward. There would have been a lot less said about their hosts and their news operation, et cetera, et cetera. But nevertheless, are they just simply going to close the books on this now, put out the cash, and move on as if nothing had happened? Or is there another shoe to drop in terms of accountability? Well, there are some other suits. Yeah, no, there are definitely more suits coming, but I'm

wondering whether somebody in a suit is going to get fired for what's happened. And I raise it because the easy answer would be, no, they're just going to move on. They'll settle these other legal attacks on them and move on as if nothing had happened. But then I think back to the Tucker Carlson of his day at Fox, which was only a couple of years ago, and that was Bill O'Reilly. Hugely popular, big number one, top-rated show,

made bags and bags of money, but then got caught in an internal sex scandal at the organization. And they settled out of court for a huge amount of money with whoever was going after O'Reilly, and then they fired him. And, you know, initially there was this concern, well know if we fire him god he's the number one guy we'll never get that audience back well they got their audience back in a couple of weeks you know first with Hannity then with Carlson um and it was a it was literally as if nothing had happened they just moved on to the next right-wing guy who was going to shout and scream.

And I wonder whether Murdoch, because listen, $800 million has got to hurt. They only made apparently $1.2 billion only last year, and they've got to give $800 of it away? And God knows how much else, as you suggested, there are other suits coming, and some of them bigger than the Dominion one. So I wonder whether there's still another shoe to drop

and whether that would make any difference anyway. You know, I've often been accused of being an optimist, even though I say some dystopian things. And if I had to choose between being accused of being an optimist or a dystopian, I'd rather be seen as an optimist. And I want to be more optimistic about this. But I really have trouble. I think that Fox News has proven that people want to hear what they want to hear. And that's become a bigger phenomena in the age of the Internet and social media. And that businesses that capitalize on that phenomena, like Fox, they can call themselves news if they want to, but really they're just about creating a club of like-minded people who will share the same ideas, same perspectives, same arguments over and over and over again.

And it's a little bit more shocking because it has the imprimatur of news because news in the name. But I just, to your point about Bill O'Reilly, I just checked on what he said after the settlement yesterday. And he said, you know, when he left, the template at Fox News changed from fair and balanced to, quote, tell the audience what it wants to hear. And millions of voters to this day want to believe the 2020 election was rigged. So O'Reilly, far from saying Fox News shouldn't have had to pay up, said, when I was there, right? And then he goes on to sort of say he told his audience in this thing that he has now, BillOReilly.com, and he has premium members and concierge members. And so it's another club. Which are you? Are you the, are you like a premium member or concierge?

I'm using the free click, but right down below it says, log in, sign up, and I'm sure there's a price for it. And he describes the virtue that he felt when he told the people on his platform that he didn't think the courts were going to award the election to Trump. He said, I lost a lot. I lost more than 1,000 premium members. So be it, he says, I did my job. But all of which is to say, there's a certain clear set of facts here. But these platforms aren't really interested in those certain set of clear facts. They're just interested in playing to the particular audience that they found and that is willing to pay them money to repeat the same kind of thing that they want to hear. I don't know that there's another media organization that has the financial strength. I don't know that the media model, as we've always understood it in the past,

has enough financial prospects in the future to overcome this phenomena. I think in the most optimistic scenario for me, Peter, there will be a media that will look more like what we are used to thinking about when we think about news media, but alongside it, there will be the clubs. And I include in that the MSNBC as well as the Fox News, because I don't think there would be the version of MSNBC that we see today had there not become the Fox News that we also see. And I don't think either of those things are particularly good. Okay, we got a couple of other things to talk about. But we're gonna take a quick break here now and, and come back and talk about them. So that's right after this.

And welcome back. You're listening to the Bridge Wednesday edition, which is, of course, Bruce Anderson and Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel7 Canada Talks or on your favorite podcast platform Or because this is Wednesday Like Friday You can watch us on our YouTube channel And the numbers for the YouTube channel are pretty good

I mean the numbers are very good for the podcast And for the SiriusXM broadcast But we're noticing that the YouTube channel numbers have gone up quite a bit as well. And along with it, a lot of... Pardon me? You're such a numbers guy. You always say, oh, you're the numbers guy,

but I hear you talk numbers too. Yeah, but nobody can compete with you on numbers. We're going to get to some numbers in a minute. But first of all, Raja Canada, the French wing of the CBC, broadcast a story yesterday that ruffled a few feathers about the Prime Minister's end of year holiday, over the Christmas holidays, New Year's, he was in Jamaica. Now, that was known that he'd gone to Caribbean Island and he was holidaying with his family there. What wasn't known at the time, at least I don't think it was known at the time,

was that he was staying with friends at a friend's condo complex in Jamaica. Looks pretty nice from the pictures, but most places in Jamaica look pretty nice where tourists go. And these friends were connected. This family was connected on a number of levels, long-term family friends. One had spoken at Pierre Trudeau's funeral. One or two of them were on the board of the Pierre Trudeau Foundation. So there were a lot of kind of check marks on this story about,

hmm, is this right? Is this appropriate? Now, the Prime Minister had checked with the Ethics Commissioner to make sure it was okay before he went on the holiday, and he got an approval from there. But some people are wondering, clearly the opposition parties and supposedly some unnamed liberals are saying, was this really a wise thing for him to have done? Cost a lot of money to protect the prime minister.

Security had to go along, has to fly on a government plane, all of that. So these stories come up every once in a while. They have for a number of prime ministers in a row here. What's your take? Is this a story worthy of exposure or not? You know it's a good question. I mean on balance I think you have to come to the

conclusion that there's nothing wrong with the media having done the story. And there are probably, you know, if there are six or seven different tests that a prime minister needs to apply to the choice to make this kind of vacation, on six of the seven, let's say, the tests are passed. He has the right to make this choice. It is true that we require of him that he travel with security, that he travel not on a public

plane. And that it's also true that every prime minister faces the sense that the public doesn't love stories about them taking vacations. And then when access to information requests go in and the costs are all tallied up, that the number sounds like a big number. And there's really not very much that the prime minister can do about that. There are probably some things. But so certainly I don't think there was anything wrong with the journalist doing the story. I don't think there was really anything wrong with the Prime Minister taking the vacation. And I remember, in the past, there was one time when the story came up that Prime Minister Harper had gone to a baseball game in New York City with

his daughter. And I remember writing something, I may have written a column that was posted on the Globe at the time, saying, we've got to stop thinking that we can have people working in these jobs and that we just sort of bridle any time they need to take a little bit of family time, a little bit of personal time, or we really want to kind of scrutinize the receipts for everything that they do. I think that is a little bit on people not to be so inclined towards that. It isn't everybody that is, right? A lot of these things do come up. They are exposed. The incumbents feel a little chill and a little bit of sense of embarrassment, and then they go away. However, with this one, I suppose if there was a test that maybe it didn't pass,

it's a little bit a function of the fact that the Yaga Khan visit that Mr. Trudeau took early on had a similar feel. Staying with very wealthy people or staying as a guest of very wealthy people in the Caribbean. And it sort of brought back a little bit of that scar tissue, I think, in the context of the political opportunity that his opponents saw. And the second thing I would say is that

it really is a question at some point of whether or not the benefits of taking that vacation outweigh what you know is going vacation plans because they couldn't afford the vacation that they wanted. Because interest rates are going up and people's mortgages are really feeling the pressure of rising interest rates. It's a reasonable question, I think, for the PM and his political advisors to say, is this kind of vacation at this particular moment in time likely to incur more political criticism than we really want to take on? And it sounds like they did have that discussion from the Daniel the daniel leblanc the cbc story um they ended up deciding that it was that it was worth doing but i think that's the only question where it's a subjective test there's no rule against what he did it's more a question of political risks uh and

and benefits in terms of rest and relaxation and family time and that sort of thing. You know, clearly they had a discussion about it, as you said, and the reporting shows that. I mean, the people inside the prime minister's office had a discussion, and I'm sure both sides were reflected in that discussion. What would you have said if you were in that room? Well, you know, I've always had this issue,

I guess in some ways similar to what you have, is that public figures should be allowed to have private lives, especially family ones. And holidays are a complicated thing for all of us no matter who we are but they're especially so for senior public figures because of the security angle and for the last whatever it's been now 50 or 60 years when a prime minister travels they got to travel with a you know rcmp security and uh armed armed forces aircraft and all of that. And so the cost of these trips become, you know, pretty significant.

I can't remember what the number was on this one, but it was, you know, somewhere approaching a couple hundred thousand dollars just for that aspect of it. Who they're staying with, you know, becomes a part of the thing because the current stories that circulate. Right. Right. Right. So you're in the meeting, you're in the meeting. I'm in the meeting and I'm saying, well, Peter, where do you come down on this? What is your, what is your advice? I'd say, you know, it's a family decision.

It's not a political decision is what I'd say. It's the same thing happened with Tofino, right? They had this discussion and the family decision was we want to go and we're going. You're going to have to figure out a way to defend it if it becomes a problem. So I would probably side with the family situation, whether it's Justin Trudeau or at some future date the possibility of Pierre Polyev. I mean, they take holidays.

First year, you can be sure they won't take any fancy holiday. But the longer they're in power, you know, they want to have their holidays. They deserve to have a holiday. But I think it's always going to come up. You know, I can remember, you know, when I was a reporter, you know, back in the day with, I guess it was either Mulroney, maybe even Pierre Turtle, that these stories would come up and you knew what was going to happen. They were always going to look bad.

You know, it also, there was an annual story about who used government planes the most. Remember? What did they, the Challenger jets, you know, which ministers used them the most. And they finally cut back on them, right? They hardly ever let them ministers use them anymore because they the stories look so bad even though they weren't on a junket they were doing

government business right so it's hard so i think that's probably the approach i would take you know at a certain point we're going to have nobody worthy of running for office. Willing to run for office. I think we have to be really careful about that too. I agree with that. And I don't say that in the sense of thinking that journalism shouldn't be able to cover this. I do think that the stories tend sometimes to focus on sensationalizing the

cost aspect without, you know, and the context is always there that we, you know, that we expect our prime ministers to travel with security and to use the government aircraft and that sort of thing. But the fact of the stories generally is that they, they torque up the sense of look at how much money it costs and look at how much money, you know, he would have had to pay for this if he wasn't given it. Now, on the question of whether or not, uh, um, there were two other issues raised that I don't think are, are really worthwhile. I mean, it's legitimate for people to talk about them, but I don't think that they had

any impact on my view of this. One is, these were expensive properties owned by longtime friends of the Trudeau family, including Justin Trudeau. He went to the ethics commissioner and they agreed that the relationship was one of friendship over this period of time. And so that accepting that kind of generosity from a friend, this is one of the things that these commissioners are required to evaluate. Is this really a friendship, right? As opposed to, is it somebody that you say is a friend but might not be a friend, but you say it's a friend for the purposes of having a gift blessed, if you like.

There's no question, it seems, that this friendship was long and enduring and recurring. And therefore, it's just like if you invited me to stay at your magnificent condominium in downtown Toronto sometime. I'm not inviting myself to have that gift given to me, but nobody would look at it and say, well, they're not friends. It's only one day in every 300 or so that we're not friends. So that, I think, no question, that's all kosher. The other thing is this notion of their involvement as donors or whatever with the trudeau foundation uh complicates this it doesn't to me at all it doesn't seem to

have anything to do with it um it only complicates it because the foundation has been in the news in the last couple of weeks yeah it's people taking a popcorn ball and trying to string it with a peanut. These things don't fit together in this actual context of this vacation, right? It doesn't, they're not part of the same thing. The Trudeau Foundation has accepted donations from people who are friends of the Trudeau family, I assume, since it started. And does this have anything to do with Chinese influence in Canadian democracy? I didn't see anything in the story about that. So that being connected to this story looked to me a little bit like somebody was trying

to throw some more meat on the fire, see if they could get a little bit more flame going or something like that. But I don't think it was relevant at all. Let me end this segment with a little story that John Turner told me once. You know, former Liberal cabinet minister, former Liberal Prime Minister for a few months anyway in 1984. But in 1962, before he, when he was just a new member of Parliament, after the 1962 election, he was on holidays, I think with his wife, and I think they were married, had just been married,

Jill Turner and John Turner, and they were on a Caribbean island. I'm not sure which one, Bahamas, or it might have been Jamaica. I'm not sure. But he was on the beach. He'd been swimming. He was lying, you know, sunning. The two of them were sunning on the beach, and he looked out on the water, and he could see that there was a guy

seemingly struggling in the water. And he watched it for a moment and became convinced that, in fact, yes, this guy is struggling. He could be drowning. So he ran out, dove in the water, reached the guy, kind of grabbed him and brought him into shore. You know who it was? I don't. John Diefenbaker, who was prime minister at the time.

On holidays in the Caribbean, you know, at a hotel. Coincidence. on holidays in the Caribbean, you know, at a hotel. What a coincidence. Yeah, and, you know, with no security, because in those days that didn't happen. But none of these problems happened either, eh? It was like they booked a hotel, they were staying in a hotel in the Bahamas, and so were the Turners. And, you know, the Turners told me, they said, you know what?

We never spoke about it again. Wow. And he obviously sat across from Diefenbaker, was friends with Diefenbaker for 20 years before Diefenbaker died. But in that moment, he basically saved the prime minister's life. That's crazy. This was the era before traveling security. Well, if I ever go into the North Sea up at our favorite beach north of Dornick

and I get caught in it, I, A, hope you'll come and get me, but, B, if you do, I will talk about it with you, I promise. I want you to know I'll thank you every day. Well, I will immediately start whistling for a lifeboat. I'll be calling for a lifeboat. There's a guy out there in that very cold water who needs help. Yeah. No, of course I'd be out there in a heartbeat.

Yeah. Okay. One more topic to discuss. and that's the CBC, which has been the focus, as it has many times over the years, has been the focus of discussion and debate about its future and whether or not there should be a CBC. Or if there should be a CBC, what should the CBC do to change its nature to be more reflective of the country?

Whatever. There's always been some of this discussion. And there's also been a portion of the population which feels the way Pierre Polyev seems to feel now, that it's time to defund the CBC. He doesn't actually say close it down, but he's pretty close to that. But there's always been this belief

that the number of people who agree with that position is the minority position. So while this debate is on right now, once again, about the CBC for a variety of different reasons, even including Elon Musk and his description of what the CBC is, while this is going on, I'm wondering if you've done, over the years of your collecting of numbers, research and polling, what the numbers are that you've seen about the support the CBC has? What is it?

Yeah, it's not what it used to be, that's for sure. I think there's a couple of reasons for that, Peter, and we have some more research in the field right now. I run a couple of questions about this, Cole, shut it down and save the money. Is it CBC News? Is it propaganda on behalf of the government? So I'll have some numbers on that in the next few days that we can talk about at some point, if you like.

I think that the challenge for the CBC is a little bit more persistent and pronounced now than it has been in the past for a few reasons. one of which is you have a party, the leader of which is pretty profoundly critical, not just a little bit critical, not just, I wish the CBC didn't seem to have so much of a left bias. It's a, we're going to defund it. We're going to shut down big parts of it. And part of why he's doing that is the base of his party likes that message, agrees with that idea. They're not really thinking about it from a fiscal standpoint. They're thinking of it from a culture war standpoint, right? That they're offended by the sense that the CBC doesn't represent their values. And so him tackling the CBC is basically saying, I'm going to help you win the values war against the woke left. It's a powerful argument, not just here in Canada, it's a powerful argument in the United

States, and we see it in other countries as well. So he's picking up on a phenomenon where politicians who like to find that hardcore of the right. And similar campaigns are underway right now in other jurisdictions to talk about defunding publicly funded news and journalistic organizations, not only happening here. So that's one thing that's working against the CBC. The second thing is that the audience for the CBC has, I don't want to say disintegrated, but it's certainly become much more fractured and in some cases smaller. The number of people who watch the national news program called The National isn't what it used to be. The number of people who kind of rally around the single channel on the TV set isn't what it used to be. Radio still has a pretty substantial audience, but it's not everybody in the country by any stretch of the imagination. Obviously,

there's a different product in Quebec under the brand Radio-Canada from the product in English Canada or the rest of Canada called CBC. And then the last thing is journalism isn't viewed with as much esteem and trust as it used to be. There was a few months ago, we put out a study that we talked about on one of our shows about how many people don't trust what governments say, our official accounts, and how many people don't trust what journalism says. And it's closing in on 45%. And if you put all of those factors together, the cumulative effect is that when Pierre Pauliev attacks the CBC, there's less visceral resistance to the argument that he's making than there used to be. And if our listeners are looking on Twitter, they're going to see lots of angry rebuttals.

But Twitter isn't the world. And there are lots of people who aren't on Twitter and who will hear some version of let's shut the CBC down and save some money who might say, yeah, why not? I don't use it. It isn't important to my sense of culture. I don't know the last time I remember that it did something important for the country. Those things kind of exist right now and that can make his message seem less controversial than the classic Friends of the CBC type organization might think that it is. You seem to be suggesting that you're in the field right now. You've said that, but you seem to be suggesting that we should probably brace ourselves for the fact that things are changing. I just feel like we need to recognize that this isn't the same conversation about the same organization in the same political context

as 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago. And that there's a lot of people who have a much more minuscule relationship with the CBC brand. And there's a lot of people who don't know that they can trust the institution of journalism or the institution of the CBC. Because in part, they don't trust any institutions as much anymore. And so, you know, people of my vintage and yours were not quite the same vintage. No, I got a letter the other day saying, calling me a septuagenarian while you're just in your 60s. You're just a kid. Right?

Yeah. I don't think it has a title yet. I took that with some degree of pride, realizing that I'm a senior statesman here. It's an accomplishment. Let me just say this about what you've told us, because I was contacted by a number of different news organizations yesterday for my comment on this latest round on the CBC. I do feel that the CBC story is, in some ways, is a constant. In other ways, it's like all of the things that are in our news cycle.

It passes through, you know, for two or three days of big time reporting and then move on to other things. But I agree with you that it is, it's a constant in the sense that people, you know, are thinking about this. It will play into an eventual election campaign in some way. I don't think it'll be a major issue but it will be an issue but here's what i here's what i said and i believe this strongly i think this this discussion and debate around the cbc is a good thing to have happening

and it should happen that the people of the country should have a say about the future of public broadcasting and not just the sort of elite little groups that raise funds on it, that the people generally should have a discussion about this. What do they want? A, do they want a national public broadcaster? If they do, what do they want it to be? And how should it be funded? You know, our friend Andrew Coyne often talks about this.

You know, he doesn't like the parliamentary grant that is given by the Parliament of Canada, but would like to see other ways, like here in Britain. You know, there's a license you pay for to receive the BBC based on the number of televisions you have in your house, etc., etc. It keeps changing the actual formula. But these various questions about public broadcasting, whether we need it anymore or not, I believe we do. 100% we need it. We should double the budget of it just to be really clear where I come from on it.

Not so that it has more money, but that it does more journalism. I don't know that it needs to be as involved in some of the other activities, but local news coverage, we need a lot of it. Exactly. But that's what I mean by having a real discussion. Forget about all the BS rhetoric that gets thrown around from all sides uh you know about the cbc but have a real discussion um about what the mandate should be if you're going to have a public broadcaster and how it's going to be funded etc etc or if you're going to kill it, are you prepared to live with that fact that there is no network

dedicated to telling the Canadian story? Well, the other part that we haven't talked about is this notion that it's propaganda, which is completely false, I think. And I think the, you know, Mr. Polyev thinks he's getting away with that. I don't think that, I don't think he's doing the country any service by using that kind of argument. When he knows that what he's equating it to, you know, and what Elon Musk is equating it to at his request, which is a kind of a state broadcaster.

These things are not even remotely the same. Well, Musk should know better. I don't know about Polyev. I don't know where he's traveled to in the world, but if you've ever been to a place that has a state broadcaster, you'd know the difference between that and the CBC. I mean, we talked for a few, you know, 10 minutes or so about the story about Trudeau's vacation.

Where do you think that story came from? It came from the CBC, Mirage of Canada, the French wing. Or as I was telling a couple of the interviewers yesterday, I said, perhaps the most embarrassing moment for the Trudeau government in its seven or eight years in office was having to force the resignation, the firing of a governor general. How did that happen? It happened because of reporting by the CBC.

So, I mean, let's get real. I mean, you can trace back through any number of different governments, liberal and conservative, and the strength of CBC journalism is pretty darn good, and it's not a partisan thing. So this whole, that element of state broadcaster, government-funded media, all that stuff, it's a public broadcaster. That's it, that's all, end of story.

You can debate, and you should debate, how worthy it is as a public broadcaster that's it that's all end of story you can debate and you should debate how worthy it is as a public broadcaster and whether it's doing the things you think are important for the country to fund that's a legitimate discussion and i'm all in for that um you know i i've been a critic just as you have uh about a number of things on the and the way the cbc manages itself now these days as i've often said on this podcast i'm just a pensioner now i know you know i'm i'm speaking lightly when i when i use that phrase i mean i am a pensioner but i'm doing a lot of other things as well but um the fact is, I think we should get in and have a serious discussion. So in some ways, I embrace what Polyev is saying.

I embrace it because it affords us the opportunity to have a real discussion about what broadcasting in general should look like and what public broadcasting should look like in the country. Yeah, yeah, I agree. He isn't really sort of saying, well, we need a public broadcaster, right? I think that's the problem is that he's unwilling to say we don't need one in Quebec, and he's unwilling to say we need one in English Canada. And I think that's a level of duplicitousness that needs to be called out. And I hope that other media, Andrew Coyne, our friend Andrew Coyne notwithstanding,

I hope Andrew actually does the math again on what would we look like as a country? How would we function as a democracy if all we had to count on was the content from post media and some from the Globe and Mail, which doesn't operate any local news operations, or maybe one or two. But we really lose a lot if we lose the CBC. Yeah. But, you know, listen, killing the CBC is one end of the debate around the future of the CBC. So I don't have a problem with somebody making that argument.

They're going to have to make it convincingly, and they're going to have to explain what they see as the outcome of killing the broadcaster, public broadcaster. But there are many others in the spectrum as well in this discussion and debate that should make their feelings known. And if we end up with a real national decision about it, as opposed to just a political decision, well, that would be a good thing.

All right, we're out of time for this ramble. Hopefully, maybe by the end of the week, you're going to have some real numbers as a result of your survey, and we can talk about it on Good Talk with Chantel on Friday. So thank you,

Mr. Anderson. Thank you. Good to talk to you. I'm glad to know that you would whistle for help if I fell into the North Sea. I'd be there. I'd be chopping through the water. Just like whatever it takes. If I go into the North Sea. I'd be there. I'd be chopping through the water. No wetsuit.

Just like whatever it takes. I don't have a way to get it. You know, I've seen you in the water. I've seen you in ocean. And usually you don't get beyond your toes. So I'm not too worried about being able to retrieve you from the crashing seas. All right. That's it for this day.

Thanks so much for listening. Tomorrow it's your turn and the random renter so you won't want to miss that friday good talk bruce returns with chantal i'm peter mansbridge thanks so much for listening talk to you again in 24 hours Thank you.