The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Some Encouraging News in Covid

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

It's our regular Tuesday commentary from Brian Stewart on the Ukraine-Russia war with new insights on the disarray inside the Russian military.  But first some encouraging news on Covid -- is the expected January surge just a bump?  New evidence in the US suggests it is. Plus, if you've ever been bothered by your employer on your holidays, you'll want to hear this story!

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. Some encouraging news on COVID, plus the regular Tuesday commentary on Ukraine from Brian Stewart. That's coming up. And hello again from Stratford, Ontario. I'm Peter Mansbridge. You're listening to The Bridge right here on Sirius XM, Channel 167 Canada Talks or on your favorite podcast platform. Okay, we're going to start today with some encouraging news. I'm, you know, I'm tired of giving difficult news on the COVID front. This is encouraging. It's not

the end. It's not even the, well, maybe it's the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, whatever. It's encouraging. And you look to the front page of the New York Times today to get that. They've got a graph. And it's a graph of COVID patients in hospital since the beginning of COVID. This is in the United States. And as we have witnessed in the past, things are worse in the States than they are in Canada, but there's usually a tracking. When things get bad in the States, they tend to follow somewhat in Canada. But here's the encouraging news. There's been concern, as there's been each winter since COVID started in 2020,

that there's a surge that comes in COVID numbers as you work yourself into the winter. Well, that surge is not happening in the U.S. right now. There's a bump. There's a bump. There's no doubt about it. But it's not a surge. So that's good news. I mean, you look back through the peaks and valleys of COVID in the U.S. January 21, 137,000 daily average number of patients in the U.S. on COVID. January of 2022, just last year at this time, 159,510 COVID patients in U.S. hospitals per day at that point. Today, this January 2023, 45,600. So, you know, almost just over a quarter of the ones that have happened last year. So that's encouraging. And, you know, maybe we're starting to pass the worst of this. And we're on the downslope. This graph would certainly look like that.

So that's the encouraging news on the day on COVID. Let's hope it stays that way. All right, as you know, Tuesdays we deal with Ukraine. And we deal with Ukraine by bringing in our favorite correspondent, Brian Stewart, to talk about it as he continues to study the situation there. Looking for the peaks and valleys on that story as well. And this comes at a time on a week where the Russians claim that their targets in Ukraine are strategic,

mainly, you know, trying to knock out power grids. Well, I'm not sure if you can tell that to the people we're witnessing and the pictures we're seeing coming out of Ukraine the last couple of days of one particular apartment building. If it was a power grid, it's awfully well disguised because nobody's found any trace of anything strategic in this building except people, civilians. And at least 40 of them were killed in a missile attack that took out this building.

And it underlines to us once again where the suffering is in this war. Suffering is among the people. Innocent civilians who are being killed seemingly on a daily basis. That is the most difficult part of this conflict to take in, in terms of those of us who are witnessing what's happening. So you've got that happening on one side, and you've got something else happening on the military front on both sides, and that's training.

I see Russian soldiers are on a joint exercise with troops from Belarus. At the same time, Ukrainian soldiers are taking training from U.S. military types, both in Germany and in the U.S. And these training exercises are supposedly taking months. So any thought that this is nearly over should be set aside, because it's not. Missile attacks right now, the land war is kind of on pause because of the winter weather, but it's fully expected to come back with a vengeance within a couple of months. On that note, let's bring in Brian Stewart to talk about what he's witnessing this week,

what he's seeing in terms of this conflict. Ryan, of course, foreign correspondent for years with the CBC and NBC, and during that time covered all kinds of different conflicts. So he's an expert analyst on both war and foreign policy. So here he is, your friend, my friend, Brian Stewart. All right, Brian, we're going to start with once again one of those things that you warned us about last week. You talked about tanks and how the Ukrainians wanted tanks from the Allied nations, for lack of a better term.

And they were starting to get them. We've seen more of that in the past week. And now the pressure appears to be on Canada, as you suggested last week, that they have these Leopard 2 tanks and could get them for Ukraine if if they were willing but it's a little more complicated than that explain it to us it is indeed first of all the leopard two tank is probably the best in the world is certainly right up there uh often 20 countries have it 14 of them in europe canada has uh 82 of them which isn't very much for a small army. They're made by Germany. The Rheinmetall turns them out very, very slowly.

The problem is there are lots, hundreds and hundreds of them around the world that could be sent to Ukraine to help. The problem is they have to get a license agreement from the Germans for the technology. And the Germans are, as we will know in this show, dragging their feet tremendously on what they send to Ukraine. So they have not given the allies yet permission to send any leopards to Ukraine. Now, so much pressure is on Germany. It's thought that maybe on Friday, when there's a big sort of NATO meeting, that they will announce that it's okay, that countries like Poland, which is dying to send in about 14 of them and others, will be able to go ahead. Canada is already under pressure from the

Ukrainian government saying, come on, you've got leopards. We're not asking you to send 12 of them, which is the size of a company of tanks, 12. But you could link up with another country, and they're hoping that a whole bunch of countries that don't have great tank armies can give a bit here, a bit there. Canada, for instance, might give six to Spain, which would give maybe 10 of its own. It's got 212.

And you could have a Spanish-Canadian gift. That kind of bringing together bits and pieces would make up for the 200-plus tanks they feel they need to really take the Russians on in a major offensive in the late, late winter or certainly in the spring. They're very vital to it. They're already getting a lot of armored vehicles, which we talked about last week. They will be married to the tanks, which will,

which will bring together a very formidable armored, armored punch against Russian lines. Of course, backed up with heavy artillery and missile strikes and the rest of it. So Canada is going to come under pressure. Now, Canada will say, as it has been a long look, our warehouses are very, very bare. And, you know, Canada is not lying. We have not been keeping up our supplies, our own military, nearly as much as the Canadian military wants. And I can just see the Canadian generals pulling their hairs out and saying, what do you mean?

You're going to take more of our tanks away? We've only got 82 of them. So, you know, you can't do that. But in this moment, it certainly is a case where the pressure is going to be there. How Canada responds, that's going to be very interesting to watch. You know, I had an interesting letter last week from a listener who said, you know, all this stuff we're donating to Ukraine, do we get it back at the end of the war?

And I said, that's usually not how donations work. You know, you donate something, that's the last time you're going to see it. But I was just guessing. I don't know. Well, very often you actually don't. And the fact of the matter is, if they've been in the war at all,

they're really often not worth getting back because we tend to forget how quickly modern weaponry wears out. These giant cannons, the Leopard 2 has a 122 millimeter cannon. It can only fire so much, and it's worn out. The Ukrainians have themselves well over 350, 400 tanks, but they're wearing down. Their barrels are running out and the rest of it. So, you know, one of the sad things is when the Americans pulled out of Afghanistan, they left much of their, a lot of armor, a lot of incredibly important weaponry behind in that mad scramble.

That could all have been used by Ukraine. But, of course, it's now been used by the taliban okay moving on um the next thing you want to talk about is is russia's military in the sense of the troubles of the russian military and we've witnessed you know a lot of that for months now but the last weeks or two we've we've we've noticed even us about it. Well, it's been quite extraordinary. They've been nothing but trouble since the invasion began and they're continuing.

As your listeners will have seen, the Russians largely took a town of Soledar. After weeks and weeks and weeks of terribly bloody fighting, they managed to win about 90% of it, which was the first kind of victory they could even look at for months for a morale booster for Putin.

But no sooner had they taken 90% of it, and the Ukrainians are still holding the western suburbs, it seems, their fighters started fighting amongst themselves verbally. I mean, as we well know, the Wagner group, the mercenary army, the Russian army of its own, the Wagner group, did much of the fighting to take the town, but the Russians got a little worried they were getting too much of the credit and sent in their own elite groups, including airborne. And when they took the 90% of the town, the army claimed, the Russian army, the real army,

claimed it was responsible for the giant victory. And the Wagner came out and screamed, what do you mean you were responsible? We did the fighting. So you had two elements of the Russian military fighting. Who should get the responsibility for it in the midst of all that uh general uh uh sorovikin who was the command of the campaign commander that we had just talked about last week is had following a very sensible strategy

of going on the defensive i think i even called him it was a bright move from a brutal man because he's certainly brutal but it was a bright move within 24 hours he was fired by Putin thrown out and then Putin brings in instead General Gerasimov sorry Gerasimov who's an almost legendary figure in the Russian army, a kind of military intellectual. He's chief of staff and an architect. But the problem is he's an architect of all the battles that go wrong, including the architect of this Ukrainian invasion. However, Putin wants him to be the main man now. And he's now going to be fighting the war as Putin sees it. This is, you know, about the third major movement of an officer in command out.

So at the top, the Russian army is fighting over command. They haven't got their command unified. The campaign is going very, very poorly in most areas. The supply is bad. Morale bad, ammo is running down, what more can go wrong? And now they've got this problem of a mercenary army they've allowed to build up to the point where it's becoming a real danger, where a lot of the Russian real military are saying, these guys are getting out of control. They're better paid than we are, they've got better weapons than we are, and they want all the glory now.

And that means they want all the influence with the Kremlin. So the army's upset over this. The Kremlin itself may have kicked out Srdjovic because he was getting a little bit too close to the leaders of the Wagner group, the mercenaries. You use Wagner group, the mercenaries. You use another term aside from mercenaries when you describe the Wagner group, and you use the term because it pulls on history for us, and that's centurions. Talk about that.

Yeah, there's a term in military use, something that's called the new centurions, which goes back, of course, to the Roman Empire, when the centurions, which were mercenary armies in protecting the emperor and the empire, got so strong, they simply overthrew emperors they didn't like and brought in emperors they did like to give them even more power. And for many hundreds of years, right really down to the modern era, mercenary armies were quite common, but also very untrustworthy at times. Machiavelli famously said, if a prince holds onto his state by means of a mercenary army,

he will be neither stable nor secure. And the French learned that during the Algerian War for Independence in the late 50s and early 60s, when part of the Foreign Legion and other parts of the French army seen as mercenaries rebelled against the Paris government of de Gaulle and basically had to be quashed. They were extremely dangerous and they were dissolved as units. So it's been a major problem. Now, in the modern era, mercenaries were sort of shoved out

because state armies came along, large, million-strong armies that fought in World Wars I and II and the rest of it. And in the Cold War, there really weren't many mercenary armies. So you didn't see these centurions growing up around and exerting great amounts of power. However, as you and I well know, we covered it after the fall of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall. People warned us that the Band-Aids were going to come off the world. It was going to become a much more fractured and unpredictable world. And so it did. It became a heyday for mercenary armies.

And we're seeing in Russia, of course, not just the Wagner group, which is about 20,000 to 50,000 strong, a good part of it made up of criminals recruited in prisons, but also foreigners from around various war zones in the world. But we're seeing a wrath of private armies growing up. Probably most notably amongst Americans is not just the russians using mercenaries the americans have made enormous use of mercenary armies they call them various names by private military contractors contingency contractors military military service providers they always basically call them contractors, but I see them as centaurians because if they get too powerful,

you better watch out because they start making their own warlords and spawning off their own units. But we've all heard in the news names like Blackwater International, Executive Outcomes, which was a very prominent mercenary group in South Africa,

Sandline International, and one called, I forget the name, but the basic thing holding them together is governments are becoming more and more casually averse because it's politically not popular to have high casualties. Well, if you have a mercenary army that fights overseas, maybe in your name, maybe privately, but they're not going to show up in your casualty rates. And a large part of the American war in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly near the end, were in fact fought by hired mercenaries.

And we have no idea what their death toll was or casualty rates. Also, they're a lot cheaper than normal military units and they don't have long pension plans and they don't have anything like the benefits plan. So they're a cheap way to get people who need money, don't mind earning it in war. Some of them love war. Some of them are drawn to the

violence and thrill of war. And in Russia's case, a great many of them join up as a way to get out of prison, long-term in a Russian prison, which is a pretty nightmarish thing to consider. It's really interesting that you make that comparison with the Wagner group now and say a group like Blackwater, which became so well known some like private security firm, which I guess it is. But they didn't use the term mercenary when they were describing what these guys were doing. But in fact, that's what they were doing. I remember the hotel I stayed in in Kabul. I couldn't get over the number of middle-aged soldiers with paunches who looked like they came from Texas or somewhere. And they were in, just private.

And you'd see they dressed like regular soldiers, and you'd see them in the helicopters, and they did a lot of protection duties for various VIPs, visiting businessmen, you name it. And you'd see them on the helicopters always sitting by the open doors with their boots dangling out, looking very, very Rambo-ish. They had a sort of a Rambo hair to them. And the regular troops got to hate them

because some of them were earning like a thousand bucks a week compared to their kind of regular puny wages. And a great many of them, I shouldn't say a great many, but many of them were former Canadian soldiers who had a time in JTF-2 or in the old paratroopers, you name it, and decided they could make some really good money in Iraq or Afghanistan working for private concerns. And, of course, people came from all over the world, from Latin America, you name it, with a bit of a military bent and earned good money in dangerous work. And sometimes it wasn't even all that dangerous, but it was certainly exciting.

But you could see how these became real corporations. They were on the stock market, and, you know, you'd buy shares in Blackwater or others. And the thing is, they became very big business. And as they became business, a lot of people would earn their spurs in one mercenary group, earn a fair bit of money, bank it, then leave and set up their own mercenary group. Start hiring other ex-soldiers on their own, other ex-inmates on their own, you name it, other ex-people ready for a bit of adventure. And so it was like mushrooms spreading across the world. And I don't know whether we even have a real idea of how many of these

private armies are out there. But the thing is, it's, you know's Canada's worst nightmare because we keep dreaming of a rules-based order in the international world. Well, mercenaries aren't exactly tied to rules-based order or any rules of any kind. And the more they spread, the more they take away legitimate arms of government. Like you send them in to police to make peace in, say, an African country. Well, you take away from their police forces, their irregular army, what have you. And it weakens the state rather than strengthens it. You know, I don't imagine Blackwater signed the Geneva Convention, so I hear what you're saying about not following the rules.

Listen, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, there's still one other element I want to touch on, on the state of the Russian military, and it's quite interesting. It's about the kind of weapons they're using and what that says about where they are uh in this conflict but we're going to take a quick break we'll be right back after this and welcome back you're listening to the bridge the t Tuesday episode. That means Brian Stewart is here with us, and we're talking about the Ukraine-Russia war. You're listening on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks,

or on your favorite podcast platform. A reminder that tomorrow, Wednesday, and also on Friday, we're also on our YouTube channel, so you can actually watch the excitement of us putting the program together tomorrow. Of course, Smoke Mirrors and the Truth. Bruce Anderson will be here on Friday. Chantel joins us for a good talk. All right.

Brian, the other thing I wanted to touch on on the state of the Russian military is the fact that it's having to go deep, deep into its backlog of weapons to find stuff they can still use to fire at the Ukrainians with some impact, I must say. But we're talking about old weaponry. Very old indeed. This week we've seen some horror shows where these ballistic missiles have been used to crash into apartment buildings and whether it was on target or not is almost beside the point because it's not very precise.

But the Ukrainians found a little bit to their stunned horror that the Russians were now using the Kh-22 missile. That's a ballistic missile that was basically designed in the time of Eisenhower and Khrushchev back in the late 50s and came out in the 1960s. And its original purpose was to take out large American naval ships like carriers with nuclear warheads or very high explosives.

It has been around for almost forever, for a good chunk of the Cold War. And it was pretty well put to retirement. But the Russians are now so low on precision guided cruise missiles and reliable weaponry that they've been bringing them out of the, I guess, the missile old folks home and throwing them in as well. It's interesting. It's funny because I first thought, you know,

they're throwing everything but the kitchen sink in now. And then I looked up the name of the KH-22, and it stands for kitchen, which is just an awful black irony. Anyways, it carries an enormous conventional warhead, 2,200 pounds, which I think is about a ton, right? So you can imagine it comes into a city. It may be vaguely going after the electricity outlets and power plants and the rest of it. It's not very precise, so it hits an apartment instead and kills dozens of people. I gather the number's over 40 in one case.

So it's a horrible thing to see, and they're very hard to track because they're meant to go up and come down very, very fast. And these were, in fact, fired from very old Russian bombers, Tupolev-22 bombers, which carried them in the air and then drop them about 250 miles away from the target. And they're very fast moving, so very hard to track. So this is a major problem for the Ukrainians. And no doubt the Russians will keep firing them because at least they're causing a lot of casualties, which the Russians want. Now, it's not just the Russians who are going deep into their warehouses

to find old materials. Ukrainians are too, right? Oh, absolutely, yeah. They're firing whatever they got, and much of their stuff is coming from the 1960s. And it's, you know, it's funny. You look at old weapons, you read about them, and you say, oh, they must be terribly old.

But some of them still acquaint themselves i'm talking about tanks that were thought to have been pretty well outdated 10 15 years ago uh were still tanks i mean they could still fire until they got knocked out themselves artillery that was made back in the 19 early 1970s still had a good play for Ukraine. They're wearing out now, which is why Ukraine desperately needs more artillery and ammunition from the West, because weapons wear out. They may be old and live long in a warehouse,

but when put on a battlefield, they don't really last all that long. All right. Last point for this week. We've talked a number of times in the past few months about the geopolitical shockwaves of this war. We talked about Finland and Sweden joining NATO, huge loss to Russia. We talked about Poland emerging as a major force in the EU and coming Euro superpower. And that's another huge loss to Russia.

Now, you want to get us up to speed on what's happening in another country that we haven't really talked about in terms of the Ukraine-Russia war, but could have an enormous importance as we move into the future. And that is, you tell us. Japan. I mean, you're right. We mainly talk about the European reaction and the North American reaction,

but the Ukraine war has had seismic shocks right across the world into Asia as well. And one huge effect it's had is to really shake Japan further into a course of rearmament. And Japan has decided it already was threatened from China. It was threatened from North Korea. It's long been threatened from Russia. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine convinced the Japanese leadership that, OK, we were already rearming, but we have to do much more than rearm. We are already the third largest economy in the world, but we spend only 1% of GDP on weapons. We're going to spend 2% of GDP on weapons, which will make Japan the third largest spender on weaponry in the world in some years from now. It's had an enormous impact on geopolitical calculations from the Pacific, because Japan has really, ever since the Second

World War, taken basically a very defensive, almost semi-neutral position. It didn't want to get involved in the outside world much. It basically, all its army was defensive. It had missiles to shoot down incoming missiles. But then it realizes, you know, if we're in a world where China, North Korea, Russia are all hostile. We can't remain defensive anymore. We have to go on the counteroffensive ability. In other words, we want weaponry, missiles that will strike inside China at Chinese missile sites, inside North Korea, if it comes to that, and perhaps inside Russia, if it even comes to that and perhaps inside Russia if it even comes to that.

It means we are threatened by the growth of the Chinese army, but also the Chinese army having huge naval maneuvers with the Russian, sorry, navies getting huge naval movements among themselves and maneuvers. So we want more ships, we want more anti-ship missiles. So they're building hundreds of these, and they're expanding their army. They're buying the latest of fighter planes, the F-35, like as Canada aims to do.

It's also developing its own very modern fighter, which it claims will be the best in the world. And it's not just a matter of weaponry. I mean, we've learned one thing really vividly in the Ukraine war, and that is command and control is critically important. You have to have a modern command system. You can't, you mean you have to have all your units working together as one, not like the Russian where all the units work separately and the command and control is about 25 years old and not up to speed with poor intelligence and the rest.

So they're also working with the Americans now and other allies in the Pacific to get together a real working command structure, wartime command structure if necessary, but emergency command structure. And it's also changing its posture. It is saying to the world, in effect, okay, we're coming to build alliances, big alliances, but we're also changing Japan's posture. We're not quiet Japan as we've been since World War II, when we were, of course, anything but quiet. We're basically going to be Japan that's going to be out there vigorously protecting its own security and protecting the security of our good allies in the Asian area. And more than that, we really understand that the invasion of Ukraine is really,

it is uniting the European concerns to the Asian concerns. It's all one big world of worry and trouble right now that we have to work on. We can't go around ignoring Europe any more than Europe can go around ignoring what's going on in Asia. So they're getting together their alliances. Canada, by the way, is not one of these big alliances. There's the Quad Alliance, the U.S., India, Australia, and Japan. It's one that works on security and mutual interests. And there's the Auxus Alliance,

the U.S., Britain, and Australia. Canada has not been invited into either of those because we were thought to be too close to China. I'm sure that's changing now, but we're still a long way from being united with this new reality of alliances in the Pacific. But you can see how the invasion know, the invasion of Ukraine, maybe Japan would not have gone this far. Maybe the alliances would not be so worried.

They're not just worried that Russia's increasing aggressiveness, it's that if they succeeded Russia against Ukraine, it would convince China that maybe now was the time to take Taiwan on. But if Ukraine could defend itself against Russia, that may well convince Russia, China, sorry, well, no, this is not a good time to take on an invasion of another country, particularly as they're all seem to be getting together in alliances to prevent us from doing that. And these alliances now include an old enemy of ours, Japan. So much more care is going to have to be taken. But, you know, we are now seeing, Peter, this is the bottom line, I think.

Japan's decision to rearm this bigger means that we're now in the biggest military buildup in history. That's bigger than before 1914, bigger than before 1939. There's more spending now by more countries on more advanced weaponry and more weaponry of all kinds than we've ever seen in the history of the world. So, I mean, this is not a story for back pages of newspapers or small, small media coverage. It's not a story to be put in the background anymore. It's an alarmingly unpredictable world, which is spending enormously on military weaponry because it feels it has to. And that deserves a great deal of constant attention and deserves Canada getting very much involved in that constant attention.

I'm really glad you made that last point because I think there are times, and there have been in the past year, where people have said, okay, you know what, I've heard enough about Ukraine. Well, you know, what you just helped outline to us is that it's not just about Ukraine anymore. It's having a global impact. It's one thing when it's Sweden and Finland. It's quite another thing when it's stretching all the way to the impact that it's having on Japan and everywhere in between. So I'm so glad that you've been giving your Tuesdays up for us to be able to talk about the latest movement within this conflict this war

and you know making us all realize some of the things that are at stake what you just went through in that last answer is scary to think about in terms of there's never been a time like this in the history of the world where so much preparation was going on by so many nations in terms of the potential that this could get much worse. Obviously, we all hope it doesn't. But clearly, there is every bit of evidence that people are preparing for that eventuality. Okay, we're going to leave it at that, Brian, for this week. Brian will be back next week, of course. Thank you so much, as always, Brian, for your expertise and your insight into this.

Okay, my pleasure, Peter. Thank you. Brian Stewart with us once again, as he has been on most Tuesdays since roughly this time last year when the Ukraine-Russia conflict broke out. All right, we have time for a couple of end bits for this day, so let's get at it. The first one deals with an issue that we've often talked about on this podcast, this broadcast, and that is the state of the media, the future for the media.

What are some of the trials and tribulations that various media organizations are going through right now? And what does the future hold? Well, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism puts out an annual kind of study of journalism. And, you know, plugging us into the state of things as they are. It's a fairly long report. You can find it if you go onto the Reuters website. But let me just read a couple of sentences from the executive summary because it encapsulates what they see as what's happening.

This will be a year of heightened concerns about the sustainability of some news media against a backdrop of rampant inflation, just a sec here for a moment, not to clear my throat, rampant inflation and a deep squeeze on household spending. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the increasingly destructive impact of global warming, along with the after effects of the COVID pandemic, have created fear and uncertainty for many ordinary people. In these conditions, journalism has often thrived, but the depressing and relentless nature of the news agenda continues to turn many people away. Could this be the year when publishers rethink their offer to address the twin challenges of news avoidance and disconnection

to offer more hope, inspiration, and utility? That's kind of a clear indication of a potential big turn taking place inside media. It goes on a couple more sentences. Big tech platforms will also be under pressure this year, and not just from the economic downturn. First-generation social networks like Facebook and Twitter are struggling to retain audiences as older people get bored and younger users migrate to new networks like TikTok. Amid this turmoil, there is some hope that the next set of applications will put more emphasis on connections and content that are good for society

rather than those that deliver outrage and anger. With huge audiences up for grabs, we can expect, or we can hope, to see the seeds of something better in 2023 with a host of new networks and models emerging. This issue of news avoidance is, you know, it's troubling. Deeper in the report, it says, at the same time, we find evidence that most publishers, 72%, are worried about increasing news avoidance,

especially around important but often depressing topics like Ukraine and climate change, with only 12% of those publishers not worried about it. They say they plan to counter this with explainer content question and answer formats and inspirational stories considered important or very important this year producing more positive news was a less popular response Okay. It talks about more newspapers stopping daily print production. TV and broadcast news will be at the forefront of journalistic layoffs as audiences are hit by news fatigue and competition from streamers.

Well, we see evidence of that every day. It's not an encouraging time to be in journalism. But the opportunities still exist, always will exist, for good storytelling on important issues. That's my theory. We'll see how that works out. All right, before we go, have you ever been in a situation where you have a job, we'll see how that works out. All right, before we go,

have you ever been in a situation where you have a job, you've got a good job, but you do get time off each year, one week, two weeks, three weeks, but you get on your holiday, you get to, you know, the cottage or take the family somewhere on a trip, a road trip, and you check your emails and there's an email saying, call the office, we need your help on something. Or you get a phone call, same thing. Well, how do you feel about that?

Feel good about that? You feel, oh, well, I always want to be connected. Or do you want to be connected. Or do you want to be not connected when you finally get your holidays? Well, listen to this. Employees at the Mumbai-based Dream 11, which runs a fantasy sports platform, will have to pay a fine of 100,000 rupees. That's about 1,500 bucks. If they contact a colleague on that colleague's time off. The company founded in 2008

makes it mandatory for workers to take at least a week off annually. And during that week, they cannot be called or contacted in any way by the office where they get a fine. $1,500 to bother your buddy on their holidays. I don't know how to feel about that.

I can remember in the height of my working days, you took holidays for sure, but you were actually always on call. And I was called back from more than a few holidays over my time because of major stories breaking. So maybe there's a difference in our business I don't know at the end of the day I'm glad I was called back but at the end of the day I'm not sure exactly what difference that made

okay that's it that's it for this Tuesday tomorrow smoke, mirrors and the truth available also on our YouTube channel Thursday your turn in the Random Ranter get your cards and letters available also on our YouTube channel.

Thursday, your turn in the Random Ranter. Get your cards and letters in soon. Very soon, please. If you have something to say this week, and like last week, the wonderful part of last week, we heard from lots of people who'd never written in before. And that was great. That's what we like.

Love to hear from the regulars but always looking for new voices as well. So remember your name and where you're writing from and if you have something to say about anything you've heard in the last couple of days or whatever you may hear tomorrow morning, let's hear it.

So that's your turn on Thursday along with the random ranter. The ranter will be back. Always get mail on the ranter. So, and then on Friday, of course, good talk. Sean Talley Bear and Bruce Anderson join us. That's it for this day. Looking forward to the email address.

If you want to write, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. Looking forward to hearing from you. And we'll talk to you again in just 24 hours.