The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Special Edition - Peter joins The Big Story Podcast

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

When the longtime CBC news anchor began his career as a reporter in the early 1970's, giving people the news was among the most trusted and important occupations in the country. When he retired in 2017, it was the era of "fake news", as trust in the media was at an all-time low. Seven years later, it's even lower than that.So what happened? Did the media lose people's trust? Did the internet do it for them? How does a legendary face of Canadian news grapple with the fact that, if he were in the chair today, less than half of Canadians would trust the news he delivered? Can anything be done to fix it? Or is it already too late?GUEST: Peter Mansbridge, former anchor of CBC's The National, host of The Bridge podcast

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's an encore Wednesday, but hey, it's not an encore this week. It's a special edition that I wanted you to have a listen to. It's a podcast that I was on last week called The Big Story, where Jordan Heath-Rawlings and I discuss the current state of media and what I think should be done and he thinks should be done to regain the public's trust in the news. Enjoy it. You're listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production. I have spent my entire working life as a member of the media. I've never done anything else. You might assume, if I did that job well,

over the course of my career, I would build more and more trust with audiences as I proved myself to be a reliable source for news and context and analysis and all the other stuff we want from the media. But no, not at all. It turns out that the first day of my journalism career was also probably the day I was the most trusted. Because that day was back in 2002 sometime, and trust in the media as a whole, in journalists and reporters and the brands we associate with delivering the news, has been steadily declining since before I was ever a

lowly little intern. I think about that a lot. I think about the reasons for it, the ones the media and journalists can control, and I think about all the ones we can't. I often wonder, because of when I started my career, what it must have felt like to begin your career at a time when delivering the news was one of the most important and trusted occupations in our society. When things were true to most people because you said them. And what it must have felt like to end your career in the Trump era. Being told that you and your organization are bought and paid for.

That you're fake news. And that the media just lies. Now, there aren't many people in the country who can speak to that, but today I've got one. You will probably recognize his voice. I'm Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Peter Mansbridge, Canadian journalism legend, longtime host of CBC's The National, of course. Now, I was going to say newly,

but it's been a few years now, right, Peter, that you've been a podcaster. Three years into my fourth year podcasting with SiriusXM. And it's called The Bridge, and you get to do sit-down interviews like this one, where you get to take your time in a way I guess you probably didn't before. Exactly. You know, I was in the land of the kind of two-minute news item.

Right. And the occasional feature interview, but they rarely ran longer than 10 or 15 minutes. And now it sort of goes as long as you want, right? I mean, that's the beauty of the world of podcasting. I usually try to keep them in the 30 to 40 minute range and explore whoever the guest is, just go for it. Well, I mean, the reason I wanted to talk to you, aside from obviously your eminent status as a, you know,

Canadian newscasting legend, but it's because I've been trying to wrap my head around the loss of trust in journalism as an institution. And I thought you would be a great place to start because like it or not, for a long time, you were kind of the face of news or at least one of them in this country. So I wonder if you felt that in any way,

that loss of trust, if it manifested in your work or in your life as you moved into the later parts of your career? Well, it started with, you know, when I started in the anchoring business in the early 1980s, trust in journalism was at its high point. It was up there with, or at least close to, doctors and nurses and firefighters.

But it started to drop in the 90s. Not precipitously, but it started. And it started with the kind of explosion of news channels, the explosion of television channels overall, the introduction of the Internet, and we progress on to, you know, streaming, et cetera, et cetera. And with more and more things available to inform yourself, some of them were dicey, still are, as a result of the Internet, social media, all of that. Some of it's been fantastic for information. Some of it's been questionable. And so we've seen the introduction of misinformation and disinformation. And all of that has led to a, you know, a reckoning really on the trust basis.

And not just for journalism, but basically for all national institutions. But journalism is something we so desperately need to be a pillar of democracy. I know it's kind of a worn out phrase, but it's true. But when you see numbers dropping from the kind of mid to high 70s, which was the case, and I'm talking about percent trust in the early 80s, to what it is now closer to 50. And sometimes, depending on which survey you're looking at, it's below 50. That is perilous. Yeah.

And I'm not sure that journalism as a whole is taking it seriously enough on how to deal with it. of tangentially a part of the very early part of my journalism career when I worked on the specials desk at Canadian Press, which was like doing agate and all this stuff. But one of the things that I would have to do every night is watch The National and watch Lloyd Robertson on CTV and write down each story that came across and then mark off whether the Canadian Press had covered it or not. And that would have been like 2002, 2003. And I was thinking about it as I prepped for this interview. That was kind of maybe the last era where there was like one source of truth for the news, right? Nothing broke on Twitter back then.

But by the time you walked away in 2017, there was almost nothing. And I don't mean to disparage the national, but nothing that would come out on like a nightly news broadcast that was actually like news for the very first time, right? Like we're just getting word out of Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever. It would have come on social media. The story would have developed over the day and people would have tuned into the national to see how you handled it or the CBC handled it, but it wouldn't have been, you know, here it is, this is coming from the CBC at 9pm, it's the truth. Yeah, generally, I have no disagreement with that. It really started with the power of social media

kind of taking over the space of, you know, breaking news. And there was this kind of clumsy effort on the part of traditional media to match a kind of Twitter style in the way they went about news. And that was disastrous because it just led to this beginning of the real precipitous drop in trust. What was happening by the time I was leaving networks for scrambling, television networks for scrambling, as print had already done, scrambling, trying to find what is the solution to the fact we're losing audience. You know, what do we have to do? And there were some not very pretty examples of new ways of doing things that didn't work.

What do you think of when you think of those? Can you give me a couple of examples? Well, I don't have to look much further than the CBC. You know, I argued very strongly when I retired and I gave my year's notice that they should stay with a single anchor format, that at the network level, that's what's always worked. Whether it was here, states, UK, single anchor. People place their trust. They don't necessarily like the person,

but they've determined that that person they can trust. Right. It's not a popularity contest. It's a trust contest. When you start mixing it up in both the format, the look of the program, the kind of items that you're going after, plus having what, in the case of CBC, was four anchors,

you're totally confusing everybody. You know, it was hard for me because I was supportive of the four people they picked. They were all friends of mine and basically really good journalists. But I didn't like the format. But I was leaving and, you know, there's only so much you can do. But there were examples everywhere. I think the earlier point I was making was not about people, but it was about the type of news that you were going after. And the more it started to look like social media and especially kind of a Twitter look at news, the more trouble you got yourself into.

And not only that, there was younger people had abandoned television. When they wanted to know what was going on, they looked at their phones. Right. And they looked at social media. And they looked at forms of social media that you couldn't trust and you shouldn't trust. So that just caused this chaotic scene

in the news business and the distribution of news. Did the CBC ever try to get you to be on Twitter, be active, engage on social media? I can remember the day it started for me. I mean, they'd bug me about, you should get on Facebook or you should get on Twitter. It's good for, you know, getting our name out there and your name and blah, blah, blah. And I resisted. Not because I was thinking deeply about all this, but because I just I couldn't figure out how to do it all. And, you know, I wasn't I wasn't into it.

But the royal wedding of Kate and Will. Right. Somebody told me in the middle of the program, because it was one of those long drawn out royal wedding things. And I was in London. And one of the, you know, the people working in the studio at Buckingham Palace, where we were just outside, said, oh, you're trending on Twitter. And I didn't have any idea what that even meant at the time. But I guess I'd been, you know, been having a good time doing the program. And, you know, it was funny at times, which is unusual for me to have that ability to show that side of me. And so I joined that day, that very day,

and quite enjoyed it when I'd figured out how to do it, but then realized that this could eventually be a problem, especially for journalists who started using social media and Twitter, especially to give their own opinions about stuff. I can recall doing a thing at the Munk School here in Toronto, at the University of Toronto, with a hundred post-grad students and asking them, what is it you don't like about traditional media? And they went through the whole list of, you know, it's fake, it's biased, you give your opinion too much. Not me personally, but, you know, just journalists in general. And I said, where are you getting all this stuff?

And they said, Facebook, Twitter. And that's when I, you know, I kind of doubled down on this feeling that we're not realizing what's happening here. And we're losing a potentially really important part of our audience, which is, you know, young people coming up. And I'm not talking about teenagers or even early 20s. I'm like up to 40. It's been going on for a while now. Yeah, exactly.

So all those things have contributed to this problem. And it is a problem. Do you think that it's, I mean, I know it's unfortunate, but how do you solve the problem of the more people who work in the business allow themselves to be people online? Because listen, and I said this on this program a lot, I don't necessarily consider myself a journalist anymore because I just interview people. But I'm also never shy about like journalists are biased. They have opinions, even if they don't tell you them, they still think things about it. We just never used to give them a venue for them to show the world their opinions. And it seems to me like the more they do that, the less people trust them.

How do you resolve it? Well, you tell them they can't do that. You know, if they're working for you, for a legitimate news organization, we don't want you out there unless you're in an opinion role. You know, if you're host of a show, let's say, you know, an opinion related show that can drive audiences and get people, you know, involved. There's a big schism in journalism right now in terms of like young versus traditional journalists who believe that, you know, their opinions and I really, I identify with this a bit that your opinions and your views on what's going on in the world shape who you are and who you are shapes how you cover it.

So it's going to factor into your work, regardless of whether or not you hide those opinions on social media. Yeah, I wouldn't go the whole way with you on that. Okay. I do agree that there's a role within the media for opinion-based shows or opinion-based columns. I mean, newspapers have dealt with this for years, right? They have opinion pages and they have journalists, columnists, who write opinion. But they always used to protect their front page and their news pages,

that the process was different and they didn't want opinion, that there had to be somewhere for readers, viewers, listeners to go to have an unfiltered in terms of biased look at the news. And, you know, I came from that old school, if you wish. And once you started to lose that, you had a problem. I agree with you that everyone carries a certain bias with it. I mean, when you go to journalism school, they don't neuter you from opinion. You know, you have feelings. And there are some stories, those can't be taken away from you.

Especially stories where there's clear harm being done to people. Could be through a natural disaster. It could be through war. I've done these things, and you see people who are not a part of the conflict or a part of the reason there was some kind of disaster. They've been impacted by it. Their kids have know, maimed in some terrible fashion. You can't see that knowing how it happened and not talk about it. So those things affect you. But when you're dealing with issues of public policy, which is a lot of what journalism covers and should cover. You have to be able to find a way to lay any personal views you have on it aside

and lay out the facts as best they are known to those who want to understand it and let them decide. You know, it's not that challenging to be able to do that. And there needs to be somewhere you can go for that. But at the moment, you know, a lot of people, most people, I haven't seen the latest stats, but most people don't think we do that. That part of what we used to do has disappeared. You want to hear a really interesting stat

that I found while looking at who trusts the media and who doesn't. People who are facing financial hardship, 68% of them report low trust in the media. People who are financially well off, only 40% report low trust. So there's a big schism there that if you're doing poorly economically, you're skeptical of everything you hear from the media. And for those who are in some form of dire straits, they probably don't trust anyone. Yeah, it is true across other institutions as well. And the media has to accept that as the challenge. You know, I mean, people say, and I know you're heading towards the question of, okay, so what do we do about it? That's, yeah, that's about what I was about to ask you.

Right. I mean, my own feeling is that we're not transparent enough, that we've never been transparent enough about how we go about doing our work. Yeah. How do you decide, you and your producers decide, well, who are we going to interview today? And how much does that relate to what people are going through or what they need to know? How do you decide what's news and what isn't news? Sure. Who's the expert that you bring on to explain policy and where do they come from? That's right. How do you decide what story on a newscast should be at the top? What story doesn't even make it? How do you determine who should receive anonymity when you're doing an investigative piece?

And why do you trust them? What is their agenda? Now, you can't do this every day with every story. But if you do it occasionally, you will start to build back trust. I'm convinced of that. If you are transparent about the mistakes you make, because we all make mistakes, and it could be bad journalism, or it could just simply be a mistake. How often do we concede that point? How often do we say, you know what we did we said such and such a thing that's not

correct right and explain how it happened exactly i mean used to have this argument at the national we'd have some little small thing that was wrong in a story and we said we got to fix that we will devote 30 seconds tonight to saying that that was wrong. And there would be people in the newsroom say, oh, you know, we don't want to do that. It makes us look bad. And really, it was a small thing and blah, blah, blah. And I'd argue and others would argue that every time you do that,

you build trust. People will believe you more when you concede that you were wrong on something. Newspapers, remember, they always have, they used to have that tiny little correction box on page. The little box on E5 or whatever it is. But it did that. It was accountability. Exactly. Where most people feel we're not accountable at all.

Well, and with digital articles now, you can just re-edit them so that the mistake is not there. Some places will put a correction on the bottom. This was changed because this was wrong. Right. It's a very nebulous process now that people are not sure like, and you will read, here's how the New York Times edited their headline. Right. Seeing as you mentioned the New York Times, when they came out with their first big Me Too stories, they devoted pages to explaining

why they were doing it, how they did it, who they talked to, whose names they protected, all of that before they even started the story. Right. That's where I think when you dig deeper on some of these trust surveys, that's where the problem is. They don't understand the process and they're not getting any help from us explaining what the process is. Now, this didn't start yesterday. This has always been a looming problem, which is just at its worst point right now.

Worst point so far. So far. That's right. I don't want anybody to think, nor you to think, that I feel that when, back in my day, that everything was perfect. Right. It was the golden days of journalism, all that crap. Because when you actually look at it, they weren't that golden, right? And we made a lot of mistakes too. There just wasn't the crowdsource corrections of what you did and the feedback in real time. Somebody had to like write you a letter saying fake news in the 1980s and mail that to the CBC headquarters. That's right. And challenged the CBC to explain it. And you

know what journalists are like. We're very defensive. Like to be right. Yeah. Of course we were right. You know, there's no way we were wrong. And, you know, and defend your people and all that stuff. And I understand that where that's coming from. And I've been there myself. But when you're wrong, you're wrong. And you're hurting everybody.

Now, the other part of the explosion between the 80s and the 70s and now is, you know, in those days, there were only a couple of us. There was Lloyd, there was me or Knowlton or whoever the anchors used to be. And you knew who all the anchors were. You knew all the, you know, the three American anchors. You knew who they were. If you went out on the street today and asked, you know, a hundred people, name the anchors in Canada and the anchors in the United States,

you probably wouldn't get very many. I pay attention. I don't think I could do it. No, exactly. It's not that these people aren't good. Yeah. It's that there are just so many sources now. Yeah. There's so many options. And in so many cases, those options aren't trustworthy because they're not trustworthy.

I think a lot of what we've talked about so far in terms of being upfront about mistakes, in terms of biases and whether or not you choose to let them show, what I'm hearing a lot and what I think about a lot is like authenticity that, you know, people can smell, especially in this day and age, they can smell an inauthentic attempt to sell them information. And an interesting stat now would be that to a certain segment of the population, you are now more trustworthy as a podcaster than you would be if you were still sitting in the chair on The National as the face of the nightly news. How have you found podcasting to be different and to let more of all the stuff you just mentioned you couldn't show out? I think I'm more authentic because you hear how I feel about stuff. But I don't pretend that my podcast is a newscast.

Right. Because it's not. It's just me talking with people I can access or friends of mine, and I'm giving my opinion at times on certain things in a way I never did before. That makes people trust you more, though, to certain people anyway. Yeah. You don't read my mail. I mean, they trust me enough to listen, but they,

they also trust me enough to get mad. Right. And that's okay. You know, I don't mind that. And I try to make room, try to make room for, you know, for their, their feelings on, on the program. I devote one day a week to listener stuff. You know, they write in about whatever it may be. And I read them and some of them absolutely don't agree with what they're saying. And that shows some time in the way I read it. I think people have to really be careful. And I know it's hard with somebody like me, because they assume that I'm basically still doing what I used to do. They assume it's the news. It's not the news. It's just me rambling.

We can do certain things in the profession to be more authentic, to be more accountable, to be less biased or at least present biases less. scheme of things, considering the way media has proliferated, is there anything we can really do to put journalism back on its course to trust? Or has that ship sailed? Like, there's too many sources of truth out there. It can be impossible to sort them out. How would the next Peter Mansbridge show up today coming out of journalism school? How would they find their path? I didn't go to journalism school. Not that I'm suggesting people shouldn't because they should. And I support them and have supported them with a number of new programs in three different universities across the country. But I had a, you know, I had a strange route. Yeah, you got discovered. I was reading, I was reading your bio.

Somebody heard my voice and thought you should be in broadcasting. So I had a strange route. Yeah, you got discovered. I was reading your bio. Somebody heard my voice and thought, you should be in broadcasting. So I had no training at all. But, you know, that was a long time. It was 1968. And when I explained the story to young journalism students, they want to throttle me. Yeah.

That it's just not fair. You know, they've saved up all their money. They've taken summer jobs. They've begged their parents to help them get them through journalism schools and here they're looking at a guy who reached the top and had you know nothing but hard work which is part of what it all is i think you you have to you have to understand and i'm not just talking about the audience here, I'm talking about the journalists as well, how important we are to the bigger picture of our societies. Like, if you believe in democracy, then you have to believe in real journalism,

accurate journalism, journalism that probes, asks questions, tries to understand why things happen, and is able to tell stories. It's not a forgotten art, but it's a not discussed enough art that the best journalists are the best storytellers. You know, they have the facts. It's one thing to have the facts. It's another thing to be able to tell the story in a way that will engage people. So you have to keep working at all of that. And you have to keep understanding that your audience is challenging you to be better and to be more accountable and to show that you're willing to go that route as well. I'm not ready to sign off on journalism and say its days are done. Its best days may be ahead. Don't buy the stuff about the golden years or

past because they weren't that golden, as I said, and they could be in the future. And there's still some examples of great journalism out there. A lot of independent journalism outlets that are funded by the audience to do specific work, like environmental journalism or activist journalism, et cetera. And some, you know, traditional stuff. Sure. I mean, we have people from The Star and City News. 680 News is right next door here. Local journalism every single day.

Yeah. And, you know, you can see examples of really good journalism in a lot of places. Sadly, you can also see examples of where it's fallen down and has cost everybody in the long run. But, you know, it's difficult times right now on a lot of fronts. You've got the challenge of trust on one hand. You've got the challenge of resources, support on the other hand. And those two combined can make things very difficult. We've all seen the layoffs that have taken place, not just in our country, but, you know, across the board in journalism.

It's not good. You know, it's not good for anybody. But that, too, can be challenged by doing a better job at the front end. Peter, thank you so much for this. And thanks for all your work in podcast and on The National. Thanks, Jordan. It's been a treat peter mansbridge is the host of the bridge obviously formerly of cbc's the national but you can find the bridge every day wherever you get your podcasts that was the big story for more from us you can head to

thebigstorypodcast.ca nothing on there there is fake news, unless you think it is. After all, it's all in the eye or ear of the beholder. Seriously, though, if you have questions or comments or by sending an email to hello at thebigstorypodcast.ca or by calling 416-935-5935 and telling us what you think. The Big Story is in every single podcast player, and of course, it is on your smart speakers. Just ask those smart speakers to play The Big Story podcast. You don't even have to say please. Joe Fish is the lead producer of the Big Story. Robin Simon is also a producer here.

Stephanie Phillips is our showrunner. Ryan Clark handled our sound design this week. Diana Kay is our manager of business development. And Mary Jubrin is our digital editor. Together, along with myself, Jordan Heath-Rawlings, your host and executive producer, we're the Frequency Podcast Network, a division of Rogers. Thanks for listening.

Have a wonderful weekend. Yes, you can trust the news. And we'll talk Monday. And that was a special, not an encore edition of The Bridge. It was a special edition of The Bridge, which aired a podcast that I was on last week with my friend Jordan Heath-Rawlings called The Big Story. Hope you enjoyed it. Tomorrow, we're back again with the regular edition of Your Turn. For this Thursday, the question is, what's one thing that you would do

to improve the health care system in Canada? And you can write in. You better write in right now because the deadline is 6 o'clock this evening. Name, location, and keep it short. Talk to you again in 24 hours.