Transcript
00:00:02 Speaker 2
Testing 1234 testing. Oh, that’s a testing, testing, testing. There you have no volume as you do with recording usually. So yeah.
00:00:12 Speaker 1
OK.
00:00:15 Speaker 2
So let’s make sure that you’re recording.
00:00:27 Speaker 1
Thanks so much.
00:00:29 Speaker 1
And it’ll just be for you.
00:00:30 Speaker 1
I don’t need my voice.
00:00:31 Speaker 1
OK.
00:00:32 Speaker 1
I’m just basically.
00:00:34 Speaker 1
Oh, OK, thanks.
00:00:35 Speaker 1
I think we’ll start out in general questions they want, it’s more of an anecdotal kind of history they’d like everyone’s personal.
00:00:42 Speaker 1
Experiences in broadcast.
00:00:44 Speaker 1
So for my first question it was about significant news events that you’ve experienced throughout your career, something that’s made an impact on you.
00:00:52 Speaker 1
So it could be a long question.
00:00:55 Speaker 3
Well, I guess start we’ll talk about Canadian experiences now. I’m an immigrant, so I arrived from the US, so I arrived in this country in 1970, which was a rather significant year. We had the provincial election.
00:01:15 Speaker 3
Which brought the Liberals to power in Quebec.
00:01:17 Speaker 3
Robert Bourassa, which was the first story I covered.
00:01:20 Speaker 3
I got off the plane literally and went off to cover it for magazine.
00:01:25 Speaker 3
And then there was the kidnapping crisis in 1970. And just on after that I covered or arranged coverage for virtually every major story in Canada from then on. Because I I went to work for the CBC.
00:01:44 Speaker 3
And ended up in positions where I was either.
00:01:49 Speaker 3
Directly covering or arranging for other people to cover every election, provincial Quebec provincial and federal national federal election, several referendums, referenda.
00:02:02 Speaker 3
So there wasn’t much that didn’t happen in in Canada and outside too.
00:02:06 Speaker 3
I was involved in the coverage.
00:02:09 Speaker 3
Canadian coverage of the end of the Vietnam War.
00:02:13 Speaker 3
Cyprus, the second go round in Cyprus.
00:02:18 Speaker 3
You know, you name it.
00:02:20 Speaker 3
I was involved in it in one way or another, mostly in broadcast.
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After my initial magazine experience.
00:02:27 Speaker 1
Was there any particular event that had a great impact on you or the community?
00:02:31 Speaker 3
Well, it’s certainly the first. The first one or another. The second one, I guess the kidnapping crisis of 1970 had a big impact on me. I was the Montreal Bureau chief for the Time Life News service, working mainly for Time magazine.
00:02:50 Speaker 3
When that happened, and it’s certainly in terms of broadcasting, I had to rely quite a bit on radio and television since I worked alone.
00:03:00 Speaker 3
I was the Bureau chief and the Bureau.
00:03:03 Speaker 3
I had stringers who worked for me, but the broadcasting was really important for me to keep in touch.
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But that was a huge story.
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It was my instant window into the history of Quebec.
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How did we get to where we were at that point?
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What were the roots of?
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Separatism in Quebec, or violent, even violent separatism like the Fronde Liberacion de Quebec.
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So it was just a very quick.
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Immersion in.
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National and Quebec politics and and history.
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So that really had a big effect.
00:03:48 Speaker 3
It also showed me a couple of other things.
00:03:50 Speaker 3
This is mainly about broadcasting, right?
00:03:53 Speaker 3
Well, it was interesting in terms of broadcasting that in Montreal at that time.
00:03:57 Speaker 3
The CBC, of course, was present, but the.
00:04:03 Speaker 3
The station, certainly the English language station, which kept most people informed and informed pretty well during that time, was a private station.
00:04:14 Speaker 3
CJD in Montreal, which was run by Standard Broadcasting, and I relied immensely on them, the CBC.
00:04:23 Speaker 3
It was actually pretty poor.
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This was a lesson I took with me later on when I joined the CBC and how to reform.
00:04:32 Speaker 3
But both the certainly the radio was mediocre anyway, was not up-to-the-minute the their their their major newscasts were OK, but they certainly were not on the street as much as CJD was. And because of their structure they they didn’t get, you didn’t get the local news.
00:04:52 Speaker 3
At various points, when you really needed it in a situation like that.
00:04:58 Speaker 3
On the English side, CJD just outshone everybody else.
00:05:01 Speaker 3
They were really.
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They had a small newsroom.
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Sidney Margolies was their.
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Was one of their main reporters, and he seemed to be everywhere at the during that time and they had some radio.
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They had people who weren’t just disc jockeys who actually did some very good service along the way and putting things in perspective.
00:05:27 Speaker 3
So there was an interesting thing to see.
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A private radio station with that kind of commitment to news and information.
00:05:35 Speaker 3
So I think they really distinguished themselves these days.
00:05:39 Speaker 3
Of course, it would be the remarkable exception for a private radio station to to do that.
00:05:46 Speaker 3
Kind of work, even the all news stations we have today do very little real news and a lot of entertainment stuff.
00:05:55 Speaker 3
That was the magazine business and I had, so I had no, I had no interest other than finding the outlet which was going to give me reliable information quickly in case I needed to react to it.
00:06:06 Speaker 3
I used to wake up during the during the early days of the kidnapping crisis, I actually set my alarm to wake up every hour during the night because you never knew what was going to happen.
00:06:15 Speaker 3
And I just, you know, I have it on CJD and I’d listen to to see whether anything new had happened that I had to go cover and then and then try to fall back to sleep.
00:06:25 Speaker 3
But I did that for for weeks during that time.
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But that.
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That was the standard broadcasting in those days.
00:06:35 Speaker 3
It is unfortunately no longer true, but they had a great commitment to to significant local news coverage by their, by their stations and then CJD was, I think, just stellar in that regard.
00:06:50 Speaker 3
They had some good news.
00:06:51 Speaker 3
People who knew how to write, who knew basic news values, who you know, they weren’t just rip and read people and.
00:07:00 Speaker 3
We don’t see that anymore, but that was the case then.
00:07:03 Speaker 3
The CBC, both radio and television.
00:07:05 Speaker 3
I could say from the outside did not distinguish itself during the kidnapping crisis.
00:07:10 Speaker 3
There’s actually a point to this.
00:07:12 Speaker 3
The television, of course, made the horrendous mistake of announcing the death of.
00:07:20 Speaker 3
Jasper Cross James Cross on the Air Cross has written about that subsequently of what?
00:07:27 Speaker 3
That was the lowest moment of his captivity was when he saw the CBC declaring him dead because he figured they stopped looking.
00:07:36 Speaker 3
They just, they just didn’t.
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They weren’t well organized.
00:07:39 Speaker 3
They had some good journalists, but they also had some people, especially internally, who did not make smart decisions during the during the the whole kidnapping crisis, the management, the journalistic management was particularly.
00:07:54 Speaker 3
Problematic, especially the bureaucrats above the the heads of the News department.
00:07:59 Speaker 3
They got very upset when our CBC reporter named Tim Raife conducted an interview with the Prime Minister.
00:08:06 Speaker 3
Which he asked him how far he would go, and and Trudeau said.
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Just watch me.
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It was, to me, a perfectly legitimate, aggressive interview by by a good reporter.
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I’m told that the management went berserk.
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You know?
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How dare you?
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You know, Badger the Prime Minister, just utter nonsense.
00:08:25 Speaker 3
But what happened though?
00:08:26 Speaker 3
For the reason that there’s a point to this, so certainly for me is that some of the better journalists at CBC Television realized that they did not have the as strong of people as they needed and as strong as news management as they needed.
00:08:42 Speaker 3
And they deliberately went.
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Out to recruit people to join the CBC from outside to try to give them some editorial strength, and one of the people they hired was the editor of The Gazette.
00:08:57 Speaker 3
The guy named Danny Harvey, who who sadly just died a little while ago, and he came in to take over the news.
00:09:04 Speaker 3
Department and he decided to recruit.
00:09:08 Speaker 3
Other journalists from outside and now I ended up being basically one of those people I had come into the CBC separately, but he’s when he moved me to Toronto to sort of take over the national assignment operation, he recruited people like Don Murray, who is the wonderful correspondent.
00:09:25 Speaker 3
You know that for the CBC television.
00:09:27 Speaker 3
But that was the beginning of the major change at CBC, which I think has sustained it took a little while.
00:09:35 Speaker 3
Once then he got out of the news.
00:09:37 Speaker 3
There was some rocky periods, but.
00:09:41 Speaker 3
Then things solidified and they’ve just gotten better and better as they’ve gone along.
00:09:47 Speaker 3
But it all came from the kidnapping crisis from their less than stellar performance.
00:09:51 Speaker 3
Radio was even even worse in some ways, because they just weren’t present.
00:09:57 Speaker 3
And later when I ended up as head of Radio News.
00:10:02 Speaker 3
You know, I knew the lessons that I had learned from that and tried to make sure that the people that it was organized in a way to be able to be very responsive to news and to have people who could talk on their feet, who could talk, live and know the history, especially in Quebec, to know a bit of the history of the province and.
00:10:21 Speaker 3
The significance of the events that happened absolutely vital to to journalism in this country so that that single event both provided me with a great story to cover as an individual.
00:10:34 Speaker 3
But lessons about the which I didn’t know I was learning about the broadcasting later on.
00:10:40 Speaker 1
OK.
00:10:40 Speaker 1
Well, you were in broadcasting.
00:10:42 Speaker 1
Was there a particular event that affected you or perhaps confirmed for you that news was providing a valuable resource?
00:10:50 Speaker 3
To the community well.
00:10:53 Speaker 3
There were so many.
00:10:54 Speaker 3
I mean, just because of the nature of my job.
00:10:56 Speaker 3
But there was, you know, we were involved in so many.
00:10:59 Speaker 3
I remember counting up.
00:11:00 Speaker 3
And I left television news for the first time in in at the end of 1984. I forget I had done.
00:11:09 Speaker 3
You know, five national elections, you know, 20 provincial elections, 2 referendums, the Pope’s visit, the Queen’s visit, you know, on and on.
00:11:19 Speaker 3
It was just in the those four years.
00:11:21 Speaker 3
Between 1980, when I took over national television news as the as the chief news.
00:11:29 Speaker 3
Editor and and 85 January 85 when I left had just one of those incredible news periods. Just everything was crammed into those those years, so it had been quite a quite a run. But what?
00:11:47 Speaker 3
What I learned was the importance of of the CBC.
00:11:54 Speaker 3
Not just to its audience, but even to other journalists.
00:11:59 Speaker 3
It was interesting in my job as the head of the CBC News, the television news I, you know, traveled around the country quite a bit.
00:12:07 Speaker 3
And the number it was, it was astonishing the number of people from outside the CBC who would say.
00:12:14 Speaker 3
How important the CBC was because we provided.
00:12:19 Speaker 3
A baseline of good journalism that they could use against their own bosses.
00:12:24 Speaker 3
I mean this.
00:12:26 Speaker 3
So they’d say, you know.
00:12:27 Speaker 3
Oh, I’m glad you’re there because you know you do it right and you know, I can go in and tell my boss.
00:12:32 Speaker 3
See, you have to do it that way because the CBC did you know what had been unsuccessful and then when we started the national and the journal.
00:12:40 Speaker 3
Which not a news event necessarily, but for me was the most significant thing that happened.
00:12:45 Speaker 3
We can talk about that.
00:12:45 Speaker 3
In a second.
00:12:48 Speaker 3
But it established a baseline of good journalistic practice, certainly in broadcasting across the country.
00:12:56 Speaker 3
And that’s as opposed to where I grew up in the states where the the the baselines were set by the New York Times and the Washington Post and.
00:13:07 Speaker 3
And the LA Times more recently.
00:13:10 Speaker 3
But in Canada, the you know the the baseline is.
00:13:15 Speaker 3
The CBC with, you know, maybe a nod to the Globe and Mail, as you know, and print.
00:13:20 Speaker 3
But the CBC has a much greater impact on Canada as a society than any of the broadcasters do in the US, even though they make tons of money, everything they don’t have the same impact individually as the CBC would.
00:13:35 Speaker 3
But during during my time between 8070 late 79 actually and through 84, the biggest internal achievement was the creation.
00:13:45 Speaker 3
What the moving of the national from 11:00 o’clock to 10:00 o’clock.
00:13:49 Speaker 3
I know this is before you were born.
00:13:50 Speaker 3
Probably the.
00:13:54 Speaker 3
And the creation of another program called the journal, which sadly is no longer with us, but that.
00:14:01 Speaker 3
Was a real signal.
00:14:05 Speaker 3
That the corporation was really committed to.
00:14:11 Speaker 3
News and current affairs.
00:14:13 Speaker 3
It moved the newscast into prime time from 10:00 o’clock.
00:14:16 Speaker 3
We were up against the biggest American entertainment programs.
00:14:19 Speaker 3
Of the day.
00:14:20 Speaker 3
Luckily, we didn’t have all these cable stations in those days, and creating an hour, you know, a whole hour of programming.
00:14:28 Speaker 3
The the national was 22 minutes long and the journal filled out the rest of the hour as a separate program. It was really significant and I know you couldn’t know, but at the time.
00:14:40 Speaker 3
It was a revolution and I was overjoyed to be part of it.
00:14:44 Speaker 3
There were three of us who were asked to do a study.
00:14:48 Speaker 3
About what we should do with the newscast and the three of us came up with this, this idea of the national and the Journal moving the national to 10 and creating a another program.
00:14:59 Speaker 3
The journal actually was the working title.
00:15:01 Speaker 3
We always assumed to come up with another name and we just called it the journal as.
00:15:06 Speaker 3
The rest of the hour, and nobody ever found a better name.
00:15:11 Speaker 3
So the three people, Bill Morgan.
00:15:14 Speaker 3
Who at the time was the deputy program director?
00:15:17 Speaker 3
I think of English television, mark Starvision, who had produced a number of radio programs.
00:15:25 Speaker 3
He had been most well known, I think, as the.
00:15:28 Speaker 3
He wasn’t the originator, but he certainly was, the longtime producer of as it happens.
00:15:33 Speaker 3
And then he originated and produced a program called Sunday morning on on CBC Radio.
00:15:39 Speaker 3
And this was sort of his entry into mainstream television and the three of us who are brought in from different.
00:15:47 Speaker 3
I was running the supper hour show in Montreal.
00:15:49 Speaker 3
At the time and Peter Herndon off, who was?
00:15:52 Speaker 3
And the head of English services for CBC Television.
00:15:58 Speaker 3
Brought us into Toronto to do this.
00:16:00 Speaker 3
To think about this.
00:16:02 Speaker 3
And to find a way to signal that the CBC had a major.
00:16:10 Speaker 3
Commitment to news and current affairs as a sort of defining characteristic of the corporation.
00:16:16 Speaker 3
It’s what we came up with and it.
00:16:17 Speaker 3
Was a big success.
00:16:19 Speaker 3
And the IT really I think changed the the nature of CBC broadcast journalism when it finally was approved by the board, I was brought in to run the National News Department to implement this.
00:16:35 Speaker 3
Mark was hired as the executive producer of the journal.
00:16:39 Speaker 3
And Bill Morgan moved from the programming office to take over current affairs, so the three people who thought this monstrosity up then had to actually put it into practice.
00:16:49 Speaker 3
So that was, you know that.
00:16:51 Speaker 3
In Canadian broadcasting terms, I think is one of those.
00:16:55 Speaker 3
Landmark moments and I, you know, I certainly have just overjoyed that I had the the chance to do it and then I ran the the news department for the next four years after that.
00:17:08 Speaker 3
So it that that was a major thing and we were we were really prepared I set up.
00:17:15 Speaker 3
And noticed when I got there that we did not respond to breaking news very well in terms of being able to mount specials, instant specials and things like that.
00:17:26 Speaker 3
So against everybody’s advice and.
00:17:31 Speaker 3
Sort of behind the backs of my bosses, I created a separate unit which was just a producer and an announcer and A and a studio director.
00:17:43 Speaker 3
You know, a director sort of named.
00:17:44 Speaker 3
He did other stuff, but he would be the one.
00:17:47 Speaker 3
So they had a SWAT team.
00:17:48 Speaker 3
So if something happened, those were the guys responsible for doing it.
00:17:52 Speaker 3
And the producer was a guy named Arnold Amber, who is still around at CBC Television.
00:17:59 Speaker 3
And the director was Rick Chisholm, who is now the I think he’s the executive Vice president of TSN. We stole him away from CBC’s Borts to do this, and the announcer was a young guy who had been a a parliamentary reporter who I had made a parliamentary reporter in Ottawa originally and then made him an announcer after that.
00:18:18 Speaker 3
And put him in this unit fellow named Peter Mansbridge.
00:18:22 Speaker 3
So so I put them together and Peter would do the weekend national and specials because he was just very good live and that was my feeling that he just he was better than the fellow who had been doing the specials at the time, Guy named Nolton Nash, who was still the anchor of the national.
00:18:41 Speaker 3
At that point.
00:18:42 Speaker 3
But I.
00:18:45 Speaker 3
With some trepidation called nolton in and told him I was removing them from specials because.
00:18:51 Speaker 3
Peter was better and no.
00:18:54 Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, I.
00:18:55 Speaker 3
I mean, it’s I one thing I learned.
00:18:58 Speaker 3
I did a lot.
00:18:58 Speaker 3
I’ve done a lot of managing over time that that the truth is always.
00:19:04 Speaker 3
Almost always the better option. What this guy’s been around for a long time. You know, I could have said.
00:19:11 Speaker 3
Oh Gee, you know, I want to, you know, to make it easy on you.
00:19:14 Speaker 3
Well, he didn’t.
00:19:14 Speaker 3
Want to make it easy, so I told him the truth that that it was our judgment that that Peter was just better live and it was actually.
00:19:24 Speaker 3
Objectively true, I was actually prepared to run tape for him to show him the difference, but knolton being a very classy guy and said, well, I don’t agree with you, but.
00:19:38 Speaker 3
You’re the boss and I accept that decision and.
00:19:42 Speaker 3
And so we made that change.
00:19:44 Speaker 3
And so Peter did all of the specials while Knolton did the national.
00:19:48 Speaker 3
And then subsequently, as you may know, Knolton stepped aside from doing the national when it looked like Peter was going to end up at CBS and New York.
00:19:58 Speaker 3
They had offered him a job and Knowlton, in order to keep Peter in Canada, stepped aside from doing the national so Peter could do it, and Peter then stayed to.
00:20:09 Speaker 3
To carry on so.
00:20:11 Speaker 1
Also on the list.
00:20:13 Speaker 3
Wow, there are good people.
00:20:14 Speaker 3
To have so those you know, those were significant events.
00:20:20 Speaker 3
I think the national and the journal, the creation of a separate specials unit, which now it’s actually the, the the successor, I mean things have changed over the years, but the successor unit is run by a part-time teacher here, Mark Bogusch.
00:20:35 Speaker 3
Who is sort of the executive producer of?
00:20:38 Speaker 3
News specials for CBC Television now, and he teaches a broadcast news class for the undergraduates.
00:20:46 Speaker 3
I guess the J Reds have it.
00:20:48 Speaker 3
No, I don’t think so.
00:20:50 Speaker 3
But Mark and I go back a long time.
00:20:53 Speaker 3
He was a a trainee from Carlton.
00:20:56 Speaker 3
He’s a Carleton University graduate and he was a trainee.
00:20:59 Speaker 3
And Carlton in the Montreal newsroom when I was the assignment editor there and then I.
00:21:04 Speaker 3
You know, brought him, made sure he got to Toronto and kept an eye on him.
00:21:08 Speaker 3
He became a line of better in Montreal, but we got him to Toronto and, you know, made sure that he was doing significant jobs.
00:21:16 Speaker 3
He’s just brilliant, great, great programmer and journalist.
00:21:22 Speaker 1
Is goes back to.
00:21:23 Speaker 1
I’m in Montreal at CBC, and your specific question towards you is how is local TV news and CBC Montreal versus?
00:21:32 Speaker 3
Well, Kristen, when I first, when I first was recruited into the CBC, I was actually recruited in to do a radio show, and I did it for I was signed to a 13 week contract to try me out and they fired me at the end of 13 weeks.
00:21:50 Speaker 3
The ratings there was actually ratings taken during my time there and the ratings had gone up quite substantially from before.
00:21:58 Speaker 3
And I knew they really wanted to get rid of me when I went in to see the the woman.
00:22:03 Speaker 3
I won’t name her.
00:22:04 Speaker 3
She’s a poor woman.
00:22:06 Speaker 3
She was not very healthy, shall we say.
00:22:08 Speaker 3
OK.
00:22:10 Speaker 3
But she said all the ratings weren’t good enough.
00:22:12 Speaker 3
And I said, see, the ratings were the highest that shows ever.
00:22:14 Speaker 3
Had and she kind of paused.
00:22:17 Speaker 3
Obviously had not paid any attention to the ratings and said Oh well, you know, it’s it’s time for change.
00:22:23 Speaker 3
We don’t really pay.
00:22:24 Speaker 3
Attention to ratings.
00:22:25 Speaker 3
So I said OK.
00:22:26 Speaker 3
All right, so you want.
00:22:26 Speaker 3
To get rid of me, that’s fine.
00:22:30 Speaker 3
Interestingly, they actually signed me up to another 13 week contract while they were firing me because they didn’t have their another host lined up and I had so much fun doing it that I kept doing it.
00:22:40 Speaker 3
But along the way, CBC Television came and and asked me if I would do some stuff in TV, and I ended up in the television newsroom down there and at the time they were doing a 90 minute program.
00:22:53 Speaker 3
It was a big experiment.
00:22:54 Speaker 3
The city at 6 and it was 90 minute program, one of the greatest collections.
00:23:05 Speaker 3
That you’ll you would have found all the people in that newsroom went on to do really significant things.
00:23:11 Speaker 3
The program was awful.
00:23:14 Speaker 3
It’s one of those things.
00:23:16 Speaker 3
It was is my only insight into how a broad, you know, you know, a Broadway show that has all these great names attached.
00:23:22 Speaker 3
It can bomb right close after a night.
00:23:25 Speaker 3
Well, they had this show and it was 90 minutes and it just never quite worked.
00:23:30 Speaker 3
It was managed badly.
00:23:31 Speaker 3
They had two completely separate units, you know, news and current affairs were totally separate and the news did the news and current affairs did the current affairs.
00:23:39 Speaker 3
And you never got a sense that it was one program and.
00:23:42 Speaker 3
It’s just.
00:23:44 Speaker 3
Very difficult.
00:23:45 Speaker 3
They didn’t have the resources really to do 90 minutes, although because it was an experiment the CBC had added resources to Montreal.
00:23:53 Speaker 2
Just as a as a.
00:23:54 Speaker 3
The collection of people on this show in The Newsroom, they had Ellie Albaum, who went on to be the Ottawa Bureau chief for the CBC Television for 15 years, who is now a major advisor to Paul Martin, teaches at Carlton and the journalism.
00:24:13 Speaker 3
School, but also is a consultant from.
00:24:17 Speaker 3
Album ALBOIM major player he he works for Ernst Cliff Research as well of you know, and he he you’ll find him behind almost anything Martin has done for the last 10 years. He ran The Newsroom a wonderful broadcast.
00:24:36 Speaker 3
Journalist named Andy Little was the the major writer on the program.
00:24:42 Speaker 3
I I joined on, as you know, the assignment editor down down there.
00:24:48 Speaker 3
Mark Bogusch was a trainee in that newsroom.
00:24:50 Speaker 3
He went on and he’s now the executive producer of all specials.
00:24:55 Speaker 3
Jason Moskovitz was a trainee in that newsroom, and he went on to become the, you know, the parliamentary reporter.
00:25:02 Speaker 3
For radio and television, he’s now often the government.
00:25:06 Speaker 3
Somewhere, the producer of the whole hour was a guy named Mark Blandford, who became one of the best.
00:25:16 Speaker 3
Drama producers for CBC Television, the the executive producer, was went on to be the deputy head of current affairs for CBC Television.
00:25:30 Speaker 3
And you know the some of the reporters are Tim Knight who’s who does a lot of training around the world these days was there.
00:25:38 Speaker 3
And Doreen Kays went off to work for ABC News.
00:25:41 Speaker 3
And they’re just, you go through the roster.
00:25:43 Speaker 3
These were all people who then went on to make a significant contribution to other things.
00:25:49 Speaker 3
But the show just never came together.
00:25:53 Speaker 3
I think it lasted for two seasons.
00:25:56 Speaker 3
I came in sort of part way through the season, one I think there was another season and then they lapsed back into one hour shows basically run by The Newsroom after that.
00:26:08 Speaker 3
Interestingly, when I came back, I left Montreal to go to Toronto and I ended up back in Montreal.
00:26:12 Speaker 3
As executive producer of this upper hour show and I integrated everything I ran the show.
00:26:21 Speaker 3
Yeah, this is CBC.
00:26:22 Speaker 3
And I ran it.
00:26:23 Speaker 3
Now, during those days, CFCF was the.
00:26:29 Speaker 3
Local force in English television journalism, they had they had by the time they were finished with the CBC, was finished with this 90 minute program.
00:26:41 Speaker 3
The margin was something like 12 to one CF was way far ahead.
00:26:46 Speaker 3
Their journalism was not bad. It was pretty solid, nowhere near as extensive or as the CBC’s but they just were much better at relating to the audience they had, you know, some solid announcers who were kind of audience friendly.
00:27:06 Speaker 3
Very active in the Community, things like that.
00:27:08 Speaker 3
The CBC always gave the appearance of being somewhat remote and aloof.
00:27:13 Speaker 3
Also, one of the big problems is that the English CBC was buried within Raja Canada so.
00:27:20 Speaker 3
So you even physically the audience could not get in touch with it.
00:27:25 Speaker 3
And if your audience are a bunch of unilingual English speakers from, you know, Montreal from Westmount or NDG or Montreal West or the West Island, you know, trying to get through the the bureaucracy or even the front door.
00:27:41 Speaker 3
Raja Canada was not easy.
00:27:44 Speaker 3
So there was a remoteness there.
00:27:46 Speaker 3
When I took over the.
00:27:48 Speaker 3
Show I decided that I was going to try to take a run at CFCF.
00:27:52 Speaker 3
They weren’t just going to give up, and in fact, I think without in any way endangering our news values, we managed over the course of the two years that I ran, it ran the program to cut the margin to about 6:00 to 1:00.
00:28:07 Speaker 3
So which I thought was pretty good.
00:28:08 Speaker 3
Started at 12 to one, we’re in heading in the right direction now.
00:28:11 Speaker 3
One I will admit.
00:28:13 Speaker 3
That one of the steps we took was to hire their anchor, but he regrettably died after the first season.
00:28:21 Speaker 3
He had a heart attack and died, and so we had another anchor, but it it’s the, you know, the ratings held up so.
00:28:29 Speaker 3
I think we showed that it was possible to make a dent in CFCF.
00:28:35 Speaker 3
No, I choose.
00:28:36 Speaker 3
We don’t know what the ratings are these days or who’s ahead and who’s behind.
00:28:39 Speaker 3
But in those days, it was strictly CFCF with the CBC.
00:28:42 Speaker 3
Way up the track we became, I think a little more accessible to the public, but still.
00:28:51 Speaker 3
Kept the emphasis on high level journalism while we’re there, so.
00:28:57 Speaker 3
That that was it.
00:28:57 Speaker 3
On the television side, there was no other force present.
00:29:01 Speaker 1
Was there any specific events at that time that brought you closer like that?
00:29:06 Speaker 1
You did better coverage?
00:29:06 Speaker 1
Of or. Well, we.
00:29:08 Speaker 3
Did we started doing tried to do specials better?
00:29:11 Speaker 3
I remember we oh boy.
00:29:15 Speaker 3
Well, I’m just trying to think back.
00:29:16 Speaker 3
I mean, it’s been so many that I’m trying to think of when.
00:29:19 Speaker 3
I was running.
00:29:19 Speaker 3
The local versus when I was running the national, I know.
00:29:23 Speaker 3
Remember, we’re doing a leadership convention in Quebec City.
00:29:27 Speaker 3
When it was the one that selected Claude Ryan who just died.
00:29:32 Speaker 3
In that one, there was actually a strike in the middle of it.
00:29:35 Speaker 3
The announcers went on strike in the.
00:29:36 Speaker 3
Middle of the.
00:29:37 Speaker 3
Special and that was, oh, well, we filled in as best we could.
00:29:42 Speaker 3
Look, I think they settled it before the end of the convention.
00:29:45 Speaker 3
UM.
00:29:47 Speaker 3
Must have been Claude Ryan.
00:29:50 Speaker 3
Yeah. So the 19.
00:29:53 Speaker 3
When did I go back there?
00:29:59 Speaker 3
Oh, I.
00:29:59 Speaker 3
I’m trying to think of when, when what time period that was.
00:30:08 Speaker 3
So somewhere between 76 and 79, I don’t know. I think it was. Must have been.
00:30:13 Speaker 3
Close Ryan.
00:30:16 Speaker 3
There was that it was a little more peace with the PQ was in power, so it was interesting being the, you know, the Crown broadcaster dealing with running.
00:30:27 Speaker 3
Back in his his folk I had covered Levac earlier in the magazine business.
00:30:34 Speaker 3
So if we we I think did pretty well the our two Quebec City reporters were Jason Moskovitz who went on to further start them at the network and a fellow named Tom Kennedy who did very well at CBC and then switched over to CTV.
00:30:50 Speaker 3
You know, and the really good smart people who we tried to cover the PQ, my instructions to them went to play it straight that we are not propagandists for federalism.
00:31:01 Speaker 3
We’re journalists and you cover it as you, you know, as you find it.
00:31:05 Speaker 3
Don’t you know you don’t get in arguments?
00:31:07 Speaker 3
You know, our job is not to argue the case for federalism or separatism, but to cover what’s going on now.
00:31:13 Speaker 3
This got us in trouble, of course, with the management of the CBC.
00:31:17 Speaker 3
Some elements thought that we were supposed to be advocates for federalism.
00:31:22 Speaker 3
Because at the time, CBCS Charter actually said that we were to contribute to national unity.
00:31:29 Speaker 3
Now my argument both as a senior network person and as a sort of senior local person, was that our contribution to national unity, I got to go our contribution to national unity was covering things fully and fairly that that’s what news is supposed to do, that it wouldn’t be contributing to national unity in the broadest sense.
00:31:50 Speaker 3
For us to skew our coverage or to avoid coverage covering things which might be unpleasant to certain sections of the Pope.
00:31:59 Speaker 3
And this made us very unpopular with some of the managers as the boards of more like the Board of Directors who actually thought that that we should be aggressively pushing federalism rather than being fair to the the provincial government, because the the Patty Quebecois did some very good things while it was in.
00:32:20 Speaker 3
Power things that the public liked and we felt it was our job to point that out, not to continually denigrate them just because of some of their positions.
00:32:30 Speaker 3
So that whole dynamic and that went on through both my local and national experience, how to cover 2 referenda?
00:32:40 Speaker 3
And governments in Quebec, whose purpose some people saw as the destruction of the country, you know how to cover them fairly and with some balance, a very difficult thing to do, which we’ll have to talk.
00:32:55 Speaker 3
About the next time.
00:32:56 Speaker 1
Don’t worry, you can run for it.
00:33:11 Speaker 3
Testing 1234 testing, 1234.
00:33:20 Speaker 1
OK.
00:33:21 Speaker 1
So the first question of one of the ones we had missed last time was your reaction to trend to the recent trends in news gathering and present presentation early.
00:33:32
I’m talking about radio television.
00:33:33 Speaker 1
And both it’s broadcast so positive and negative.
00:33:38
And what do you?
00:33:39 Speaker 1
Mean just overtime, like how it’s change?
00:33:44 Speaker 3
OK.
00:33:45 Speaker 3
Well, there, been there been some significant changes in news gathering and presentation both in radio and television.
00:33:54 Speaker 3
In radio.
00:33:57 Speaker 3
Particularly in CBC Radio, I think the the trend has been largely good.
00:34:04 Speaker 3
That during my time over the last.
00:34:07 Speaker 3
30 years we have gone from using rather pedantic.
00:34:17 Speaker 3
Just voiced reports where a single reporter would just talk for a minute and 1/2 or two minutes to using a much more complete.
00:34:29 Speaker 3
Package of of on scene sound actuality sound as they call it more interviews and presenting information more as a package.
00:34:41 Speaker 3
In some ways radio learned a bit from television.
00:34:46 Speaker 3
I think they learned some good stuff about presentation.
00:34:49 Speaker 3
From television.
00:34:51 Speaker 3
But particularly CBC Radio didn’t commit the bad stuff, so they kept the the the emphasis on the content, but tried to put the listener more on the scene than than before.
00:35:07 Speaker 3
Before it was presentation that you just presented information to the.
00:35:11 Speaker 3
Listener, I think more recently you’ve seen reporters try to involve the listener in the story by having the sound and the feeling of what of of the location and of what was taking place.
00:35:24 Speaker 3
So in radio you can say there’s been quite a positive development when you hear, you know.
00:35:29 Speaker 3
To hear some of the really top notch reports on CBC Radio you.
00:35:35 Speaker 3
You can.
00:35:36 Speaker 3
You can note that some of that took place because of the improvement in technology in the last 30 to 50 years, right?
00:35:43 Speaker 3
I mean, as I went from big bulky tape recorders to very easily managed smaller tape recorders and now more recently digital recorders.
00:35:56 Speaker 3
The editing is much easier than it used to be, so you can create very quickly create a package, a news item which can put you on the scene in television.
00:36:09 Speaker 3
UM.
00:36:11 Speaker 3
We’ve seen some of the same things happen as we’ve as we’ve moved from from the early days of film into videotape.
00:36:19 Speaker 3
That was a major change in in news gathering.
00:36:24 Speaker 3
And I happened to be for certainly Canadian terms sort of on the forefront of that because the Ottawa Bureau, the Parliamentary Bureau of the CBC, was the first first location to go from from film to videotape.
00:36:38 Speaker 3
I happened to be running the Bureau at the time we did that and it was interesting to see the.
00:36:44 Speaker 3
Instant change.
00:36:46 Speaker 3
In a purely technical sense, it was actually a change in grammar.
00:36:51 Speaker 3
If I could use that term to refer to the grammar of the visual image with film.
00:36:59 Speaker 3
It looked unreal, right?
00:37:01 Speaker 3
I mean, you knew it was film.
00:37:02 Speaker 3
Anybody at home would perceive it as as a recording, so you could edit items in a certain way, which didn’t follow a logical sequence.
00:37:14 Speaker 3
Particularly they could you could cut it that way because people knew it wasn’t real.
00:37:20 Speaker 3
But as you introduced videotape all of a sudden.
00:37:24 Speaker 3
Since it looked live, it looked real.
00:37:27 Speaker 3
People were used to sporting events, they were used to recording, but recordings that were sequential and use things happened after one thing happened after another.
00:37:37 Speaker 3
So all we had to instantly change the grammar in our minds of how we cut things.
00:37:44 Speaker 3
To accommodate the fact that the the material looked live and I know it’s hard for a younger person to understand that, but it’s really the difference between film and video.
00:37:58 Speaker 3
On a news item was rather significant.
00:38:01 Speaker 2
So that was that.
00:38:02 Speaker 3
Was one thing.
00:38:03 Speaker 3
The video the videotape gave us the opportunity to do similar things to what we had done in in, in radio.
00:38:12 Speaker 3
Now going, you know, there’s sort of going back and forth.
00:38:15 Speaker 3
You could very quickly gather images and sound made sound a lot easier.
00:38:21 Speaker 3
Here in film you had to record good sound separately, right?
00:38:26 Speaker 3
You recorded it as a separate item.
00:38:28 Speaker 3
You know, you would shoot.
00:38:30 Speaker 3
It was called double system film.
00:38:32 Speaker 3
Where the the, the, the, the.
00:38:34 Speaker 3
The good recorded sound was separate and you had to edit them separately and it was very complicated or.
00:38:41 Speaker 3
You could.
00:38:41 Speaker 3
Take the sound off the magnetic stripe on the edge of the film.
00:38:45 Speaker 3
But with videotape?
00:38:47 Speaker 3
Every item became what we called a triple system.
00:38:51 Speaker 3
You could you had image, you could have the actuality soundtrack, and you had a narration track every time, and it was a major, major change in how you presented material.
00:39:04 Speaker 3
The quality just jumped up.
00:39:06 Speaker 3
But you know, was it?
00:39:07 Speaker 3
You couldn’t even give a percentage to it.
00:39:09 Speaker 3
It was so, so different and so much better.
00:39:13 Speaker 3
And there was then very little excuse for you not being able to present a fairly intelligent package to to the listener.
00:39:21 Speaker 3
So there was a big emphasis on better sound of.
00:39:25 Speaker 3
Of cutting things in a logical sequence and of scripting.
00:39:31 Speaker 3
Carefully to to that because the the voice the reporters voice then became much more part of an integrated package of picture and sound rather than just be the voice over a series of of almost unrelated images.
00:39:47 Speaker 3
So the challenge for the, for the, for the writer.
00:39:53 Speaker 3
Right to under score the pictures and to integrate the sound rather than imposing the voice on top of it. Major, major change in presentation style.
00:40:05 Speaker 3
What has happened since then? So videotape in Canada, anyway, was introduced largely around 1970.
00:40:13 Speaker 3
7677.
00:40:17 Speaker 3
What we’ve seen happen since then, of course, is newscasts becoming.
00:40:26 Speaker 3
Not shorter than the newscasts have become shorter.
00:40:28 Speaker 3
The items have become shorter, certainly on the CBC.
00:40:32 Speaker 3
We used to do fairly long items, but I’ve noticed since I’ve left since I left daily television anyway, that both the interview set.
00:40:45 Speaker 3
Clips and the items have become have become.
00:40:51 Speaker 3
And they now, of course, are presented in quite a different style.
00:40:55 Speaker 3
The CBC has adopted the style of some of the American networks where the anchor becomes the central figure.
00:41:05 Speaker 3
We used to view the anchor as somebody who was presenting material, you know, queueing material for the audiences benefit.
00:41:16 Speaker 3
But now you see the reporters interacting through the anchor as if they are reporting for the anchor who happens to be there as our representative.
00:41:26 Speaker 3
I mean, that’s it’s a certain presentation.
00:41:28 Speaker 3
Style, which has become quite prevalent.
00:41:33 Speaker 3
I’m sure it will pass in a couple of years.
00:41:35 Speaker 3
We’ll go back something else, but it’s it.
00:41:37 Speaker 3
It really is noteworthy because it’s a major change, you know?
00:41:40 Speaker 3
Walter Cronkite used to say, you know, here.
00:41:43 Speaker 3
Here is this reporter, and the reporter would report and sign off.
00:41:47 Speaker 3
Same with the CBC.
00:41:49 Speaker 3
Even when Peter started Peter Mansbridge, he would say, here’s a reporter and the reporter would sign off, say, Don Murray, CBC News, Baghdad.
00:41:58 Speaker 3
Now the reporters come to the end of their report and they throwback to Peter, not to the audience.
00:42:05 Speaker 3
Right.
00:42:05 Speaker 3
They throw Peter and Peter may have something to say or he may not.
00:42:10 Speaker 3
Excuse me.
00:42:10 Speaker 3
CTV is using a similar kind of system.
00:42:14 Speaker 3
Interesting change in in perception as to what’s important and they they they have judged.
00:42:23 Speaker 3
That the anchor needs to be involved with that and function as the prime interlocutor of those things.
00:42:33 Speaker 3
I think that’s.
00:42:33 Speaker 3
A subject that can be debated somewhat.
00:42:38 Speaker 3
I actually would have a bigger problem with CTV than with CBC.
00:42:44 Speaker 3
Or another network say than the CBC.
00:42:46 Speaker 3
I mean Peter is a very skilled working journalist, so.
00:42:52 Speaker 3
The use of him as an interlocutor is not bizarre.
00:42:56 Speaker 3
Other networks often have people who are not.
00:43:01 Speaker 3
As skilled journalists and they are really just.
00:43:04 Speaker 3
You know presenters, so involving them is really artificial.
00:43:10 Speaker 3
So I mean, you can make your judgments on that, but anyway it’s a significant recent change in the style of presentation I have to, I guess, bemoan the fact that study after study shows that the length of clips in items have become shorter and shorter over time.
00:43:36 Speaker 3
The lengths of clips have become shorter and shorter.
00:43:39 Speaker 3
This usually comes up especially during election campaigns where people you know, some academic gets a grant to study this, and in both the US and Canada, the average length of time that a subject.
00:43:49 Speaker 3
To speak on a news item has gone from, you know, back in the old days, you know, when I when I was active in Daily News where you might have a clip that would be 30 seconds or something like that, they’re now like.
00:44:04 Speaker 3
12108 I mean it’s just.
00:44:07 Speaker 3
These tiny little clips there is a belief.
00:44:12 Speaker 3
That seems evident.
00:44:13 Speaker 3
Some people express it directly and some just show it by their actions that the audience.
00:44:21 Speaker 3
Cannot sustain its attention.
00:44:24 Speaker 3
Now that is a belief that I fundamentally disagree with.
00:44:27 Speaker 3
I have found just from experience that that the audiences are pretty smart and if you tell them interesting stories in an interesting way that they’ll follow you along and they they you know, they.
00:44:40 Speaker 3
And get bored if you choose a bad clip, they may, but if if it’s an interesting person saying something interesting.
00:44:48 Speaker 3
Yeah, this is a version to talking heads on television.
00:44:52 Speaker 3
Oh no, it’s only talking head.
00:44:54 Speaker 3
Well, I’ve always found talking heads interesting heads to be.
00:44:59 Speaker 3
Quite fascinating.
00:45:00 Speaker 3
So I think that’s a.
00:45:02 Speaker 3
It’s a misperception that broadcasting people work themselves into that what’s what’s boring.
00:45:10 Speaker 3
What boring and boring talking heads, but interesting people are endlessly fascinating.
00:45:18 Speaker 3
So I I think that is something we’ll look to looking down to the future, how is television a very powerful medium going to handle that, that tension between.
00:45:31 Speaker 3
Presentation side and the editorial side, the more we let people who are only expert in presentation dictate.
00:45:41 Speaker 3
The editorial content the worse it’s going to get, but good journalists have to good journalists who understand the grammar of broadcasting have to be the ones to to make those decisions and not be defensive about.
00:45:55 Speaker 3
Running stuff longer of not being stampeded by the latest trends.
00:46:02 Speaker 3
All right, let’s.
00:46:04 Speaker 1
What about you, kind of.
00:46:05 Speaker 1
Covered this a little bit significant.
00:46:07 Speaker 1
Technological developments you were saying in radio where?
00:46:09
It gets what’s going on?
00:46:13 Speaker 3
Well, quite a bit of news.
00:46:15 Speaker 3
The as the cameras have become smaller, lighter and cheaper. When when we switch to E&G the the cameras.
00:46:26 Speaker 3
That we purchased. I remember there were RCA TK76 cameras. I believe they cost $175,000 or something like that. I mean really expensive 150,000 I can’t.
00:46:39 Speaker 3
To go back and remind myself, but very expensive.
00:46:43 Speaker 3
And of course now you can shoot broadcast quality stuff on a camera that costs a couple of 1000 bucks.
00:46:50 Speaker 3
So the economics of it have have changed where we used to have these, they were lightweight relatively, but then videotape.
00:47:00 Speaker 3
But they’re very expensive, so the costs have come down. You now can buy something at RadioShack, which will shoot pretty close to broadcast quality. You know, digital camera.
00:47:11 Speaker 3
Digital or digital, I mean, you can get a more sophisticated model, but my the one I have at home which I think cost me.
00:47:20 Speaker 3
800 bucks or something like that.
00:47:23 Speaker 3
And is now.
00:47:24 Speaker 3
I mean I bought it a.
00:47:25 Speaker 3
Couple of years ago.
00:47:26 Speaker 3
We’ll shoot stuff which will, you know, you could get by with on television. So certainly for $10,000.
00:47:35 Speaker 3
You know you’re you’re laughing.
00:47:38 Speaker 3
So that’s a major change.
00:47:39 Speaker 3
The the fact that individuals can shoot broadcast quality, material, technical, technically technical quality is a is a major, major change.
00:47:51 Speaker 3
You know going from film to videotape and now from videotape to to lightweight digital cameras.
00:47:59 Speaker 3
Major, major change so cameras can get to more places.
00:48:03 Speaker 3
The biggest change besides the that is the ability to broadcast at first by satellite and now by by Internet.
00:48:15 Speaker 3
Or to transmit it from anywhere in the world.
00:48:19 Speaker 3
Basically I mean, you can if you’re in a place where you can’t.
00:48:24 Speaker 3
Connect by wireless Internet.
00:48:26 Speaker 3
You can usually get a very lightweight portable satellite dish, and you can hit the bird from the middle of the jungle right from the desert from wherever.
00:48:38 Speaker 3
So the ability to broadcast live.
00:48:42 Speaker 3
Or close to life.
00:48:44 Speaker 3
From anywhere in the world is astonishing.
00:48:46 Speaker 3
I mean, and that’s taken place just in my professional lifetime.
00:48:51 Speaker 3
We’ve gone from, oh, we can’t.
00:48:54 Speaker 3
You know we can’t get out of there because we don’t have the equipment to a single reporter being able to carry enough gear.
00:49:04 Speaker 3
To get on the air from any place in the world.
00:49:07 Speaker 3
I mean it’s that is just astonishing.
00:49:11 Speaker 3
So that’s a that’s a big, big change.
00:49:14 Speaker 3
Both radio and television, I mean, you could do it on radio usually, but now you can now broadcast or transmit I should say and broadcast digital images from virtually anywhere.
00:49:26 Speaker 3
Well, it has.
00:49:29 Speaker 3
Because live now drives out report, right?
00:49:34 Speaker 3
I mean, this is not necessarily a good thing.
00:49:38 Speaker 3
The ability to go live from anywhere has meant that people have gone live from anywhere.
00:49:46 Speaker 3
Sometimes it’s really significant news.
00:49:48 Speaker 3
Sometimes it’s not.
00:49:50 Speaker 3
Sometimes it’s in context.
00:49:52 Speaker 3
Quite often it’s not.
00:49:55 Speaker 3
So this is this is a problem.
00:49:56 Speaker 3
It has reduced the time for considered journalism.
00:50:02 Speaker 3
Journalists are supposed to be not just transmitters of stuff they’re supposed to be people who observe.
00:50:11 Speaker 3
Synthesize, analyze and then communicate the material.
00:50:16 Speaker 3
Trying to put it into some kind of context.
00:50:20 Speaker 3
Technical ability to get it on the air instantly from anywhere has meant that journalists more and more are being pushed to put stuff on the air and then to very frequently to pontificate about it with very little background.
00:50:37 Speaker 3
So I think that it this this has been a problem that we are still grappling with of those who are involved in broadcasting, how to find that.
00:50:48 Speaker 3
That way of living, how to find that method and process by which we can do live stuff but also give journalists time and space to consider to analyze and to put into context.
00:51:06 Speaker 3
So far, the live is winning.
00:51:09 Speaker 3
I mean, we’ve seen it in the war.
00:51:12 Speaker 3
The Iraq war, particularly with the Americans, the Canadians actually have been better at it.
00:51:17 Speaker 3
The CBC, I know I may sound like a CBC apologist here, but I, you know, I was part of it for a long time, and I’m proud to say that the CBC.
00:51:26 Speaker 3
Still stops and thinks about its journalism.
00:51:30 Speaker 3
They make mistakes.
00:51:31 Speaker 3
You know, we’ve all.
00:51:31 Speaker 3
You know, I made a gazillion when I was.
00:51:33 Speaker 3
There, but they still stopped to think about the journalism the American networks increasingly, unfortunately do not. The pressures of having too many live 24 hour networks are really hurting journalism, I think.
00:51:53 Speaker 3
In the long run.
00:51:55 Speaker 3
The the pressure to get stuff on even when you really don’t know what it is, it’s gone all the way from those ridiculous police chases in California in particular.
00:52:06 Speaker 3
But you know, they’ll be covering live.
00:52:09 Speaker 3
The police chase even and armed robbery suspect you know it.
00:52:13 Speaker 3
They’re it.
00:52:13 Speaker 3
This is not.
00:52:15 Speaker 3
International news to be carried on CNN.
00:52:17 Speaker 3
I mean there’s it’s, I mean it’s not it’s it’s barely a local story, right.
00:52:22 Speaker 3
I mean, it really is.
00:52:23 Speaker 3
But you’ll you’ll see that you’ll see then people blow themselves away on live television, which happened in California.
00:52:30 Speaker 3
Chase of that very kind.
00:52:31 Speaker 3
It was a it was not a national story.
00:52:33 Speaker 3
And the guy.
00:52:34 Speaker 3
You know, blew his brains out when he.
00:52:36 Speaker 3
Was surrounded by.
00:52:37 Speaker 3
The police all over, you know, they were interrupting, Mr.
00:52:40 Speaker 3
Not Mr.
00:52:41 Speaker 3
dress up, but you know Sesame Street or something was in the morning and all these little kitties watching this guy.
00:52:46
Blow his brains out.
00:52:49 Speaker 3
So the that sense of what’s what is worth carrying live.
00:52:56 Speaker 3
Don’t just carry it, because you can make a judgment.
00:52:59 Speaker 3
That’s what journalists do.
00:53:00 Speaker 3
They make judgments.
00:53:02 Speaker 3
That’s been lost.
00:53:04 Speaker 3
So those, that’s the technical side, the radio, we talked about the the lightweight has really been a a boon to good radio.
00:53:14 Speaker 3
Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer people doing radio news in North America, and I think we may have touched on this before the.
00:53:23 Speaker 3
Changes in the rules by the Federal Communications Commission in the States and the CRC here.
00:53:30 Speaker 3
Have meant that local stations are no longer forced to have newsrooms as a public service, so the number of local newsrooms in the US I so I I.
00:53:41 Speaker 3
Should have my.
00:53:42 Speaker 3
Numbers at hand, but if you you can do the research, they have plummeted.
00:53:47 Speaker 3
I mean it’s it’s gone from.
00:53:49 Speaker 3
Where every station had some kind of news presence to where now most stations do not.
00:53:55 Speaker 3
They just don’t have of their own news presence.
00:53:58 Speaker 3
They may pick up a service.
00:54:01 Speaker 3
They may not, but that’s that’s the deregulation that’s taking place.
00:54:06 Speaker 3
So that’s really a shame.
00:54:07 Speaker 3
It just when it is possible to cheaply gather significant information relatively easily, more and more places are not doing it.
00:54:26 Speaker 3
Oh jeez.
00:54:28 Speaker 3
You know, if I didn’t have to dig them out, I mean, I I have some photos of me during the kidnapping crisis in Quebec and, you know, wandering around looking for.
00:54:37 Speaker 3
You know, letters from the kidnappers and the FLQ.
00:54:43 Speaker 3
And I’ve I’ve been around and about for a lot of things, although I’ve tended to be behind the scenes for most of them and.
00:54:49 Speaker 3
That’s I was a boss.
00:54:51 Speaker 3
For significant periods of time.
00:54:55 Speaker 3
Well, I have a video of almost all my shows that I did.
00:54:58 Speaker 3
You know they when I was doing media, I did shows about the media.
00:55:02 Speaker 3
So we have those and.
00:55:04 Speaker 3
Uhm, and I’ll have old news items I did to Margaret Trudeau and Margaret Trudeau finally dumped the Trudeau when they split up.
00:55:14 Speaker 3
I was.
00:55:14 Speaker 3
I was running the Ottawa Bureau, but none of the reporters want to do the story and we just.
00:55:18 Speaker 3
There was none of them wanted to do it.
00:55:20 Speaker 3
So I was the Bureau.
00:55:21 Speaker 3
Chief and I, I ended.
00:55:23 Speaker 3
Up having to do this story, you know.
00:55:25 Speaker 3
And I was.
00:55:27 Speaker 3
It was very embarrassing.
00:55:28 Speaker 3
Somebody said I’ll have to check this.
00:55:30 Speaker 3
Somebody said there was actually a reference to me in the Trudeau miniseries.
00:55:35 Speaker 3
And I didn’t see, I only saw a couple of the.
00:55:37 Speaker 3
Episodes which I.
00:55:38 Speaker 3
Thought were brilliant, I thought.
00:55:39 Speaker 3
But Colin Fiore was come.
00:55:41 Speaker 3
Fiore is was wonderful, but somebody swears that during the Margaret thing somebody the dialogue makes reference to me. Now it actually is true that I called the Prime Minister’s office and said look at, I need a.
00:55:55 Speaker 3
Comment on that and Pat Gossage, who was his press aide at the time, remember, reminds me of this all the time.
00:56:02 Speaker 3
Every time I see him.
00:56:04 Speaker 3
How they nobody wanted to talk to me.
00:56:07 Speaker 3
And you know he and I had to negotiate for some kind of response.
00:56:10 Speaker 3
And then I did a stand up in front of 24 Sussex Drive I.
00:56:14 Speaker 3
Probably have it around somewhere.
00:56:17 Speaker 3
So if you want, I’ll, I’ll noodle about that a little bit, see if I can find something.
00:56:27 Speaker 3
OK, yeah, I’ll look.
00:56:29 Speaker 3
I’ll look around.
00:56:31 Speaker 3
That’s it.