00:13:00.720And I think his approach to world affairs and domestic affairs seemed to give people permission to go a little farther than they had been going.
00:13:14.580There were all kinds of, oh, what do you call them, social misdeeds that people could commit.
00:13:20.600But it's one thing to sort of criticize people for it.
00:13:23.760But it was the full consequences of it.
00:13:26.760I mean, what was that, the kids from the school in Kentucky and the states who had the, I can't remember their name right now, but that kind of went viral.
00:13:39.080And even though, I mean, the main kid in that, I think, probably doesn't have to work a day in his life with the settlements he got from the lawsuits he filed.
00:13:48.000But people were constantly trying to accuse each other.
00:13:51.180And it was very, you know, Orwellian in a sense, that word gets overused, but kind of Stalinist, where people are, even goes back to the French Revolution when, you know, j'accuse, right?
00:14:03.240And people were, there was sort of a terror going on.
00:14:07.680Ben Mulroney can probably speak to that.
00:14:12.260And I don't know exactly where it came from, other than there had been this sort of long march through the institutions that had been going on for about the previous 20, 25 years.
00:14:25.980So young people were coming out of schools with this attitude.
00:14:30.000Young people were graduating from university.
00:14:43.500I mean, the National Post initially threw Rex Murphy under the bus for saying, and if you go online, you can find that column, when he said he didn't think Canada was an institutionally racist country.
00:16:18.940You know, there used to be so many journalists have told this story many times that when I graduated J school from BCIT back in the 90s, there were two full-time salaried paid reporters.
00:16:30.360Reporters, like paying your mortgage level paid, who worked at the Vancouver Sun only on softwood lumber.
00:16:51.860And they're younger and younger and younger and coming out of these universities with journalism degrees without a lot of experience.
00:16:59.460So it kind of created this perfect storm for the government to back up the money truck and say, OK, we're going to save you.
00:17:07.940And now a lot of them, unfortunately, either one way or the other, are dependent upon government funding, meaning they're getting paid by the government.
00:17:19.540Do you see more people cluing into the fact that a lot of mainstream media are getting paid by the government and rejecting them because of it?
00:18:06.860Those are merely the vehicles that carry journalism.
00:18:10.400There are lots of other ways to deliver journalism.
00:18:13.200And the 21st century is discovering that there are a lot, like you mentioned, a rewrite.
00:18:18.960I can go on Substack and read all kinds of good commentary from experts in the fields, not journalism's columnists trying to find expertise in them.
00:19:52.340And they're just not going to believe you.
00:19:53.280And there's some other practices like the use of unnamed sources and that sort of stuff, which is very liberally applied these days, which have declined.
00:20:01.180So there's definitely been a decline in the ethics and the application of what were the ethics of journalism organizations in the past.
00:20:11.840So going along with that trend you're concerned about, censorship, I'm not sure that we can trust them to defend our right to freedom of speech anymore.
00:20:25.040And journalism, trust in journalism is plummeting.
00:20:28.800I read a recent, it was an Edelman survey on trust.
00:20:35.060And trust in journalism, I think it was something like 50, high 50%, close to 60% of Canadians believe that journalists are deliberately saying things they know not to be true in order to mislead people.
00:20:49.960This isn't flubbing something or getting a date wrong or accidentally mispronouncing somebody's name, which all journalists do.
00:21:25.360It wouldn't matter if the dearly departed Rex Murphy, OK, we're delivering the news and Don Cherry, we're delivering the sports.
00:21:34.120If they're on direct government payroll, that's the problem.
00:21:38.000It's the perception of bias that destroys trust because it's a conflict of interest.
00:21:44.160No matter how much they try to guard against it, it's an inherent conflict of interest, very similar to ethics.
00:21:50.760The perception of corruption is what gets you.
00:21:53.220And so this is where, again, I plead with every journalist who's in the field right now who can actually have some influence over their employers.
00:22:18.440I sometimes get updates, you know, from the CRTC, which you were also a member of, I will point out.
00:22:24.180Again, folks, this is why you need to go subscribe to his sub stack called The Rewrite, because he's got a lifetime of experience in this.
00:22:31.160When it comes to the Online Harms Act, though, this is the current new law that is still in play.
00:22:37.120Now, for folks who forget what it was, it's kind of this double-headed law.
00:22:42.880One of them was what any normal person would want to do, was to protect young people online from being disgusting imagery being shared, all that stuff.
00:22:52.720Any reasonable person would say, sure, tighten all of those laws.
00:22:55.980But there's an element to it about so-called hate speech or online expression of harm or intent that was really alarming a lot of people who value free expression because it was punishing people for tweets, right, going back and forth in time.
00:23:14.300I saw that it sounds like the minister responsible for this is going to be Frazier going forward.
00:23:21.760Where do you see the current Online Harms Act going?
00:23:25.060Do you think they're going to split the bill and they're going to get rid of the online censorship element?
00:23:30.680I don't think they will because, well, it depends.
00:23:34.780The last government, Trudeau's government, was very susceptible to lobbyists.
00:23:39.520And the Online Harms Act, and it's had two or three different efforts to get through, was pushed for, some of the groups pushing for it a lot were
00:23:53.160religious minority groups, Muslims and Jewish groups as well, who felt they were being subjected to prejudicial statements online and wanted that to stop and that sort of thing.
00:24:07.160There are ways, I think, to address those issues, civil actions and that sort of stuff, if you behave.
00:24:14.740But what gets really tricky, as you say, is when you get into this area of hate speech.
00:24:19.260So do you want to end up where, and this is where I'm concerned about the Carney's sort of connection, you know, admiration for things that are British, is that the rules in England right now,
00:24:34.840you can get arrested or you can certainly get visited by the police if you say something that makes somebody feel uncomfortable online,
00:24:45.220that they interpret it as racist or that.
00:24:48.640It doesn't even have to be overtly racist.
00:24:52.780But I am hopeful that they will be practical and they will do things like deep fakes, for instance, you know,
00:25:00.000turning women into online porn stars like that, that all they have to do is amend section 162 of the criminal code,
00:25:07.580which is all about sharing of intimate images without permission, to include deep fakes there.