Western Standard - Fawcett v. Fildebrandt： Can & Should Canada’s Legacy Media Be Saved？

00:00:00.000 Music

00:00:00.500 Good day and welcome to Fawcett v. Fildebrandt. I'm Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western

00:00:17.380 Standard, and this is the very first episode, our first, well, I guess to borrow a term from

00:00:22.980 our first guest, Jen Gerson, experimental episode to see how well it goes. I'm going to be joined

00:00:29.040 by my regular co-host, Max Fawcett, who is the lead columnist for Canada's National Observer.

00:00:35.120 This began when first Max invited me on his show, Maxed Out, and we were expected to disagree and

00:00:43.940 be assholes to one another, and it had a surprisingly civil and fruitful conversation.

00:00:49.480 And I reciprocated, hoping that maybe I'd get a rise out of him, and I failed as well. 0.99

00:00:53.520 Coming at things from different angles, but unfortunately managing to find more common

00:00:59.700 ground than we had hoped. But we put our heads together and thought, you know, kind of reminisced

00:01:04.960 about the old firing line show that, no, not firing line, crossfire that CNN had on, and we thought

00:01:11.060 that, well, Canada and the West could use something like that. So that's what we're doing here today

00:01:17.240 with our first episode of Fawcett versus Phil de Brandt. Our first show is going to deal with

00:01:24.560 one big question, which will obviously have a lot of smaller questions as a part of it. Our first

00:01:28.340 question on our first episode is, can and should Canada's legacy media be saved? Before we get into

00:01:35.680 that, though, I'm going to hand it over to my co-host, Max Fawcett of Canada's National Observer.

00:01:40.700 Thank you, Derek. Pleasure to be here. This is going to be interesting. See if we can find a way

00:01:48.960 to disagree a little more loudly than perhaps we have in the past. But we have someone here,

00:01:55.480 I think that both of us have probably disagreed with on more than one occasion.

00:02:00.160 Jen Gerson needs no introduction, but I will give her one anyways. Don't worry, don't look scared.

00:02:06.100 Um, she is a, I would say, kind of perfect blend of new media and old media. So Jen got her start 0.62

00:02:14.720 in the mainstream media, uh, working for the Calgary Herald, working for Post Media, um, and still

00:02:22.760 keeps a toe in those waters to this day as, uh, what's the official, you're a part-time columnist

00:02:28.620 with the Globe and Mail? Contributing columnist with the Globe and Mail. Contributing columnist with

00:02:31.740 the Globe and Mail. Show up at the CBC on occasion when they forget that they don't like me anymore.

00:02:35.200 There we go. Yeah. Um, but she is the co-founder of The Line, which is, I think, one of the most

00:02:41.580 successful and encouraging startups in the new media space in our country. Um, sort of a centrist,

00:02:48.680 center-right perspective, but brings on a lot of really smart, interesting voices and is making a

00:02:53.800 go of things, uh, financially is doing well. And, uh, you know, I think for anyone who says,

00:02:58.540 if we just let the old ones go away, the new ones will flourish, they are, they are thinking of

00:03:03.060 the line, uh, in a lot of respects there. So, uh, it is a pleasure to have Jen on.

00:03:07.320 They can't get rid of me. I mean, you're stuck with me in some form or another. I'm like a

00:03:12.280 barnacle of the entire industry. You're the cockroach of the media. 0.99

00:03:15.700 Exactly. I'll die here. It's, it's my destiny. 1.00

00:03:20.020 Well, it's good to have you on.

00:03:21.180 Thank you. I'm instantly regretting my life decisions and wondering what I got myself into,

00:03:24.920 but let's give it a shot.

00:03:25.760 All right. Well, I guess we'll just start with the big question and I'm sure you're

00:03:30.520 going to have a quippy, lippy answer for it, but can and should Canada's legacy media be saved?

00:03:36.940 Nope.

00:03:38.540 Next.

00:03:40.060 Podcast over.

00:03:41.020 I expected, I expected a hard no, uh, but maybe, maybe elaborate a bit.

00:03:46.240 Well, what do you mean by save? Saved by whom and under what terms?

00:03:49.780 I think it's very clear. The, they're not capable of saving themselves. They've had a lot of time

00:03:54.940 to do it. They can't. I suppose the answer would then be, can the state, can and should the state?

00:04:02.520 Can and should the state?

00:04:03.420 No. Like, I don't know what to say. Like, if we are dealing with, we're dealing with private

00:04:07.480 for-profit corporations, um, that have had every opportunity to make the transition to a digital

00:04:13.940 first space and have demonstrated over the course of, what, 30 years that they are incapable of doing

00:04:20.760 it in a, in a financially sustainable manner. Why should the state save them? I mean, make the

00:04:27.000 argument for me. Make the argument for why the state ought to, ought to save them just for devils, 0.63

00:04:30.760 just devils ought to argue. Let's play with that idea.

00:04:32.220 Making, making Derek make this argument, by the way, is hilarious.

00:04:35.020 This is, I'm here to, I'm here to just push everyone's buttons.

00:04:38.220 This is, throw it out there, throw it out there.

00:04:39.940 This is a, this was an interesting bit of jujitsu that you have done, making me make

00:04:44.500 the argument. This was from, uh, Sunday's Toronto Star, um, or I'll paraphrase. They have a picture

00:04:50.080 of, uh, heritage minister, minister Pablo Rodriguez up there, and they more or less frame it as,

00:04:55.000 oh, this is the front page above the masthead. And they said, uh, along the lines of, uh, you

00:05:00.860 know, will, uh, Pablo Rodriguez defeat, uh, meta and Google and save the news industry in

00:05:08.020 Canada. Right off the bat, just, just great, independent, fair, detached journalism. I mean,

00:05:14.800 while they're at it, why didn't they just put his, like, put him on a pedestal, put a little

00:05:18.500 frame around his face, do a little smiley face and some heart emojis around too. That's exactly,

00:05:23.800 that's exactly the sort of mentality you want to have as a national newspaper.

00:05:26.800 And I'm sure they put a financial, I, I, I can't confirm. I haven't looked into it. I don't

00:05:30.960 have the print version, but 20 bucks says they probably didn't put a disclosure on there,

00:05:35.180 but their wild conflict of interest of hundreds of millions of dollars in covering that story.

00:05:40.760 Can this really nice, awesome minister save us? Don't you love this guy? Will he save democracy?

00:05:45.620 Will he save democracy? Okay, so, so, so, so I'll try to frame it the way these guys do. It's that,

00:05:49.780 they're not saying we need to go away, the independents need to go away, but they're saying

00:05:54.480 that we're not really adding to the conversation, that legacy media is the guardian of reliable and

00:06:01.740 factual journalism. And without these institutions in particular, reliable, factual journalism goes

00:06:09.100 away. Yeah. And therefore democracy itself. Because legacy media in the last five, 10 years

00:06:14.280 and five years in particular, just covered itself with glory in terms of being the bastions of

00:06:19.440 reliable, you know, public service journalism with, with exceptions that I will, I can certainly

00:06:24.620 happily name if you like, what you have is a legacy media that's done, that has done nothing, but

00:06:30.300 essentially cut itself down to nothing, and, and, and prove itself, prove itself less and less

00:06:35.540 competent and capable of just marshalling the resources required to, to, to cover the basic news

00:06:43.320 in a daily way. We've seen, we've seen the legacy media pull out of beats, pull out, sorry, fire people

00:06:50.620 on mass. We've seen them pull out of jurisdictions. So like what, how much, when we take, when do we

00:06:56.300 talk about saving sort of things like post media or tour store or CTV or things like that? What, what

00:07:02.300 do we mean here? Are we talking about keeping them technically in their current state, where in post

00:07:08.780 media's case, what you have is government money going to overwhelmingly service American batch hedges, debt

00:07:16.380 plays, or are you talking about saving them in a way that you're restoring them to what they looked

00:07:21.260 like five years ago, 10 years ago? Why stop there? Why not try and fund them to the extent that they

00:07:26.140 look like they, like the newsrooms look like they did in the 80s or the 70s? Like what, what, what are,

00:07:31.500 what does it, what does saving mean in this context? Well, I think it's a fair question because

00:07:36.780 as you point out, um, sort of keeping them in their current like weekend at Bernie's state is not

00:07:42.460 really saving them. It is keeping them from not dying. Uh, because I think no government or certainly

00:07:49.900 this government does not want that on their watch. Uh, and they especially don't want the Toronto Star

00:07:54.220 dying on their watch. That, that has always, I think been the understood quid pro quo is that they're

00:07:59.100 going to bail out post media because they want to bail out the Toronto Star and they can't do one

00:08:03.180 without the other. And they live in a, in a mindset from what 1999 where this, this is actually some kind

00:08:08.780 of fair exchange for the purposes of the Canadian public because if you bail out, you bail out your

00:08:13.260 left-wing media organization, it will bail out your right-wing media organization and what other

00:08:16.940 organization counts and what other factors matter in this conversation? Totally. Because they don't.

00:08:20.700 But there's, but I think there's a, a legitimate concern around news gathering, news dissemination,

00:08:28.940 reporting, funding the things that are not easy. Um, so, you know, I talked about the line,

00:08:33.500 the line is a success. The line does opinion and opinion is, you know, as you know,

00:08:38.140 it's lower cost, lower barrier to entry and people want it. People want opinions. People don't

00:08:43.340 necessarily want like a 10 part series on corruption within the schools or some sort of corporate

00:08:50.380 malfeasance that takes work. It's not sexy. And I'm my concern. And I think a lot of people's concern,

00:08:57.180 maybe even the government is that if we don't find a way to fund journalism, that will go away completely.

00:09:03.500 So my, my response to this is that to some extent, what we're talking about are the

00:09:09.340 aesthetic and class concerns of an, of a, of a, um, overthrown priestly class. I mean,

00:09:14.940 when you say stuff like, well, the people don't actually want the 10 part, uh, series of corruption

00:09:19.420 on their local school council or whatever, aren't you hearing a little bit of, but the plebs won't 1.00

00:09:24.300 listen to the opera there? No, it's not the opera. Well, but, but, but it is because if you can't

00:09:30.140 present or package your journalism in a way that an audience will find value in it,

00:09:35.420 that's the issue, right? The, the issue isn't with saving the media. The issue isn't with government

00:09:39.340 funding. The issue is with what you fear your audience will accept. Well, I think it's, it's the

00:09:44.380 economics of it that sure, like think of it through basic inputs and outputs inputs of time, especially

00:09:50.700 investigative work. So, you know, you'll get, uh, we've all been pitched and, Hey, I've got the big

00:09:55.900 story and you know, nine times out of 10, probably more it's a quack and, and he's got a conspiracy

00:10:01.660 theory, but every once in a while, okay, maybe this one's got some merit. And so you give it to

00:10:05.580 an editor who gives it to a reporter and that reporter might follow this thing. And it could,

00:10:09.500 if it's a big story, it could take weeks, maybe more. And there's a really good chance at the end

00:10:14.300 of the day, there's a dead end. There's nothing you can publish. And so you've invested your inputs

00:10:20.060 are a lot of time and a lot of therefore money, and you got nothing out of it, which is why it's easier

00:10:25.020 and more economical to do opinion or short news of the day, latest crap going on.

00:10:30.380 So that's why the thing is you actually need to have a media organization. That's not just

00:10:33.820 surviving paycheck to paycheck. You need a media organization that's thriving and bringing in

00:10:37.500 enough money to be able to divert resources to potentially low cost outcomes, high reward,

00:10:43.260 low cost outcomes. But I would say like to say there's no market value in that is wrong because

00:10:48.940 as we've seen, when there are certain investigative pieces or there are certain types of reported

00:10:53.420 pieces, and when they hit, they're hugely profitable. They can be hugely lucrative.

00:10:57.980 Well, like Global Mail covering China, like that was the Global Mail slash CTV's baby.

00:11:03.740 They did that. Sure. But then the other thing I would say is, you know, when Matt and I do spend

00:11:08.860 money to send one of us to a thing to do on the ground reporting, that is some of those lucrative

00:11:14.620 stuff that we do, because it brings in and generates subscriptions, like paid subscriptions from an

00:11:19.660 audience that suddenly is like, oh, you guys are more than an opinion outlet. You're doing stuff

00:11:23.660 of value and I'm willing to support that. So there's a market argument for doing all that kind

00:11:27.660 of stuff. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't underestimate the market value for that. But getting away from

00:11:33.260 the market, I do think that it's very possible that there are going to be types of high risk,

00:11:38.380 high reward journalism that costs a lot of money to produce and may or may not produce a return.

00:11:45.980 And in a market that is where newsrooms are much more pared down, the newsrooms of 5, 10, 15 people,

00:11:52.300 and where you have newsrooms and news organizations that just don't have the mega tons of money that

00:11:56.540 they did 20, 30 years ago, that becomes a harder, harder thing to picture working, right? I do think

00:12:02.700 there are private models that will make it work. But we don't know what those models are right now.

00:12:06.700 And that's going to emerge over time. So I would say, yeah, there is a place for the state to step in

00:12:13.420 and address the potential market failure here. I do think that's right. What do you think that

00:12:18.300 could look like? The CBC, that's what it looks like. The federal government is already hugely

00:12:24.780 invested in Canadian journalism to the tune of the CBC, which gets a billion dollars a year in public

00:12:31.740 funding. Like, if the CBC isn't well equipped to address the market failures that are going to emerge

00:12:37.500 as a result of this terrible apocalypse that we're all about to go through, then what the hell is it

00:12:41.820 good for?

00:12:42.380 Okay, but let's say there's a redefinition of the CBC's mandate, and they take all the

00:12:48.460 programming television, scripted television, they take all the opinion out of it, and they just

00:12:53.580 put all the money into reporting in communities that aren't well served, in local communities,

00:12:58.460 doing the things that maybe other people don't want to do. Is there going to be a consensus around

00:13:04.140 that reporting and that it's acceptable, that it's of public interest, or is it just going to become

00:13:08.780 yet another front in the culture war of, like, well, we can't trust the reporting on XYZ because

00:13:13.500 it comes from the dreaded CBC? Everything is going to become a front in the culture war,

00:13:17.180 but the way that you best prevent becoming a front in the culture war is by preempting it and

00:13:21.820 understanding that that's a risk, and the CBC has to be able to address it. And this is why I've made the

00:13:26.540 argument that a mandate review for the CBC is so crucial, because so much, a significant portion of the

00:13:31.500 population has so fundamentally lost trust in the CBC that it's not going to be able to serve its

00:13:36.540 basic function under the current, under the status quo. I just don't think it's there. I've made the

00:13:41.180 same argument. And I think that the mandate that you've described is pretty close to what I would,

00:13:45.740 what I would also agree with, but I would go a little bit further and I would say I would like

00:13:49.820 a CBC that does not see itself in competition with private media, because otherwise what you have

00:13:54.460 is you've got a new imperial oil, you have a new essentially monopolistic journalistic exercise.

00:13:59.020 But what I would like to see is a CBC that sees itself in service to its local journalism

00:14:05.100 organizations and startups. So I would like to see, for example, all of the written content is maybe

00:14:09.420 open license. So every media organization can use it, all of its photos, open license,

00:14:13.580 all of its videos, open license. I would like to see massive money put into the CBC archives.

00:14:18.540 I'd like to see, for example, I would just like to see a shift in mindset, because right now I think

00:14:23.980 the CBC sees its role as dictating to Canadians what Canadian values are. And I would like to see

00:14:30.060 them shift that way of thinking into saying, no, our role is to serve Canadians.

00:14:35.980 Well, because there's this confusion over, I think, what they are and they feel this sort of

00:14:41.100 survival instinct fear of like, well, we got to get bigger or we're going to get smaller.

00:14:44.940 Yeah.

00:14:45.500 They go to the places where they should actively be backing away from. They go to the advertising,

00:14:50.220 they go to the things that sell. So opinion, you know, what have you, whereas they should be going,

00:14:54.460 oh, no, the private market is doing a very good job there. We'll go over here. We'll go over to the

00:14:58.220 thing that is not sexy, is not attractive, but serves a public interest.

00:15:02.140 And what if you were to have like a CBC, instead of in only major urban centers, more and more doing

00:15:06.780 what CBC Calgary did, which is branching out to places like Lethbridge, these sorts of low and saying,

00:15:11.900 hey, our job is to serve this particular center. And maybe part of our job is going to be providing

00:15:19.740 journalism training. Maybe our part of our job is going to be sharing what journalism values looks

00:15:26.140 like. Maybe part of our job is going to be helping people to do media editing. We're going to teach

00:15:32.700 people how to use editing software. We're going to open up our facilities so that local media

00:15:36.780 organizations can come in and use broadcast facilities. They can use our podcast studios.

00:15:42.780 We're going to see ourselves less as a competitor in the space and more like a public library.

00:15:47.260 Like infrastructure, where we're going to provide access to the tools of journalism

00:15:51.820 for community members so they can make their own contributions.

00:15:55.100 I would like to see the CBC understand that we're about to go through a media apocalypse. It's going

00:15:59.820 to last five to 20 years. And their role is to be the seed bank in the apocalypse.

00:16:05.820 The arc. The preservation of certain values and virtues that they can then help, that can be then used

00:16:13.900 to help other private media organizations flourish and create their own for-profit and financially

00:16:20.780 successful organizations.

00:16:24.060 But is there any... Okay.

00:16:28.300 You know, one of the basic principles of capitalism is creative destruction, that the existing firms and

00:16:34.940 industries will often need to be destroyed for capital to be reallocated to the new.

00:16:40.780 And that's... The federal government is very clearly doing everything in its power, humanly possible,

00:16:47.020 to stop that from happening. I guess there's a couple scenarios we can look at, but based on the

00:16:55.180 current scenario, we have media bailouts, we've got C18, all of this in place. What do you think the

00:17:02.700 emerging new media is going to look like if that status quo remains? Let's say, you know, there's no alternative

00:17:09.500 scenario where Polyev comes to power and blows all that up, but just Trudeau and his successors

00:17:14.540 continue on there, and this is the regime, and they continue to pile one thing on top of another.

00:17:20.460 What's your prognostication of what it's going to look like? 0.88

00:17:23.180 Sickly, incredibly, and intensely dull. Absolutely unwilling to innovate and take risks. 0.97

00:17:30.460 Just a really awful place for ambitious young journalists to work. You're going to see a huge

00:17:38.460 brain drain because who wants to work in that kind of media environment? Nobody.

00:17:44.140 And I just sort of think it's going to be a slow chipping away of independence over time,

00:17:48.620 right? You're just going to see a lot of these private media organizations fall further and further

00:17:53.420 into whatever government it is. I'm not even talking about an ideological government, but it's going to

00:17:58.060 be just more inclined not to make waves with the existing government. Because why pick a fight if we

00:18:03.820 don't have to? And well, you know, we don't really want to piss the wrong people off. Then, well, and

00:18:09.660 like, it's not going to, it's not going to be an obvious, like, oh, hey, we're going to become

00:18:13.900 propagandists for the liberals overnight. It's just going to be a slow, slow dulling, dulling of the entire

00:18:19.820 media market. It's going to get a little more boring, a little less controversial, a little

00:18:23.420 less willing to push, a little less, and it's just going to chip away over time. It's going to

00:18:27.420 worse and worse. I think one of the things that is not commonly understood among the non-journalist

00:18:33.980 class is how bad things already are. I think people look at papers like the Herald or the Journal,

00:18:40.140 or they look at the Toronto Star and they think, well, there must be like hundreds of journalists

00:18:42.860 still working in there, you know, pursuing their craft. And I heard from someone who is, you know,

00:18:48.140 close to the Journal there, like, I think it was like, fewer than five people are reporters there

00:18:52.300 now. Like, it is already dead. There's no there there. It is just more in like the newsroom on

00:18:58.540 the other side of this wall than the Journal probably has. A lot of it is management and then

00:19:04.540 life support is sort of what is sustaining things. So, you know, I think I'm supportive of the idea of

00:19:11.740 taking it off the ventilator. My concern is just always, what do we lose when we do that? Because

00:19:17.900 there was a really interesting podcast with Paul Wells, Andrew Coyne, David Hurley. And,

00:19:24.780 oh, God, her name escapes me. She worked at Le Journal, CBC, and not Chantal. No, no, no, no.

00:19:32.140 Oh, God, this is going to go badly for me. But anyways, and they were talking about the future

00:19:37.340 of the media. What do we do? And they all sort of seem to say, like, wow, look at the New York Times.

00:19:42.460 There's, you know, there's Figaro in France. Like, just let the market figure it out.

00:19:47.260 Canada's in English Canada. Quebec is a whole different story. But in Canada, English Canada,

00:19:52.140 our media market is the hardest, I think, in the world in terms of what you have to do to build a

00:19:57.820 new media company. Because we're competing with the Americans. We don't have population scale. We don't

00:20:03.340 have a geographic or cultural barrier that makes people, I need to get the news from somewhere because

00:20:08.780 the people on the other side speak Welsh, or they speak French. And I just think if we put our faith

00:20:16.060 in the market, I think we are ignoring the fact that the market in Canada is unusually challenging.

00:20:22.220 I'm not ignoring the market. I'm saying that's the argument for having the CBC.

00:20:27.100 If you have a non-challenging environment, the logic for the CBC disappears.

00:20:32.140 Yeah, right. But yeah, I mean, I think that when you say creative destruction,

00:20:37.580 that's a really pretty term. It maybe underplays what destruction looks like and how ugly that can

00:20:43.180 be. I've never had anyone describe it as a pretty term.

00:20:45.420 No, but I mean, it's, yeah, we're going to have a couple of really, really weird years.

00:20:50.620 And we're going to see what the impacts in a country that is sparsely populated,

00:20:55.180 very diverse in many different ways, including geographically and culturally,

00:20:59.020 what happens when you lose a unified narrative that follows through a mainstream media

00:21:06.460 conversation. When we lose that, and we are, we're losing it, that's going to get weird.

00:21:13.180 And I think especially in some small towns, underserviced or unserviced markets, things

00:21:18.220 are going to get really weird. You know, I've heard stories of people going in through small towns in

00:21:22.540 British Columbia, and like the whole QAnon craze is the predominant craze now. Like that is just 0.99

00:21:28.380 overwhelmingly accepted in those those small communities and cultures, because they don't

00:21:32.060 have access to great information or their cultural milieu is such that they're getting their news on

00:21:39.500 particular Facebook groups, right? Just yesterday, actually, I had without naming them, I had a small

00:21:46.540 local community paper approach us about buying them out or doing essentially share swap where they would

00:21:54.540 come in as a little part of us. But I mean, there was just an absolute no way to make that work.

00:22:02.300 First of all, I can barely locate where they were on a map. But you know, it's local paper community,

00:22:08.140 no one's paying for a paper subscription anymore. So you don't have that. And they're no longer

00:22:15.580 have a monopoly on advertising that ended not with Facebook and Google, but with Kijiji. That was,

00:22:20.140 that was that a long time ago.

00:22:22.780 Yeah, there's no way. And I do think these these small ones, they're all gonna die. I don't, 0.76

00:22:28.860 I don't see a way out of it.

00:22:30.780 But what potentially replaces them? What potentially replaces them are people from within these 0.99

00:22:35.500 communities, who decide to take up the role of serving their communities with information that's

00:22:41.180 useful to their neighbors and their friends, probably through platforms like Substack,

00:22:48.380 platforms like Facebook, and can these people make a living on a subscription based model?

00:22:53.820 Well, that's the question.

00:22:54.780 Yeah, of course I can. Because you don't need a lot of money to make money to, sorry,

00:22:58.780 you don't need a lot of subscribers to make money on a subscription model. Even if you're in a town

00:23:03.180 of what, 10,000 people, and you have 100, maybe if you're lucky, up to 200 or 1000 of those people

00:23:11.180 paying you a small amount of money. And that's before you're looking at any advertised local

00:23:16.060 advertising revenue, you can potentially have a living in that. If you're in a, if you're in a,

00:23:20.780 if you're in a town where your cost of living is reasonable, right? So is it going to be a newsroom

00:23:26.620 of five people with a monopoly of advertising? No. But is it going to be maybe mom and pop kind of

00:23:32.780 operations that are providing a service to their community because they saw a vacuum,

00:23:37.100 and maybe we're able to monetize that to a reasonable degree? I think that's a potential.

00:23:42.220 Let's talk about the transition though. You're talking about, you know, there's little communities

00:23:45.900 in DC where everyone's kind of getting their news on QAnon. I think inevitably in the transition,

00:23:52.940 there's going to be some, there's going to be some weird shit. There's going to be stuff like that. 0.98

00:23:58.060 I think we'd probably come through all right on the other side. I mean, I mean, people believe

00:24:03.020 all sorts of weird stuff in the 60s. And they came out through and they're like, oh, that was weird.

00:24:07.180 Let's get back to work. As long as there's a penalty for the weirdness. I think that's...

00:24:13.260 What do you mean a penalty for the weirdness? There used to be a social penalty. If you were one of the,

00:24:18.060 if you were a person who was putting newsletters on cars, windshields, and they said, you know,

00:24:21.980 you had your worldview and put it there. How familiar were you with the 60s?

00:24:25.820 Pretty familiar. Pretty familiar. There wasn't a lot of social penalty for weirdness.

00:24:30.380 Eventually there was. Absolutely there was. Well, eventually.

00:24:32.460 It was called the 80s. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, that's what we're talking about. That's, that's,

00:24:36.620 that's the process, right? We're going to go through this experimental phase where people

00:24:40.460 are going to, well, the satanic panic, which is the subject of my book, happened in the 80s. 0.99

00:24:44.300 People believe in all kinds of crazy shit. But yes, there is going to be this weird, this 0.95

00:24:49.500 intermediation period. People are going to start to believe all kinds of alternative narrative theories.

00:24:56.220 And they will in time live or die on the value that they have to their community.

00:25:02.460 That's, that's, and yes, you can't, I don't see how you practically punish people for buying into QAnon.

00:25:10.300 You don't practically do it because that, I mean, that would be, you know, you can't tax them.

00:25:13.740 No, you can't tax them. But the challenge is that right now we have.

00:25:17.020 This is Canada. They will try. Well, okay, fair enough. But we, you know, we have technologies now that

00:25:22.300 allow people to actively seek out other people with the same views as them and then build foundations

00:25:28.380 around those communities that doesn't let anything into them, right? That did not exist in the 80s.

00:25:32.940 That did not exist in the 60s. Well, actually it did at a smaller scale.

00:25:36.700 At a much smaller scale. Like the part of the reason, this is where we get into my book,

00:25:40.220 part of the reason why the satanic panic took off the way it did was because you had small

00:25:44.700 communities of professionals who would meet regularly for conferences where ideas around satanic ritual

00:25:50.460 abuse and all of these kinds of theories would, would, would spread within these relatively

00:25:55.340 closed professional groups and would then the professionals would leave their conferences,

00:25:59.100 go back to their home communities and spread them within there. That was one of the chief

00:26:02.460 agents of travel for this conspiracy. You're seeing that on social media happen at scale,

00:26:07.980 right? Yeah, that's the difference. And that's what's extremely disruptive about that. But the other

00:26:13.740 thing I would say is that in the past, when you had moral panics, like the satanic panic,

00:26:18.300 it's my model for a lot of this stuff for obvious reasons. Those, those moral panics would last years

00:26:23.260 and years and years and then burn themselves out. What you're seeing now is a lot of moral

00:26:26.940 panics and conspiracies lasting a couple of months and now burning themselves out. And then 0.98

00:26:30.780 within a higher degree of frequency, right? So we're in a place of, of just radical experimentation

00:26:36.540 where people are trying on alternative narrative theories. It's kind of what I call a lot of this

00:26:40.380 stuff. And it doesn't hold, it doesn't manage to capture the mainstream in the way that it did

00:26:47.740 previously. And it burns itself out at a much higher rate. I don't think it's good or bad. I'm

00:26:54.540 just saying it's, it's, it's, it's not, I don't expect within 10 years that because of the collapse

00:26:59.820 of mainstream media, that we're all going to be like hailing Q. I don't think that's going to be 0.99

00:27:04.940 where this goes. I, but okay, surely the satanic, then I confess that I'm not deeply knowledgeable

00:27:12.700 about the satanic panic. Let me tell you all about it. But that was confined to a very small

00:27:19.980 slice of the population. No, it wasn't. This is actually something that people was, is really

00:27:24.620 interesting. This was mainstream. This was radically mainstream. This was mainstream in modern therapy.

00:27:30.300 This was mainstream in media. This was absolutely mainstream in police departments all across North

00:27:36.060 America. I remember in churches in the nineties. It was still kind of, it was still kind of, it was

00:27:40.700 petering out, but it was still there. This was mainstream in a religious space at the time. And

00:27:44.460 it was also concurrent with the rise of evangelical Christianity as well. This was a, this was,

00:27:48.940 this was not some, like the satanic panic of the eighties and nineties was way more mainstream

00:27:54.060 than QAnon is today. Interesting. Way more mainstream. And there's some interesting reasons why that happened.

00:28:00.140 Even there, there were even people today who are ostensibly mainstream people who are very,

00:28:04.860 very convinced. In fact, you can make the argument that the satanic panic became QAnon. Right. Right. 0.85

00:28:10.940 So this was not, this was not a small thing. Oprah, Geraldo, they were all, this was on the front

00:28:15.980 page of the Globe and Mail. This was, this was, there's the whole thing about, about uh, heavy metal

00:28:20.620 and playing the records backwards. Highly credentialed people at the upper echelons of things like, uh,

00:28:25.820 psychological sciences here in Canada were firm proponents. When I was a kid, I had to, I had to

00:28:32.300 keep my like Marilyn Manson CDs, uh, pretty, pretty hidden. I guess the way it was, uh, maybe could

00:28:38.780 switch it back a little bit to where we were to beat journalism. Um, the regular grind of the news,

00:28:46.460 watching city hall, watching the legislature, you know, you know, one reason I think, uh, you know,

00:28:52.780 you were both talking about this, that most of the new media tends to focus on analysis and opinion

00:28:59.340 on the news that's already out there is because beat journalism is so expensive.

00:29:04.220 Uh, also there's a limited market for it. There's a limited market, but, uh, another is

00:29:09.340 the cost as well. There's a few things like our, our news department, our news department is almost all

00:29:15.820 full-time salaried reporters. Our opinion side is one editor and then a bunch of contracted freelance

00:29:23.900 writers. Um, news generally for the most part requires salaried full-time people. And so it's

00:29:31.900 a totally different economic model. What do you think beat journalism is going to look like 10 years

00:29:37.420 from now? If, you know, let's just say, um, you know, Rodriguez gets hit by a bus, not that I would

00:29:44.300 say that, but let's just say he gets hit by a bus. Let's say his bill gets hit by a bus and the bailouts

00:29:48.060 get hit by a bus. Just, it all dies and they have an epiphany and they say no more bailouts, no more C18.

00:29:53.820 We're just going to let the market go. What does beat journalism look like in a decade?

00:29:57.020 Regardless of the bailouts, this is, the bailouts aren't actually going to dramatically shift the

00:30:01.660 course of anyone's destiny here. We're talking about the bailouts. They'll buy them time.

00:30:05.420 They slow down the change. They slow down the change. They don't stop it.

00:30:08.380 But let's just say that stuff ended. We had 10 years of growth.

00:30:10.940 A lot of beat journalism is going to be replaced by AI. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

00:30:16.860 So, you know, local city hall, city hall puts up its transcript of all of its meetings and

00:30:24.220 subcommittee meetings and AI goes through it, creates a story. This goes back to a human editor.

00:30:29.020 The human editor double checks for facts, tries to put anything in context. It pops up on the website.

00:30:33.820 Now all of a sudden, um, a new start article that used to take hours and hours and hours to produce

00:30:38.460 can be produced in 10 minutes. So, you know, weather stories, humans don't, are not going to be

00:30:44.380 producing weather stories in 10 years. Sports. Sports. Humans are not going to be producing

00:30:48.380 sports in 10 years. Is it going to replace all of journalism and all reporting? Absolutely not.

00:30:52.620 AI can't do that. But AI can not, but AI can certainly play, will certainly replace, you know,

00:30:59.020 day-to-day coverage of what's happening in parliament. AI can replace day-to-day coverage of

00:31:03.820 what's happening. Um, just anything that's automated where the, the text can be put online,

00:31:09.180 AI can, can do an adequate job of, of, of covering and filling in that.

00:31:13.580 That's just, it's already pretty much there where you can also have a fake AI person who

00:31:18.380 looks like a reporter and you can have them in a fake AI studio and reading the news,

00:31:23.020 looking like it was on CNN. It's not just the text now.

00:31:26.220 Their hair will never go gray. So great. But, um, no, I mean, it's not going to replace all

00:31:30.620 journalism. And I don't see AI as being a threat to journalism because let's be honest here.

00:31:35.660 AI is not going to replace journalism jobs. The journalism jobs are already gone.

00:31:39.340 AI is going to serve as a tool for human journalists, human editors to maximum, to massively increase

00:31:46.060 their output. And to build on. And to build on. Yes.

00:31:48.460 One of the, one of the problems right now is we're still stuck in a mode where we're doing,

00:31:53.580 we're trying to protect things that were done simply because they exist, right? Well, that,

00:31:57.580 that job was there. We got to protect it. And to make journalism successful and thrive,

00:32:03.660 it has to be not what have we done, but what should we do, right? What need is not being

00:32:08.220 currently met by technology, by the market. And we don't need, you know, we don't need people to

00:32:12.700 cover box scores and baseball. We have that already. We don't need people to, like Jen said, do the sort

00:32:17.340 of tick tock of what happened in the legislature because AI can do that. But there are some things

00:32:21.420 that technology definitely cannot or will not do. And those are the places that journalism should be

00:32:26.780 going into. And until we get that mindset, mindset shift away from how do we protect to how do we

00:32:33.260 build, I think we're, we're going to be in this sort of, this sort of purgatory.

00:32:39.660 You know, maybe small little sidetrack, but I think it's relevant to this question that we've

00:32:44.460 been tackling here at the Western Standard is, you know, we are looking at how we integrate AI.

00:32:50.620 What do you think are some of the guidelines a publication or newsroom should have around

00:32:58.060 legitimate and illegitimate use of AI in the newsroom?

00:33:01.020 That's going to be such an interesting conversation in the next years. I don't think AI is,

00:33:04.780 is like exactly where it needs to be for us to do this, but it's so close that we need to start

00:33:10.140 having that conversation. I think disclosure is the first one. Like if this is not written by a human,

00:33:16.300 I do think that you're until, until AI becomes so normalized that everyone just sort of assumes

00:33:20.860 that a lot of this stuff isn't being written by human. I do think that you need very proactive

00:33:24.380 disclosure with people about it. Also, I do think that I wouldn't let the machines run wild without

00:33:30.300 a human supervision or human editor like that. I think you still need to have somebody.

00:33:34.540 I just rewatched the Terminator this weekend.

00:33:36.140 There you go. But I mean, I do think that you need, if you're going to have an AI sort of recap

00:33:41.100 the latest happenings of the city council meeting, you still need a human on the other side of that,

00:33:45.580 double checking the quotes, making sure everything is correct. There's still going to be a fact

00:33:50.220 checking process that stuff, the stuff's going to need to go through. And I think that you always

00:33:55.260 need to ask yourself, you know, is this AI replacing humans or is this tool making us more helping humans?

00:34:05.180 That the tool shouldn't be an end in and of itself. I would say that the tool should be an aid to human

00:34:11.020 productivity, not a replacement for human creativity. That's if we're kind of assuming

00:34:15.980 in this that AI is going to be used within publications, current and future publications.

00:34:23.260 But this could very easily take the form of, well, let's say Google, Google's not allowed to do news

00:34:28.140 in Canada anymore. Well, they might just say, we'll create our own news.

00:34:32.140 Well, they're already there. I hope so.

00:34:33.820 So their big, their big thing is they're tired of their search, sending people off of their servers.

00:34:39.740 Yeah. And so what they're going to do is when next time you Google, I need a recipe for such

00:34:43.740 and such, rather than it sending you to allrecipes.com, they'll just have their AI serve up the

00:34:48.860 recipe for you and you stay on their turf and you pay them your money that they are going to try to

00:34:54.620 eat more of the pie. And I'm just picturing like, okay, so what if it might not even be us using the AI,

00:34:59.980 we might just get completely cut out and AI without any human supervision, because it'll be easier.

00:35:06.140 I don't think the AI is there to be used without human supervision. I really don't.

00:35:09.660 Not yet. But I mean, it could be there really soon.

00:35:12.220 It could be, but I still think that you're going to have use for our skill sets. Let's just say,

00:35:17.500 even in an AI dominated journalism space.

00:35:18.780 We all hope so.

00:35:20.060 Well, and I think it will send us ideally up the value chain. There's a lot of things that

00:35:24.780 journalists do right now and certainly used to do, you know, the glory days. There's a lot of

00:35:28.940 pointless tasks that were being done inefficiently.

00:35:31.180 Grunt work. 0.93

00:35:31.980 Grunt work. And now the machine will do it for us and we get to focus our mental energies on

00:35:37.420 analysis, on higher thinking, on, you know, on delivering value for the customer

00:35:43.820 in a way that is more than just the AI can do. I think it will push good journalists to a better

00:35:49.980 place.

00:35:50.380 Well, except the problem is that good journalists get their start on the grunt work.

00:35:54.700 Yes.

00:35:55.020 So if you get rid of all of that need to do some of that grunt work stuff, I mean,

00:35:58.780 my first job at the Toronto Star was listening to the radio room, right? It was listening to

00:36:03.020 police and the radio scanners waiting for someone to die or waiting for a terrible thing to happen

00:36:06.940 and then gathering information about it. You couldn't replicate that training now.

00:36:12.140 And if we have a situation where AI is able to spot, do what radio rumors used to do,

00:36:17.900 firstly, you know, you're, you're just losing opportunities for young journalists to get the

00:36:21.980 training and the mentorship that we, that we used to get. Now that being said, we've already lost it.

00:36:25.980 It's already gone. So where do you balance this? I don't know. But my, my suspicion is that the real

00:36:32.060 crisis or the next crisis after this crisis is going to be, how do you train up a whole generation of

00:36:37.500 journalists in an AI space where all of those mentorship and, and training opportunities are now

00:36:43.340 gone and you're asking them to go from university to essentially to do, to straightforward, straight

00:36:49.100 into analysis or high level thinking journalism before they've had the 10 year apprenticeship that

00:36:54.060 they actually need to do that. I get that and I understand it, but I keep on having this

00:36:59.420 meme in my head that keeps recurring when you're talking about this. And it's, you know, we all remember

00:37:04.940 our, you know, grade four math teacher when we complain about learning our multiplication table saying,

00:37:10.620 well, you're not always going to have a calculator in your pocket. God, they were wrong. Like, like,

00:37:17.980 yeah, it's nice if you know your times tables, but it's kind of useless now because we all have

00:37:23.260 a super calculator in our pocket that could put a man on Mars. So maybe it'll be the equivalent of

00:37:29.100 that. Maybe it's just like, this is just something we don't even really need to worry about anymore.

00:37:33.020 And they're just going to go straight to calculus with their weird graphing calculator.

00:37:37.420 Or maybe Western civilization collapses and we all have to go back to some kind of

00:37:42.620 repeat of the local grain news. I mean, like I said, I'm, I'm not really worried about my ability

00:37:47.980 to function in the future world. I just sort of think that it's not going to look like it was in

00:37:52.620 the past. And being wedded to the way it was is a pretty good way to sort of tip the scales in the

00:38:00.140 wrong direction. I mean, I, you know, I, I'm an optimist, so I'm a technological optimist, but

00:38:08.140 you know, to me, the interesting premise with the thing that AI forces us to confront

00:38:13.260 as journalists is how do we be trusted? How can, how can we demonstrate and earn trust from the

00:38:19.580 people who use our services? And I think the problem with journalism is for a long time, we've

00:38:23.980 taken that for granted. We show up assuming we're trusted, right? You walk into the building, it has the

00:38:28.540 letter, you know, it has the masthead and you're like, I'm trusted. And you haven't had to work for

00:38:32.620 it. And I think the new environment that we're in, you have to prove that you're trustable. You can't

00:38:39.820 make mistakes. You have to be accountable when you are or when you do. And I think that has to be sort

00:38:45.500 of a defining question when, when media companies roll out AI is how does this impact our trust? How does

00:38:52.380 this, does it increase or decrease the amount that our, our users, our supporters, our customers trust us?

00:38:58.940 And I didn't, I'm still not sure that that thought is as prominent as it should be.

00:39:03.660 I think that's true. If we're talking about kind of, you know, catch all publications that people on

00:39:11.100 both sides of the divide used to be able to read at the same time and more or less have an agreement

00:39:15.820 on facts on, this is probably the wrong term for it, but perhaps it's, we're headed towards kind of a

00:39:21.180 return of the yellow press, maybe not as extreme, not as explicitly partisan, but if nothing else,

00:39:26.780 a more tribal press where, well, Western standard readers trust the Western standard, but they don't

00:39:31.900 trust the national observer, national observer readers trust you guys, but won't trust anything

00:39:37.100 from us. The yellow press was the norm for most of the history of the press. The whole period where 0.96

00:39:43.020 we all have shared narratives in a shared media conversation is actually relatively recent.

00:39:49.020 Prior to this, the more norm thing was like you had your press, you had your ideological newspaper

00:39:56.380 that you went to and you relied on and your writers and your readers to tell you about the day.

00:39:59.420 Before that pamphlets.

00:40:00.220 You had pamphlets and all that kind of thing. So like the, the, the tribal and highly siloed 1.00

00:40:07.260 media environment, it is actually the norm for society. It just hasn't been the norm in our lifetimes.

00:40:13.820 And that's what the shift that we're getting used to. But I'm also wondering if the future,

00:40:18.380 going back to Google, if the future is Google creating its own news hub in every community,

00:40:24.140 right? Using AI, and maybe they have a handful of journalist editors in every region, helping to

00:40:30.380 direct news generation of news stories, doing the weather, doing the sports, doing the local town

00:40:35.900 meetings, doing the local blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then that becomes the shared thing.

00:40:40.540 Everybody has essentially the same news hub. And then you have your, your Western standards, your national

00:40:46.300 forums, or more interesting in depth stuff for the good writing, right? I mean, an AI can do good

00:40:55.180 writing, which is not as fun, now is it? So what if, what if that's, that's how we reestablish a kind

00:41:01.260 of shared narrative is through AI generated news hubs. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not saying that's

00:41:06.060 the way it's going to be. I'm just saying that that could be one way this picture rolls out.

00:41:10.300 I think the danger there is always in, if there's a central sort of one publication, or one company

00:41:17.100 that's running things, what happens, the control of that becomes very, very valuable, and very, very

00:41:23.420 contestable.

00:41:23.900 We already saw that with social media trying to grapple with regulating what can be posted on it

00:41:28.700 during COVID, because there was some disinformation. But a lot of times, as it turned out, things weren't

00:41:34.540 disinformation. If we're talking like, like, leaks from the Wuhan lab, that stuff was

00:41:39.420 flagged as fake news turned out not to be. And so social media plot for, you know, especially,

00:41:43.900 you know, Google, YouTube, sorry, Facebook, YouTube would highly regulate what was allowed

00:41:48.700 and ban you if not. But that was regulating who could post onto it. Now it just might be,

00:41:54.860 it could get more extreme to that if the common narrative is just kind of a Google news.

00:41:58.540 This is, but this is the, this is exactly the same conversation we've been having for the last,

00:42:02.460 but however many decades with the consolidation of news under post media.

00:42:05.820 I mean, yes, when you have one entity controlling the majority of the content, you run into these

00:42:14.700 problems. And this is why you need to have strong antitrust conversations. Maybe the Google news

00:42:20.060 hub is going to be different from the, I don't know how that's going to work out. I'm sure that

00:42:24.700 eventually someone's going to go after Google for antitrust stuff in this Canada, for it's in Canada.

00:42:29.020 This will not prevent that or potentially it's another company. It's another company doing the

00:42:34.620 equivalent of this, right? So part of the problem, I think is, you know, C18 is going after Google

00:42:40.540 and Facebook all the wrong way. I think there is probably a strong case for antitrust against both

00:42:45.420 of these companies. But I'm not sure that can happen in Canada. I think that's, that is

00:42:49.740 got to come from the United States. There's no track record of being able to consolidate. Well,

00:43:00.140 we love monopolies as long as they're Canadian monopolies. Exactly. I mean, like that's,

00:43:03.340 that's how the media got into the situation in the first place, right? I heard someone describe us

00:43:07.180 as the test case on C18 for the Americans. And I thought that seems backwards. Why would we want to

00:43:12.220 be their test case? That seems like a good way to end up as, as roadkill. Yeah. And that's,

00:43:17.420 we're going to be the first guy on the beach here. We don't even know where we're charging.

00:43:22.140 Yeah, it does not, that's not a good place to be. No. No. All right. Maybe last word to you,

00:43:28.860 Jen. I don't have any more words. What else do I have to say? Come on. Well, it was all very eloquent.

00:43:36.220 Well, before we wrap up, where can people learn more and support the line? The line.substack.com.

00:43:43.900 Yeah, that's right. There you go. We'll show up. You'll find us.

00:43:46.700 Great. Well, I guess that's a wrap for our first attempt at this. We're going to try and find

00:43:51.500 something where maybe Max and I are a little less agreement, a little less agreement than this,

00:43:57.340 because I think we will have a shared stake. And I will be there. It'll be, it'll be great.

00:44:01.020 You two have at it. Have fun. Have fun, boys. And I, I'll try and avoid having my Jon Stewart moment,

00:44:05.580 where I explain how another crossfire is bad for democracy. And you guys are bad for democracy,

00:44:10.380 and you should not do this. We probably are bad for democracy, but it's just so much fun.

00:44:13.580 Yeah. What do you do? Yeah. We're both going to get yelled at in our respective silos for this.

00:44:17.900 So we're not allowed. We're not supposed to be talking to one another. All right. Well,

00:44:23.420 Jen, thank you for being our first guest. And Max, it was a slice. All right. Until next time.

00:44:28.860 Thank you very much for joining us on our very first episode of Fawcett versus Fildebrandt.

00:44:34.460 Thank you very much. And God bless.

Western Standard - July 26, 2023

Fawcett v. Fildebrandt： Can & Should Canada’s Legacy Media Be Saved？

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