Graham Richardson: Anchors away

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast, the show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Graham Richardson spent over 25 years delivering news to Canadians. Our past kind of crossed in Edmonton back in the early 2000s and since then, he's been a fixture on CTV in Canada, whether as a reporter anchor or local anchor in Ottawa during the infamous and sometimes misunderstood trucker convoy protest of 2022 Graham was one of the best at bringing Canadians the truth about the goings on in Ottawa, all the while being both friend and foe to the protesters, depending on who he spoke to, it was definitely the weirdest of times. How weird? Well, does the protest in your town have bouncy castles and Nazi supporters all at once? You will appreciate Graham's perspective on media, broadcast media and social media. He gets it where so few do. Today, he is working for Edelman Global Advisory in Ottawa, where he is getting the message out effectively for their clients. Graham Richardson joins me from Canada's nation's capital, Ottawa. We're born the same year you. You just had better marks than me because you went to Queens. 

Graham Richardson  1:21  
Yeah? I had a good time there.

Matt Cundill  1:25  
Well, I was gonna say, because it says, I think it's a bachelor of arts you got. So what did you study? 

Graham Richardson  1:30  
Politics, English? I knew when I was about 15 that I wanted to be a reporter. So I picked, I picked the stuff I loved to get my marks up. And then I picked the shortest undergrad and the shortest post grad, and wanted to start working right away, by the way, at the same time, I was going to school at Acadia with Todd battis, really, we both came up through CBC at the same time in Alberta, that's right, you went to kings and Halifax, right? And I didn't know him then, but I started in Calgary, and he had started in Edmonton, almost like months apart, and I just talked to him yesterday. I'm still in touch with him. Can you get him to, like, come on this podcast. I'm sure he will tell me about the Kings experience. Because kings, which is kind of inside the Dow ecosystem in Halifax, has a very attractive journalism program that is small, but it's very particular. Yeah, so I figured out I wanted to do this when I was 15, and I was watching Ted Koppel cover the Tammy Faye Baker scandal of all things. And then I would flip back and forth between David Letterman and Ted Koppel regularly. And I love politics. I really believe, as a Toronto kid of limited means at the time that you need to get out around the country's big and so I didn't want to go to Ryerson. I didn't want to go to U of T I wanted to go to a place like Halifax, because I was only there for a year. But it's important to see the country if you're going to cover it. And my time there and my eight years in the West has helped me cover legislatures in Ontario, and I mean that I am not at all shocked or surprised that the West in particular looks at the political choices that big cities like Montreal and Toronto have made and Ottawa have made in the last few years, and looked at us like we're a different species. There is an ingrained approach to government that is different the further away you get from Ottawa, most pronounced in the West. So long answer your short question. Kings was a part of that for me, because part of the reason I want to go I'd never I'd never spent any time in the Maritimes. Never spent any time in Atlantic Canada, and it was a short stay, like eight months or an academic year. But I really enjoyed learning about that perspective, and now you went to work at the CBC out in Calgary. I believe it was, that's right. How was that experience at that time, working at the CBC where the budget is treated differently than, let's say, your counterparts at CTV Calgary, well, I came in an interesting time. They had just made the ingenious decision to close Calgary's local newscast and have a provincial broadcast, one of the many, many poor choices in local news that the CBC has made. And I say this with great affection. I'm a huge fan of the CBC, and I think it it needs to survive and perform a function for Canada, whatever that function is. So I was a part of the sort of the rebuild of Calgary to build this regional newscast. And immediately, when you want to know what's going on. You talk to cameramen, you talk to camera people. Immediately, they were all like, this is ridiculous. Nobody in Edmonton wants to see Calgary news and vice versa. In a very, very big way. This will not work, and it didn't work. We tried, but it was good to be a part of that, because, you know, I truly believe in television. News, there has to be a certain amount of throw me off the dock. And that was a throw me off the dock moment. They didn't have an assignment editor, so I was a researcher paid a very low salary, telling very experienced cameramen why they had to go do something because it was important. Meanwhile, the monster CTV at the time, Darryl Jan Barb Higgins was just killing everyone with way more resources, and it kept me up at night as a 23 year old trying to match that with limited resources. But it was a very good experience to go through the things I learned there, on writing and on story treatment and on journalism for those four years in Calgary, I still carry with me today. So it was the same story up in Edmonton with Carrie Dahl and Darryl McIntyre. David would just run roughshod over everything. And then number two was ITV, which I believe you went to at one point, but yeah, the CBC was truly kind of felt like it was, it was off the map for most of Alberta, after they tried to do a provincial broadcast, yeah. And then they came back and split back to Calgary and Edmonton. And yeah, Carrie and Daryl, one of those two sort of combos that really lit the screen up together. So I left CBC to go to global at the time, which was ITV still great friends with Linda Steele, her and Gord Steinke, another great duo. And actually, what's interesting about that, Matt, is that they when they flip to automation, or however they rate television stations, many years ago, in Edmonton, it was one of the markets where, in fact, it showed that global was winning, especially at six o'clock. And it's still a very, very significant station in the ecosystem of global with Caroline gay, who I know as well from, originally from Ottawa, so, yeah, it was different. It was great. So at the time, going from Calgary CBC to what was ITV wick, and then became global Edmonton, it was like going to one of these old school power super stations, right? Like it was everywhere. They were very aggressive. They wanted Daily News. There was no sort of naval gazing about what should we do? How should we cover this? You know, should we be covering this? That CBC team seems to get mired in debates about that. ITV knew exactly what they were going to do, when they were going to do it, and how they were going to do it. What happened here today? We're going to cover it. And they did one of those anecdotes I'll never forget him at an Eskimos game. I'm up in Section O in the nose bleeds. I had cheap season tickets. Loved Edmondson, great, great place, still a great place, obviously. And I hear my news director back in the day without cell phones. We had cell phones, not smartphones. I heard my news director being paged at Commonwealth. Tim spellasi, please call the newsroom. And so I decided I probably should call the newsroom too. And that was the Pine Lake tornado. And so that night, literally, the entire ITV team rushed down to Pine Lake for that tragedy. It's one of those news moments you know that would play out completely differently now for a whole pile of reasons, but that sort of adrenaline rush to get there, to know that something major had happened, and to try to reflect it back to people we were live from there at 11 o'clock that night, and we had, I think, two or three reports, very proud of that coverage, because it was so quick, the turnaround, and of course, led by Linda, because she was Doing late on her own at that point, I think, but just, you know, driving the story for days so you could do the serious stuff inside ITV, and it was a superstation, because it was on the satellite, it would be picked up by cable across certain companies across Canada. So even though your family might be in Toronto or out east, it would still be accessible and people would still be able to watch you. It felt like it had a very light atmosphere. Gord plays guitar. Gord Steinke plays guitar. He drives motorcycles. He would come into our radio station at the bear, we'd sit down and we would, we would just talk rock and roll. We talk about his band and his music, and how is it possible that you could cover like these, really, you know, dark stories or big stories, but it still felt like family, and it still felt really, really light, and the personalities were big, and Darren de Titian's doing the sports afterwards. And it goes for a whole hour, and I'm trying to remember who did the weather. I think it was Bill Mattison at 1.0 

yeah, I was there at the end of Bill Matheson. And then it was, and then it was Claire Martin, Kilo Pascals, yeah. That is the key to local news to this day, and global Edmonton, ITV, and I would argue, a lot of the supper hour ecosystem, for CTV, the six o'clock hour, they fully understand that, that you must you can't be silly. Sometimes you're silly with weather and you have some fun and Patricia bull and I, my co anchor at CTV Ottawa, for many years during pandemic, we found that first of all, everybody was tuning in because it was the biggest story in the world, but it was different in Edmonton. It was different in Ottawa. It was different an hour away from Ottawa, so everybody was tuning into local news to hear the nuances about. What they should do, and the fear that they were facing. And I can't tell you the number of people who reflected what you just reflected that you know, when the world is so grim, watching you guys laugh about a story is just so important to us to just give us a bit of a break. And we really found that during that time. And it was one of those moments of my career in television where, you know, I fully understood that even though things are really bad in the world, and you could apply that to today, you've got to provide a fuller picture. Like David Gray, a great broadcaster and friend of mine, used to, used to talk about, he was one of the best reporters I ever learned from he used to talk about, you know, we're, we're reflecting back a comic strip sized picture of the world, right? And you've got to open that up and close it as much as you can, to give people a broader sense the notion that you're reflecting reality back to people, their reality is quite different. So you can't get caught in that trap where this is truth. And I think when we're talking about media and disconnect and trust, which we're spending a lot of time talking about, and my new employer, Edelman, we talk about trust a lot, I think if the media has lost its way, collectively, and there's evidence that we have, or they have in some cases, and I qualify that because I'm a huge defender of journalism, part of it is that we've lost sight of the fact that we're holding up a piece of a mirror, not the whole mirror, and there's going to be disagreement about our choices, which most good journalists understand fully, and some who don't, I would think too quickly dismiss some of those criticisms about the choices we're making in the Mirror we're holding up. So I love that you mentioned trust. So I look at trust as a form of currency. It's like money. It's hard to accumulate and it's very easy to lose. So I look at the last we'll call it, 2016 beyond. I don't even know where to put the pin in it completely, but where did that trust go with mainstream media? Or how was it depleted? I think it was depleted. I don't think it's at zero. First of all, I think it is diminished, and the biggest reason for it diminishing is the proliferation of content everywhere, in your pocket, right? So I'll never like one of my formative moments in television news, Glenn kubish and ITV fantastic Assignment Editor. Being an assignment editor in TV is like getting pecked to death by 1000 different chickens. Glenn was the master, and as everybody followed their stories, we would gather around the television at 559 and there were four televisions up above these cupboards, and we'd all gather and watch what everybody had. And we knew in people's homes, 1000s of people were gathering, and the news junkies were flipping back and forth, right? So all of that is gone. All of that's gone because, for obvious reasons that everybody talks about, I can watch Lester Holt right now if I want to from last night's newscast, whatever I want right, whenever I want it, what has caused that depletion is the proliferation of other things that are out there, and those who are in favor of doing your own research and going after your own information and ignoring mainstream media and only going to socials and Reddit and everything else they do not understand or care to learn about what it takes to put something factual on the air and the process it takes to get on the air. Do not get me wrong. Journalists make mistakes, sometimes bad mistakes, and in this environment, when that happens now, that is folding into a larger narrative that either A, the media is biased, or B, it's lost its way and it's not worth anything anymore, and so it keeps me up at night, because I'll put it to you this way, Matt, if the next pandemic hits tomorrow, I honestly believe more people will die, because everybody thinks everything's lie, or everybody thinks big chunks of there's this great conspiracy out there to withhold. And whenever I'm confronted with that, particularly about the media, I have a quite a simple answer. And you would know this, the media collectively can't organize a lunch, let alone a single editorial, lie or manipulation as a collective, it's impossible. Is there something to be said about where media come from? Are they too big city? Are they too perhaps progressive versus drawing from rural sources, where the debate we're having now the people who make things versus the people who talk and think about the things fair. Anybody who says the parliamentary press gallery is of one voice has spent zero time around them. It is a chaotic collection of individuals who can't agree that the sky is blue, let alone that we're going to collectively. Get together and, you know, keep Justin Trudeau in office. You know, like SNC Lavalin was broken by mainstream media. Jody Wilson Raybould was broken by mainstream media. India was covered relentlessly. That embarrassing trip by Trudeau by mainstream media. If that in fact, is true that they're in it to hold him up. Those things don't match. It doesn't make sense now, before the Conservatives pounce, many at some of the Conservatives pounce and say, Yeah, but subsidies to media, soft coverage of Trudeau, I don't accept soft coverage of Trudeau. Should organizations that run journalism? Should they be taking direct subsidies from governments? I say no, because of this, because of this. And so you had a very short question. It's a very long answer, but I think all of those things have combined, and also that overall feeling from Canadians that we are losing something, that things are slipping and people are looking for things that are wrong, and media and politicians, even more so, are an easy target. 

Matt Cundill  16:11  
So this brings me to another question involving the CBC and money. So when Trudeau became prime minister in 2015 one of the things he did was he opened up the checkbook for the CBC. And in this period, one of the things I noticed is that the CBC began to get their podcast. Platform took off. It's now one of the top in the world. The digital stuff was there. The websites are phenomenal. There's video, there's there's multi platform. Meanwhile, companies like Bell and global and all the other ones out there, they're cutting back and they're going the other way.

Graham Richardson  16:45  
 They can't afford, or at least they say they can't afford to do this. The CRTC is rather limp in enforcing licenses and standards across the country, and now we're left with their newsrooms outside of the CBC. That feels wrong. It is wrong. And I will say this in defense of my former employers. I tell people this and they're surprised on a full day when is in summer vacation or Christmas, when I left CTV in August, let's say so pick a day like today, for instance, February or March, CTV Ottawa, although the format of the news collection has changed. We would have 10 to 12 reporters available to us, plus anchors. People are surprised at that. That's a pretty good sized newsroom, you know. And they're, they're MSJ is multi skilled journalists. They're not full crews. In some ways, that benefited us. In other ways, it is difficult. It is more difficult. All that being said, yes, the CDC surges with funding in 2015 on, because it had been 10 years of austerity under Harper. And one of the things that governments do, and you'll find this next time, when they change, they do the different thing. You know, he didn't do that. So I'm going to do that. And I think it's fair to say that Trudeau folks fundamentally believe in public broadcasting, whereas conservatives are a lot more skeptical about it and whether the CBC current form is the way it should be. And those are good, robust debates to have. But yeah, on the private side, there's an imbalance here, right? There's an imbalance here, and it's going to get more acute. Because if polyev, in fact, wins, and he does what he says, one of the first things he's going to do is, of course, got CBC, and it's kind of like the argument ages ago in network sports competition over advertising money, like, why is the public broadcaster subsidized to 1.4 billion, or whatever it was back then, it's now 1.4 billion. Why are they going after ad revenue too, when they've got this big parliamentary subsidy, and so there's lots of things to talk about there. There's lots of things to talk about there. You make a fair point. And don't get me wrong, I am not dismissing the critics of the CBC. I think that a good public broadcaster receives the criticism and adjusts. And in many places, I think the CDC has lost its way. I generally just think that in 2025 we need more independent journalism, not less. And the critics at the CBC would say the CBC is nothing close to independent, so I understand that.

Matt Cundill  19:11  
Yeah, I had a father in law last night say, can't wait to defund the CBC. And I'm like, Well, do they need that much budget? No, however, we don't want it to go away. That's not going to be good. So I think if I had a wish list of where we could start, I would probably start at the CRTC level. Let's talk to Bell about the money they're making on NFL, all the TV shows they put out, all the streaming stuff. How much you making from crave? How much you making from this? And then let's talk about your news commitment, because it's really, you know, this idea of trying to monetize news is lunacy. And I will default to Marty Forbes, The Wiz in Edmonton, whose general manager said, listen in radio. It's always been about, you know, your stations that play the hits will make all the money you play all the commercials, the new stuff put people on the street. You're going to lose money, but it will be offset by playing the hits. And somewhere along the way, the smart people who do the money manage to separate it all out to say, well, we're losing money here. I mean, listen, many, many ways to count. I think the CRTC, if the CRTC, can properly, you know, hold license stations accountable to their news commitments, and have strong news commitments. There might be a way out of this. 

Graham Richardson  20:25  
Yeah, you would think so. You would hope so, because the public wants it. That's the other danger here is that look at any of the recent elections, right? If you only consume your information on social media, you know all of the newscasts and all of the newspapers, the traditional newspapers and radio news stations are all garbage. The ratings don't support that. There's still a very sizable chunk of people. In fact, the leading news websites in the country right now, if you are only digital, CTV and CBC, they reach millions of people, and people trust those sources, and when they make mistakes, they are quite rightly roasted. But I fundamentally cannot accept, let's junk it all, because, you know, we don't need it anymore. You know, I covered the pandemic, and I'll never forget it. And I don't think we fully come to terms with what it did to us, but I know in my soul that we provided an essential service in a very, very scary time. I'm very proud of what we did, and all journalists did for the most part. And so it is a very, very important question that I think is connected to a lot of things, right? And when we talk about trust, in our Trust Barometer, 25th anniversary is coming out in a few weeks. One of the things that sticks with me from 2024 the last one, is the number of people we surveyed worldwide and in Canada who think actively people organizations are lying to them, journalists, business and government, that there is this great desire to mislead, not just I don't agree with you, but you're in on something that I don't know about, and I don't trust you, and I think you're pulling one over on me. That feeling has grown tremendously. It's a real problem, the manipulation of the information for other purposes, and how well, Steve Bannon, infamous person behind Mr. Trump, or close to Mr. Trump, flooding the zone with S, with crap, right? That was the strategy, so that people couldn't determine what was solid, good information and what was not. And I think we're seeing that play out in a number of places, not just in the Trump world, I think, all over the place. 

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Matt Cundill  23:11  
slash apps. Well, as we are speaking today, I don't mind putting a time stamp on this, but last night, there was a tragic plane crash involving a commercial airliner and a helicopter, an army helicopter, in the DMV, just over DC, Virginia and Maryland. And I thought, Oh, well, I'll just get my news from Twitter, because it's, you know, one of the morning or something. And I would just like to say how thankful I am right now to all the aviation experts and FAA insiders who have all the answers on why those two aircraft came together. These, by the way, amazing people, the same people have been my guiding light through a pandemic, the Middle Eastern crisis and two elections. You turn on CNN, you turn on something with a camera and real journalists. I mean, it's something like x and I got this from blue sky as well, which is supposed to be better. And, yeah, there's nothing out there on the phone, 

Graham Richardson  24:02  
just people spewing right and politicizing and grabbing onto a detail, like it's fact, because we need this to be explained. And then last night, you have the president united states saying something looks fishy, and I'm paraphrasing whatever he put out right, and he's describing the events, you know, and it's just like, how do you cover that as a standard news story, knowing that all of this mess is going on around it. And you know, we all are the same. We are doing what you did, grabbing our information from our phones, from our feeds, from our socials. And then the role I would think should be of real journalists out there is to actually talk to people, officials, who are involved in the investigation. The problem is that a lot of people see that, and they say that guy's in on it, and there's no evidence of that at all, particularly when, again. Guarantee. I don't know what happened here, but I guarantee you, if there was a severe instrument malfunction within seconds of that becoming out, there will be hundreds, if not 1000s, of people saying that's what they want you to think. This is a cover up, you know, and disinformation and bad information is so much more easily believed and it moves more quickly because it's an easy answer. You know, there's a conspiracy to cover it up. Of course, they're going to say that, and sometimes it's just usually, 99% of the time. Of course, it's much more mundane. You might be actually telling the truth. So we'll see what happens we I want to say we don't know what happened. We don't know, and that's the other thing in this age, Matt, you cannot. I'm not sure about that, is not a good lead when there's millions of reporters with smartphones or people who describe themselves as reporters. Yeah, I wish we could kind of bottle this up as a juice, because you touched on it earlier, and that's the ability to organize information inside, whether it's a radio station, TV station, or any media, news organization, it's got to be some of the worst communication in the world, because people are off doing their thing. They're working all the time and getting the right message out. For example, for our latest contest that we're doing, how do we get people to communicate that properly to the audience so it's not ambiguous, it's got to be written really well. And to think that the government can get involved and create something. I've done events. It's hard to get events, you know, right, and many different ways to do it. I think a great example of that is what happened to you in Ottawa. But I want to talk a little bit about and really sort of let the audience know that in 2010 you replaced Max Keeping and he was cjoh. She was the anchor, and then you followed, and then I couldn't think of a more trustworthy guy to follow Him than you. And so you're you're there, and you're in Ottawa. And what's it like to be anchor of that important TV station? Yeah, it was a great honor to be asked to do it the time my kids were younger, and I'd been doing network for about four and a half years. I'd been covering. Five years I've been cover. I'd gone to LA with babies. Don't do that. La was great, but it's it's a crazy place, as we've seen. And then three and a half years on Parliament Hill with Bob Fife, which is unbelievable, who I still talk to, and is still working the beat, still breaking stories. It was a really big opportunity that I was flattered to be asked to do. So that was 2010 and I ended up doing it for 15 years. And Max was ahead of his time in many ways. He understood the role of the celebrity anchor in galvanizing a community around charity events and being a personality, not just somebody who read teleprompter. Max was really colorful, and, you know, just a deep, deep affection in the community. And I just knew I couldn't be that. So I just came in. I wanted to be myself. And Kevin Newman told me that it would take me five years to be an anchor like Kevin. I've got 20 years. I've got, you know, I've been all over the place. I backfilled for Canada. Am later on, I was backfilling for the national and Kevin Newman was right, except it took me six years, and there's something about anchoring that, like, if you look at our frames now, where we're on your podcast, the camera places things on you. You know people see you in this way, right? And you have to be entirely comfortable with who you are and what you're doing, flaws and all to convey to people that you're giving them the straight goods and you can trust what I'm saying. And it's not like I was untrustworthy before, but I was 40 years old. I didn't know the audience, and the audience didn't know me, so it took some time, and I said, when I left, I said I was a little shaky, and I just thanked everybody who stuck with us, who stuck with me too, because it's the art of making it look easy when it's not. And it was a thrilling ride, like it was just an I say to journalism students, if I could, I'd start every newscast, every broadcast with get this. It's just a wonderful way to make a living, and you're so engaged, so intense. And still, the public cares and watches. Yes, young people are watching in different ways, but they are still very, very engaged in what's happening around them. And CTV, Ottawa and CTV generally, is still a very big part of that. So the pandemic hits in 2020 and then about a year or so later, I think it might have been 2022 can't remember if it was 21 or 22 it was 22 for the for the so called Freedom convoy. So here's downtown Ottawa. You're local, but obviously national as well. So you're sort of putting this out to everyone. You go with your phone and you are showing the story, and the story is, is that these trucks have clogged up a major artery in Ottawa. Massive effects on the city, massive effects on all the people you know in and around, very, very disruptive. But it seems that people elsewhere are getting this there. This is really just about clogging up Parliament Hill, but no, we're clogging up one of Canada's biggest cities. And I think you mean you're the most qualified to be covering this, I do believe at least one of the most qualified. But most of the stuff that's coming out there, other people also have cell phones, and they are pretending it is a Buffalo Bills tailgate party with bouncy castles. Oh, we have some Nazis over there. We have a bunch of other people over here, and now we started a fire. Now we're desecrating what sort of Zoo was that.

Unknown Speaker  30:28  
So I'll

Graham Richardson  30:29  
never forget it, and I want to particularly because a lot of your audience is, I would guess, Alberta based. And, you know, Western based. I do not believe it was a French I do not believe that there were overwhelmingly, you know, freakish people, whatever you want to call Yes, there were extremists, French and English. There were anarchists. I did see evidence, you know, we've all seen the Nazi flag and that sort of thing. But I also think there were small business owners who'd had enough. I think there were people who needed to strike out in an extraordinary time that will be written about 100 years from now and 150 years from now, who felt that no one was listening to them and the Prime Minister was calling fringe. And the spark of this, of course, was the vaccine mandate that further interfered with a lot of these truckers, with going the United States and delivering goods. And there was a party atmosphere. I had friends who came down to see it. It was self fulfilling, right? Oh, they're not, they're not bringing the cops in. They're not going to clear this out. And it's good. Well, I gotta go check it out myself. The canal was open, right? And these folks are all resourceful. There's a lot of them had camping equipment. They had cooks. They had people drove eight hours with food. It was a bit of a party. There was a DJ right at the corner of Sussex in Rideau, and the DJ kept coming back, which I couldn't understand. Why wasn't he just told not to come with his flatbed. He kept coming back in right? And so yes, there was this party atmosphere. But the Rio Center, our main mall, closed for three weeks straight. People lost their jobs. A woman called the newsroom in tears. She was in a wheelchair in her apartment. Her her son was delivering her food. I'll never forget this. He couldn't get the groceries to her. She was running out of money because she was eating at the convenience store, eating junk food because she had no access to food. So I tell the pro convoy folks that two things can be true and three things can be true at the same time. This was an extraordinary unlawful protest, like when the police tell you to leave and you don't, you're breaking the law, that's, I'm sorry. You know that is not an infringement on your free speech. You can't go into a theater and yell fire when you're blocking roads and interfering with people in wheelchairs to get their food. That's not a right. But at the same time, it was a crazy, crazy time that affected people differently. I'm talking to you on a laptop. I got to go into my studio and do the news every night. My wife works in the public service with with the RCMP, and her job was not interfered with. So, you know, like that, fatigue, frustration, anger and feeling that things were just absolutely going to hell, and I had to do something. I fully understand that. 

So the two things, I mean, I get a little picky right now, and it's tough to be picky with this. One of them is Justin. Trudeau was not responsible for health mandates. That's a provincial thing. So I feel like explaining to these people, why aren't you going to your provincial people to do it? And if you're truckers and you can't get across the border, shouldn't you be in DC talking to Joe Biden, who had put that in Trudeau is kind of responsible for none of the things that they were complaining about. I do understand if you're a small business owner and things aren't going your way. Yes, I totally get that. They go to Ottawa to try to well, maybe we can move Trudeau along, and it's Aaron O'Toole who winds up paying with his job for the whole thing. I kind of felt like everybody needed a civics lesson well, and this was driven by emotion and anger, and who on our political spectrum right now or back then, and up to and including a few months ago or a few weeks ago, draws the most emotion and anger as Justin Trudeau. It was a unifying hate Trudeau protest as well. And it's interesting, he mentioned that about O'Toole because there were pockets of the, obviously, of the conservative caucus, who were supportive. We've seen evidence of that. And O'Toole was kind of picking the wrong side on this, because they saw this as an opportunity to expose all the problems with Justin Trudeau leadership. So yeah, civics less than fair enough. But it was about much more than mandates. It was about much more than the pandemic. It was about a lot of things, and I it was the biggest story in the world. People forget that all network American television was here, and then the Ukraine war happened right after this ended, and then that became the biggest news in the world. And you know what, Matt, the thing that stays with me, without getting into, you know, all of the endless debates about whether they went too far, and were they violent, or weren't they violent? I mean, I it was an illegal protest because the police told them leaving, they stayed, and nobody's ever going to convince me otherwise. As a guy with a camera and a parka, I never felt unsafe. The only time I felt challenged was when my network demanded that I go with security, because immediately they knew I was I was with CTB, and that's when I felt threatened. I wished I'd been able to just go out on my own more, but they were worried about my safety and all that, because things were, things were pretty crazy. Things were pretty crazy, but I think it was, it was a watershed moment. And we talk about the disconnect between how we see things and what even what's happening in the United States to this day. And I think that was an encapsulation of this, the convoy protests like you saw that people around the country have forgotten this, but there's a place called billings bridge just outside of downtown, and there was a new group of protesters circling the city in their cars, and people from Ottawa. This is laid in the convoy. People from Ottawa in their cross country ski gear went out to Billings bridge and blocked the road and said, you can't go any further. It was like a standoff with people from the Glebe push people in Ottawa to that level of frustration. It really, I said on TV at the time, it caused a lot of people to question how secure our society was and how stable it was, because it was clear after three or four days that help was not coming. And I say to this day, if they shut down Yorkdale in Toronto or showay Gardens in Toronto, or the Eaton center in Toronto for three or four days that would have been it in Toronto, because it was up here in the Rideau center. It was a different reaction, and that's the other current that sort of is still moving through provincial politics, that you kind of left us on our own here and we had to deal with things. It was a local, international, national story that I think is still relevant and says a lot about where we were and what's happening. I wonder historically, how it's going to be in the history books. Because if I really wanted to go down there with a microphone and just ask one question to everybody who was there, why are you here? And I knew that I would get 100 different answers if I asked 100 people, yep, and that's a fair assessment, because there were anti vaxxers there, right? There were people like, I talked to a woman with her child who was there, who did not, who believed in body autonomy and did not agree with the vaccine at all. And then I talked with people who just wanted to party. There was lots of drinking going on, you know. And then there were, you know, families and the bouncy castles, and then there were anarchists. There were people who really just wanted to take part of something that absolutely brought a symbol of our democracy and power structure to a standstill. And they succeeded. Was this the beginning of the end of how you looked at journalism? Like was this sort of like the moment where you're moment where you're like, um, maybe I'll have to pivot at some point. No, no, no, no. And you know what my kid at the time said, Dad, all my friends know you're a reporter because I was posting to tick tock and social media, they said they didn't know you were a reporter. Bennett, I've been on the air for 25 years, 30 years. Why did I change? I just think I'm 54 turning 55 in June. Felt like eventually I was going to do something like this outside of media, and I wanted to do it when I had runway, and I want to do it on my own terms, and not be that sort of angrier guy in the newsroom waiting for a check, talking about how things used to be. Because media is in flux. And, you know, mainstream is shrinking, right? Mainstream is shrinking so, you know, my son's a reporter, so I'm still a huge news junkie, and there is a future. It's just that it's shifting and changing. And if I was not going to last until my last days as a retired person, which I wasn't, because it just it's changing too quickly. I wanted to take this opportunity now, when I still had time and energy to do it. So you work at Edelman, which is a PR firm. What does a PR firm do? Who is your client? How does it work?

We've got a series of consultants and PR people, and I'm managing director media, and we talk to companies about media and mainstream and social and digital campaigns. We deal with crisis with big corporate clients. We have small nonprofits. We deal with as well. You know, pick a company that you work for, or someone works for a large company, or whatever, and they're trying to do things. On the government relations side, we kind of help them work through that. We do lobbying. I don't do that, but it's not as simple as that. There's a plethora of things we are doing, you know, whether it's an airline, you know, a rail company, or a small nonprofit. One of my, one of my clients I like to talk about, is the concussion Legacy Foundation. And. They are a wonderful organization that is highly focused on brain injuries amongst athletes, soldiers and in things like domestic violence and how TBI is traumatic brain injuries impact so many parts of society. So our job with them is to get them attention, to get them traction, to get them in front of the right people to make their arguments, particularly on the soldier front. Because if you are a JTF two soldier, for instance, like an Albertan we know through concussion Legacy Foundation, Shane, who has done tours of duty in Afghanistan and has a brain injury and wasn't getting the right response from Veterans Affairs. Our job is to help him get attention. So it is PR, but it's government relations, it's a whole plethora of things. I'm finding it very challenging and really quite rewarding and different, but similar to a newsroom. If that answers your question, what would you say to somebody who is downsized out of media. What advice can you give to them about making a transition out of a newsroom, out of a radio station, out of a broadcast facility and into something else? Well, many of us have said there are incredibly valuable, transferable skills we are used to working on incredibly intense deadlines that are unforgiving. We synthesize information in a digestible way for the public, like no other profession, can we understand people and the public in a way that others do not. And I also tell them regularly that many clients, big and small, are still very, very interested in media very, very interested in how they can get their story out. And the other thing that I'm doing a fair bit of is advice, right? Like we are thinking of doing this. How do you think that's going to play? Like, that's not PR media relations, that's advisory work, which is very, very fulfilling. And what's exciting about my line of work after media, is that, you know, from time to time, I get to be in the room, as opposed to waiting for the announcement to come and covering it for the public, I get to help shape sort of which direction, whatever client wants to go with it, which is challenging, fascinating and all new for me, you just triggered some things in my head and something that we're very, you know, fortunate to have worked in media in the era that we have for as long as we have, and that's you get into the room, and people come up with an idea. It's like, of course, you'll say it better than me, but I'll just go, yeah, how do you think that's gonna land? Right? Like, what do you think is gonna happen at the end of this? Like, in broadcasting, we really do work from the last page backwards, right? It's get in, get out. How do we want this to really land with people? And we see more than ever mistakes that are being made because people don't look to see how something's gonna land, right? And the complicating factor in 2025 Of course, I like to tell clients, and I tell the public. I tell my sons, everybody, my family, is that there's a million reporters out there now, because everybody has smartphones in their pockets that are HD cameras, right? So there's risk everywhere, and so oftentimes that causes large corporations to freeze and not do anything which is not a good strategy. It depends. It depends, right? Like there are times where less and zero even is a better strategy, but I find a lot of times in Canada anyway, that's the default. Let's just let this go away, right? Forget corporate like, look at Justin Trudeau, right? I honestly believe you know that Toronto St Paul's, if that's not a sledge hammer to the head that he's going to lose, I don't know what is, for those who don't know Toronto, St Paul's, they lost the by election. It's right downtown. It's pure liberal country. It's Carolyn Bennett's riding, and they lost it, you know. And if he left when that happened, the party be in much better shape, and the country would be too, you know. And so there's sometimes this sort of freight train in front of people that is difficult to see. So we like to think that our job is to say, look at that, you know. And it's a fascinating, subtle change, but sometimes significant change in how to look at things. That's why you're here, because some people can't read the pickle label from inside the jar. That's a good way to put it. I try to Graham, thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. You've been very, very helpful with this in depth discussion about journalism in the future. Thanks so much for asking me, Matt, it's

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  44:29  
been fun. The sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan serminsky, edited by Taylor MacLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.