Transcript: David Cayley

An interview with the Canadian author and broadcaster

In recent years, we have seen heated debate in this country around the CBC and its future. With the question of defunding no longer looming, it is a good time to pause, to look back at where our national public broadcaster has been, and to talk through where it might go from here. My guest on this week’s program is a veteran CBC producer who has written an insightful and well-researched new book about the institution — and where he thinks it went wrong.

David Cayley is a Canadian author and broadcaster. For thirty years, he made documentaries for the CBC Radio show Ideas. His latest book is The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back).

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: It’s wonderful to have you on the program. Your work has, of course, been known to me for a long time, but your essay during the pandemic for the Literary Review of Canada really stands out to me for its insights, its independent thought, and, frankly, its courage.

DC: Thank you.

TH: So, I was excited to read this book on the subject of the CBC — your former employer, and mine as well. When you went to press with this book, the future of the CBC was uncertain. The election victory of the Liberals had not yet happened. Now, it’s looking more like business as usual at the CBC, which I think makes this critique all the more important. You open the book with a struggle within the CBC, sometimes referred to as the “Seven Days War” — an internal battle over the program This Hour Has Seven Days around 1964, and how it ushered in this second era of CBC history. I want to start today, though, just to give listeners a bit of context, with your own history at the CBC between 1971 and 2012, which included many years on the show Ideas. Can you sketch that out for us, so everybody knows what the background is?

DC: I started freelancing in ‘71 — Five Nights for very old people who will remember — and it was a time of what was later called the Radio Revolution, an expanding radio service, and lots of programs to freelance for.

For three years in the mid-seventies, I worked at CBC Vancouver. In 1976, I was let go as the host of the morning show, which was then broadcast to the British Columbia region, after a long-simmering political dispute with management about the kind of coverage we were giving. It culminated when the American Indian Movement leader, Leonard Peltier, was extradited from Vancouver, and my coverage was deemed by the management to be somewhat over the top. They said, “Well, we’ve had enough of you as a program host. But you can continue freelancing.” And they were as good as their word, which I appreciated. I continued to freelance and then caught on at Ideas around ‘81 and found a home. It was where I could do what I wanted to do, and I was very fortunate in my colleagues there. That continued on until 2012, essentially broadcasting radio documentaries.

TH: I want to focus on this second era that you discuss in the book, but before we do that, can you just give us a little bit of the broad strokes of the first era. You go into a brief history of the beginnings of the CBC, and I think it would be useful for listeners. There was a lot there I didn’t know. If you can give us a rough outline?

DC: I took that phrase from Eric Koch, who was a German émigré who joined the CBC radio service in 1944. He was very much part of that first era, the so-called Golden Age of radio. He was also right in the middle of the This Hour Has Seven Days [controversy]. He was actually the supervisor at the time and recused himself; he went back to being an ordinary producer because he didn’t want to rule on it. But he wrote a very excellent history of those events between ’64 and ’66. And in that history, he says that this was the end of the first era of Canadian broadcasting. The phrase stuck with me. I thought, “That’s right.” He defines the CBC in the first era as “church-like.” He means by the metaphor to evoke, I think, a certain esprit de corps, a deep loyalty to the institution, a sense of vocation or mission — sometimes called an adult education influence. I mean, it’s easy to get it wrong by just looking at that ... You know, radio, before television, was television. It was primarily a commercially driven entertainment medium. The CBC was never free of commercials; radio only became free of them in the ‘70s, because we weren’t making any money carrying them. But I think what Koch was referring to … And Alphonse Ouimet, who was the president at the time of the Seven Days brouhaha, also used this religion metaphor, which I think is interesting (and also misleading in a certain way).

But that, in broad strokes, gives you the first era. The people who created Seven Days and who pioneered what I call the populist era at the CBC would have called the old style elitist. Reeves Haggan, who was the supervising producer who commissioned the Seven Days series, said the CBC was Don Mills talking to Don Mills. Which may not mean much anymore — maybe not in the rest of the country — but Don Mills was then a middle-class suburb. The CBC, according to Reeves, had its audience, and it spoke to its audience.

So, if that was true — if the populist critique of the elitists was true — it’s very interesting that populism, as I designate the primary character of the second era, has now ended up also with its own audience, in a mirror of what it criticized. So, maybe we could spin a sociological law out of that! But anyway, I think it is the case with the CBC.

TH: It’s so interesting, because reading through this … I mean, one of the critiques that are made a lot right now is that the CBC is very elitist. I’ve made that critique myself. So many of us who worked there lived in the same neighbourhoods, we were educated, secular, urban. Most of us were progressive politically. And so, to see this referred to as “populism” is so interesting to me. But I want to read a quote from the book, where you write that “populism at the CBC was not about letting the people speak, but about speaking for the people.” Can you elaborate on this? What did populism, CBC-style, look like during that period — and where do you think it’s ended up?

DC: If you look back to Seven Days — just because I used it as a prototype — they promised that they would be for their audience. If the old image of religion at the CBC meant that the church was important, you had to maintain the integrity of the church in which the people were included, but it wasn’t driven by the wishes of the people in exactly the same way.

Seven Days said they would speak for the people. They would bring justice. They would bring entertainment. They would bring excitement. And, above all, they would be for those people who had been excluded from the CBC. So, I take that seriously. They rooted their authority in the audience. And it may seem to some people listening to us that there would be no other place to root your authority — that it might seem just obvious, that that’s the way it should be. And if you listen to CBC Radio now … I mean, this was policy. People were told to do this. But now it’s second nature, the personal pronouns: “It’s your weekend. It’s your traffic. It’s your 401.” If you listen to the traffic reporter. It’s all, “Canada lives here.” It’s all, “We are one. We speak with you, for you, within the same frame as you live in. We’re really one.” Right? We know what’s making news because it is what you care about, it’s what we care about. We know who you are; you know who we are. It’s such a constant emphasis, you might not even notice it — this compact community to which the CBC speaks. And obviously that isn’t Trumpism. Populism has had many meanings; it’s been a left-wing phenomenon and it’s been a right-wing phenomenon. I just used the term because it was current at the CBC. It was, to an extent, the way people spoke.

TH: The programming that flowed from that. I mean the Radio Revolution, you write about that at length. That was super interesting to read about, and the shows that I loved over the years, including As It Happens. But you wrote in particular about Q under Jian Ghomeshi, and the assumption that the audience shared that same encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, the same language as its hosts and its producers. You pointed out that Ideas went to great lengths to identify references — to explain them — so that there wasn’t a sense of exclusion with the audience. What did you see as significant about that development with Q?

DC: Well, you’ve nearly said it. It was as if popular culture, media world, was second nature. You didn’t need to establish a critical distance from it. You analyzed it, you were endlessly interested in its permutations, in fact. But it was a kind of second nature. And this was a long emphasis at the CBC, beginning with “creative renewal,” so-called, around 1990 or so. There was a panic — certainly in the radio service, which I can speak more directly about, but I think in television as well — that we weren’t keeping up. There was a tremendous sense of panic generated by management — and it’s described in detail in the book — that we weren’t “the right kind” anymore. That people were younger than we were, they were immigrants. Whatever it was, we just didn’t have our finger on the pulse anymore. We had to get it back on the pulse. And that, in the end, turned into a kind of trend-spotting, pop culture, “everybody did the same thing yesterday, everybody watched the Super Bowl.” CBC lost its distance from what people didn’t even call “pop culture” anymore — they just called it “the culture.”

So, if Jian Ghomeshi, for example, had said something about “what’s going on in the culture,” he would be understood. Everyone would know what this blob, “the culture,” is, right? That was also a very strong point made by Richard Stursberg when he took over in 2003–04. That there’s just “the culture.” There isn’t high culture, there isn’t low culture. In fact, he was very harsh on his drama producers, saying they weren’t keeping up. That they had to “get with the program.” So yeah, in the end, I would say what was lost was critical distance, the sense that there are many cultures in the country and that the CBC is also, as a second point, creating culture and not just subscribing to it.

TH: So many interesting points about that. One of which is you talk about the adoption of certain terms, and yuppie is the term that you use as an example. This is really interesting to me because when I was in the newsroom, I kept a list of words I thought we should avoid, for the reasons that you laid out in your book. I lost that fight every single time. But talk to me a little bit about this — why yuppie? And why do you think that adopting these phrases, sometimes from academia, sometimes from activism, and using them as our parlance is problematic?

DC: If you give me a minute, I’ll talk about that example and then say why I think it’s broadly significant. The example itself is just one that meant a lot to me. People now may not even know what the word yuppie refers to, but it appeared around the end of the seventies. It designated young, urban professional. It was an acronym, but when I first saw it, I didn’t know what it meant, and it was in a context where it was assumed I did know what it meant. So, that’s the first attribute of these words: they drop into the discourse and you’re supposed to know what they mean instantly. What yuppie did, in my opinion, was repackage the words hippie and yippie. Hippie was broadly speaking the sixties, and yippie was a particular political aspect of the sixties. Yippie was the Youth International Party of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and others who were kind of Groucho Marxists, as they were sometimes called. But yuppie put it all into this word, which basically said, “The sixties are over, the hippies have grown up and become yuppies.”

It was the transformation of everything that might have been beginning in the sixties into essentially a demographic phenomenon. Now they’re a demographic segment. They’re the yuppies, right? They’re the young urban professionals. The whole thing was about consumer style, it turns out. Just a big generation with a new aesthetic. Now it’s in place, and they’re out there purchasing. And so, the word does a tremendous amount of work. It really is a little tiny word that embodies a worldview. It’s a little bomb, if you like, of meaning. And if you just start using it as if it were an artless sociological term, that you don’t have to notice that you’re incorporating it … Okay, that’s the exposition. But how many words are there like that? The word that just is instantly there, before you get to think about it, or whether you want to use that word, or if you want to endorse all the meanings that are encoded within that word. And if you look at it that way, then you see that we largely have, as a common being, a sort of pop sociological vocabulary, a whole lot of little shorthand ways of speaking about the things that are going on.

The main difficulty is that it imposes a worldview, or includes us in a worldview, but makes us think that we understand what we may not understand. Or what might have another face. So, that’s my argument about pop sociological words.

TH: I think it was such an important one — and an important one for journalists to think about, in terms of how we create a space for a conversation in this country. Another point you make on that front is the lack of formality. I think one example you use is a radio host saying to I think a professor or something, “Well, hey there, Jessie.” That kind of thing.

DC: I remember that one. Yeah. “Hey there, Jessie.” He had never met him before!

TH: This over-familiarity. One of the arguments you make going forward for the CBC is that there needs to be some distance. There needs to be a formal forum created that can accommodate all of these different opposing viewpoints that we are dealing with in this country. Say a little more on that.

DC: Well, this preoccupied me from the very beginning of being a broadcaster, from when I began around ’71. My Bible at that time was a book by a Brazilian educator called Paulo Freire, a book that had quite a big vogue around that time called Pedagogy of the Oppressed. People might remember the name of Martin Buber better than the name of Paulo Freire. But it was all about dialogue. Everything had to be dialogue. And I was allying myself to this broadcasting monologue and asking myself, “Well, how can there be dialogue in a monologue?” Right? The answer I came up with was not answering machines. It was not feedback. It was not “tell us your stories.” It was that that you have to leave space in your discourse for a response.

One of the main attributes of populism, as I understood it, was to overwhelm the listener. To saturate the listener. To say, “This is about you.” To absorb them. Patrick Watson said, “We’ve got to have them watching. It’s going to be mandatory viewing.” Everything about it was supposed to be compelling, including, involving. It was all getting closer. So, my theory was, in a certain way — which makes it sound not so good — about getting farther away. So that there’s room for a response. So that the discourse — discourse is too fancy, let’s say “talk”— so that the talk is unfinished. It is never completed. There’s room in it to think. There’s room in it to respond. There’s room in it to go farther. It isn’t part of the saturation. If we can use the image of saturation for the ambition of mass media that want above all to include you, be you. Think for you, with you, around you. There is no idea of distance.

A second part, if you’ll allow me, this is very unpopular in a way. Ever since “the personal is political” in the sixties, and the feeling that bad things fester in privacy. This was Seven Days: the light of publicity is essentially good. It’s healing, it’s restoring, it’s exposing, it’s bringing to light. Everything has to be shown, investigated, improved, brought to justice. There’s a tremendous emphasis on that.

Then formality becomes part of the old style, the first era, the elitists. The CBC announcer, “Good evening, I’m Lister Sinclair.” It’s not the sound of the friendly “Hi, happy Tuesday,” or whatever Ghomeshi used to say. “Happy Monday,” or “Happy Friday.” Happy, happy. It’s all that. The CBC broadcasts are full of benedictions of that kind: “Enjoy. Be good. Take care. Be safe.” It’s all this. Yeah, there are all kinds of benedictions. And they all are about closeness. So to speak to talk about distance at all begins to seem almost perverse. “I’d like to get farther away from you.” It’s very easily misunderstood. Because I don’t really mean that. I, as a broadcaster, wanted listeners as much as anybody else wanted listeners. But I wanted them on certain terms.

If you allow me to go on a little longer, what recommends my unpopular position, or makes it worth a moment’s thought anyway, is that we’re in this kind of media apocalypse. I mean apocalypse as revelation, which is the meaning of the word originally. Once you’ve turned nearly every single person on the planet into a broadcaster through their smartphone, and a publisher as well, you’ve reached a certain point at which the media, the mediation, is staring you in the face. It’s not a remote theory that Harold Innis has, or an exotic theory that Marshall McLuhan has. Now it’s there, and it’s having catastrophic consequences in the ability to put people into these so-called filter bubbles or echo chambers or whatever you call it. You really are getting an amazing segmentation of opinion.

It seems like it’s a good time to raise questions about media practice, even though they may seem remote and idealistic. I think there’s a long way to go with this, but that we should be at least trying to start conversations and explore. Could there be a different style? Could there be a CBC that creates a public forum that is formal but not stuffy, that is distanced but not cold or unfeeling in any way? It really is an unproven or untested idea at this point. It’s a starting point.

TH: Let me see if I understand what you mean by translating it into practical terms. So, if I believe in this ethos of creating this separate space and I want to have some distance from my audience, say I’m at the CBC and I’m covering the trucker convoy. With the model that the CBC had in place at that time, its audience was very much, I think, like its producers and its hosts in its opinions. There was that homogeneity of the opinion that you write about in the book. It treated its coverage as if it was speaking to that one group and was cozy with that one group. Now, if I was to insert myself into that story now with your view that you are taking, I would take more of a critical distance, maybe more uncertainty, more humility, and more space for more perspectives. Am I understanding that right?

DC: Yeah, I think you are. I mean, the first thing I’d say is go open a truck door and see who’s inside that truck and find out how they got there and why they are there. The most shocking thing to me about the CBC’s coverage of the trucker convoy — it was egregious in both services but it was kind of summed up in a Fifth Estate episode in which the whole thing was entirely treated as a problem. A problem of public safety, a problem of order, a problem of noise and inconvenience.

First of all, to begin at the beginning, I think the CBC needs to ask itself: What is a public? Because populism has the public. Essentially, when it speaks about the audience, it’s speaking about a singular being — the public, the audience. But there are many publics, and they are dynamic entities. They come and they go; they’re fuzzy at the edges.

The convoy had all the hallmarks — whatever you thought of it, and I mean that — whatever you thought of it, it had all the hallmarks of an emergent public. It was spontaneous. Its leaders were later identified; there were probably some people who were more influential than others. But generally, you’d have to really be pretty prejudiced not to see that as a bubbling up, as something kind of emerging from Canada’s political unconscious. And it grew spontaneously. It gathered strength as it grew. The people on the bridges, the people in the parking lots — all somehow summoned, called by this phenomenon. They identified with it. A friend who was in Ottawa, and was reflecting with me on the joyousness that was evident, said, “Well, they were finding each other. They hadn’t known each other. They were actually finding each other.” An experience of political community, which they hadn’t necessarily known was available yet. So, that’s the first thing.

The second thing is this phenomenon, being spontaneous and chaotic, is also undefined. What its meaning is going to be is not [immediately clear]. That is the great sin, for me, of the CBC and the government: to fix a meaning on this thing right off the bat — a hostile meaning. The prime minister’s shocking interview with French television saying that these are misogynists, these are racists, these are people who are against science.

So, they had come to Ottawa to present what I would call … I mean, with animus, with violence, with the banners — may I say it on your podcast? — the “Fuck Trudeau” things. Yeah, I mean, that’s a violent phenomenon. But they essentially presented a conversational proposition: “These mandates that you’ve imposed on truckers to get vaccinated, when most of them are already vaccinated, and it’s obvious that the vaccination is not preventing transmission …” Everyone knew it by the time the government did that. Why the government did it is beyond me, but they did it. And they were saying, “No, you’ve taken a step too far here. We will not swallow this.”

Now, that’s a conversational proposition. It’s a view of society. Just as the opposite view is a view of society: that we’re all one great immune system and we can’t afford to let anybody not get vaccinated. It needed to be discussed. The two views needed to compare notes. They both have their evidence; they both have their arguments. But we didn’t get any of that.

We got that one proposition was not admissible. It couldn’t even be brought up as a proposition. These people were “misinformed.” They were in the grip of “misinformation.” So, you’ve estranged a big part of your population. You’re sowing the wind; you’re going to reap the whirlwind. It’s going to happen.

To me, that’s a tragedy. That the CBC is not there at least to speak for conversation. For investigation. For “Can we understand this? Can we find things we agree on? These are our fellow citizens.” I don’t know, have I answered? It would be that if you were there, practically speaking, yeah, go get in a truck and start talking. And you don’t have to agree with everything you hear. You may find that this person does have fanciful ideas about the influence of the World Economic Forum, or some other theory that you don’t accept. But the conversation has to begin. And it can only begin on the basis of the legitimacy of all points of view that don’t want to destroy the space for conversation itself.

TH: Your writing about “the emergent public” really helped me to understand something that I have been trying to figure out. The media has moved on from that story, and I have not. I’ve been trying to understand why. An old friend of mine and I had coffee recently and he said, “Why aren’t you moving on from that story?” And it’s exactly what you articulated. This was an emerging public. It was not treated with dignity; it was not allowed conversation. This is millions of people that are involved in this, who were not vaccinated, who had their rights taken away. I don’t think that an emergent public just dissolves. I don’t think that’s what happens. And so, I think we need to contend with that public at some point. Otherwise, it comes back to haunt us.

DC: I totally agree with you. I think that we can’t get over the whole pandemic period because it was a watershed. And it was a watershed towards a form of society that I don’t want to live in. So, I believe we have to keep contesting it. And more than contesting it, trying to understand it. What happened there? And that’s only just beginning to become clear.

TH: Can you say more about that?

DC: Well, I just finished a book by two American political scientists called In Covid’s Wake.

TH: They’ve been on this podcast.

DC: Oh, you’ve talked to them? Yeah, that’s an exceptional piece of work. It only covers part of the story. They’re not interested in vaccines; there’s a lot of things they’re not interested in. But insofar as they cover what happened in American politics, that’s quite a step forward, right? That’s a mea culpa from the knowledge class, if you like, in the United States. And wonderfully well done. That’s a valuable piece of research. But it’s only a beginning. For the most part in my own little milieu, it’s either what you said, that people have moved on, “Why are you bringing that up? How about those Blue Jays?” Or they don’t want to hear about it because their views are the same as they were before. That this was just a scandalous eruption of yahooism around the edges of what was otherwise a properly focused public health response.

TH: The other question I wanted to ask about media coverage and about the crises of the last couple of years — although I don’t like saying “crises,” because, as you point out in your book, this constant making of crises makes it really hard for us to pause and think and be rational and calm. But during this last period, one of the eruptions we saw in the media was this debate over objectivity. We saw this really prominently in the States, in the New York Times and other outlets. This is one area that I think we may disagree on. Or perhaps not, I’m not sure. You call objectivity “the myth of objectivity.” And you write that “critics of all ideological stripes are preaching a gospel of reaction, whether they want to make America great again or to restore Enlightenment values. But there is no way back. And this is true whether or not the lost world of ‘trusted news’ and ‘liberal science’ ever glowed quite as brightly as these critics claim.” Talk to me about your thoughts about the method of objectivity in journalism and what use it may or may not have right now.

DC: First of all, a word is always just a word and it has different meanings for different people. So, if you start speaking against objectivity, to somebody it essentially means fairness or dispassion. And they think, “He’s speaking against dispassion. He must be in favour of everybody prosecuting their case.” So, objectivity is a problematic word. It might mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

But I take it to mean the basic modern split between subject and object. And the idea of being objective is that you can subtract something that you call subjectivity and somehow find what is the case absolutely. So, objectivity is science in its first, naive 17th century formulation. I don’t think you can analyze it without going back and finding some of those early accents. So, was objectivity ever the standard? No. Science was disputed from the beginning. Or interpreted differently from the beginning. The romantic reaction begins shortly afterwards. So, it’s never been an accepted term. But in media, Michael Schudson has traced it out and found you don’t hear it before the beginning of the 20th century. Nobody is saying that they are going to be objective in George Brown’s time. It goes with the consolidation of mass media. It’s the ideology of the consolidated press in Canada, which happens around the time of the First World War. There’s a massive wipeout of small newspapers, and you get the big papers that are now failing, I’m sorry to say.

I’m talking about that objectivity, right? So, when the person from the CBC newsroom comes on to the afternoon show and is asked, “Tell us what’s making news,” that’s the myth of objectivity — that that person knows what’s making news, because news has a definition. News is not a set of things that the CBC is interested in right now and is willing to give you the reasons why it’s interested in them. They’re the news. They’re “what Canadians need to know.”

And that isn’t true. That’s just a set of conventions that have grown up to define a set of events that people must be informed about and other sets of events that they are not going to be informed about. And the claim that constitutes a world — that this is The World at Six or the world at 3:30 — is mystifying. I don’t mean most people believe it. But it’s like advertising: keep saying it and somehow you think, “Yeah, it’s The World at Six, it’s The National, it’s what Canadians need to know.” So, it isn’t contestable.

I think in a frightening time — and everyone will probably agree on that — that there’s a huge temptation to go back, to go back to what you think are your founding ideas. The founding ideas, I say, of modernity. And objectivity is one of them, right? The BBC in 2019 starts the Trusted News Initiative. “We’re going to get back to the real news, and we’re going to get the crazies out of here. We don’t want them.” I don’t think it’s going to work. It’s not right. It doesn’t face the media apocalypse, which we are in, whether we like it or not. People aren’t going to turn in their phones. And so, I think it’s a nearly impossible challenge. It can barely be comprehended. If you know anything of media history, and you think about the craziness created by the printing press in the early 16th century, which was just as disorienting for people as we’re disoriented … So, it’s good to know some history. Or the beginning of alphabetic literacy, what that means in relation to an epic oral sensibility. These watersheds have happened before, and they’re very instructive to study. But I don’t know if there’s ever been anything quite like this before.

I said that, right? Each person with the means of communication in their own hands is certainly a revolution of some incalculable kind. All I’m saying is that it’s better to think of going forward than to go back. Better to think of how to look at both faces of the Internet and say, “Well, yes, there’s lots of misinformation. Yes, I know there’s somebody in Alberta who thinks that Bill Gates has two heads, or whatever it is. But there’s also a lot of people thinking for themselves, and with new means of communication in their hands.” So, I don’t think we can encompass this or even imagine it. But I think we need to be thinking about new ways of coming to grips rather than going back.

I think if you look at the discourses of Trumpism, as much as of CBCism — not that there is such a thing — they all are going to go back to trusted news, or they’re going to make America great again. It’s always getting back to that, right? We’re going to get back to the old-time religion. We’re going to get back to the old-time news. We’re going to get back to this, back to that. No. We’re not going back.

TH: I think there’s some really good points in there. Just to tackle the objectivity debate first — I agree that it’s an aspiration. It is essentially a myth. But I think it’s a useful myth, in that it’s an aspiration towards a bunch of principles like fairness and, exactly like you said, dispassion. Abandoning that, on the ground, what that looked like was things like we in the media no longer call people for comment. When we publish hit pieces. We just publish these crazy things, and we don’t call people for comment anymore. Or we rely way too much on anonymous sources. So, there’s a whole range of standards and practices that I think have been eroded. And so perhaps “objectivity” is just this aspiration, but that aspiration may have been useful in guiding our conduct in concrete ways that produces more fair news. What do you think about that argument?

DC: I completely agree with it. And that’s why I began by saying it all depends on what you mean by the word. I’d rather call that fairness. I’d rather call it courtesy. I’d rather call it a self-critical attitude, so that I’m aware of my prejudices, rather than cultivating the idea that I don’t have any. I’d rather take off the table the idea that there’s somebody without prejudices. Hans-Georg Gadamer, the German philosopher whom I quote — the idea is to put your prejudice into play. To put it into the conversation, rather than concealing it and trying to get back to. Trusted news, yeah, I just don’t think it’s a way forward. But I totally would like to preserve all those things that are maybe encoded within the word “objectivity” that refer to fairness and self-awareness and courtesy and so on.

TH: Your calls to move towards something new really land for me. So many of us right now in this generation are working so hard right now to find this path forward. I don’t think we’ve found it yet. But I loved some of your suggestions, particularly at the end of the book, about what that might look like, from a philosophical perspective. And so, I just want to end on that note today, on talking about your concept of pluralism and how this next generation of journalists, particularly at the CBC, could employ that concept.

DC: Well, I’d like to present it as a sense of adventure. If you’re going back, you’re going back to the tried and true, the already known. Maybe there isn’t that much to talk about. There’s just, “Which side are you on? Are you one of ours or one of theirs?” If you start from the assumption that you really don’t know — which isn’t that hard right now, it just involves a certain amount of self-awareness that this really is a novel situation. That even if we want to go back to, well, the return of religion, let’s say — yes, but the same religion or something new?

If you start to look at it that way, then there is a lot to talk about. And that’s the excitement of it. If you really don’t know, then it’s interesting to explore. If our imaginary CBC reporter opens the truck door with the attitude that he might find something interesting there, somebody who has actually experienced the world, thought about the world, has a certain experience of the world that you don’t already know … So, going right back to the beginning of our conversation, and these words that make you think you already know: “I know who you are. I can name all your leading attributes, because I’ve classed you.” Right?

I’m very aware that people would read this book and say, “Well, that’s just errant idealism. I mean, what does he think? That the CBC is going to become some kind of seminar?” Well, no. I think there could be a sense of adventure. But it has to begin from some kind of humility, that begins in the recognition that we really are in a media apocalypse. Or that we really have reached a whole series of frontiers — an ecological frontier — where we really don’t know the answers to that, right? Science is hugely contested. Science was the dream of peace. The war of opinion would end, and we would know what is the case. But now science inflames opinion, because we don’t exactly know what we’re talking about. And that’s across the board.

If you had broadcasters at the CBC — or whatever it’s going to be after broadcasting — who had the breadth and the humility to become questioners, then that’s my fantasy, my dream. That then you would open a space of discovery. Really, its foundational statement is: “We have a future, but we don’t know what it is. So we have to find it out.” So yeah, that’s the way to end.