Peter Mansbridge is probably
the most recognized journalist in the country.
Disclosure: Peter kindly taught me how to hold a microphone when I
replaced him at the now defunct CBC radio station in Churchill , Manitoba
Peter has been the subject of
some controversy for a speech he delivered to the Canadian oil lobby in
2012. I haven’t seen the speech but I
doubt it would be any different than one he would give to the Kiwanis and I
believe his news judgment would not consciously be affected by accepting a
payment from the lobby group. Though, in retrospect, he probably wishes he had
agreed to speak to the Kiwanis.
Peter has been reading the
news on The National for the past 25
years. He also does numerous interviews, as well as moderating expert panels
that usually include political pundits, pollsters and newspaper columnists,
discussing political events. The panels are like newspaper columns, striving to
understand the backroom workings of the political parties and their strategies.
But looking at a number of episodes of The
Insiders and the At Issue panels I
noticed an interesting phenomenon.
When moderating the At Issue and The Insiders panels Peter is, I believe, breaking new journalistic ground
that places the moderator on the same plane as the panelists. Peter not only
questions the panelists but also offers his own comments on the news and issues
discussed. During a May 13, 2013 At Issue while commenting on the Nigel
Wright affair, Peter looks at the three panelists, Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Bruce Anderson, and says, “What do we make of this?”
In a rare non-political
edition of At Issue on September 19,
2013, which dealt with the near collapse of Blackberry, Peter sums up the
discussion by saying that Blackberry “…appears to be in serious trouble and yet
nobody seems to be talking about it, or really seems to care about it.” This is the sort of declaration that a
columnist makes. The rest of the segment
responds to Peter’s general assertion.
At one point Peter interrupts
Chantal saying, “But it’s really not about how we see ourselves. I am sure that
most Canadians would, you know, like, pick Sydney Crosby or you pick Chris
Hadfield or any number of things that define us. But outside of Canada when
internationally we’re looked at I don’t think there is any question that a lot
of people identified us with Blackberry five years ago but now, you know, it’s
changed, it could be the oil sands that define us to a lot of people on the
international stage.” This is again a
sweeping opinion that a CBC journalist would not make.
Peter as moderator employs other
techniques that CBC journalists don’t normally use. For example, he often prefaces his
introduction of a topic by saying that “some people” or a lot of people” are
saying something about an issue. Or, he
will say that a trusted person has said such and such about an issue. Those
“people” are rarely identified.
For example, during a January
23, 2014 At Issue Peter comments on
the political situation in Ottawa: “You know, a wise old political hand told me
just in the last couple of weeks that if you are going to win, if you are going
to win in politics, you gotta have three things going for you, you gotta have
the polls in your favour, you gotta have crowds when you appear and you have to
have money and if you have all three things, you got a really good shot at
winning and of the three parties only one has got all those three things.” It is somewhat unusual for a journalist not to
attribute the source for the initial statement and even more unusual to offer
the opinion that only one party has all three things. I suspect that two of the three parties would
disagree.
The Senate scandal has been
the focus of many At Issue
segments. Here are a few examples of
when Peter has offered various opinions about aspects of the scandal:
*May 23, 2013: “You know, the
NDP has been calling for an RCMP inquiry.
That’ll bury this story for a long time, right?” (Like a lot of
columnists, Peter is not always right.)
*May 28, 2013: “When you run
that against the back drop of some of the things we’ve talked about in the last
few weeks, about, you know, the potential of, you know, a kind of open mutiny going
on inside the Conservative caucus, I found that interesting.”
*October 25, 2013: “Well, where
does the week come to an end with the Prime Minister? I mean his people are all
running around saying he’s back, he’s on top of his game, he’s looking
good. How much of that is real? There’s
no doubt he had a better week than he’s had lately.”
*November 20, 2013: “Some of
the stuff in this document about some of those other senators that you just
mentioned is pretty devastating stuff about the way they were operating.”
*November 21, 2013: “Well, (this
is) as bad as it gets, unless somebody gets charged and there’s a trial and people
have to be on the witness stand.”
*November 28, 2013: “Wow, you
kinda wonder after that, like, what’s the role of everybody there and what’s
the role of Question Period.”
There are many others...
The Insiders,
which has a lower profile than At Issue, focused on the budget on February 11, 2014. When Jamie
Watt refers to the Conservative’s good management of the economy, Peter
questions this: “That’s being challenged now more than it had been the last
couple of years.” Jamie Watt and the
other pundits that appear on The Insiders
are clearly identified as Conservative, Liberal or NDP strategists. Oddly, when Jamie appears on a regular
segment of another CBC show, Power and
Politics, he is not identified as a Conservative.
Peter Mansbridge is probably
not only the most well known journalist in Canada
Peter and his producers have
in recent years re-shaped CBC’s flagship news program and his role in it. He is no longer just a newsreader or
interviewer. He has grown into the equivalent of a TV news columnist offering
opinions on the news and current events. Peter seems to want to distance
himself from his old role as just a CBC journalist; following each broadcast At Issue is posted on Youtube with no
reference to CBC.
I suspect that Peter’s role
as TV news columnist has gone unnoticed, except by the newspaper columnists and
pundits who appear on his show. Does the CBC fully understand that Peter has developed
a new journalistic form that does not seem to be captured in its journalistic
policies? CBC news management was
unaware that Rex Murphy’s commentary on The
National had been improperly labeled for five years. CBC should acknowledge
Peter’s role as a commentator, not just a journalist, and revisit its
journalistic policies.
