Peter Mansbridge on how Canadians lost trust in media

In today’s The Big Story podcast, the long-time CBC news anchor began his career as a reporter in the early 1970s, giving people the news was among the most trusted and important occupations in the country. When he retired in 2017, it was the era of “fake news,” as trust in the media was at an all-time low. Seven years later, it’s even lower than that.

Peter Mansbridge is the former anchor of CBC’s The National and host of The Bridge podcast. “It really started with the power of social media taking over the space of breaking news, and there was this kind of clumsy effort on the part of traditional media to match a kind of Twitter style in the way they went about news,” said Mansbridge. “And that was disastrous because it just led to this beginning of the real precipitous drop in trust.”

So how does a legendary face of Canadian news grapple with the fact that, if he were in the chair today, less than half of Canadians would trust the news he delivered? Can anything be done to fix it?

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