What is the future of investigative journalism? | The Fifth Estate

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[Elamin Abdelmahmoud] Good evening, everybody, and welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm really excited about this conversation about the current state, the future state of investigative journalism. But before we get going, can I just say, um, I'm really excited to watch that documentary. I have so many questions about it, but also I want to introduce you to our esteemed panellists. So I'm just gonna go one by one, and then we'll get into it.

So first, we have Rianna Croxford, she's an award-winning investigative correspondent with the BBC. You should absolutely find her World of Secrets, The Abercrombie Guys investigation, which dropped I think it was a year ago, was it? Yeah, absolutely incredible work.

Next to her, Mark Kelley. Mark Kelley, one of the hosts of The Fifth Estate. He has won an International Emmy. He has won so many Geminis, they ran out of Geminis, actually, that he had to rename the award. That's how many Geminis this guy has won. They were like, we can't-- We're out of Geminis. We've got to introduce a new name.

Next to him, The Globe and Mail's Robyn Doolittle, who has investigated so many paradigm-shifting investigations just in the last 10 years or so. We're talking about Unfounded, which changed how people talk about sexual assault and policing in this country. We'll talk about also Secret Canada, which I feel like we are going to get into tonight, because there's so much of that happening here.

And then next to her, of course, Steven D'Souza. Steven D'Souza is the newest co-host of The Fifth Estate. He's a veteran reporter, two elections. He's a Canadian Screen Award winner. Sorry, they didn't have Geminis for you, pal. Mark took them all.

But that's all right. Look, let me start by this. Mark, the thing that we talk about so often with investigative is people say it's expensive, people say it's time-consuming. And maybe it'd be helpful to orient us a little bit around what that means. So when we say, "A story takes years," what goes into that time?

Elamin, I want to make a quick shout-out first. What we do and why we do it is for all of you who are here tonight. And we don't often get the opportunity, doing what we do, to spend time with the people who watch our program. I want to take this opportunity to say thank you, because there's no point in doing what we do if you're not watching what we do. We are here for you. And I just want to say thank you that tonight you are here for us. But we really appreciate this very much.

[applause]

Because as mentioned, we're at a time right now where we need your support. And I'm hoping we can count on your support. Because what we do, it does take so much time. It takes time, it takes money. It takes resources. And in a world of shrinking resources, we become a target. A line item that we saw with W5 when they were recently cancelled that Bell Media just looked at the cost and said, "Well, if we take that off the list, we save a bunch of money." But what do we lose with that? I mean, we lose so much of our public interest journalism. We need to band together as a team. We need to defend what we do. And we're entering a period right now where we're going to have to do that more than ever. And I don't want to have to tell you that we are important. I want to prove to you that what we do is important by watching what we've done over the years. And that was a great example to give you a taste of what this show and many other journalists in this country have accomplished by the work we do.

-Thank you.

-[applause]

I appreciated that emotion and passion coming in terms of defending this field. But I still want you to take me through that journey, pal. I still want you to sort of illustrate, okay, so we're talking about a story that goes from, I think there's something there, to getting it to the audience, the idea that this could take months, for example.

-What goes into those months?

-It's research. It's phone calls. I mean, it's boring. [laughter] You know, like Julian said, "Two things you don't want to see made, hot dogs and television." I mean, there's just a lot of work that is taken, just you've got sources, you're working on sources. You've got a phone number that leads you to somebody else. Rianna can talk about that. I mean, that takes years. If you're piecing together, it's a bit of a puzzle. And you're convincing people who also to come on air and tell their story. And that can be a hard thing when there are many forces trying to prevent people from coming on to tell their stories. So there's so much work that is actually done before you actually leave the building with a camera to go do your first interviews. And that's sort of the unappreciated part of the work that's done. And that leads us to that point and then, you know, then we'll spend weeks in editing it. To do this, we've got legal reviews of going by. We've got editorial reviews of going by. You just don't appreciate the process. And the process will grind you down. And by the time that that story gets to air, you hate it, you never want to watch it again. You've seen it over. And it's like, we've got to change this. We've got to restructure that. We've got to rewrite this. I mean, it's a hard grind. But it's so worth it in the end. And then when I can get home and turn on the TV and watch it. I have never, ever in my years said, "You know, that wasn't worth it." There's just this incredible sense of satisfaction, of impact and of making a difference and of giving a voice to the voiceless and standing up for these people and holding powerful people to account. There's a deep, deep satisfaction, a professional satisfaction in doing that. And I am so, so proud to say I am a co-host of The Fifth Estate.

-Beautiful answer. Thank you.

-[applause]

I-- Mark, I'm glad you brought up impact because Robyn, a project like Unfounded, 20-month investigation, so much time goes into that. Reading the project, there are so many quotes where I think, I don't know how you get a source to tell you this painful thing that happened in their lives. Right, and then you publish something like that. It goes out into the world. And cases get re-reviewed. Cases get reopened. In some cases, convictions arrive. That's a really big deal and I just wonder for you, as you look at a project that is that sprawling, how do you measure the success of something like that? How do you measure impact?

Well, first, I love the name, The Fifth Estate. Can I just say, just quickly before I answer your question, um, and congratulations to the CBC and The Fifth Estate for 50 years, and I'm honoured to be asked to be on this panel today. And as we saw in the documentary, Canadians are just so lucky to have you. Measuring impact. I mean, this is the scariest thing as an investigative journalist is the truth is, when you start doing something, and you look at your bosses and say, I need a lot of time to do this, and I need a lot of money and resources to do this. You don't know what's going to happen. So, Unfounded was an investigation that we did at The Globe in 2017, I think is when it was published. I started it in 2015. And it was my first big investigation that I did at The Globe and Mail on their investigative team, and again, it took a year and a half. And it was looking at the ways that police mishandle sexual assault cases. And through FOI, we looked at how, across the country, and there are more than 1,100 different police jurisdictions in Canada, that they were dismissing, on average, about 20% of cases as fake or baseless. Not that we couldn't charge someone, that this is a made-up allegation. And it changed huge amounts of policy. It was a unicorn investigation in some ways in that. We found the perfect sources, we had video, which is not always what happens in newspaper land. We had the data to back it up. But it also landed just before Me Too, at a moment when the culture was really primed to hear that investigation. If it had run five years earlier, I can see a world where it just kind of goes away. And I remember the night before we hit "publish," I was talking with the editor, and we actually had a moment, we were kind of looking at each other and going, his name's Dennis Choquette and we're like... "I wonder if this is going to do anything?" And how do we justify 20 months of work? And I think that that is the beauty of what our news outlets do when they give us this space, is you don't know. But maybe it does change the country, and Unfounded did. And if that's the first line of my obituary, I would be completely delighted. So, when I start doing a piece of investigative work, I think about, is this really important for the country? Is this something that's going to make my country better? Like, that is truly at the heart of what I'm thinking of. And I am really lucky to work at The Globe and Mail, where that's what I view my mandate as being. I think the CBC is similar in that respect. But it's a huge risk, and that's why events like this is just really filling my cup up right now, guys. Because seeing a sold-out show to come nerd out on investigative journalism. Anyway, I don't know if I entirely answered your question there, but the truth is, I don't know how you can manage impact. When you start, you believe in the story, you know it's important, and you swing. That's all you can do. And sometimes you miss. I've had things that have not run, that I spent months on. I have several 6,000-word investigations sitting in a folder somewhere that got murdered because it just didn't cross the finish line. And that's the other thing, is the bar has to be high. You have to be prepared to say, "I don't got it, it's not here." And it's risky, it's soul-crushing, the highs are amazing, the lows are devastating. But I think we're all just so lucky to know that this is our profession.

I want to know what all of those 6,000-word investigations are. They're good, they're good, but they're, you know... But I've also learned not to ask investigative reporters what they're working on. They say, "I'm not telling you, pal."

Rianna, I want to talk about The Abercrombie Guys, because that's a project that began, I think, talking about trusting your gut and saying, and going to an editor and saying, "I think there's something here, I need to pursue it." That's a project that began with a chance phone call. How do you train your instincts to say, there's something more here, I need to follow what's happening here?

I think a few things happened. So to rewind, um, I did a story about the former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, Mike Jeffries, who, as a result of my reporting, was arrested and charged with sex trafficking in October. He was charged with running an international sex trafficking and prostitution business, which I'm still kind of taking in because I spent a good two and a half years in the weeds, digging, not really knowing what the outcome would be. And now I'm sitting here with the understanding that there might be a trial next year. But that began with a chance phone call back in 2021. It was during the COVID lockdown, which was a very long time ago. And I'd been researching the fashion industry when I spotted a post on Instagram. It was a group of male models talking about how they felt abuse against men in the industry was being overlooked. I reached out to somebody who had commented and we soon got talking on the phone for about an hour about a whole range of things. When he turned to me and he said, "I feel like I couldn't trust you with something that I've never told anyone before." And he told me something which, at the time, when I told my editor, seemed a little bit outlandish. He told me about how a close friend of his had referred him to a middleman who seemingly had no nose and wore a snakeskin patch over it. And he claimed that Jeffries had been at the centre of a well-oiled machine, one which not only involved this middleman, but allegedly a whole network of recruiters. He didn't have any evidence, other than a diary entry from about 10 years prior when the alleged incident took place, talking about the darkest time. So, look, my editor obviously didn't say, "You know what, Rianna, "you go work on that story with those very few leads "that you have and seemingly no documentary evidence "to support allegations against a man "who is a multi-millionaire "who ran a billion-dollar corporation." But I thought there was truth in it or something had gone on because of how highly organized it all sounded. And largely through word of mouth, um, and later through recovering documentary evidence from old iPads and old laptops, I managed to piece together my own trail. It was very old school, knocking on doors, meeting with men who had never spoken before. And that was the other thing that struck me. I'd done a lot of stories in the sexual abuse space involving women, but so rarely do we hear stories like this from men. And so that was also why I thought there was merit looking into it. And the more evidence I found, the more that I heard, the more I felt a moral imperative to pursue it. There was absolutely nothing in the public domain about it before we released our investigation last year. And that, again, was quite striking because normally when I'm doing a story like all of us, we can find public records or newspaper archives, you know, threads to pull at. And I definitely felt like I had built a case from scratch, which was quite difficult. Um, yeah.

Steven, look, you've covered, um, you've covered natural disasters, you've covered U.S. elections, you've covered mass protests. I think there is a lot of things that we can do in journalism with the questions of "What happened here?" And "Whose interests are being served in this place?" But I think an investigator maybe demands a different gear, which is to say, "What are you not telling me?" It sort of invites a different set of questions. What are you not telling me and in whose interest is it to sort of keep these things kind of hidden? How do you make the turn from the other types of reporting that you've done to investigative? Like, how does that change you as a reporter?

Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time in New York covering, as you say, natural disasters, mass shootings. And, you know, you're always trying to feed the beast, you're trying to get the story on for that day. And you always come away with the feeling that, you know, there's more there, I know that there's more there. And if only I had that more time, I could ask that extra question or I could read that extra report or dig a little bit deeper. And so when I came to The Fifth Estate two and a half years ago, I suddenly had that opportunity to step back from that daily grind and to ask those difficult questions. And suddenly, you know, if I get a phone call in the middle of the night from a source around the world, I had the time to develop that source over months and work into finding the information that that person had and turn it into stories. So, for example, we did a st-- The first story I did for The Fifth Estate was about the Patel family who died crossing the border from Canada into the United States. And it was a story that was quite personal to me because my wife's family is from the same part of India, my parents came to Canada. And the first question I had, I think, like everyone was, why would a family with two small children risk their lives... to cross in the middle of winter to go into the United States when Canada has so much to offer? And so, you know, like so many of us, it always starts with a very simple question. And from there, it launches us into very different places. And the phone call I got in the middle of the night was, after we'd done our first documentary about the family, was from someone in India who had watched our story and said, "I have more information for you." And so the question was, will that person trust me and can I trust them? And it was something that unfolded over a number of months, something you can't do when you're on a daily deadline because your editor's always saying, "What do we get on the news tonight?" And it's something you maybe have to put off to the side. But, you know, thankfully, for a program like The Fifth Estate, having the amazing staff that we do, having the time and the resources that we do, we were able to take that single phone call and turn that into our second documentary where we were able to find the individual that Indian police accused of bringing that family to the border. Because that was another question we had was, somebody brought that family to the border and pointed them in the middle of a blizzard across the field and said, "Your freedom is on the other side." And a family who'd probably never even seen winter before. And so our question was, "Who was that person?" And so, you know, we've gotten to a point where now we can say as closely as we can, according to the information that we have, that we believe it's this individual. And, you know, you speak about... the fear you have sometimes of the story. It's like, do we have it right? And that's one that right up until the moment that story went to air, we're like, "Are we certain that this is the guy? You know, because we're going to put somebody's life on TV and say that this person committed, you know, allegedly a pretty heinous act. Do we have the information right? And so these are the things that, you know, stick with us for so long. And this is why, you know, we value the work that we do and why we put so much work into it and why it takes so long. Because you don't want to get it wrong. Because, you know, you are playing with people's lives. And, you know, it's so important to get it right. And, you know, just going back to your first question, about why it takes so long, sometimes it's not always up to us. For example, we just aired a documentary recently on the protesters who were in [indistinct] during the convoy. And there were some individuals who had some extremist beliefs. And we've been working on that for almost two and a half years. And part of it was that these men were on trial. And so we couldn't air a documentary in the middle of a trial because it would prejudice the judicial proceedings. And so that was something that we had to keep working on and working on. And sometimes it would go to the side and sometimes it would be front and centre. And when the trial was over, suddenly we had the information that we had to really tell the story in a way we wanted to. And so this is the-- You know, sometimes things just don't always go according to schedule. But, you know, we always put the work in that we can to be able to get to the final product.

I think one of the things you're touching on and I think it's really important to mention, in the work that we do, is the notion of accountability. And that was in the first mission statement of this program. You know, there's journalism that will tell you what happened. And then we try to explain why things happen. But ultimately what we want to do, and we want to be fierce about this, which is to hold people accountable. And we're living in an age now, uh, where trying to hold people accountable is getting more and more difficult because people protect themselves. They sue the journalists to stop us from doing our work. And it's very successful. There are very few organizations... news organizations in this country, and I hope that The Globe and Mail is one of them, along with the CBC... that will protect us, journalists, with lawyers, will protect us, journalists, from lawsuits, and will stand up to this form of intimidation. And-- and-- you know, it used to be that you could sit down and do an interview with somebody, a corporate CEO, whatever person that may be. They'd be available. Now they're never available. Now you're going to get an emailed statement. So we had that segment in there that we called "the jump," or the unscheduled interview, or the spontaneous interaction, as Bob McKeown used to call it, where you're literally chasing a person down a hallway to get them to answer your questions because that's the only way... you can reach them because they will hide behind lawyers. They will hide behind the PR people. Cecil Rosner's here, and he was featured prominently in that doc. And what are the numbers? Cecil wrote his book, and he was talking about the change between the number of-- of a-- "In 1991, in 1991..." I'm cribbing this from Cecil's book with help from Julian. "In 1991, there were 13,000 journalists and 23,000 public relations people." PR flaks, as we like to call them. "In 2021, there were 11,000 journalists, 160,000 PR people." And those PR people make it their job to keep information out of our hands, to spin a narrative about the great work that's being done, to hide the truth. And that's the big thing that we're fighting against. We're fighting against information that won't be released. I know, Robyn, you've spent a lot of time on that in The Globe and Mail, with governments that are holding back what is public information from the public broadcaster and other journalists in this country. And you've got very well-trained PR, damaged PR firms that are protecting their clients, their well-paid clients, and a real lack of accountability. But that drives us, and that's driven us for years, and, um, and it drives us to great lengths to find the story. But it's something we can never, ever abandon. And in this age now, where we're talking of disinformation and misinformation, I mean, that's the paradox of our times right now. We have never had more information available to us than ever before in our history. And yet... so many people are so badly informed. How can that be? And that is a function of the disinformation and the misinformation. And that is also the obstacles that we're up against as we try to tell the stories we do, hold people accountable, and get it right.

I want to go a little bit more into that from two angles. One is this idea of this more information than ever before, but then people are not necessarily engaging with that information, or not necessarily engaging with the correct information. But also, Robyn, the Secret Canada investigation um, was an investigation about the freedom of information infrastructure in this country and the ways that it has changed. And it has gotten much worse. That is one of the things that your investigation found, is that this country is a little bit better at keeping secrets than it used to be. And as a result, like, we as journalists are not served by that until the people are not served by that. What I want to talk about is the relevance of investigations versus the importance of investigations, because I think those are two different things. If you sit down across from somebody who does not engage in reading the news very often, and you say to them, "I'm working on an investigation about freedom of information requests." It's not going to sound like the sexiest sentence on the planet.

-No, it won't.

-No. But however, it is so deeply, deeply important because it shapes the entirety of the information that you end up consuming as a newsreader. So how do you thread that needle of relevance and importance? Because I think those are two-- Sometimes we talk about them as though they're from different planets, but they're clearly, clearly not.

Well, first, my reporting partner, Tom Cardoso, is in the audience somewhere from The Globe, who we did Secret Canada with, and there was a big team at The Globe. Hey, Tom. Secret Canada was an investigation at The Globe, and it's open to everybody. You can go to secretcanada.com, and it is a repository of freedom of information requests that have been completed from hundreds of institutions across the country. Tom and I, in the early days of that, spent a lot of time discussing how are we going to, one, pitch the most boring-sounding investigation of all time to our bosses. Two, convince them to make a searchable database website as a tool for Canadians outside of The Globe and Mail and accessible to everyone outside the paywall so that it wouldn't be viewed as just a Globe thing. And then three, get Canadians to care about access to information. Again, sounds so dry. And we decided to just lean into the boring and just embrace it, and whenever we would talk about it, the pitch is, it's the most boring investigation of all time. It's actually the most important. And I think that, you know, what I love about talking about this issue, I'm assuming that this particular crowd knows a lot about FOI, and you don't need the spiel, but in general, this is the process by which we as Canadians have the ability to access our records. We have a right, you know, to understand how our leaders are governing, how our money is being spent, et cetera. In Canada, it's just horrific at releasing our own documents to us, and it's gone on forever, and it's getting worse, and successive governments keep making it worse and worse. And what I love about this issue is that it should be a completely nonpartisan issue. This is, to me, this is, like, utter populism. This is, I want to know what my tax dollars are doing. And I think something, like, the biggest threat to journalists right now is that, um-- You know, Mark, you mentioned that we have to defend ourselves, and I totally agree. But unfortunately, like, those interviews when you're trying to chase someone because they are dodging you, even though they are a public servant, and they absolutely, you pay their salary, they have to answer to you, they won't. And then you go to them for comment, and it is spun against you as they're the political opposition. I remember growing up and having The Fifth Estate and the CBC on at night in my home, and that was-- they're doing it for us, for the citizens of this country.

-On your behalf.

-The journalists are asking the questions for you. The newspaper, they're asking the questions. I don't have time to be there at this press conference. I'm feeding my family. It's going to work. And many Canadians don't view that as the situation anymore. It's the elites. It's them. It's the other. Never mind, like, what the reality is. That's the narrative. And so I swear I'm coming back to Secret Canada here, but that is the thing that keeps me up at night, for us, is we need to win back the hearts and minds of the public. And I think a big part of it is defending ourselves, but just, like, turning down the dial a lot. And it's like, guys, we're here for you. You can be mad at me. That's okay. You're like a parent. Your child is yelling at you. Maybe calling readers a child is not a good way to bring them outside.

-You know, but stick with me.

-[Elamin] Forget she said that. But, like, projects like Secret Canada, it's just straight public service. And everyone's screwing up. And we can yell at all of you. There are 10 trillion stories that are worth doing in this country. And I think thinking through, like, I think about this a lot. Like, what are the things that you can do that are really value-add for people in this country? And so Secret Canada, again, it is something that everyone can access. And you know what I love the most? Is journalists across the country are using it. Students are using it. University students are using it. And I think that it's opening their eyes to this thing that they never thought about before. Like, why is the government keeping secrets from us? And why is it so hard to investigate things in this country? It's because we uniquely have these stupid laws. So, um... that's where we're at right now. I appreciate this, because, like, when you talk to U.S. journalists--

-[scattered applause]

-Yeah, no, absolutely. [Robyn] Give me these platforms for access information. When you talk to U.S. journalists and you tell them about, like, our freedom of information infrastructure here, they do look at you like you're a little bit crazy. I, like, and I say this about the U.S. It's not a particularly open country, -but just compared to us.

-[Robyn] The U.S.?

-Yeah.

-The U.S. is so much more open. Sorry, I'll stop talking in a second, but like-- Yeah, no, but that's what I mean. I had to investigate the Champ-- You know the Champlain Towers, the condo that fell down? Very tragic, hundreds of people died in the middle of the night. Created by Canadian developers. Natural investigation for The Globe's investigative team. Did they build anything here? What are the state of those buildings? Very basic investigation. The U.S. leg of that investigation took something like three days, okay? Because you can, in Florida, go on a website, look up what a developer has built. You can look up the companies that have created those buildings. You can look up the directors. You can look up the directors from related companies and just very easily establish a web of buildings. You can then look up the building permits. You can look up the lawsuits easily. You can check the criminal courts, etc. Three days. In Canada, there is no way to do any of that at all. Long story short, we ended up trying to find the buildings that were built by those developers by using the names found in U.S. records and then going to The Globe archives and reading, page by page, classified ads from the 1960s. Just by eyeballing. Because you can't search them. Eyeballing, looking for the names. There's one. And then we can send it off to the archives. Pay thousands of dollars to get those property records back. It's a joke. Was that a sidebar that was not useful? But anyway...

That's incredible useful, actually. ...the United States is like utopia compared to us. Canadians have no idea how ridiculous this country is with respect to that. And they complain about their court system. There's a system called PACER which you can access federal court records. And Americans hate it. And they have to pay fees to get the--

-Ten cents a page.

-Ten cents a page. And they hate it. For me, I love it because I can access an indictment the day after somebody's arrested. I can see exactly what the federal case is against them. Whereas here, I have no idea. And we have to go to court to fight to get the ITOs and to get all these documents related to arrests. And we may never ever see them. But, you know, there, it's all laid out. And yeah, they complained about it quite a bit. But one thing I just want to mention is, you know, the tool you created, when we talk about the future of investigative journalism, I think one thing that's so important is within our own industry is pulling the veil back on what we do. And so empowering everyone to have the tools that we have. So, like, you know, the tool that you have, the public can use, other journalists use it. Even within the CBC, having people from The Fifth Estate talking to our local reporters, giving everyone the tools to be able to do the same kind of work that we do, so that it's not a mystery, that it's not this, you know, magical elixir that only The Fifth Estate can do. It's like, no, every single reporter should have these tools so that they can do the same kind of work. Because that's the skills needed from the person covering City Hall to the people on this stage, so that they can find the stories that are important to everyone and dig as deep as they can. Because, you know, as newsrooms shrink, people get more-- the workload grows and people are under more pressure to produce. So we have to be able to empower everyone to have the skills to be able to investigate. And so that's one thing I think is really important, is to pull back the veil and to empower our colleagues to do the work that we do as well.

I have so many more questions, and maybe an uncomfortable one, Mark, if you don't mind. Can I ask you, we say this thing about saying that investigative journalism is important. We also acknowledge that the number of people who are watching it is down. How do we reconcile those two things?

I love it. Let's go. Yeah, I'm going to take issue with that. Look, there's no two ways that, you know, traditional terrestrial TV is evaporating, you know, where everybody is getting their information or watching their programming on streaming services. But I look at the programming that we do, The Fifth Estate, which has made it available on YouTube, and the numbers that we've been getting on YouTube are-- they're fantastic. There is an appetite for what we do. I mean, is there a disconnect now on the delivery service? Absolutely. Do I wish I could figure it out? I really do. And I have dark days where I think, you know, we're having a hard time finding an audience. But then I have these other days where I look at the reaction that we're getting online. Our digital publications when we'll take our investigations and put them on cbc.ca. The interest, I mean, we've got a series, Harvey's here, we've got a series on the CRA and some leaks that great work that Harvey Cashore has done breaking these stories about what's going on, and how the Canada Revenue Agency is, you know, it's just the gang that couldn't shoot straight, -and how it's...

-[laughter]

...giving away your money to fraudsters. And these stories have had an incredible reach. So, yeah, on your traditional TV, we're having a hard time with those audiences as everyone else is. But not the content.

-Yeah.

-Our content is king. And we still have that. That is an asset, and that's something that we want to be proud of. And I'm sick and tired, you know, when I hear the people who want to attack us. It's like, "Oh, you know, CBC doesn't matter anymore." That's bull[muted]. That is just not true.

-It matters to Canadians.

-[applause]

And... it may not matter to certain people who would like to see us shut down or defunded. But it matters to Canadians. And we're finding different ways to reach Canadians, whether it's online, whether it's on radio, whether it's on television, whether it's on YouTube. We're going to great lengths to be able to bring our journalism to you. Because it's yours. I mean, what we are doing is not serving the interests of the Fifth Estate. It's-- it's-- as Robyn's saying, we are serving you. You know, we're doing this program this year where we're calling it Reacting to News Deserts. The fact that there've been a lot of closures in the media over there. I think it's since 1991 there have been about 500 media outlets that have shuttered. And so we put a call out to our viewers and said, "Hey, what are some stories that you think aren't being properly covered?" And we got so much reaction from people. And then we acted on some of these stories. And we wanted to say, we investigate for you. And that's not a gimmick. That's a promise. And that's a promise that we intend to keep.

-I, uh, yeah.

-[applause]

Listen, we will take all the applause breaks that we can because I think that's a really important point to make. Rianna, I take seriously the idea that if people are not watching the content on traditional outlets and traditional ways, you do an investigation like yours and you do it as a film but also you do it as a podcast and you do it as a series, as, like, an online series. So you're sort of able to get at people from a bunch of different ways. But also, we know that if people are not necessarily watching the content directly, they're watching TikToks about it, right? They're watching, like, news influencers who say, "Hey, did you hear the big story?" And by the way, those influencers never give credit to where that story came from. But there's a real question. It's like, how do you get the audience back? How do you watch, you know, an influencer explain the investigation that you did, that you put years into and say, "Did you hear this thing that just happened?" You're like, "Yeah, I did, man. I put it together. That was actually me. Maybe you could mention my name somewhere in there." How do you get that audience back, do you think?

I go into the comment box and I write, "Thank you." You can watch the documentary here and you can listen to the podcast here. But no, I think the kind of broader point is that we can't be complacent with our audiences. We can't keep expecting them to come to us. We also need to go to where they are. And at the BBC, you know, my team and I sometimes talk about the dreaded rollout, which is you've done the investigation, which could take weeks, months. With Abercrombie, it took two years. And then you've got to repackage that story into a million different formats for so many different programs and different audiences. And that really is where the value-add is as well. I'm making TikToks. I'm doing it for linear telly, for radio. I did an hour-long documentary, an 11-part podcast series. And, you know, I actually also think about when I do stories, where else can I plug this? And sometimes that is reaching out to influencers or to massive social media accounts where I know that audiences who I know are going to be interested in this and saying, "Hey, look, would you mind promoting this?" Because I think we've got a mutual audience here, and there is actually public interest in getting this out to a broader audience. So I think it's also sort of working with people who have massive platforms that sit outside mainstream media. And I think one of the funny things from doing the Abercrombie story is so many people write in to me saying, "I'm so glad you pursued that. Mainstream media would never do that. I'm so glad you pursued that story." You know, like, just, ah. And I'm like, "I am mainstream media." You know, and we are fortunate at the BBC to have the time and resources to kind of invest in investigative journalism and do so impartially, do so where we give you the facts, we show our workings, we're transparent, and we ask you to make up your minds about what we're doing and don't impose a judgment or opinion on you. But yeah, I just feel like there's a broader question in terms of how do we change this perception of journalists. So I feel like in recent years you know, we've definitely come under a lot of pressure, and we are sometimes seen as this monolith people to attack as opposed to sort of humans who are out here serving you, wanting to help tell stories and cover issues that are important to the public. But at some point, I mean, it used to be that journalists were under attack, but now I think we live in a time where journalism is under attack. And that's the bigger and broader issue that we have to deal with. And a lot of that, which has originated south of the border, is trickling up to Canada. You know, and Steven, you were mentioning the Coutts documentary, and there are people there saying that you and Rachel, the team that worked on this, should be detained for what you've done. We just-- I was last week in Alberta and we were showing up to do a story about libraries, by the way. I'll tell you more about that. Which are under attack right now. And the town council had held a closed door meeting and passed a motion that said that the mayor and the town councillors and the library board people shall not talk to the media, which was us, The Fifth Estate, because there's no other media in town. I mean, they passed this motion that said you can't talk to us about a public library being paid for by public taxes in this community that the public is fighting for. And they did this, and I said, yeah, I walked into the Town Hall and I said, "You can't do that." And they said, "Well, we did it, and we're not going to talk to you." And I'm standing there and I'm fuming, and then this woman comes up to me and she says, "Are you Mark Kelley from The Fifth Estate?" I said, "Yeah, I am." She said, "I saw that story you did a couple of weeks ago on Dawson Creek, and it was really good. -Keep up the good work."

-[laughter]

I said, "Tell your boss that, would you? Or tell the mayor that." But I mean, these are just, you know, the obstacles that are in front of us and so it's one thing to try to reach our audiences, it's one thing to just try to reach the people we want to talk to, to tell our stories. But that creates part of that disconnect as well, and the difficulty in telling our stories and reaching those audiences. I just want to bring up one comment we had on TikTok. We did a documentary recently about the impact of the war on Gaza on the U.S. election, and the CBC social team had condensed it down to a short TikTok video, and one of the comments was, "CBC would never air this."

-[laughter]

-And, I mean, and so thankfully for our social team, the official account when-- could reply to this individual and said, "Actually, this was just on TV, and you can stream it right now on CBC Gem and on CBC YouTube." And it's, you know, it's interesting, the online audiences, because Harvey's CRA story, there was an influencer who did a TikTok explaining the story, and there were people in the comments saying, "I'm not going to have time to watch this, just explain it to me." On TikTok, and it's like, well, you know, that's great in a sense. Like, maybe they might not watch the documentary, but we have people talking about it. And I think that's-- I guess I'll take that as a win at the end of the day, because for me, the biggest fear I always have is silence, right? You put a story out there, and then there's just silence, and nothing happens. And that's the biggest fear for me when we put a story out. And so, to have people talking, I guess, in whatever form it is, you know, I guess we'll take that as a win, but you still want people to see the work that you do.

Look, I think the thing that everybody's trying to get at with those answers is that trust in journalism is also down quite a bit, and that is something that we have to reckon with as a field. There's something different that happens with investigative. I think there's something different about the relationship that people have with investigative, which is to say, "Hey, can someone spend some time looking into this thing, because I'm really worried about it, or it's a big deal to me." So, I just wonder what your take is on the role of investigative in restoring the trust that people have in journalism.

I mean, this is going to be a not quite answer to that.

-[laughing]

But...

-Great.

-...we are--

-Love that.

I find news outlets are so bad at telling their own stories, and it's like the journalism across Canada, there's very, very, very few news outlets that are really bad. People have different takes on things, but everyone is trying their best. We have a good media environment, I think. And, I mean, particularly investigative. The public loves investigative journalism. Our movies, our books, they're all investigative journalists, as the main character. It's-- You inherently understand what it is. People get behind it. So, when we do it, you know, you're talking about, Rianna, like, you put it, I think in the old days, when I was starting, 20 years ago, you'd put out a story, and that would kind of be it, and you let it off, and on to the next one. Now, there needs to be, like, an ad campaign after, almost. You need to go out and promote your work. You need to now hustle, and get eyeballs on it, and do panels, and talk to the public, go do interviews on shows. I mean, this is something, when I was doing the Rob Ford investigation, that I really, really learned, that it's not enough to just publish something and leave it. And so, I think that the journalism is going to speak for itself, and the diligence that journalists do, you see so many more of those behind the story pieces, that accompany it, of how we did it. Being transparent, being open, being accountable to readers, we hold the powerful accountable, and then we need to be held accountable. And I actually don't mind getting yelled at on social media, honestly. Like, truly, because I have this giant pen, that I, you know, have my say, and put it out in the paper, and I'm okay with being held accountable, and I've learned some things from readers and reactions. So, I think it's just being really transparent with readers, being available, and it's a conversation, and just, um, unapologetically promoting the importance of journalism, as a non-partisan way, to hold the powerful to account.

Well, I want to thank these panellists again. Thank you so much for your time. Steven D'Souza, Robyn Doolittle, Mark Kelley, Rianna Croxford. Thanks again, you guys. We appreciate it.

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