I'm Katie Kurik, and this is next question Lisa La Flam. She's long been a household name in her native Canada, where she worked for CTV for thirty five years. I felt you should hear this directly from me on June twenty ninth. But last summer she became the face of female outrage when she was unceremoniously let go from her job anchoring the Evening News. I was blindsided and I'm still shocked and saddened by Bell Media's decision. It was denied by her employers, but viewers and fans couldn't help but wonder if choosing to go gray was behind her pink slip. I was super jazzed to talk to Lisa, and it turns out we have a lot in common. In fact, she was once called Canada's Katie Kurik in one article. When it came to her firing, she couldn't get into details for legal reasons, but we still had plenty to talk about. If you want to get smarter about your career, make sure to check out Wake Up, Call It Work, a brand new newsletter by Kittie Currect Media, brought to you by Think with Google we'll be delivering fresh stories on all things business, tech and navigating the modern workplace. Follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss an addition, Are you battling cancer? I'm passionate about raising awareness about early detection, and it's also critical to understand all treatment options, especially their impact on survival and quality of life. View Ray has reinvented cancer treatment with Meridian MRI guided radiation therapy. We're nearly eighty percent of patients complete treatment and as few as five sessions, often with little or no side effects. Innovation like Meridian gives hope to millions of people around the world. Locate I'm already and at fewry dot com. If you can bring your screen down just a bit. Yeah, now, let's get too perfect. Hi, Lisa, I'm so excited to be doing this. Thank you so much. I know we got a million things to talk about, woman, we really do, right, So um gosh, I've been reading about you and talking about you, and listening to other people talk about you. I guess I'll start with the most typical question is that you're never supposed to ask, but how are you doing well? I'm a little jetlagged. I've just come back from a great month in Africa working for Journalists for Human Rights on women's issues, actually for journalists and female politicians and teenage girls who are victims of rape and end up pregnant and have become outcast. Social worker Purity Geekunda has made it her mission that teenage mothers victims of rape and abuse as young as ten are back in class. She founded Greenland Schools Education. Incredibly full, inspiring, emotional and fulfilling month to be able to cover these stories for Journalists for Human Rights. And so how am I? I'm good? Obviously, your story, Lisa created a firestorm and you became the story which no journalists really likes. How uncomfortable were you that the whole world, or at least a lot of us, were talking about you. Well, the support obviously has been enormous globally. I realize that journalists we are a support system which I might not have known about, and women support women, which is huge for me. That has been a great comfort really at a time of change. August fifteenth of last year, you recorded something for your audience explaining what had happened and really thanking your viewers for their support. I want to play that real quickly, or at least part of it. Today, with a range of emotions, I'm sharing with you some information about me and my career with CTV News. For thirty five years, I have had the privilege of being welcomed into your homes to deliver the news on a nightly basis, so I felt you should hear this directly from me. On June twenty ninth, I was informed that Bell Media made a quote business decision to end my contract, bringing to a sudden close my long career with CTV News. I was also asked to keep this confidential from my colleagues and the pub like until the specifics of my exit could be resolved. That has now happened, and I want you to know what these last thirty five years have meant to me. Everything. Gosh, Lisa, when you listen to yourself say those words, I can only imagine what you're feeling. For you and I both covering sudden change is what we've always done. Let's face it, you never know when you wake up what's going to have happened in the world. So I was a very adept at covering sudden change, and I put everything in perspective, so this happened, and then my own sudden change gets As you said earlier, no journalist wants to be part of the story or the story. But it's all perspective for me. You know, I've seen Canadian and US sold and British soldiers have their legs blown off in Afghanistan. I've seen babies born in tarpolands in Haiti. Really that's the sudden change you don't come back from. And I put everything in perspective. I always have, including this, so I don't linger. I look forward, and I have to because I am an optimist. You had two years left on your contract, Lisa, Do you have any better understanding about how it happened, why it happened, and why it was handled the way it was handled. You know, the company has said, or a company spokesperson has said, repeatedly that your age, your gender, your gray hair played no role in this decision. Help me unpack this if you could, within the parameters that you are able to discuss it in. Honestly, everything I wrote and said in the tweet stands it was a business decision. What do we do? We're in this industry that we both love. We know business decisions happen every single day. People lose their jobs every single day, and many of my dear friends in this industry have lost their jobs. So that's the nature of the industry is change, and it is a very changing industry right now, as we both know. So, as I said, optimism is my default position, although I would say cynicism and optimism sort of our dance partners in my brain, I'm going to give optimism the lead, as I always do, because that's you know, the alternative isn't as pleasant. This incident struck such a chord among so many women. It's smacked of just terrible agism and sexism and a double standard that so many women have had to deal with. Certainly, I feel like I've had to deal with that my whole career. Let's speak send in generalities, because we've both been in this industry a long time and we know lots of women who have also been in it, and we call it agism, which is uniquely attached to women in general terms. We don't talk about agism when it comes to men, and I think that's an important distinction to make as a society. We should address this clearly. I think in broadcast journalism. Men are allowed to age and look distinguished, but when women start to show their age, it's jarring and off putting and considered, you know, not appealing to an audience, which is so infuriating, honestly, And I think part of it is because we don't have real role models of women being allowed to age naturally on television, and people like Anderson Cooper can have white hair the same color as your hair and be called a silver fox, but when it happens to a woman, it's a whole different ball game. Although I'm going to tell you when this process started for me, which by the way, decades ago, that I started going gray, and I've been coloring my hair forever. It feels like, in fact, you started going gray in your twenties, right, Yeah, I did. I did, and I had very dark hair, and you get used to coloring your hair, and I remember being tired of it well many many times over the years, especially when I was in specific like war zones, and you realize that, God, I've got three weeks. That's the window. We have three weeks before the roots start being obvious when you have really dark hair. I reached my max was when obviously the pandemic. All of the salons were closed in Toronto, and you're just you're covering like the weirdest, craziest story you've ever covered. And and I am not kidding. All of a sudden on a Friday, the city is shutting down, the world is shutting down. You're looking what's happening at in Wuhan and in Potma in Italy, and the last thing you're thinking about is your hair. So I one Saturday morning, in the very early days of the pandemic, obviously three weeks in, I just couldn't do it anymore. And that was it. And I remember very vividly being, you know, a few months in, and it is ugly. I mean, we all know it is not pretty to have a racing stripe or look like a skunk. Yeah, And I was in the dog my dog park here and a woman on a Saturday morning she took her It was almost like a merry Tyler Moore moment. She took her beret off. She said, I'm with you, Lisa, and she had the whole gunk going on, and I don't know, I just thought it was good, although I wish I could have worn a beret on for the news. Well, let me ask you, as a practical matter, how did you deal with that transition from dyeing your hair every three weeks to letting it become, by the way, the beautiful head of white hair you have now you're very fine time and all of a sudden it was done. There was a massive amount of email and tweets rather, but it was largely positive because people were going through the same thing. Did you get any negative feedback, either from within your company or outside the company? I'm curious what people were saying and writing about Well, I mean, obviously there were I don't know if you're the same as me, but you seem to remember the negative comments sadly more, I think that's pretty much human nature. I think everyone's like that. So, yes, there were some negative comments, but actually laughable. To be honest with you, I learned a long time ago to laugh at the people who had all this wide open criticism of any woman on TV, on Twitter. Okay, buddy, thanks, But you know, I would say the mass majority inside and outside was positive, And I remember thinking at one point, I guess like, you've gone too far now, you know, you get to this point you're like, Okay, you're three inches on either side of the parts. You're not going back. And so, how did the people at the station or you're at your network, how did people at CTV respond to it? Did you get any inkling that this was a problem, not at all? Totally positive, Totally positive. My female colleague, my male colleague, By the way, we have had a very dear the show producer who I used to call Anderson Cooper because he went prematurely gray and he's like, you're in the cloud, You're in the club when we come back. Lisa lets it rip when it comes to Don Lemon's remarks about women in their prime, Are you or a loved one battling cancer? I'm passionate about raising awareness about the importance of early detection and for patients and their caregivers to fully understand all available treatment options, especially those that have meaningful impact to extending survival and improving quality of life. You know, too often the length of treatment, recovery period, and debilitating side effect can be difficult to cope with. Our partners at Viewray have reinvented cancer treatment with Meridian MRI guided radiation therapy for those who qualify around eighty percent of patients complete treatment and as few as five sessions, often with little or no side effects. Viewray is working to educate patients about this life changing cancer treatment and where patients can find a Meridian treatment center. Innovation like Meridian gives me hope for the millions of people around the world currently battling cancer. So talk to your doctor to find hospitals where Meridian is available. Visit viewray dot com. How can we support women as they age in a whole host of fields. We've got voices and platforms and ways of express seeing how we feel when we see this kind of misogyny and sexism. We just have to keep, you know, naming and shaming, I guess, to try to expose a patriarchal society that I mean, I'm not kidding you. I was in Tunisia where we were working on stories about Believe It or Not, normalizing the idea of women on TV, normalizing the idea of women politicians. So we in North America we actually have made enormous strides, obviously, but it's clearly there's hurdles, and I guess it's just the support. It's the support network that we just can't let our side down. There was so much support for you from women everywhere and many men as well who thought you were treated very shoddily. It sort of makes me mad that they didn't reverse their decision, or we're not seeing you on another network delivering the evening news. What more can be done to make sure the message is being heard loud and clear and that people are voting with their remote controls. I will say, in general terms, in society, we don't realize or recognize or utilize the voice we have as consumers in this world, especially where we are. And I mean I'm not going to speak about my own situation because I can't, but I will say these things over time make a difference. Well, people, I don't think realize how much power they have. You know, when certain people boycott certain networks, they pay attention, and if they galvanize consumers to boycott a network, that can have a real impact. I am no conintended that I'm always looking for silver linings. I always was and I still am. So I think that that is an important thing for people to address. But in general, the subject of agism is something we shouldn't let our guard down. I mean, I look so much to you know indigenous cultures where it's the elders, the knowledge keepers we look to as our guides, and in other cultures it's women at a certain age become Was it Germaine Greer who called us crones at a certain age? That's something we can keep working to change. And as I said before, you you just keep calling something out. This is not about my situation. As I said, this is about women in general, and it's not something that just mattered to me recently. This is an issue of sexism and ageism. Anything ending in an ism, to be honest, has been something that has been worth focusing on analyzing and determining the veracity of it. If I can put that, I agree, except for feminism, that's a good ism, that's a greatism. Speaking of Germania, let's talk about sexism. Though. You know, I think you and I got into the news business around the same time. I'm a little older than you are, But do you feel that it's changed dramatically Because I joke in speeches that I got into TV news when harass was two words instead of one, and when people said that I lacked ravatas when I did the CBS Evening News, I said, I later discovered that is actually Latin for testicles, So I guess, I guess I'm wondering do you think that it's changed. I mean, they're certainly many, many more high profile women in television news, both on camera and behind the scenes and executive positions then there were when I started out by far, So do you think strides have been made? And what kind of bullshit did you have to deal with Lisa early on in your career. I'm just curious, Probably the same bullshit you had to deal with, because, first of all, top answer, absolutely, we've made strides. I mean, I remember begging to go to Baghdad twenty three years ago whatever it was. Now women are assigned if there women and men in an assignment desk doesn't decide based on gender, so that's huge. You grow a thix skin early on as a woman in this industry, so you have to learn to wear that six skin. Our first obligation is always to the truth and never to those people trying to tear us down. But you know, it's been a journey of beautiful progress for women. But growing up and certainly as a young reporter, no, Barbara Walters really was the one Diane Sawyer sixteen minutes. I remember visibly watching, thinking, okay, but I'm serious, there was there were a very few. I feel like progress has been made. And then I hear someone like Don Lemon making a bonehead remark on CNN about women in their prime. Let's listen to what Don had to say. This all talk about age makes me uncomfortable. I think that I think it's the wrong road to go down. She says, people, you know, politicians are something and not in their prime. Nicki Haley isn't in her prime. Sorry, when a woman is considered being her prime in our twenties, at thirties and maybe forties, that's not, according to me, prime for what it depends me. It's just like prime. If you look it up, it'll if you look if you google when is a woman in prime, it'll say twenties, thirties and forties. I say, I agree with that. So I think she has to be careful about saying that, you know, politicians aren't in their problem. You could qualifier you're talking about prime for like child or Lisa. I know Don Lemon and eighty five years old. No, he's he's actually a nice guy. I think maybe he was trying to be provocative, or maybe he was reacting to agism by Nicki Haley with sexism. Again, those isms probably not a good idea at all. But what was your reaction when you when you heard what he had said? Well, again, it's all through the chrism of the moment. And I was in Africa when that happened, and I had just been talking to a female politician, the first Arab woman ever to become the mayor of a major Arab city. And I do the interview, I go back and I'm checking, Oh, why is Don Lemon trending? I'm not joking. I was gobsmacked at the idiocy of that comment. I replayed it. Did I just hear that? There was a sanctimonious quality to the google it part that I just with stunned at. And I'm exhausted by the sort of the heads against the brick wall nature of a comment like that. Obviously, he wouldn't have said it if he didn't feel there was some kind of acceptability in society to make a comment like that, And that is a sad statement. I don't know the man, I do not know him, but I know that that comment gave me enormous insight into how his mind works, and I wish his mind would catch up with the calendar because it's you know, it's twenty twenty three, and that is not acceptable to me. How do we take him seriously when he interviews the next female politician or any woman's issue, really if you think the woman you're interviewing is over thirty or maybe forty. And as a husband, I don't know. I think he was trying to be cute and made a terrible mistake. And I'm not sure he really believes that. I think he was trying to be edgy or something. And is okay though when you have a position, as we both know, is a position of privilege. Oh, I don't think it's okay at all. I'm just trying to understand his motivation and what might have prompted him to make such a bonehead comment. Yeah, that's a good word for it. Up next, Lisa on the state of journalism in our polarized world. That's right after this. I'm curious to get your thoughts on sort of the modern media landscape. You know, linear television is declining every day, and as the demand declines, salaries are going down. As well, and I'm just curious how you feel about misinformation, disinformation, truth decay, as it's sometimes been called, living in a post factual world. It's just so dramatically different than it was when we started out. I don't know what are your thoughts on all of this change. I mean, I always think they've never been more informed and less enlightened. It's a difficult time because of misinformation. And I don't understand why people see their power of critical thinking. I mean traditional media where people are getting paid to work hard to learn a craft. It's like, would you go to Twitter if you had colon cancer and get advice? You know, if you had a lump in your breast, would you go to Instagram? No, you go to a doctor. So if you want a fact on what's going on in Ukraine or Afghanistan at this moment, why wouldn't you go to people who are professional journalists? Because learned that this is a craft that we've honed and that's our only job is to gather facts. And so I'm worried because I feel like we need some kind of correction in the world right now to expose the misinformation. It's not that difficult to check your sources. I mean, I've always believe media literacy is as important as math, maybe more important than math. Right now, since we have a phone we can quickly calculate, we don't really use our brain the way we had to, and that worries me. I mean Finland, for example, it is now in kindergarten part of the curriculum to teach the difference between real news, fake news, misinformation, disinformation. This should be everywhere, and I think during the pandemic one of the biggest legacies was misinformation, and there were nights I used to feel like we're spending half the time correcting false information, and sometimes that came from the highest levels of power, and that is very disconcerting. So there's a lot of work to do here, and we can't any of us stop. Do you think the genie is out of the bottle, that media literacy is our best hope, because it seems to me that correcting disinformation, that it's too pervasive, it's become too ubiquitous to to kind of corral it. At this point, I don't know, can't you can't can't I mean, honestly, we can't accept that. We have to keep fighting to expose misinformation, and I don't know. We are seeing it. We're seeing it crumble in certain places, and then it pops like WACA mole, you know, and that is frustrating. But I don't feel it's something we can ever. I mean, we're seeing trust being eroded, you know, all of the institutions of society, right, Yes, I agree, And I'm curious how you feel about this move towards more commentary on cable news. You know, for so long I've just been trained or I was trained as a journalist. And now I'm more outspoken because I have my own company and I can speak out about things that I am passionate about about gun violence or helping people understand sort of our changing notions of gender identity. But I never gave my opinion on anything, and now it is totally so different, particularly in cable news and prime time, And I'm wondering how you feel about that. I feel it's one of the reasons for the erosion. Actually, if people want to know what's happening in the world, you need on the ground field reporters who can cover it through their eyes, trusted eyes show it's what's happening. Don't give me your opinion. I do love I've got to be honest. I'm a complete newspaper junkie for columns well thought out, I just write. I love reading that. I don't know, I feel that is part of them, and I don't know if it's a money thing. I have no idea why it seems like that's taken over. I think it's because a shrinking audience, you have to get a certain piece of the pie. So instead of giving information which I think people don't necessarily have a visceral response to, right, And it takes intellectual work to be a critical thinker that to get sort of like minded audience who wants to hear kind of a reinforcement or validation of their own pre existing views that they gravitate towards people who reflect those views. But in the end, what have you learned? Actually, Like, if you look at the situation on the ground in Ukraine right now, I mean, you can hear all of the chats we'll call it chat, it is only the very rare which is still still there. It's still there. You know, generals who've experienced war in any Afghanistan or Iraq, who can look at the actual battle front and give you some knowledge that might give you an insight into where it's going next. But the general I don't know. With general chat, if we're actually informing the public, and I agree with you, I am trained also to just give the facts. And that's a comfortable place to be because I know what to do with facts. I'm seeing something, I'm asking questions, I'm getting answers, and that is the fact for that moment in that place, and we reflect it back. Otherwise, I don't know. I'm not equipped. I couldn't possibly give people an opinion that would be worth it for a conflict of that nature or any of these things. I don't understand actually why it's shifted so dramatically onto the chat format and away from news. That's why I ask could it be money in the sense that fewer resources in the industry at large, I mean fewer field reporters. That's definitely part of it. I mean producing an in studio show with people giving their opinions is a lot less expensive than having foreign bureaus and having reporters on the ground. And you know, I think they're still obviously places that do that and do it well. And I also think having Donald Trump as president presented certain challenges to news organizations in terms of how they handled misinformation that he was perpetuating, that the president of the United States was perpetuating and if they corrected him, they would be considered biased or criticized him, or it made it even more complex and even murkier. And I'm sort of along those lines to get your opinion on Fox News because in the dominion lawsuit, it's come to its surface. And I'm sure you've been reading about this, Lisa, that their primetime anchors knew that there were falsehoods being perpetrated by people about a stolen election, but they also knew their audience and they were afraid they were gravitating to more more conservative upstart networks like Newsmax, and so they intentionally lied to their audience and they told them what they wanted to hear. And to me, that is such a betrayal and so Craven and as Rupert Murdoch himself said, it was a business decision. Now the question is do Fox News viewers even care that they were lied to? But that's a question, and also accountability democracy is something we should protect and not allow. I think I don't know what the viewership is at the moment for Fox, I assume it's gone down since Trump. Yeah, but they're still the highest rated cable in the United States. So I wasn't shocked by any of that. I guess I was surprised that he under oath admitted they knew it was a lie. It's all about the principles of journalism, and I guess maybe therein lies the difference. At one point, you've got to declare yourself you're either a journalist or you're not, and we all do have to follow some kind of code of ethics or else it just becomes a circus. And that has been a dangerous circus what's unfolded and perpetuating lie in America. And this has all been a learning experience, I think for everybody since twenty sixteen, and the world. It's not just an American situation. It is a world question now, and that makes it really important that we don't take our eye off the ball and see what are the consequences of this admittance on the stand that, yes, our on air people, I'm not going to call them journalists if they've been lying, openly, knowingly lying, that's not journalism. One oh one. Let's face it, it's wrong. And I don't know what the outcome of this is going to be. Do you have a clue of where it might go. I don't because I think a lot of Fox News viewers aren't convinced that this was the case, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the election was somehow stolen, and that's something that Donald Trump continues to say. And I think because it's not being covered where they're getting their news, I'm not sure it will have an impact on their viewership. Yeah, that's the dangerous element to all of it. You hear what you want to hear, selective hearing. And I don't know what the way around that is, except we are in a polarized world right now. It has probably been never this bad in history the last six years, growing though, and I do as I said, I feel there is going to be a correction because it can't stand. This can't continue this way misinformation, which is the greatest threat to democracy. People just don't even realize what they're letting slip through their fingers. And I will again point to having just been in countries where it's just a word free press and a media freedom and democracy. These are just words and we take it for granted, and that is very disheartening for me to see on a global scale. It really is. We don't know how lucky we have it. Are Canadians as polarized as Americans? I would say we are, We're growing. We are very polarized in this country and the world is. It's the same in the UK, it's the same in France. There's probably not a Western country right now that is not as polarized. And I sadly will say the reason that the central theme of it is people coming on one side or the other of immigration, and that is the part that really personally hurts me. Having covered so many of these conflicts around the world, and I'm going to speak specifically to what's happening in Afghanistan. And you know, nobody wants to leave their culture, their language, their friends, their relatives willingly and go to a country where they don't know anything. It's because it's a life or death situation. And I think, sadly that is one of the reasons that has generated this division in the world. What do we do with victims of conflict? I mean, certainly Afghanistan is I'm going to use the term gender apartheid. What's happening that, you know, little girls can no longer go to school and women who for twenty years have been going to university and working and now they're hiding. The women I know personally are hiding in their basements. They're putting their kids, their little girls, through secret schools. This is not okay. This it's not okay. And I don't know, I'm going on a bit of a tangent there, but it is something I think does not get enough coverage now. And I understand why, being in the industry, we know we only have a capacity for so much conflict and then people sort of turn away. But this is when I think we need to refocus on I really do. And again it does come down to the politics of crisis and how we weaponize it. Sadly, I agree, I agree. I mean, yes, I think modern politicians are more interested in using issues against each other than actually fixing anything. And that's so sad because that is such a position of privilege. Really, you're an elected official, You're put in a position to work for the public. I don't know, I can't. I have trouble. I have trouble with a lot of these things, but not like you. I mean I also wasn't speaking out about things like that. Now I can speak freely about what I see what I see specifically, as I said, I know there are issues with indigenous women in this country and your country, and immigrant women, but I really do think there's more we can do as a society. Is it liberating in some ways to be able to address some of these issues that you couldn't address when you were anchoring an evening newscast? Absolutely it is. I mean there's there's things that you could say to your team around the pod, but you wouldn't say on air if you felt that any particular government wasn't doing enough, wasn't fulfilling an obligation that they'd made to whomever domestically or internationally. And yeah, now I can. I mean I'm not I'm not really that person to be honest politically, but but I can know, and in an opportunity, if I'm asked, I don't have to shy away from it. And there's definitely liberty. It's about what we do with our voices that can help empower younger women. I think, Lisa, do you think you have a book in you. I don't know. I marveled at your book that you remembered so much. I feel sometimes if I ever wanted to sit down and write the book, how would I? And I do? I have box loads of handwritten note books and all of that, and it seems like a mammoth operation to even open them and look through it. But maybe one day I'll know when the time is right. Well, listen, Lisa, thank you so much for spending all this time. It's been a real pleasure. I feel like we're old friends now that we sat down over a long, potentially boozy lunch. We need that hopefully, Yeah, next time, next time with cocktails. Anyway, good luck to you, and thanks again for coming on the podcast. I'm I'm really grateful. It was really great to talk to you. Katie, and I just so appreciate the opportunity to sort of share some of the things we've both experienced and the passion I think we both share for the industry that we don't want to see destroyed. It's a wonderful profession, and I think we both feel very fortunate to have had the careers we've we've had, and hey, we're not dead yet, well exactly Thank you Lisa, Thank you Katie. Great to talk to you. Thanks for listening. Everyone. If you have a question for me or want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world reach out, You can leave a short message at six O nine five point two five five o five, or you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Currek Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Curick, and Courtney Litz. Our supervising producer is Marcy Thompson. Our producers are Adriana Fasio and Catherine Law. Our audio engineer is Matt Russell, who also composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app, or visit us at Katiecurrek dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I'm Katie Kurik, and this is next question Lisa La Flam. She's long been a household name in her native Canada, where she worked for CTV for thirty five years. I felt you should hear this directly from me on June twenty ninth. But last summer she became the face of female outrage when she was unceremoniously let go from her job anchoring the Evening News. I was blindsided and I'm still shocked and saddened by Bell Media's decision. It was denied by her employers, but viewers and fans couldn't help but wonder if choosing to go gray was behind her pink slip. I was super jazzed to talk to Lisa, and it turns out we have a lot in common. In fact, she was once called Canada's Katie Kurik in one article. When it came to her firing, she couldn't get into details for legal reasons, but we still had plenty to talk about. If you want to get smarter about your career, make sure to check out Wake Up, Call It Work, a brand new newsletter by Kittie Currect Media, brought to you by Think with Google we'll be delivering fresh stories on all things business, tech and navigating the modern workplace. Follow me on LinkedIn to make sure you never miss an addition, Are you battling cancer? I'm passionate about raising awareness about early detection, and it's also critical to understand all treatment options, especially their impact on survival and quality of life. View Ray has reinvented cancer treatment with Meridian MRI guided radiation therapy. We're nearly eighty percent of patients complete treatment and as few as five sessions, often with little or no side effects. Innovation like Meridian gives hope to millions of people around the world. Locate I'm already and at fewry dot com. If you can bring your screen down just a bit. Yeah, now, let's get too perfect. Hi, Lisa, I'm so excited to be doing this. Thank you so much. I know we got a million things to talk about, woman, we really do, right, So um gosh, I've been reading about you and talking about you, and listening to other people talk about you. I guess I'll start with the most typical question is that you're never supposed to ask, but how are you doing well? I'm a little jetlagged. I've just come back from a great month in Africa working for Journalists for Human Rights on women's issues, actually for journalists and female politicians and teenage girls who are victims of rape and end up pregnant and have become outcast. Social worker Purity Geekunda has made it her mission that teenage mothers victims of rape and abuse as young as ten are back in class. She founded Greenland Schools Education. Incredibly full, inspiring, emotional and fulfilling month to be able to cover these stories for Journalists for Human Rights. And so how am I? I'm good? Obviously, your story, Lisa created a firestorm and you became the story which no journalists really likes. How uncomfortable were you that the whole world, or at least a lot of us, were talking about you. Well, the support obviously has been enormous globally. I realize that journalists we are a support system which I might not have known about, and women support women, which is huge for me. That has been a great comfort really at a time of change. August fifteenth of last year, you recorded something for your audience explaining what had happened and really thanking your viewers for their support. I want to play that real quickly, or at least part of it. Today, with a range of emotions, I'm sharing with you some information about me and my career with CTV News. For thirty five years, I have had the privilege of being welcomed into your homes to deliver the news on a nightly basis, so I felt you should hear this directly from me. On June twenty ninth, I was informed that Bell Media made a quote business decision to end my contract, bringing to a sudden close my long career with CTV News. I was also asked to keep this confidential from my colleagues and the pub like until the specifics of my exit could be resolved. That has now happened, and I want you to know what these last thirty five years have meant to me. Everything. Gosh, Lisa, when you listen to yourself say those words, I can only imagine what you're feeling. For you and I both covering sudden change is what we've always done. Let's face it, you never know when you wake up what's going to have happened in the world. So I was a very adept at covering sudden change, and I put everything in perspective, so this happened, and then my own sudden change gets As you said earlier, no journalist wants to be part of the story or the story. But it's all perspective for me. You know, I've seen Canadian and US sold and British soldiers have their legs blown off in Afghanistan. I've seen babies born in tarpolands in Haiti. Really that's the sudden change you don't come back from. And I put everything in perspective. I always have, including this, so I don't linger. I look forward, and I have to because I am an optimist. You had two years left on your contract, Lisa, Do you have any better understanding about how it happened, why it happened, and why it was handled the way it was handled. You know, the company has said, or a company spokesperson has said, repeatedly that your age, your gender, your gray hair played no role in this decision. Help me unpack this if you could, within the parameters that you are able to discuss it in. Honestly, everything I wrote and said in the tweet stands it was a business decision. What do we do? We're in this industry that we both love. We know business decisions happen every single day. People lose their jobs every single day, and many of my dear friends in this industry have lost their jobs. So that's the nature of the industry is change, and it is a very changing industry right now, as we both know. So, as I said, optimism is my default position, although I would say cynicism and optimism sort of our dance partners in my brain, I'm going to give optimism the lead, as I always do, because that's you know, the alternative isn't as pleasant. This incident struck such a chord among so many women. It's smacked of just terrible agism and sexism and a double standard that so many women have had to deal with. Certainly, I feel like I've had to deal with that my whole career. Let's speak send in generalities, because we've both been in this industry a long time and we know lots of women who have also been in it, and we call it agism, which is uniquely attached to women in general terms. We don't talk about agism when it comes to men, and I think that's an important distinction to make as a society. We should address this clearly. I think in broadcast journalism. Men are allowed to age and look distinguished, but when women start to show their age, it's jarring and off putting and considered, you know, not appealing to an audience, which is so infuriating, honestly, And I think part of it is because we don't have real role models of women being allowed to age naturally on television, and people like Anderson Cooper can have white hair the same color as your hair and be called a silver fox, but when it happens to a woman, it's a whole different ball game. Although I'm going to tell you when this process started for me, which by the way, decades ago, that I started going gray, and I've been coloring my hair forever. It feels like, in fact, you started going gray in your twenties, right, Yeah, I did. I did, and I had very dark hair, and you get used to coloring your hair, and I remember being tired of it well many many times over the years, especially when I was in specific like war zones, and you realize that, God, I've got three weeks. That's the window. We have three weeks before the roots start being obvious when you have really dark hair. I reached my max was when obviously the pandemic. All of the salons were closed in Toronto, and you're just you're covering like the weirdest, craziest story you've ever covered. And and I am not kidding. All of a sudden on a Friday, the city is shutting down, the world is shutting down. You're looking what's happening at in Wuhan and in Potma in Italy, and the last thing you're thinking about is your hair. So I one Saturday morning, in the very early days of the pandemic, obviously three weeks in, I just couldn't do it anymore. And that was it. And I remember very vividly being, you know, a few months in, and it is ugly. I mean, we all know it is not pretty to have a racing stripe or look like a skunk. Yeah, And I was in the dog my dog park here and a woman on a Saturday morning she took her It was almost like a merry Tyler Moore moment. She took her beret off. She said, I'm with you, Lisa, and she had the whole gunk going on, and I don't know, I just thought it was good, although I wish I could have worn a beret on for the news. Well, let me ask you, as a practical matter, how did you deal with that transition from dyeing your hair every three weeks to letting it become, by the way, the beautiful head of white hair you have now you're very fine time and all of a sudden it was done. There was a massive amount of email and tweets rather, but it was largely positive because people were going through the same thing. Did you get any negative feedback, either from within your company or outside the company? I'm curious what people were saying and writing about Well, I mean, obviously there were I don't know if you're the same as me, but you seem to remember the negative comments sadly more, I think that's pretty much human nature. I think everyone's like that. So, yes, there were some negative comments, but actually laughable. To be honest with you, I learned a long time ago to laugh at the people who had all this wide open criticism of any woman on TV, on Twitter. Okay, buddy, thanks, But you know, I would say the mass majority inside and outside was positive, And I remember thinking at one point, I guess like, you've gone too far now, you know, you get to this point you're like, Okay, you're three inches on either side of the parts. You're not going back. And so, how did the people at the station or you're at your network, how did people at CTV respond to it? Did you get any inkling that this was a problem, not at all? Totally positive, Totally positive. My female colleague, my male colleague, By the way, we have had a very dear the show producer who I used to call Anderson Cooper because he went prematurely gray and he's like, you're in the cloud, You're in the club when we come back. Lisa lets it rip when it comes to Don Lemon's remarks about women in their prime, Are you or a loved one battling cancer? I'm passionate about raising awareness about the importance of early detection and for patients and their caregivers to fully understand all available treatment options, especially those that have meaningful impact to extending survival and improving quality of life. You know, too often the length of treatment, recovery period, and debilitating side effect can be difficult to cope with. Our partners at Viewray have reinvented cancer treatment with Meridian MRI guided radiation therapy for those who qualify around eighty percent of patients complete treatment and as few as five sessions, often with little or no side effects. Viewray is working to educate patients about this life changing cancer treatment and where patients can find a Meridian treatment center. Innovation like Meridian gives me hope for the millions of people around the world currently battling cancer. So talk to your doctor to find hospitals where Meridian is available. Visit viewray dot com. How can we support women as they age in a whole host of fields. We've got voices and platforms and ways of express seeing how we feel when we see this kind of misogyny and sexism. We just have to keep, you know, naming and shaming, I guess, to try to expose a patriarchal society that I mean, I'm not kidding you. I was in Tunisia where we were working on stories about Believe It or Not, normalizing the idea of women on TV, normalizing the idea of women politicians. So we in North America we actually have made enormous strides, obviously, but it's clearly there's hurdles, and I guess it's just the support. It's the support network that we just can't let our side down. There was so much support for you from women everywhere and many men as well who thought you were treated very shoddily. It sort of makes me mad that they didn't reverse their decision, or we're not seeing you on another network delivering the evening news. What more can be done to make sure the message is being heard loud and clear and that people are voting with their remote controls. I will say, in general terms, in society, we don't realize or recognize or utilize the voice we have as consumers in this world, especially where we are. And I mean I'm not going to speak about my own situation because I can't, but I will say these things over time make a difference. Well, people, I don't think realize how much power they have. You know, when certain people boycott certain networks, they pay attention, and if they galvanize consumers to boycott a network, that can have a real impact. I am no conintended that I'm always looking for silver linings. I always was and I still am. So I think that that is an important thing for people to address. But in general, the subject of agism is something we shouldn't let our guard down. I mean, I look so much to you know indigenous cultures where it's the elders, the knowledge keepers we look to as our guides, and in other cultures it's women at a certain age become Was it Germaine Greer who called us crones at a certain age? That's something we can keep working to change. And as I said before, you you just keep calling something out. This is not about my situation. As I said, this is about women in general, and it's not something that just mattered to me recently. This is an issue of sexism and ageism. Anything ending in an ism, to be honest, has been something that has been worth focusing on analyzing and determining the veracity of it. If I can put that, I agree, except for feminism, that's a good ism, that's a greatism. Speaking of Germania, let's talk about sexism. Though. You know, I think you and I got into the news business around the same time. I'm a little older than you are, But do you feel that it's changed dramatically Because I joke in speeches that I got into TV news when harass was two words instead of one, and when people said that I lacked ravatas when I did the CBS Evening News, I said, I later discovered that is actually Latin for testicles, So I guess, I guess I'm wondering do you think that it's changed. I mean, they're certainly many, many more high profile women in television news, both on camera and behind the scenes and executive positions then there were when I started out by far, So do you think strides have been made? And what kind of bullshit did you have to deal with Lisa early on in your career. I'm just curious, Probably the same bullshit you had to deal with, because, first of all, top answer, absolutely, we've made strides. I mean, I remember begging to go to Baghdad twenty three years ago whatever it was. Now women are assigned if there women and men in an assignment desk doesn't decide based on gender, so that's huge. You grow a thix skin early on as a woman in this industry, so you have to learn to wear that six skin. Our first obligation is always to the truth and never to those people trying to tear us down. But you know, it's been a journey of beautiful progress for women. But growing up and certainly as a young reporter, no, Barbara Walters really was the one Diane Sawyer sixteen minutes. I remember visibly watching, thinking, okay, but I'm serious, there was there were a very few. I feel like progress has been made. And then I hear someone like Don Lemon making a bonehead remark on CNN about women in their prime. Let's listen to what Don had to say. This all talk about age makes me uncomfortable. I think that I think it's the wrong road to go down. She says, people, you know, politicians are something and not in their prime. Nicki Haley isn't in her prime. Sorry, when a woman is considered being her prime in our twenties, at thirties and maybe forties, that's not, according to me, prime for what it depends me. It's just like prime. If you look it up, it'll if you look if you google when is a woman in prime, it'll say twenties, thirties and forties. I say, I agree with that. So I think she has to be careful about saying that, you know, politicians aren't in their problem. You could qualifier you're talking about prime for like child or Lisa. I know Don Lemon and eighty five years old. No, he's he's actually a nice guy. I think maybe he was trying to be provocative, or maybe he was reacting to agism by Nicki Haley with sexism. Again, those isms probably not a good idea at all. But what was your reaction when you when you heard what he had said? Well, again, it's all through the chrism of the moment. And I was in Africa when that happened, and I had just been talking to a female politician, the first Arab woman ever to become the mayor of a major Arab city. And I do the interview, I go back and I'm checking, Oh, why is Don Lemon trending? I'm not joking. I was gobsmacked at the idiocy of that comment. I replayed it. Did I just hear that? There was a sanctimonious quality to the google it part that I just with stunned at. And I'm exhausted by the sort of the heads against the brick wall nature of a comment like that. Obviously, he wouldn't have said it if he didn't feel there was some kind of acceptability in society to make a comment like that, And that is a sad statement. I don't know the man, I do not know him, but I know that that comment gave me enormous insight into how his mind works, and I wish his mind would catch up with the calendar because it's you know, it's twenty twenty three, and that is not acceptable to me. How do we take him seriously when he interviews the next female politician or any woman's issue, really if you think the woman you're interviewing is over thirty or maybe forty. And as a husband, I don't know. I think he was trying to be cute and made a terrible mistake. And I'm not sure he really believes that. I think he was trying to be edgy or something. And is okay though when you have a position, as we both know, is a position of privilege. Oh, I don't think it's okay at all. I'm just trying to understand his motivation and what might have prompted him to make such a bonehead comment. Yeah, that's a good word for it. Up next, Lisa on the state of journalism in our polarized world. That's right after this. I'm curious to get your thoughts on sort of the modern media landscape. You know, linear television is declining every day, and as the demand declines, salaries are going down. As well, and I'm just curious how you feel about misinformation, disinformation, truth decay, as it's sometimes been called, living in a post factual world. It's just so dramatically different than it was when we started out. I don't know what are your thoughts on all of this change. I mean, I always think they've never been more informed and less enlightened. It's a difficult time because of misinformation. And I don't understand why people see their power of critical thinking. I mean traditional media where people are getting paid to work hard to learn a craft. It's like, would you go to Twitter if you had colon cancer and get advice? You know, if you had a lump in your breast, would you go to Instagram? No, you go to a doctor. So if you want a fact on what's going on in Ukraine or Afghanistan at this moment, why wouldn't you go to people who are professional journalists? Because learned that this is a craft that we've honed and that's our only job is to gather facts. And so I'm worried because I feel like we need some kind of correction in the world right now to expose the misinformation. It's not that difficult to check your sources. I mean, I've always believe media literacy is as important as math, maybe more important than math. Right now, since we have a phone we can quickly calculate, we don't really use our brain the way we had to, and that worries me. I mean Finland, for example, it is now in kindergarten part of the curriculum to teach the difference between real news, fake news, misinformation, disinformation. This should be everywhere, and I think during the pandemic one of the biggest legacies was misinformation, and there were nights I used to feel like we're spending half the time correcting false information, and sometimes that came from the highest levels of power, and that is very disconcerting. So there's a lot of work to do here, and we can't any of us stop. Do you think the genie is out of the bottle, that media literacy is our best hope, because it seems to me that correcting disinformation, that it's too pervasive, it's become too ubiquitous to to kind of corral it. At this point, I don't know, can't you can't can't I mean, honestly, we can't accept that. We have to keep fighting to expose misinformation, and I don't know. We are seeing it. We're seeing it crumble in certain places, and then it pops like WACA mole, you know, and that is frustrating. But I don't feel it's something we can ever. I mean, we're seeing trust being eroded, you know, all of the institutions of society, right, Yes, I agree, And I'm curious how you feel about this move towards more commentary on cable news. You know, for so long I've just been trained or I was trained as a journalist. And now I'm more outspoken because I have my own company and I can speak out about things that I am passionate about about gun violence or helping people understand sort of our changing notions of gender identity. But I never gave my opinion on anything, and now it is totally so different, particularly in cable news and prime time, And I'm wondering how you feel about that. I feel it's one of the reasons for the erosion. Actually, if people want to know what's happening in the world, you need on the ground field reporters who can cover it through their eyes, trusted eyes show it's what's happening. Don't give me your opinion. I do love I've got to be honest. I'm a complete newspaper junkie for columns well thought out, I just write. I love reading that. I don't know, I feel that is part of them, and I don't know if it's a money thing. I have no idea why it seems like that's taken over. I think it's because a shrinking audience, you have to get a certain piece of the pie. So instead of giving information which I think people don't necessarily have a visceral response to, right, And it takes intellectual work to be a critical thinker that to get sort of like minded audience who wants to hear kind of a reinforcement or validation of their own pre existing views that they gravitate towards people who reflect those views. But in the end, what have you learned? Actually, Like, if you look at the situation on the ground in Ukraine right now, I mean, you can hear all of the chats we'll call it chat, it is only the very rare which is still still there. It's still there. You know, generals who've experienced war in any Afghanistan or Iraq, who can look at the actual battle front and give you some knowledge that might give you an insight into where it's going next. But the general I don't know. With general chat, if we're actually informing the public, and I agree with you, I am trained also to just give the facts. And that's a comfortable place to be because I know what to do with facts. I'm seeing something, I'm asking questions, I'm getting answers, and that is the fact for that moment in that place, and we reflect it back. Otherwise, I don't know. I'm not equipped. I couldn't possibly give people an opinion that would be worth it for a conflict of that nature or any of these things. I don't understand actually why it's shifted so dramatically onto the chat format and away from news. That's why I ask could it be money in the sense that fewer resources in the industry at large, I mean fewer field reporters. That's definitely part of it. I mean producing an in studio show with people giving their opinions is a lot less expensive than having foreign bureaus and having reporters on the ground. And you know, I think they're still obviously places that do that and do it well. And I also think having Donald Trump as president presented certain challenges to news organizations in terms of how they handled misinformation that he was perpetuating, that the president of the United States was perpetuating and if they corrected him, they would be considered biased or criticized him, or it made it even more complex and even murkier. And I'm sort of along those lines to get your opinion on Fox News because in the dominion lawsuit, it's come to its surface. And I'm sure you've been reading about this, Lisa, that their primetime anchors knew that there were falsehoods being perpetrated by people about a stolen election, but they also knew their audience and they were afraid they were gravitating to more more conservative upstart networks like Newsmax, and so they intentionally lied to their audience and they told them what they wanted to hear. And to me, that is such a betrayal and so Craven and as Rupert Murdoch himself said, it was a business decision. Now the question is do Fox News viewers even care that they were lied to? But that's a question, and also accountability democracy is something we should protect and not allow. I think I don't know what the viewership is at the moment for Fox, I assume it's gone down since Trump. Yeah, but they're still the highest rated cable in the United States. So I wasn't shocked by any of that. I guess I was surprised that he under oath admitted they knew it was a lie. It's all about the principles of journalism, and I guess maybe therein lies the difference. At one point, you've got to declare yourself you're either a journalist or you're not, and we all do have to follow some kind of code of ethics or else it just becomes a circus. And that has been a dangerous circus what's unfolded and perpetuating lie in America. And this has all been a learning experience, I think for everybody since twenty sixteen, and the world. It's not just an American situation. It is a world question now, and that makes it really important that we don't take our eye off the ball and see what are the consequences of this admittance on the stand that, yes, our on air people, I'm not going to call them journalists if they've been lying, openly, knowingly lying, that's not journalism. One oh one. Let's face it, it's wrong. And I don't know what the outcome of this is going to be. Do you have a clue of where it might go. I don't because I think a lot of Fox News viewers aren't convinced that this was the case, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the election was somehow stolen, and that's something that Donald Trump continues to say. And I think because it's not being covered where they're getting their news, I'm not sure it will have an impact on their viewership. Yeah, that's the dangerous element to all of it. You hear what you want to hear, selective hearing. And I don't know what the way around that is, except we are in a polarized world right now. It has probably been never this bad in history the last six years, growing though, and I do as I said, I feel there is going to be a correction because it can't stand. This can't continue this way misinformation, which is the greatest threat to democracy. People just don't even realize what they're letting slip through their fingers. And I will again point to having just been in countries where it's just a word free press and a media freedom and democracy. These are just words and we take it for granted, and that is very disheartening for me to see on a global scale. It really is. We don't know how lucky we have it. Are Canadians as polarized as Americans? I would say we are, We're growing. We are very polarized in this country and the world is. It's the same in the UK, it's the same in France. There's probably not a Western country right now that is not as polarized. And I sadly will say the reason that the central theme of it is people coming on one side or the other of immigration, and that is the part that really personally hurts me. Having covered so many of these conflicts around the world, and I'm going to speak specifically to what's happening in Afghanistan. And you know, nobody wants to leave their culture, their language, their friends, their relatives willingly and go to a country where they don't know anything. It's because it's a life or death situation. And I think, sadly that is one of the reasons that has generated this division in the world. What do we do with victims of conflict? I mean, certainly Afghanistan is I'm going to use the term gender apartheid. What's happening that, you know, little girls can no longer go to school and women who for twenty years have been going to university and working and now they're hiding. The women I know personally are hiding in their basements. They're putting their kids, their little girls, through secret schools. This is not okay. This it's not okay. And I don't know, I'm going on a bit of a tangent there, but it is something I think does not get enough coverage now. And I understand why, being in the industry, we know we only have a capacity for so much conflict and then people sort of turn away. But this is when I think we need to refocus on I really do. And again it does come down to the politics of crisis and how we weaponize it. Sadly, I agree, I agree. I mean, yes, I think modern politicians are more interested in using issues against each other than actually fixing anything. And that's so sad because that is such a position of privilege. Really, you're an elected official, You're put in a position to work for the public. I don't know, I can't. I have trouble. I have trouble with a lot of these things, but not like you. I mean I also wasn't speaking out about things like that. Now I can speak freely about what I see what I see specifically, as I said, I know there are issues with indigenous women in this country and your country, and immigrant women, but I really do think there's more we can do as a society. Is it liberating in some ways to be able to address some of these issues that you couldn't address when you were anchoring an evening newscast? Absolutely it is. I mean there's there's things that you could say to your team around the pod, but you wouldn't say on air if you felt that any particular government wasn't doing enough, wasn't fulfilling an obligation that they'd made to whomever domestically or internationally. And yeah, now I can. I mean I'm not I'm not really that person to be honest politically, but but I can know, and in an opportunity, if I'm asked, I don't have to shy away from it. And there's definitely liberty. It's about what we do with our voices that can help empower younger women. I think, Lisa, do you think you have a book in you. I don't know. I marveled at your book that you remembered so much. I feel sometimes if I ever wanted to sit down and write the book, how would I? And I do? I have box loads of handwritten note books and all of that, and it seems like a mammoth operation to even open them and look through it. But maybe one day I'll know when the time is right. Well, listen, Lisa, thank you so much for spending all this time. It's been a real pleasure. I feel like we're old friends now that we sat down over a long, potentially boozy lunch. We need that hopefully, Yeah, next time, next time with cocktails. Anyway, good luck to you, and thanks again for coming on the podcast. I'm I'm really grateful. It was really great to talk to you. Katie, and I just so appreciate the opportunity to sort of share some of the things we've both experienced and the passion I think we both share for the industry that we don't want to see destroyed. It's a wonderful profession, and I think we both feel very fortunate to have had the careers we've we've had, and hey, we're not dead yet, well exactly Thank you Lisa, Thank you Katie. Great to talk to you. Thanks for listening. Everyone. If you have a question for me or want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world reach out, You can leave a short message at six O nine five point two five five o five, or you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Currek Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Curick, and Courtney Litz. Our supervising producer is Marcy Thompson. Our producers are Adriana Fasio and Catherine Law. Our audio engineer is Matt Russell, who also composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app, or visit us at Katiecurrek dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.