Hi, back with the podcast. I didn’t want to release this episode until Brian Stewart’s new book was released. It’s frustrating for readers to hear about a book they can’t buy yet. But Stewart’s generous, introspective memoir, On The Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent, was published on Tuesday, so here’s my interview with him.
Stewart was a globe-trotting CBC foreign correspondent in, especially, the 1980s, and he continued doing a mix of reporting and anchor work until about 15 years ago. These were the apex years at the Corp, when few people who cared about politics dared go to bed without watching The National, and the CBC’s team of foreign correspondents was often viewers’ only window into big international stories.
One of those stories had a visibility and effect that few reporters can imagine achieving, and fittingly, it opens Stewart’s book. That was Stewart’s 1984 reporting from the Ethiopian famine, which led straight to the newly-elected government of Brian Mulroney taking a lead in the international humanitarian response, and onward to Live Aid and much else. This short video from Adrienne Arsenault features a clip of David Bowie introducing an edited version of Stewart’s Ethiopia report from the stage at Wembley Stadium. That’s one definition of hitting the big time.
But there’s a lot else in the book, including Stewart’s early days, when his father’s work for the Simpson’s department-store chain allowed the family to live beyond its means, abroad and at home. So Stewart was at Upper Canada College when a lad named Conrad Black was expelled for peddling exams. They became friends for life.
Because it’s my show, I dwell longer than you might on Stewart’s work at the Montreal Gazette, in a city that has always punched above its weight for news generation. Stewart got on The Gazette in 1967 by writing about school-board reform, which is a special love language that only a newspaper for Montreal anglophones could understand. He arrived just in time for Charles De Gaulle’s Vive le Québec Libre! speech, Trudeaumania and the deadliest years of the FLQ. (I came along a generation later, just in time for Meech Lake, Oka and the Polytechnique massacre.) Going to TV meant Stewart had to give up a widely-read column in the Gazette. Can’t have been easy, but he obviously chose correctly.
I think this was our first conversation or close to it, but this business is a succession of echoes, and we found much to talk about. There’s a little handwringing about the state of the industry, but mostly this is a celebration of work worth doing.
Since I have no plans for more podcast episodes, we’re doing things a little differently. This episode exists only on Substack and on Youtube. Here’s the Youtube video, which lets you see Stewart talk.
I’ll have more video content from time to time, but these days I’m more of a writer. Thanks for watching, listening and reading.
