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The Current Transcript for February 11, 2019

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: The ayatollah says we're all on board at our own risk. Some of us are here because it's our job, but there are 50 Iranians on this plane who have come because they want to be with their leader at this historic moment.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: It was 1979 when a cleric whose name was barely known to the wider world, flew out of exile in France to a homeland in political turmoil. Within days he would take over the government create, an Islamic theocracy and change the course of the world. CBC journalist Carole Jerome was on that plane and then on the ground exactly 40 years ago today, when the Ayatollah Khomeini assumed power in what became known as the Iranian revolution. In covering the ongoing story, she would also witness the political consequences because she fell in love with one of the architects of that revolution. Carole Jerome on the story of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh in an hour. Also today, the extraordinary rise in people who insist the world is flat.

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VOICE: One thing that we have to deal with as flatearthers from the heliocentric community is they always say that we have absolutely no evidence to support what we believe. Well I think I'd like to provide a little more evidence that supports this idea.

AMT: Thousands of YouTube videos offer up conspiracy theories and ostensible explanations arguing the world is flat and it seems YouTube's algorithms may have a lot to do with the number of people being lured into that space. In half an hour, we're asking about YouTube's responsibility and culpability. But we're starting with the troubling statistics highlighted in the news today, coming out of a CBC News and Sports investigation into the vulnerability of children in community sporting leagues.

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VOICE: What could have helped me back then was just somebody to ask some questions, like what's going on here? Almost feel like people did have suspicions and turned a blind eye.

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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'No sport is immune': CBC investigation reveals scope of sexual abuse in Canada's amateur sports over 20 years

Guests: Jamie Strashin

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VOICE: I do my best to kind of forget that whole part of my life.

AMT: Brian Jessup avoids skating rinks as much as he can and he hasn't laced up a pair of skates for years. The ice brings back bad memories of the abuse he suffered as a young figure skater.

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VOICE: I've always felt that it doesn't do me any good to recollect and think back because it brings up the feelings of you know I was robbed of being able to have a normal life and being successful. That opportunity was taken away from me.

AMT: Brian Jessup is just one victim of predatory coaches in Canada's amateur sports system. As you have been hearing on the news, an investigation by CBC News and Sports has revealed hundreds of coaches have been charged with a sexual offense against a minor over the last 20 years. CBC reporter Jamie Strashin has been looking at these numbers and he joins me in our studio. Hi Jamie.

JAMIE STRASHIN: Hey Anna Maria.

AMT: Well we learned a little bit there from Brian Jessup, but tell me more about him.

JS: Brian Jessup you know grew up in Ontario, very typical upbringing at the outset. He played hockey, he liked the sport then he tried on a pair of figures skates and he was pretty good at it. He excelled up the ranks very quickly and by the time he was 11 or 12, he was one of the top skaters in the province of Ontario. But Anna Maria, behind the scenes things were deteriorating for Jessup. His home life was broken. His father was an alcoholic. He says his mother was suffering from mental illness. Around the time he was 12, he met a very well known coach in the figure skating community, a man by the name of Kevin Hicks. And Anna Maria, Hicks had a great reputation in the skating community.

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VOICE: I admired this man. I looked up to him. He was an idol of sorts to me and I aspired to be like him. You know he made me feel special because he took me on vacations, bought me nice clothes to wear. I didn't come from a family that had a lot of money, so that materialistic things back then were super important to me.

JS: And Anna Maria, things escalated from there. Jessup actually moved in with Hicks. The grooming continued. He alleges the abuse continued until he was 18-years-old. At this point in time, he left skating, he broke free of Hicks, but the next two decades were bleak. He was really weighed down by what had happened to him. He abused drugs, alcohol, went through a series of broken marriages. It was only when he tried to become sober, part of this process of becoming sober, that he started confronting what had happened to him. He started talking about what happened to him and he went to police and told his story. Eventually Kevin Hicks was arrested and charged in 2012, convicted of one count of assault on Jessup, three counts involving another skater. It's actually unusual to be hearing from victims like Jessup. He actually went to court to get his publication ban lifted.

AMT: Why did he do that?

JS: Anna Maria, it's part of his healing process, to be able to talk about it, but most of these cases often don't get a lot of attention. Certainly we hear about the high profile cases, the ones involving national coaches, but we don't hear about the cases that could affect kids at the local level, the hundreds of thousands of kids participating in local sports. Lots of work is going on in this area, but we don't really know how big a problem it is. We've never known what the scope of the problem is and finding this information was hard. Navigating the courts in Canada, it's a difficult thing to do. This information really isn't meant to be found.

AMT: So tell us what you found. What are the numbers like?

JS: In the last 20 years Anna Maria, 340 coaches involved in amateur sports in Canada, have been charged with a sexual offense. Out of those charges, 222 convictions involving more than 600 victims. And currently as this investigation is going to air, there's 34 cases still before the court. So this is a problem in this country that really does you know persist and when you kind of dive deeper into the numbers there's really all kinds of cases here. A lot of these cases were historical, in fact in 35 percent of the cases, the victim came forward more than 10 years after the event occurred. So lots of different stories here, all of them tragic.

AMT: 600 victims, that's a lot of pain. Which sports are most affected?

JS: Anna Maria, really in Canada, we found that no sport was immune. This was a pervasive problem across all sports. In fact, 36 different sports, we found a coach where there had been a conviction. Obviously the sports where there's a higher amount of enrollment, we some more convictions. In hockey for example, we saw 59 convictions, in basketball 15, 27 in soccer, 15 in swimming and 13 in martial arts. So, no sport immune. This is an issue Anna Maria that a handful of people in this country have really been working on for a number of years. One of them is Sandra Kirby. She's a professor at the University of Winnipeg and a former Olympian.

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VOICE: We constantly are rolling the stone up the hill. There are people who even with all of the information out in the press now, simply don't get it. They don't get the magnitude of the problem. Sport is a public domain. It is supported by public money and we have a right to have a safe quality experience for all participants in sport across the country. And to do less is really to do a disservice to what Canada is, in my view. We've got a number of criminal cases that have come forward. There are a number of these where the outcome is guilty, but it really is a small piece of the iceberg we're talking about.

AMT: Jamie, what makes her say that people still don't get it?

JS: Well Anna Maria, kind of the 20 year period for us as an investigation period, was kind of tied to that Graham James case. He was the junior hockey coach in the late 90s serially abused a number of players, including former NHLer, Theo Fleury. We kind of used that to say kind of what's happened since then? You know there was a lot of things that, a lot of talk around that case. Sport Canada made a call to action and the big takeaway of that was that many clubs instituted background checks, but the conversation really kind of stalled there and experts are telling us that this really needs to be out in the open, that everyone in the sports community, from the national level to the local level, down to those local clubs and organizations, really need to start talking about how to keep children safe. Now this whole investigation of course looked at coaches, Anna Maria. And Lorraine Lafreniere is CEO of the Canadian Coaches Association, she says they really never knew the scope of the issue and says seeing these numbers is a tremendous resource.

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VOICE: You have to have the difficult conversation. We have to talk about the fact that we need to protect our kids and not presume that everybody in the clubhouse is a good person. We need to figure out how to set the rules up, so that we actually don't even have to decide if you're a good or a bad person. We just have a set of standards that you need to adhere to and that's what protects us all.

AMT: So she says we need standards, but what's in place now, surely there must be some standards around the stuff by now.

JS: Well Anna Maria, there are standards in place, but the sports system in Canada is very disjointedm very ad hoc, it's not designed to protect children, it's designed to develop athletes you know throughout the whole system. To kind of explain this, I'm going to introduce another voice in all of this. Her name is Noni Classen, another person who had been working in this area for years. She's the director of education at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection in Winnipeg and she says the structure makes it very hard to hold people accountable.

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VOICE: The national level has limited oversight over the provincial level let's say. So they would have policies in place for the national level, but that doesn't necessarily trickle down to the provincial level, in terms of having authority over ensuring that at the provincial level they put policies in place. It's more recommendations and then we see the same thing from the provincial level to the local level, is that they don't have the authority to mandate what local clubs are doing. The local clubs again would be given recommendations for what they should be doing and this is where the problem is, is that we have a lot of caring people who are committing a lot of time because they care about children, but they don't have a lot of tools to be able to, because of the way the system works, to be able to reach out and get the help that they need when something goes wrong. And people are not and people need to be held accountable, there isn't the system there to be able to do that right now.

AMT: So who is making the rules and enforcing them?

JS: Anna Maria, really it's up to local clubs to create implement and enforce their own rules. Some are doing a great job at it. Some have been very proactive and going out and discovering what best practices arem others not so much. A lot of convenors and directors of clubs that we spoke to would love to see some kind of program in place so that every club across the country is kind of playing by the same rules. You know a baseball club in Barrie, Ontario, a hockey organization in Fredericton, some kind of uniformity, so that a very simple set of rules is put in place and everyone knows you know what they are. I spoke to the people at Leaside Baseball Association, a kind of sizable baseball association in midtown Toronto. They had an incident a number of years ago, a number of new board members came in and really found that there was not a lot of procedures in place, that they were starting from scratch. One of those people that came in was a man by the name of Jesse Harrison. He runs the baseball operations there now.

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VOICE: Everybody's kind of left to fend for themselves. It's a little bit scary that some of these procedures aren't you know unified across the province or even across the country and in each sporting body because it's something that needs to be dealt with and discussed.

JS: Now Anna Maria, now Leaside for instance, you know they're doing things that a lot of organizations are doing, like criminal background checks, but they're also doing some other innovative things. For new coaches they're putting them out there, they're evaluating them, seeing how they interact with the kids on the field and they're taking another step, they're trying to create education that can be used with young players, which is a key thing here. That's a piece of this that's still missing.

AMT: How common is it for clubs to do criminal record checks on volunteers and employees?

JS: Anna Maria, most clubs do or at least they try to. It can be quite time consuming. Background checks can be hard to keep track of, whether people have done them or not and there's also issues. This is the largest volunteer sector in the country. You don't want to deter people, you have to ask permission, but there's issues around background checks. When you look at our, you know the database that we gathered, most of the coaches that we found, never would have been detected by a background check because they hadn't been charged with a crime yet. So and especially in the historical cases, you could have someone who could be coaching for years, who would never have been detected because no one had ever gone to police. So I'm going to bring back in Noni Classen here, she says background checks can offer a false sense of security.

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VOICE: Really what we've been hearing about what individuals are doing is really relying on criminal records checks and criminal record checks, as a process, are really inadequate because they can be part of the process, it's not to say they're not important part of the screening process, but the majority of individuals who are going to be a risk to children, will not have a criminal record.

JS: Classen really you know stressed to me that it's not the job of the criminal justice system to protect children. That comes after someone comes forward. The job of protection is for organizations, clubs and parents to really focus on that prevention part.

AMT: So the obvious problem with criminal record checks, they don't necessarily point things up, so if that's not enough, what should clubs be doing?

JS: Experts are telling us clubs need to have standalone policies around sexual abuse and codes of conduct. Not something mixed in with respect in sport with bullying, something standalone that deals with this. Clear and easy reporting, making it very simple for a parent, for a child, to report something that happened. Not to a club member, not to a club official, but to an independent party. Education for parents, coaches and athletes. And on the national level, you know there is a call for some kind of registry. So if someone's accused of a criminal offense or even something that's not criminal, but questionable, they can be put on a list that clubs can access and experts are saying it doesn't necessarily need to be a list of bad coaches. We could also have a list of good coaches. So there's a number of things that are out there.

AMT: This has got to be really frightening for parents listening who have kids in sports. What can they be doing?

JS: Anna Maria, this is really about prevention, taking all the steps that you can before something happens. And the first thing parents can do is shift their focus away from the field of play. I'm really guilty of this, you're really focused on you know, is my kid playing, are they winning. Lorraine Lafreniere, she's the CEO of the Coaches Association, reminded me that parents really need to stop doing that and focus away from the field.

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VOICE: If the parents shifted and said, what's your rule in the clubhouse? What are your rules in extended travel and your social environments? How do you manage? How do you train people? How do you make sure that there's always adults present? That will change the system.

JS: And Anna Maria, Lafreniere also makes another really good point. Youth sports is super competitive in North America, super competitive in Canada. You know sports are very limited. You know when your team is successful, you don't want to do anything to kind of derail that and certain coaches you know are put up on a pedestal and Lafreniere says you know parents are very reticent to confront them.

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VOICE: When there's a false sense that a coach has the gold dust to change your son or daughter to a superstar, whether it's for the NHL or for basketball or for swimming or alpine and you let go of all of the other safety parameters around that, that is the problem. We do need to make sure and continue that conversation, that it isn't just about performance over safety. It gets lost in some of these pockets of sports where they're driven by success and we just have to do a lot of work to help change that.

AMT: That's a lot to change. So until that changes, what can parents do on a practical level?

JS: A lot of these cases that we saw, especially the ones in the last few years, kind of exist in a kind of a new modern context, if you will, where the modus operandi of the problem coach has evolved. It's moved into that you know unsolicited, inappropriate electronic communication. So parents really need to be asking you know their children the question, why are you talking to the coach outside of you know these set times? Is it necessary? And really challenging the coach on that. But in the end, it's really about parents acting on things that they believe to be questionable, but Noni Classen concedes that's not always easy.

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VOICE: We had a situation where we had a coach who was, the kids were volleyball athlete and the coach would walk in and start stroking the girls' hair, it was a girls team and putting his fingers through the ponytails of the girls' hair. And it became the question thereof, well it's not all legal, but is this okay and what do we do with this? How do we bring this forward and who do we bring it forward to? And what became very clear in that situation is that no one knew what. No one knew where to go with it or what to do with that information. So what ended up happening was in that situation is the individual, one of the parents decided to be the mom who said something. So the parents would go to the coach and say you know I'm not comfortable with you stroking our kids hair and the coach would say well I love long hair. So this is what I do. So now what? Because you're not going to be reporting that to police, but is it acceptable? And this is the area we're talking about.

JS: And Classen and others say, Anna Maria, there really needs to be a system in place so parents have somewhere to go, so they're not the one left to correct the coach's behavior.

AMT: What about the kids in all of this, the players, do they have a role to play?

JS: Sure. Education programs you know would help, so they know what abuse is. So they know what to do when it happens. It brings us back to Brian Jessup, anna Maria, the former figure skater. And really when he looks back on what happened to him, he says having more information, changes like this, might have changed the outcome for him.

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What could have helped me back then was just somebody to ask some questions, like what's going on here? Almost feel like maybe people did have suspicions and turned a blind eye and I mean I was very timid and easily controlled. Like I wish I could say, you know I should have come forward back then and told somebody, but I don't know how it's possible even in today's sports, how a young kid could do that. And that's something that we all need to figure out is what tools can we put in place to make a kid feel safe enough to come forward and tell somebody.

AMT: He hits on something really important there. He felt so vulnerable that he wouldn't have been able to do that and he was not alone there. And so in making that change, how likely is it? How do people move forward with that? How do we help vulnerable children who can't speak about it to speak about it?

JS: Well Anna Maria, we've seen issues where the sports community has said, this is something that's important to us. This is something that we think needs to change and here's how we're going to do it. You know I think of concussions in sport. 25 years ago, no one talked about concussions and we've seen slowly over the last number of years, more awareness, more education, to the point now where people are aware of this issue and there's been change around it. If people want to put their mind to this and fund it and put real tools in place, this is an issue that we can deal with and hopefully see these numbers decrease greatly in the next 20 years.

AMT: Really interesting work Jamie and those numbers again, pretty staggering. Thanks for this.

JS: Thanks so much for having me.

AMT: Jamie Strashin, a reporter with CBC. You can see more from the series, Shattered trust: sexual offenses in amateur sports, tonight on CBC Television on The National. It'll focus on the gymnastics community, which is reeling after being thrust into the spotlight with high profile sexual assault cases. Now coaches, parents and athletes are having uncomfortable conversations. That story tonight on The National on CBC Television and on CBC News Network. Stay with us. The news is next and then you know we circle the globe to bring you the most compelling stories, including the next one right after the news, on those who believe the world can't be circled because it is flat. What's behind the spread of the ultimate conspiracy theory, in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Flat or round? What one author learned about believers of the flat-Earth theory

Guests: Alan Burdick, Zeynep Tufekci, Kurtis Baute

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, 40 years after the Iranian Revolution, former CBC reporter Carole Jerome recalls her personal and professional connections with that major moment in history. She not only reported on the upheaval in Iran, she fell in love with a close adviser to the Ayatollah Khamenei. She is my guest in half an hour. But first, wrap your head around the flat-Earth theory.

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VOICE: The Earth is flat and stationary. The sun, moon and stars are all very close. The community is basically a bunch of freethinking people who realize we've been indoctrinated from a young age with this, the whole spinning ball. So basically anybody who believes in the spinning ball is just somebody who has not tried to debunk flat Earth. And I mean, legitimately, give it the good scientific method, which is, is it observable? Does it match our observations?

AMT: Well does that have you rethinking everything you thought you knew about our planet and its shape or are you scratching your head in disbelief? Believe it or not, the flat-Earther community is alive and thriving. This month, it came to light that a Quebec politician, Gatineau city councillor, Nathalie Lemieux, is among the flat curious. She asked on Facebook, "who decided the earth is round and why should we believe it?" The flat-Earth movement is a gospel being spread primarily it seems through YouTube videos. YouTube channels with names such as Globe Busters boasts tens of thousands of subscribers and according to a 2018 poll, just two thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24, are firm in their belief that the Earth is round. In a moment we'll speak with a sociologist and technology critic who says YouTube has pushed some users to increasingly extreme content. But first, I'm joined by Alan Burdick. He took a deep dive into the world of flat-Earthers for the New Yorker. He is now a senior staff editor at The New York Times Science Desk and Alan berdache is in Syracuse, New York. Hi.

ALAN BURDICK: Hi, how are you?

AMT: Well, I'm really curious to know what you know. So when and how did you become aware of this burgeoning community of flat-Earth believers?

AB: I guess about a year and a half ago. A friend of mine was kind of poking around and noted that there was a big conference coming up, this is November of 2017, the first conference of the flat-Earth community. And a lot of jokes were being made about it. I even hesitated whether I wanted to really take it seriously, but, you know, it seemed like 600 people were signing up for, you know, $250. People did seem to be taking it seriously and I wanted to just kind of stop and find out who these people actually were and see what I could learn without you know, without making jokes about them.

AMT: And so you went to meet them. What did you learn?

AB: Well so I spent two days in Raleigh, North Carolina with 600 people of all kinds, you know there were parents there with their kids. It was probably half women. And I heard pretty much the same thing in talk after talk after talk, which was, you know, wake up, there's this huge conspiracy out there to hide the truth about the actual shape of the Earth, and you know if you're a free-thinking person you will, you know, you'll stop and do your own research and and learn the truth. Now, doing your own research essentially means watching all of the YouTube videos that everybody else watches, and essentially falling down the rabbit hole of of this frankly crazy thought. I mean I didn't go into it, I didn't want to go into it with that kind of judgment, but I came out of it feeling like I was sitting in the middle, essentially of a mass delusion.

AMT: And I mean you cover science, so this was a tough thing to do, to listen to this.

AB: Yeah. You know I kind of thought initially I might have to go in armed with all kinds of arguments about why the Earth is not flat. And I just almost immediately gave that up, because it, you know there was no arguing that was going to persuade anyone. And these folks are all alike in the sense that number one, they're very prone to conspiracy thinking. You know, I've heard mention of the fake moon landing, and you know false flags and Stephen Hawking didn't really have ALS and the astronauts are freemasons. There was a certain degree of kind of anti-science or just distrust of science, you know, pro-intelligent design, creationism, and a really strong religious element. I mean at heart, the flat-Earth theory is kind of a deeply scriptural, you know literalist point of view.

AMT: And so, when you ask them about, what about the pictures from space, what do they say?

AB: Oh you know just like they faked the moon landing, NASA and all these other organizations are simply photo-shopping pictures of the Earth. And I would ask, you know, okay so that sounds like a really massive project. How in the world do you, is this kept secret. I mean there must be thousands upon thousands of people involved in photoshopping images of the Earth. How does not one person leak it out? Oh well you know about compartmentalization. You know people are here doing it, they don't necessarily know what other people next door are doing. It's a very kind of cloistered self-fulfilling thought process that gets you here.

AMT: Well you know and we heard you know about the Quebec councillor in Gatineau, wondering why they are hiding the information. So who does this community see as "they"?

AB: "They" is essentially everyone who is not them. So, there are a couple of things going on. One is you have the large group of people who are, you know, kind of believeing this, they're watching the YouTube videos. They watch one video and it kind of takes them farther down the road and you just have to kind of believe that the powers that be -- your government -- is deeply involved in deceiving you. Now you know that I suppose it's not so far-fetched, but this takes it to the logical extreme. There are now also a group of people who are organizing conferences around the flat-Earth notion. They're organizing cruises. They're sort of making money off of this idea. And I began to feel very cynical about that group. I mean the first group I feel sorry for, because they do take it seriously. The second group, I feel like there's a degree of scam going on, where they're really just kind of feeding off of the most provocative idea, and I'm not sure even how many of them actually believe it.

AMT: How do you go on a cruise if the world is flat?

AB: Well that's the whole idea, right. You get on a cruise and you go looking for the edge of the Earth. Now, you know, I don't know what kind of a cruise ship pilot you're going to find who's going to be able to find the edge of the Earth.

AMT: It's going to keep them very safe, they will not fall off.

AB: Exactly and they'll drink a lot and they won't really care by the end.

AMT: But you make the point that, I mean, you were dealing with people of all different education. You met a war veteran.

AB: Yeah I met war veterans. I met, you know, kids in college. I met IT you know, designers and like computer people. So a couple of things are going on and one is again, they're lonely to a degree where you know they're sitting in front of YouTube and they're following one idea after another, father and farther down this hole. Now of of course if you come to believe that the Earth is flat, there aren't a lot of people that you can share this idea with, right. You can't go home over the holidays and talk with your family about it. So it's kind of an isolating thought and so the notion that then you might come together with other people who believe this is immensely freeing and immensely powering. I heard again and again the language of coming out, and coming out as a flat-Earther. I'm so relieved to unburden myself of the shame. And it was like a big family reunion, it was very embracing. I mean everybody I met was really nice. I do want to say that. And so It solves a kind of a loneliness, but it also addresses a kind of existential loneliness. I heard a lot of people saying you know the idea that we're on a globe spinning at 17,000 miles an hour in some vast universe is just ridiculous and people who believe that must be absolutely miserable. And they don't feel that way and in their conception, the Earth is flat, it's got a domeover it. The sun is only a few hundred miles away and you know, you living in this dome, you're special. Yeah. You're chosen and the sun is shining on you and only on you.

AMT: Well we're going to talk to somebody about where some of that comes from in a moment. Alan Burdick, thanks for speaking with me.

AB: Thanks very much for having me.

AMT: That is Alan Burdick. He's a senior staff editor at The New York Times science desk. We reached him in Syracuse, New York. Well for years YouTube has been criticized for its role in pushing viewers to videos that peddle conspiracy. Last month the online video giant singled out flat-Earth videos when it announced plans to tweak its algorithms to tackle the problems of conspiracy videos. Zeynep Tufekci has called YouTube the great radicalizer for the site's ability to push viewers to extreme content. She's an associate professor at the School of Information at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And we've reached her today in a Washington D.C. Hi.

ZEYNEP TUFEKCI: Hello, can you hear me?

AMT: Oh I can hear you now yeah. Welcome.

ZT: Hi.

AMT: I'm just wondering what you think of the YouTube, what's the YouTube layer in this first of all?

ZT: So here's more or less what's going on. YouTube, the parent company of which is Google, which also is Alphabet, makes money by keeping people on the site and collecting a lot of data on the people and using that both to better keep them on the site and to target them with ads. So basically Google, for all the fancy talk about everything else, is an ad broker. But the fancy party is that Google has some of the world's best artificial intelligence computer scientists. In about 2015 they implemented some of their shiniest, nicest AI coming out of their Google Brain project, their AI project to YouTube's recommendation. So if you go on YouTube, on the right hand side there are videos besides the one you just watched that have been tailored to you. And they're kind of like designed to engage you and take you down that rabbit hole. Right. That's sort of, that way you just stay on the site longer and then you watch video after video. And when you think about the flat earth thing it's quite unlikely these people just got up one morning and said Oh I think the earth is flat when it's true. That's what probably happened is that they're just minding their own business on some other thing and element saying there are people already prone to conspiratorial thinking and that's actually quite common but we'll get to that. And this is something else. They searched a tutorial this year or something and you too recommended an otter plate like you only would have to do anything things like a cafeteria which just serves you sort of junk food that's really appealing though. And before you finish your plates Wayne in from a few and you take one bite right. This is sweet. And then it shows you another wine. And they just stared watching this and just went down the rabbit hole. And the funny thing is I think the flat-Earthers are they're spectacular because it's such a spectacularly false belief. It's the least worst example I've come across in terms of a community that's gone down YouTube's rabbit holes because the worse versions are the hate speech, the misinformation around the world that are you know far less entertaining than the idea of flat-Earthers going on a cruise.

AMT: So let me ask you, so essentially whatever you're looking at, whether it's left or right or a specific kind of strain of conspiracy that side bar, the algorithm keeps pushing you like offering you more in that vain?

ZT: Yeah, so I first discovered, it doesn't do it every time of course, but I first encountered this when in 2016 I was researching then candidate Donald Trump's candidacy. It was being dismissed as a joke generally and I thought wait, I think this was actually a lot more viable than people think. There's a movement here and there is a lot of social media component to it. So I was going to Israel lives to try to study and prayed about it. I have a opinion perch at the New York Times I was writing a column I had attended the rally I want to have a quote from him. So watch a bit of something from the rally and to my recommendations has lost their mind after I watch you know a couple of cups of Donald Trump. I was going to recommend the white supremacy staff very terrible misogynist staff Holocaust never happened staff all. This was crazy what kind of correlation is there and I have a technical background, I thought it was just a correlation something. So I started testing this and I found it in Canada that didn't just hold for the political right. If you write stuff you know Bernie Sanders was then a candidate or Hillary Clinton also candidate. It shows you more conspiratorial stuff under left right. To give you just more of the same it Warrener to get you down the rabbit hole because that's just especially for younger people. It's going to keep you there. It was true for a lot of things if I watched the video about being a vegetarian you to was like how about a video on veganism and would just play that I would watch a video but jogging you two would play ultramarathons stuff to me now. So all it was doing was it had theA.I. empowered by Google's senior management to just do just this had figured out a human weakness. We'd like to be told there is something more edgy and more engaging something behind the curtain something. I mean conspiratorial thinking is an unhealthy version of it but it's kind of way scientific thinking gone wrong. I I'm going to discover something else why it was doing I was just dragging me trying to drag me down or whatever rabbit hole, it thought I would be vulnverable.

AMT: So let me ask you what alarms you about this then?

ZT: Well this alarms me greatly. I think is one of the biggest legacies of YouTube because it's around the world. So imagine this is just hte US, you're seeing the versions of these things in English, where there's the heaviest intervention and Google is most active because you know they're here. I imagine in Indonesia, in Sri Lanka, Brazil, all sorts of countries that have internal tensions. Sri Lanka recovering from a civil war and you're a young kid and you just want to go on YouTube and search a little bit about say Buddhist history or something, it is going to recommend to you some stuff that's really extreme quite quickly. You're in Indonesia, you're a devout young kid and you're like oh let me learn a little bit about how to perform some religious ritual. It's going to drag you down an extremist rabbit hole by the recommendations with very little oversight.

AMT: So you're saying it's culpable in the polarization and the extreme.

ZT: I think it's playing a role. Now YouTube will say well this is human nature or that the stuff already exists. Well, both of those things are true, but it really is that they're making money off a cafeteria essentially. That is monitizing, making a lot of money off a human weakness. And around the world and aound me, I see so many parents babysit their kids with YouTube essentially, people are busy, people are hurried and they don't also realize this is what's going to go on and you put the kid in front of some NASA video and some nice stuff right. And I've heard so many stories like this, you put them in front of the moon landing story and half an hour later the kids coming back, mom the moon landing never happened. Guess what I learned, right.

AMT: OK. Zeynep, we have to leave it there, Zeynep, but I get your alarm. Thanks for speaking to us.

ZT: Thank you for inviting me.

AMT: That is Zeynep Tufekci. She is an associate professor at the School of Information at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's in Washington D.C. today. We did contact YouTube, which replied in part with this quote. "Over the last year we have worked to better surface credible news sources across our site." And then it goes on to say, "while we've made good progress, we also recognize there's more to do and continue to invest in the user experience on YouTube." Well my next guest watched the flat-Earth movement spread online and he decided to do something about it. Kurtis Baute is a science educator in Vancouver. Last summer he hit the flat Earth of Saskatchewan to make a scientific point and he joins me from Vancouver. Hi.

KURTIS BAUTE: Hello. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Well first of all, I want to get into details of what you did, but what did you see that made you aware of the flat Earth belief and made you want to do something?

KB: So as someone that spends a lot of time on YouTube as a profession, I noticed that this is a really quickly growing community of people and it's you know they're making videos that aren't based on fact and it's really concerning because I mean I think we know more about the universe now than we ever have and to just throw all that out the window is kind of mind boggling.

AMT: So what did you do, you did an experiment? What did you do and where did you do it?

KB: So I took my bike to Saskatchewan to measure two shadows from two different sundials. Think about it this way. You're in Ontario and I'm in Vancouver. It's still dark here, but it's probably, looks pretty good out there in terms of a, probably pretty bright out there right now, right. The sun hits the planet at different angles, well it makes different lengths of shadows in different places at the same time. So what I did is I biked one of the straightest, longest roads in the world, which happens to be in Saskatchewan and I measured two shadows on two sundials and figured out that indeed the Earth is round. There's curvature and I can measure its circumference that way.

AMT: And what did you deal with those results with the experiment? Where did you put it?

KURTIS BAUTE: I made a video for YouTube with it. That was the whole purpose of it. I mean my experiment is fairly crude. Obviously we've done way better experiments on this in the last 2000 years, but I did it to raise awareness on YouTube.

AMT: Okay so you show this on video, the world really is round. What was the reaction?

KB: I've had thousands of comments ranging from you're a hero, good work, keep up the science to you know this is evil and basically death threats from it. So it's a wide range.

AMT: Death threats?

KB: Yeah I've had a number of comments saying you know I wish you'd gotten hit by a vehicle while you were biking down the highway and you know it's, I know that one of the earlier guests were saying that it's a very positive community and I'm sure that it can be, but there's also a lot of people that aren't well.

AMT: So what has this taught you about science and belief?

KB: That's a tricky question. I mean I think that it makes me very concerned. I think I've learned that a lot of people will just engage with content and accept it if it's simple and if it seems from their very own eyes to be you know reliable, like you can go look at the ocean and it seems to be a straight flat line and it's a lot more easy for people to do things like that than to really start to think critically and really engage their brains in these things. And that has made me really concerned because a lot of the most important issues of our time, like climate change, aren't just, they don't just hit you in the face. You know you have to sit down and really think about them to make sense of them.

AMT: And as someone who is a science educator, how does it make you look at your job? Do you despair sometimes?

KB: No I mean on the one hand like it gives me a good platform because I can you know do a 2000 year old experiment and you know it makes it makes headlines because this is something that apparently people no longer believe. But yeah on the other hand, it can be extremely sad. I mean I think that the universe and what we know about it through science is totally incredible and it can enrich your life and yet people turning to these really obscure and untrue things like the flat-Earth theory and yeah that's hard. I mean I think that it's a real tragedy for sure.

AMT: Are you at all hopeful that the YouTube algorithm change will affect this?

KB: Yeah I think it definitely will. I mean YouTube has all the control that they want to take in terms of what they get, what they show to the viewers. The video made for this project in the summer had very few views until actually after they changed the algorithm and I don't know if that's related.There's a couple other factors, but now it has half a million views and I think that it probably has something to do with that.

AMT: OK. Kurtis we have to leave it there, but thanks for sharing your thoughts and all of that with us.

KB: Thanks for having me.

AMT: Kurtis Baute, science educator, he's in Vancouver. Let us know what you think. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us. Four decades to the day after the Ayatollah Khomeini took power in the Iranian revolution, the memories are alive as ever for journalist Carole Jerome. Her story of revolution and romance in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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On 40th anniversary of Iranian Revolution, former CBC reporter recalls love affair with one of its leaders

Guests: Carole Jerome

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE: The Ayatollah Khomeini appears tonight to have come to full power in Iran as he said he would in another of those bloody convulsions that have recently swept the country. After two days of fighting between military units loyal to Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar and pro-Khomeini forces, the military chiefs suddenly withdrew their support from Bakhtiar and proclaimed their neutrality. Within hours word spread that Bakhtiar and all his ministers were resigning, leaving the government to Khomeini's provisional regime.

AMT: Well that's a report from 40 years ago today, February 11th of 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran. The Shah had fled the country after days and only days of fighting, the army declared its neutrality and the Ayatollah Khomeini and his regime took charge. What happened since has shaped the course of world history. My next guest had an up close view of the early days of the Iranian revolution. Carole Jerome was a journalist, working as a producer and reporter for CBC Radio and Television, assigned to the CBC's Paris bureau. That's where the Ayatollah Khomeini was busy plotting to overthrow the Shah, just outside of Paris. When he returned to Iran to take power, she was on the plane that brought him there.

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VOICE 1: The Ayatollah says we're all on board at our own risk. Some of us are here because it's our job, but there are 50 Iranians on this plane who have come because they want to be with their leader at this historic moment. Behind me, one small bearded man has spread a newspaper on the floor as a mat and is kneeling in prayer to Mecca. A woman in a white flowered scarf is doing the same down the aisle. Mahmoud here is sitting here having breakfast at 33,000 feet. Are you freightened?

VOICE 2: No I'm not. I heard and I saw so many Iranians and my brothers killed and for that reason I would like to be enjoy to them and I have no brother.

VOICE 1: Do you believe that Allah will protect you?

VOICE 2: Yeah.

AMT: Carole Jerome's job was to file reports on what was going on, but her connection to the story in Iran became deeply personal as well. That's because in Paris, she had cultivated a high level source. He was a close adviser to the ayatollah. A leader in the government in exile. A man who went on to serve as the country's foreign minister during the hostage crisis. At first their relationship was solely professional then they fell in love. Carole Jerome is with me in our Toronto studio. Hi and welcome.

CAROLE JEROME: Thank you Anna Maria. It's good to see you again after all these years.

AMT: Listening to that report on the plane, does that take you back? What was it like on that plane with Khomeini on that day?

CJ: It was momentous and we knew it. We knew this was one of the cataclysmic events of the 20th century, if this revolution actually took hold and actually happened. And by then it was pretty clear that he was going to triumph over the Shah and the Shah had already left the country of course and so we knew that this was a huge historic occasion.

AMT: You say you were there at your own risk. What were people worried about?

CJ: Well at that point we didn't know for sure if there was still any loyalty to the Shah or to the Royalist forces in the armed forces and we were warned that there was a distinct possibility we might be shot out of the sky by Iranian Phantom jets and we doubted it very much because the plane was full of us. We were, the journalists were the first hostages really.

AMT: Were you frightened on that plane?

CJ: No we were too busy. There was an awful lot to prepare and there had been pandemonium in Neauphle-le-Cheateau when they decided who would get on the plane and they just kind of drew lots for it. And you had to then go into the trees in this little yard garden in this village in Neauphle-le-Chateau, where they had marked there's this the Canadian tree and the American tree and the British tree and so on. And if your name was on a list nailed to the tree, you were on that plane. And every journalist there, there were hundreds, wanted to be on that plane. This was a big story.

AMT: And in fact, you make the point that because you were in the Paris bureau, you essentially inherit the Ayatollah Khomeini as a story.

CJ: Well we inherited him because he came from Najaf. And he tried first to go to Kuwait and the Kuwaitis wouldn't let him in. So he ended up going to Paris, which is where Sadegh and Banisadr and others of the Liberation Movement of Iran it was called, were based in Paris. So they had been doing a lot of organizing from there. So they brought him to Paris.

AMT: And that's how you ended up on the plane and you mentioned Sadegh. Who was Sadegh Ghotbzadeh?

CJ: He had been a long time leader and revolutionary within the student revolutionary movement. He had been arrested when he was very, very young by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police in Iran and eventually his family got him out, so that he had spent 19, 20 years in exile with this Muslim students organization. Fomenting revolution against the Shah, they led demonstrations and this revolution for the West it had come from nowhere overnight. For people like Sadegh, it had taken decades for it to happen.

AMT: What was your first impression of him?

CJ: He was extraordinarily charismatic and compelling and very, he expressed himself extremely well, but he was also very casual about it.

AMT: What happens with the chemistry? When do you begin to fall in love?

CJ: Probably the moment I met him, but I used to go to this beautiful restaurant, which was his headquarters in Paris. You know, you would go in and he would kind of hold court there. And I just remember one evening I was there with him and the other revolutionary organizers and I realized I cared very much for him and it was mutual.

AMT: Did you have any misgivings about getting romantically involved with this man who was your source and a newsmaker?

CJ: Of course I did. Of course I did. But we don't really choose those thing,s do we?

AMT: But as you talk to him, what is your sense of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh's vision for the future of Iraq? What did he tell you about what he expected to see there?

CJ: What his vision was, was some vague idea of a modern republic guided by the moral principles of Islam and the Imam, Khomeini, was to be its spiritual guide. And he expected, they all expected, that once the revolution prevailed that the Ayatollah would go back to the holy city of Qom, which is outside Tehran and be a kind of an overall moral guide, but not a political leader.

AMT: We are marking the anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini taking power in Iran February 11th of 1979. Is there a story that stands out in your mind from that specific day?

CJ: I don't know if its actually that specific day, but what I do remember very vividly, was the moment we knew what this was unmistakably and it was a press conference that the Ayatollah had called in the school, which was behind the Senate building and Khomeini was so imposing, wearing his black robe and his turban and those scowling eyes and just no expression. I remember the first time I saw him in Neauphle, I looked in his eyes and you just, it was like looking into the abyss. And he announced that religiously he has the right to declare this provisional revolutionary government and any opposition to this government will be considered blasphemy and it will be punished according to the laws of Islam.

AMT: Which meant?

CJ: Which meant this was his theocratic dictatorship and the punishment for blasphemy in Khomeini's Iran is death.

AMT: So when the Ayatollah said that, that was the turn you saw, what was happening on the streets after that?

CJ: Well the streets were chaos by then. It was basically anarchy. There had been split upon split of different groups. So there were huge demonstrations in the streets, but very often there would be groups of people who would be chanting long life to Khomeini, long live Khomeinian.

AMT: So you go in with Sadegh and on that day you kind of go off and you're reporting and you see him a bit, but you continue to speak to him and your role as a reporter through the hostage crisis. So he's in the midst of that and you're talking to him and you're reporting and you still see him. He's also coming out of the country on business. You meet him at one point in Paris.

CJ: At the Paris embassy, yeah. I thought I was being invited to one of those diplomatic soirees that's got diplomats, local politicians and a few journalists and you know dinner at the Iranian embassy and I get there and to my horror I find that it is a dinner of Iranian diplomats and the staff of the embassy with Sadegh and Mansour Farhan who was his ambassador to the UN and me.

AMT: You're the only woman.

CJ: Sadegh has invited me to this dinner.

AMT: I mean we are talking about these are members of this new Iranian revolutionary government. It's a theocracy. Women are by this time in Iran, it's the law.

CJ: No in Paris.

AMT: Yeah I know, but in Iran, but you're in Paris.

CJ: And I'm just dressed in a nice silk dress.

AMT: Well you're the only woman at the table with all of these powerful men.

CJ: I'm the only woman at the table.

AMT: What did that say about Sadegh, that he would bring you to that table with those men?

CJ: It said he was reckless. It said that that he believed that now that he was in a position of power, that he could do what he wanted. But it was also that he wasn't going to toe the line for any of them and to make it worse, after the dinner, everybody was leaving, but then the ambassador came and I presumed was going to take me to the front door and usher me out. Oh no, he took me to a private room and left me there and it was Sadegh's room.

AMT: It was the Shah's bedroom.

CJ: It was the Shah's bedroom. And I said to Sadegh, are you out of your mind having me here? He says, I couldn't resist.

AMT: I just want to get my head around.

CJ: He was like that.

AMT: OK, Carole Jerome, I just want to get my head around the fact that you are a CBC reporter covering this guy. You know, it's a different world right now. The bosses were never, they would have pulled you off the story so far.

CJ: I told them you know, they knew. I told them way back when, I said you need to know something about me and my relationship with him and it was at that point I was talking to, it was my boss at The National. And he and a couple of the others consulted and they looked at my work and they said well, as far as we can see, you're holding your own and you're not giving us his line by any means and I didn't and if you're willing to take the risk, we'll take the risk and send you in. And they did.

AMT: Did other journalists who were covering this challenge you on this at all?

CJ: They didn't know.

AMT: It was a secret.

CJ: It was a secret.

AMT: You talk about being reckless. What kind of risks were you two running with this kind of relationship?

CJ: Oh the worst.

AMT: When you say the worst, what does that mean the worst risks?

CJ: Prison and death.

AMT: For both of you?

CJ: Yeah, but you dont think of it in those terms. It was an extra added risk to what was already an extremely risky situation. You know yourself going into Bosnia, you take huge risks going into these places and you put it in your back pocket and you keep it there.

AMT: When did you begin to worry about his safety in Iran?

CJ: Oh we were always worried for his safety in Iran. During the very early days of the revolution, when we first landed on Khomeini's plane, I was at a pro-Shah rally and a couple of kind of thuggish fellows came up to me and said weve got that bastard Ghotbzadeh, he's done for. And I said who, who's got him? Who are you? And they kind of melted off into the crowd.

AMT: Because he was a known factor.

CJ: Oh yeah, he was a known factor.

AMT: And there were several, there were a couple of assassination attempts on him.

CJ: Yeah. Never knew quite who, it could have been almost anybody.

AMT: What made Sadegh turn against Khomeini and that regime?

CJ: I only know this later, after I did five years of research to write the book about his life and I learned a great deal from the people who had been closest to him and who had been part of his counterrevolutionary organization. He took issue, first of all, with the fact that Khomeini had maintained this political power and that it became the dominant political power in the country along with the Council of Guardians. And Sadegh used to actually say to Khomeini himself, he had a big confrontation with him one time, that he would obey Khomeini on religious matters every time, but not on political matters.

AMT: So when you are leaving the country because they're in pursuit of you. This is why they're in pursuit of him.

CJ: But I didn't know this at the time.

AMT: But he tells you, he gives you kiss goodbye and tells you you can't come back for a couple of months until the government changes.

CJ: I understood basically what he was saying, but I didn't know anything, any details about what he was actually trying to mount here in terms of a counter-revolution.

AMT: So you get out and he's arrested. What do they charge him with?

CJ: He was charged essentially with treason and blasphemy, all of these things. But before he was arrested, some of his friends had tried to get him out, to get him to agree to leave because they knew that they were coming for him and he refused to go. He didn't feel that he had the right to do that. That he'd helped to bring this nightmare upon his country and that he felt a responsibility to try to stop it and to take it back to the dream that they'd had, of this wonderful new free democracy.

AMT: He doesn't even deny, when he goes to trial, he doesn't say oh you got me wrong, I'm innocent. He actually argues his point.

CJ: No. Again he's like Dontrelle in the French Revolution, who stood there in the dock and accused his accusers, saying that they are the ones who were the counter-revolutionaries. They were the ones that had betrayed the revolution and its ideals and turned it into this almost terrorist regime and also at his trial, in a last defiant gesture to Khomeini, he refused to ask for any clemency. He demanded the death penalty.

AMT: Did he say set me free or execute me?

CJ: Yeah.

AMT: You know this now and you knew this after the fact, but when this was happening, could you even follow it? What was going through your mind.

CJ: I, at the time, I didn't have access to any details really from the trial, but I was assured by one of the French lawyers that they were not going to execute him, that they were going to give him seven years in prison and that was supposedly confirmed. So that was the last I knew until I was wakened in the morning by a phone call from one of my colleagues at CBC, saying the news has just come across that they've executed Sadegh and I didn't want you to hear from anybody else. What happened, what they had done, was there had not been an official order, a death sentence. Some of the clerics they believe went into the prison and took him out and shot him without an actual judicial order. I was told later by one of his best friends they had shot him from the feet up and that his beard had turned white when they went to bury him.

AMT: What does that mean?

CJ: We don't know what they did to him.

AMT: That suggests they tortured him, that his beard changed colour.

CJ: Yes.

AMT: And shooting him from the feet up, they wanted him to suffer even.

CJ: They hated him. Yeah, they hated him. But Sadegh always said at the end he said, I just want people to know that I didn't run away. I stayed and I tried my best to change it all for my country.

AMT: When you think of him all these years later, what do you think about?

CJ: I miss him. I will always miss him and I know many people who do. He was so remarkable. He was unforgettable. He was deeply flawed, aren't we all, but he was genuine. And even his enemies say that whatever else Sadegh was, he was loyal. If he said he was your friend, he was your friend. And even his enemies recognize that. He is deeply missed by his family. But to me I think of the tragedy really of an entire life lived like that fighting for a dream that turns into a nightmare. His entire life, it's one of the reasons he never married. He always said that because he couldn't ask anybody to share the dangers of that life.

AMT: What do you see as the legacy of the Iranian Revolution?

CJ: Unfortunately, the legacy of the Iranian Revolution is exactly the opposite of what Sadegh and his group wanted. The legacy of the Iran Revolution is the development of Islamic fundamentalist groups all over the world and Islamic fundamentalist terror and there is a straight line from Khomeini to Al-Qaeda to ISIS, to any of them. That's the impetus. That was the driving force that exploded all of this upon our world. And I think what people often forget is that the people that suffered most from this Islamic fundamentalism, that particular strain, are Muslims around the world. I loved Iran. It's a wonderful, extraordinarily beautiful country with a deep culture of poetry and music and art and it's just such a tragedy that this has all happened the way it has.

AMT: Carole, thanks for coming in. Thanks for talking to us about all of this.

CJ: Thank you very much for having me, Anna Maria. I don't think I could have told this story to anyone else.

AMT: Thank you.

CJ: Thank you.

AMT: Carole Jerome is a former CBC journalist who covered the Iranian Revolution. Her memoir is called, The Man in the Mirror: A True Story of Love, Revolution and Treachery in Iran. She joined us in our Toronto studio. Let us know what you think of what she had to say about her experiences. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC, find us on Facebook or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. The actor, poet, writer and musician Henry Rollins is on the show. He'll be speaking to Tom about his new comedy special, Keep Talking Pal. On this 40th anniversary of Iran's revolution, we are going to give the last word to an Iranian-Canadian who witnessed change in the country from a much different perspective, as a child. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Feb 11, 2019 episode transcript

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