Former CBC “chief correspondent” Peter Mansbridge has an interesting new gig: he’s playing a journalist in a series of HomeEquity reverse mortgage ads and videos.
The spots find him sitting face-to-face with his subjects, very much as he used to do on his weekly interview program, Mansbridge One on One, only instead of facing Sidney Crosby or Margaret Atwood or Robbie Robertson, he’s facing HomeEquity Bank president and CEO Steven Ranson, a man with all the charisma of day-old Cream of Wheat.
The “interviews” are filmed in The Danforth Music Hall in Toronto and begin with an establishing shot of the Music Hall marquis to drive home the notion that this is a very real, completely true event, before the camera enters the building to reveal the rows of empty seats.
Source: YouTube
The subject of the conversation is reverse mortgages, and I’m going to do a deeper dive into these in a future issue, but today, I just want to consider the ethics of Mansbridge using his reputation as a trusted news anchor to sell financial products to seniors.
I mean, actually, what is there to consider? How can that be ethical?
The sheer greed of the man might be worth a mention—the guy made a fortune on our dime (which he padded with paid gigs at oil companies) and retired to a $500,000 year pension, according to Canadaland, and yet, it’s not enough. He needs to sell his last scraps of credibility for just a few dollars more.
It’s a bold move for a man who apparently used his 2021 autobiography to bemoan the lack of public trust in news media:
Source: CBC
I’m betting his decision to shill for HomeEquity won’t do much to solve the problem.
