Podcast #294: When Entertainment Reporting Gets Political

Jonathan Kay interviews veteran entertainment journalist Ben Mulroney—whose career has taken him to the Oscars red carpet and Kelly Ripa’s studio—about how ideological fads have damaged his industry.

Introduction: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Kay.

My guest this week is someone who needs no introduction here in my native Canada, but who’s less known outside our borders. He’s Ben Mulroney, the son of the late former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, and a significant figure in his own right thanks to his long career in entertainment-news television.

As you’ll hear, Ben became something of a media star when he was still in law school back in the 1990s. For almost two decades, he hosted the programme eTalk—from 2002 to 2020—and covered major events like the Oscars, the Golden Globes, and, here in Canada… the Juno Awards. (Trust me, it’s a thing.)

More recently, Ben has become a nationally aired radio host with a growing YouTube channel—though his career was interrupted in 2020 amid the social-justice frenzy that followed the murder of George Floyd. During that fevered moment, Ben’s wife, a public figure and fashion stylist named Jessica Mulroney, got into an online argument with a black Canadian influencer by the name of Sasha Exeter. Exeter then claimed she’d been bullied by Jessica; and while the evidence for this was thin to non-existent, the fevered political climate of that period was such that Ben and Jessica were both targeted by cancellation campaigns.

And Ben, despite having nothing to do with the bickering between these two women, stepped down from his job—which, as he’ll discuss in the conversation that follows, he was fairly sick of anyway.