During the course of my three five-year terms on the FSC board, my high esteem for the company never faltered. It marked a significant part of my life, as I took very seriously the task of overseeing the company and ensuring that the Trust Principles were upheld and respected in the company’s conduct. In their essence, the principles are independence, integrity, and freedom from bias. Both the principles themselves and the importance of safeguarding them truly spoke to me. The model Reuters established appealed to my belief in the great importance of both ethical standards in the corporate world, and in the need to protect the free press, regardless of what that entailed. At times this even necessitated intervening in the actions of another director. When board member Rupert Murdoch went over the 15 percent ownership threshold for outside shareholders, for example, it was my responsibility to step in and directly challenge Murdoch’s actions. I will admit that after telling him it was unacceptable to pass the threshold and informing him that he must sell down, I held my breath to see if he would simply tell me to go to hell. But after several days, he did sell down, reducing his company shares to the appropriate and authorized amount.
After the end of my third five-year term (and having passed the three-term time limit) I was happy to accept the position of chairman of the board of the Founders Share Company and continue into the next decade with Reuters. I wanted to do everything in my power to keep the company on its course. It was a powerful and occasionally humbling experience to observe the many ways—great and small—in which the Reuters people evaluated and sometimes adjusted their own actions to ensure that they were in keeping with the Trust Principles.
On the evening of September 11, 2001, as a shaken world absorbed the news of the devastating terror attacks in the United States, David Wenig, Reuters president of Investment Banking and Brokerage Services, requested that the large electronic billboards outside of Reuters’ London office display an image of the American flag, to communicate England’s solidarity with America. Feedback came in from a number of editorial managers asking that the flag be removed, as it could be construed to be an indication of bias. I happened to be in New York on that day, visiting the Lazard financial management firm in my capacity as their senior advisor and managing director.
I had arrived at Lazard’s Rockefeller Center office quite early in the morning, and a colleague and a secretary were the only other people in the sixty-second-floor office. It was an absolutely beautiful day, cool and clear, the skyline of the city crisp and vivid against the bright blue sky. On one of the television monitors, I heard the breaking news that a plane had just hit a Manhattan skyscraper. The southern-facing exposure of the Lazard offices provides a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson. After hearing the news, my colleague and I went to the window from which we could clearly see a vast plume of brown smoke pouring from the north tower of the World Trade Center. At that moment, we saw a second plane approaching rapidly from the southwest. We stood shoulder to shoulder watching with disbelief as the plane hit the south tower, sending a massive fireball shooting into the sky. I don’t believe either of us spoke—what was there to say? The sight was so dramatic—so viscerally brutal—it is virtually impossible to convey to anyone who did not see it with their own eyes.
After the towers collapsed, the scene in lower Manhattan was one of utter devastation, and the scale of human suffering unbearable. I was not only deeply shaken by what I had seen, I was not at all sure that more attacks were not on the way. I had no intention of getting into the elevator to descend sixty-two floors, so I remained where I was. My colleague followed suit. At about 11 a.m., I heard voices and saw several policemen entering the office. They seemed surprised to see us, as the building had been closed off and no one was supposed to be inside. My colleague and I took the sixy-two-floor elevator ride in silence, emerging in the plaza with no idea where to go or what to do. Like countless others, I was marooned, unable to travel out of the city. I followed the events surrounding the London Reuters’ office and the American flag by telephone from my hotel. I was both touched by their impulse to display solidarity and impressed with their difficult decision to take the flag down. To me, it represented the pinnacle of integrity, and embodied everything I admired about the organization.
In an internal newsletter dated September 19, 2001, Wenig discussed the painful decision to comply and remove the flag, saying, “It was and is clear on reflection that the ideals of independence and objectivity go to the heart of what we are as a company. These pillars cannot be selectively retracted when we feel passion, or when we believe that right and wrong are so plainly clear. In fact, the trust principles are reinforced most powerfully when they are stretched and challenged the furthest.”
This was a remarkable demonstration of what it takes to protect ethical principles in a corporate world. The Trust doesn’t pose a burden of expense or bureaucracy on the corporation, but it does preclude prioritizing profits over everything else. The fact of Reuters’ longevity as a company is evidence that with a long-term view, the Trust Principles have served the institution extremely well. It is also a clear indication of the clarity of vision and flexibility of mind of the Trust founders, not dissimilar to that of the authors of the US Constitution—anticipating in the extreme long term the needs and obstacles of the company—creating a structure of preservation that is neither too specific nor too broad, but that will safeguard the principles without compromising the company’s ability to operate, expand, and adapt to the times.
For all its core ethos and latitude, the Trust is by no means immutable—human vigilance and foresight remain crucial to its safekeeping. In Michael Nelson’s memoir Castro and Stockmaster: A Life in Reuters, the company’s former general manager writes, “The Founders Share became vulnerable every time the protracted agenda over an EU Takeover Directive fired up again. The call for ‘one share one vote,’ if carried, could have wiped it out. We pressed the case that the Founders Share should be viewed as a qualitative rather than economic instrument, designed to protect Reuters core values, but having no economic value of its own. In this way, we sought to distinguish it from the majority of ‘golden shares’ designed to uphold the interests of a particular person, family, or other grouping.”
I can only hope that the unbroken line of individuals that have carried the torch of the principles forward year after year will continue indefinitely. What is at stake is more than just a corporate ethos and goes beyond even the imperative of preserving the value of media organizations. Lack of integrity—and a media that does not stick to good journalistic practice—can create a very dangerous situation for the rest of the world. America felt the full extent of journalism’s power when Katharine Graham and two of her Washington Post reporters had the courage and tenacity to investigate the Watergate break-in to its culmination—resulting in the downfall of the president himself. But over forty years later, the country is reeling from the one-two punch of an assault on the free press and the prevalence of television “news” shows that are thinly disguised propaganda machines. For every just force, there is an opposing unjust force, and the power to vanquish a corrupt president can manifest as the power to protect one.
The present struggle over the freedom of the press and the maintenance of truth in reporting and disseminating the news can be traced back at least as far as the period between the World Wars in the twentieth century, when governments threatened to take control of information. In 1941, Reuters took strong measures to prevent being taken over (specifically by the British government); it was then that the Reuters Trust was formed and Trust Principles put in place. In the 1980s another kind of crisis arose: the danger that information might be taken over by the superwealthy. If there is cynicism in the belief that anything and anyone can be bought, it is only because it happens with increasing frequency.
At the heart of these issues is the preservation of truth—of conscience itself—by maintaining the independence of the means of producing and disseminating information. A September 2017 Reuters US poll found that national confidence in the American press had risen to 48 percent, up from 39 percent