Alan Rusbridger was Editor-in-Chief of Guardian News & Media from 1995 to 2015. He launched the Guardian in the US and Australia as well as building a website which today attracts more than 100 million unique browsers a month. The paper's coverage of phone-hacking led to the Leveson Inquiry into press standards and ethics. Guardian US won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service for its leading global coverage of the Snowden revelations. He is the author of Play It Again. He lives in London and Oxford, where he is Principal of Lady Margaret Hall and chairs the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. arusbridger.com | @arusbridger
Also by Alan Rusbridger
Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible
The paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Alan Rusbridger, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 096 2
eISBN 978 1 78689 095 5
To Lindsay and Georgina who, between them,
shared most of this journey
Contents
Introduction
By early 2017 the world had woken up to a problem that, with a mixture of impotence, incomprehension and dread, journalists had seen coming for some time. News – the thing that helped people understand their world; that oiled the wheels of society; that pollinated communities; that kept the powerful honest – news was broken.
The problem had many different names and diagnoses. Some thought we were drowning in too much news; others feared we were in danger of becoming newsless. Some believed we had too much free news: others, that paid-for news was leaving behind it a long caravan of ignorance.
No one could agree on one narrative. The old media were lazy and corrupt: and/or the new players were greedy and secretive. We were newly penned into filter bubbles: rubbish – they had always been there. There was a new democracy of information: bunkum – the mob were now in control. The old elites were dying: read your history – power simply changes shape.
On this most people could agree: we were now up to our necks in a seething, ever churning ocean of information; some of it true, much of it wrong. There was too much false news, not enough reliable news. There might soon be entire communities without news. Or without news they could trust.
There was a swamp of stuff we were learning to call ‘fake news’. The recently elected 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, used the term so indiscriminately it rapidly lost any meaning. The best that traditional journalism could offer was – or so he repeatedly told us – fake. We should believe him, not lying journalists.
Truth was fake; fake was true.
And that’s when the problem suddenly snapped into focus.
Throughout recent centuries anyone growing up in a western democracy had believed that it was necessary to have facts. Without facts, societies could be extremely dark places. Facts were essential to informed debates,