Breaking News by Alan Rusbridger

Author:Alan Rusbridger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I wasn’t so ideologically devoted to free, but I was to open. I was intensely interested in the Guardian exploring all the implications of the latter. And, of course, I shared Emily’s concerns about the best information being restricted to those who could pay for it, while the rest fed on scraps. But then I wasn’t the business brain in the company. This was going to have to be a close and never-ending conversation between the editorial vision, the engineering opportunities, the public value and the commercial realities.34

Shortly after catching up with Emily in 2016, I was at a London dinner hosted at the Savoy Hotel by the New York Times. There was much talk of Donald Trump and of the NYT’s success in sustaining a metred paywall since 2011. At the end of the meal the executive editor, Dean Baquet, thanked the guests for their discussion about politics and business models for news. He was happy with the NYT’s position, but he asked whether anyone else around the table shared his concern about the new reality in which 98 per cent of Americans were now excluded from the NYT’s journalism and might well have to make do with substandard information.

The table, until then quite voluble, fell quiet. The question hung there as we bid our farewells. It was the rarely-articulated ‘gated community’ question. In a world of almost limitless information, the best would be available only to the more affluent. The rest of America would make do with an ocean of free stuff; some true, some fake.

The next day I emailed Dean to thank him and to commend him on his question. ‘Thanks my friend,’ he replied. ‘And yes I fear a world of only rich elite media. I may be comfortable sitting at dinner in the Savoy but I’m also a guy who grew up in a poor neighbourhood in the American South. And I’m not so confident the people like a young Dean will be able to afford the reports we all edit. That would not help the divide that plagues the world.’

The New York Times had performed brilliantly during the election campaign: it had done everything you could ask of a serious newspaper. But 13 days after the dinner Donald Trump was elected 45th President of the United States.

The proportion of bad news to good news in the US was, by then, frightening. A study of Twitter in November 2016 by Oxford academic Robert Gorwa found that professional news content and ‘junk news’ were being shared in a one-to-one ratio.35

For every piece of ‘real’ news, people were consuming stuff that was fake, propaganda or conspiracy theories.

One to one.

Worse still, studies showed that very nearly two thirds of ‘average people’ did not know how to tell good journalism from rumour or falsehoods.36

The ability to tell fact from fiction had reached a tipping point.

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