Singal has been a bête noire for transgender activists going back to 2018, when he wrote an essay for The Atlantic suggesting that the medical case for youth gender medicine is weak. Ever since, he has been ruthlessly, relentlessly attacked online. In quieter, more rational circles, his rigor has made him a hero, especially as the evidence mounts that he was right all along.

Democrats and progressives seeking a way to refocus on their party’s strengths — and to walk back the dogmatism that characterized the party during “peak woke” — might learn from him.

Singal and I met in Brooklyn in late April, shortly after the latest round of online drama between him and his critics. In person, he is physically large and unexpectedly striking. And he displays an equally unexpected millennial masculinity — half “my therapist thinks I have ADHD”, half patience and problem-solving. His slight haplessness and disorganization with technology form a running joke on “Blocked and Reported”, the podcast focusing on internet controversies he co-hosts with fellow journalist Katie Herzog. Yet he’s solicitous about my recording and sound quality throughout the interview, perhaps from painful personal experience.

All successful journalists claim integrity and rigor, but few since the journalist-as-activist era began have had the nerve Singal has shown in going against the consensus on their own side. In part as a result, many centrist Democrats who have felt disillusioned with their party’s direction have swung Right. Through it all, Singal has stuck with his bog-standard liberal beliefs, despite the enormous outpouring of hatred against him.

At our meeting, however, he was determined to deflate any grandiose claims about himself or his work, often with the same mild, undramatic rebuttals he has offered before, and that his critics have found unsatisfying. His reporting on trans issues is “a small part of my overall career”, he says. And his unusual ability to be contrarian in his reporting was because “things just worked out in a very lucky way”.

Singal’s early résumé is as normie as it gets for successful male talking heads, including a youthful stand-up comedy phase. He is 41 and grew up in an affluent suburb of Boston. Like many of his generation, he was “politically activated” by the administration of George W. Bush. “I couldn’t believe anyone could be conservative,” he says. “We didn’t think it could get any worse.”

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He spent two years at Brandeis and another two at the University of Michigan as an undergraduate, writing columns for his college papers in what he calls the “true-but-insufferable” category of “very basic liberal stuff”. It was only later, while working at The Boston Globe, that he had the distinguishing insight that he was writing ill-informed hot takes (many of us never learn) and that he instead wanted to better understand how the world works. He enrolled in a public-affairs master’s program at Princeton, which he describes as “aimed at do-gooders” and which stressed quantitative skills, teaching him to read and evaluate research papers.

Princeton set him on the path of debunking phony science that has since made his career. His first job out of grad school, in 2014, was working under Adam Moss at New York, where he edited the magazine’s new social-sciences vertical. In his 2021 book, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, he writes that when he started the job, “thanks to a fairly stats heavy master’s program… I knew some of the differences between good and bad research, and some of the ways quantitative claims can mislead.”

Even so, he was surprised by “the fire-hose of overhyped findings that would fill my e-mail inbox daily”. Many deeply penetrating, popular, and influential cultural beliefs, it turns out, are based on really questionable research. In fact, the most grabbed-onto claims might be the most specious, Singal argues, in that they’re convenient to believe, and offer us supposedly easy fixes for complex social ills.

He published the first big, in-depth feature on researcher findings that the implicit-bias test — notorious for proving that everyone is secretly racist — was “weak and unreliable, statistically speaking” and “barely measures anything of real-world import”, as he recounted in The Quick Fix. Many of his New York headlines from this era are surprisingly freewheeling, given the later evolution of the magazine, such as “Is a Professor Getting Railroaded for Questioning Social-Justice Dogma?” (2019) and “Business Insider Retracted a Bad Piece — and Set a Terrible Precedent” (2018).

Singal says he believes that today’s version of the magazine has “hollowed out some of the most interesting thinkers”. Nonetheless, he remained an establishment-friendly voice on the larger issues, and places in The Quick Fix read very 2021. The false implicit-bias information, for example, is important because it might be detrimental to “urgent tasks like police reform”. A quote from a song mentioning “crossdressers” gets the apologetic aside that “it was the 1950s”.

None of this — neither the rigor nor the careful hewing to many liberal values — spared Singal from the outrage on his own side over trans issues. Singal is the most blocked user on Bluesky, the Lefty alternative to X (formerly Twitter). He is listed by the GLAAD Accountability Project as a purveyor of disinformation. And at least one trans activist website has compiled a truly sick biographical dossier on him that also targets his family. This and other websites accuse him, among other things, of “sea-lioning” — apparently the crime of harassing others by persisting in asking reasonable and polite questions.

This persecution has taken a new turn recently, with the re-election of President Trump, as the far Left has singled out dissenters on the center Left for the disaster. In a recent thread on X, the Nation columnist David Klion wrote that Singal’s “many haters warned him for like five years that his work was going to empower the Right’s crackdown on trans people. We were all right and he’ll never erase what he did.” Ross Barkan, an UnHerd contributor, also declared himself a “hater” on the same thread for the same reason, and condemned Singal as having “like replacement level Dem opinions coupled with trans obsession”.

Singal tends to counter these charges with several assertions that can seem myopic to his critics. He’s vociferously anti-Trump, and always has been, he says. And he believes that reporting in elite coastal media outlets doesn’t actually influence public opinion in ways that can swing elections. “People don’t realize how small even the big outlets have gotten,” he told me. And “I’ve always been a skeptic of how much influence the media has.” In other words, youth gender medicine was going to be controversial regardless of what Jesse Singal had to say about it. This may be true but seems like a bit of a dodge. Critics like Barkan have called Singal “obsessed” with a “fringe” issue — yet his reporting implies that he thinks otherwise. So why not say so?

On April 30, Singal and Herzog dropped an episode of “Blocked and Reported” on the criticism from the Left, in which they semi-jokingly explored the topic of who was responsible for the so-called vibe shift to the Right and the perceived horrors of Trump II. Asked the duo: “The question is, is it literally our fault?” The charges against them, Singal and Herzog argued, are a case of the “slippery-slope argument.” Meaning: if you allow a whisper of dissent on a topic, before you know it a crazed dictator is making the whole thing illegal.

“What always gets me about these arguments,” Singal said, “is that it’s a very long, very slippery slope, with like spinny parts and tunnels and loop de loops…. We pointed out there’s weak evidence for youth gender medicine… OK, people are going to jump from that to ‘therefore we should elect Trump’?”

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I am, I fear, a person of the slippery-slope mindset, because I can see the connection between debunked trans science and the election. But the more I try out my theories on Singal, the more persuasive his stubborn precision of thought becomes. It’s never flashy, and it’s often something he’s said before, or else a simple and hard-to-evade question: How does X thing you just said actually cause Y? Talking to him reminds me that Democrats were once very good projecting ownership of superior facts — they were the ones who’d followed the process, focused on the details, and had better research and policy on their side. A return to this kind of authority anywhere in government would be incredibly welcome, and Singal’s narrow focus on the granular truth suggests a direction for his party.

I’m not the only critic he’s disarmed. After the online spat with Barkan, the two men participated in a peacemaking podcast, at which Barkan walked back his online claims that Singal had “reaped what he sowed on anti-trans”, and ended up mostly agreeing with Singal on trans policy. “I think trans people are absolutely entitled to lives of safety and dignity,” Singal told me, “but I have some questions about whether the maximalist form of self-ID is tenable. An intelligent liberalism would understand this as an area where there are conflicting rights claims, depending on whether you view biological sex or gender identity as having primacy, and where those conflicting rights claims need to actually be resolved via discussion and compromise and democratic sense-making.”

His friend Mike Pesca, the journalist and host of the daily podcast “The Gist”, tells me via email that while Singal has been “more directionally right and specifically right on [the youth-gender-medicine] issue than anyone else covering it,” he is “still a pariah among the staffs at the major outlets.” In Pesca’s opinion, “the better editors know he’s good and are willing to work with him. The New York Times has published him, I doubt the New Yorker ever would, for fear of a riot. The Atlantic might. New York magazine probably won’t.”

Pesca also tells an anecdote about having coffee with Singal, and his friend telling him “this is the coffee shop where the barista went on Reddit, told the community I was here, and there was an earnest discussion about whether to poison me.” This, of course, represents the epistemic ditch that liberalism has fallen into — on one side of the counter, people like Singal, making their careful case for a balanced and reasonable system of human rights; on the other, those who have turned the rights into a religion and don’t give a shit what the science says.

It’s significant that Singal hasn’t broken through to the people who should be his allies — on the contrary, they want to poison him. And it suggests that human rights on their own can’t sustain serious politics without deeper claims and higher aspirations. Trump has offered his own incoherent version with American Greatness. Singal isn’t the type, but it almost seems he could do the same with a kind of reasoned excellence. “Make Our Systems Work Again” sure has a nice ring to it.

Unfathomably, Singal hasn’t stopped going to the coffee shop. Stubborn to be sure — or perhaps the science on barista-poisoning is weak.

All the Republican presidents who have followed LBJ, signer of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, have complained of Left-wing bias in the system. But with Houdini-like skill, public broadcasting has always managed to evade elimination.

Until now, that is. The old arguments once that staved off termination seem to have dried up, while evidence of five decades of progressive bias has been collected and curated. Then there is Trump and Elon Musk, with their zeal for cutting back the permanent state — precisely that part of the state whose views and desires are platformed by American state media.

The threat that taxpayer-funded journalism represented was clear from the start. A young lawyer in the Nixon White House anticipated the danger and wrote in a 1971 memo that “we are confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences — that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system”.

That young lawyer was none other than Antonin Scalia. The future Supreme Court justice argued that eliminating the creature that the act had created, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, CPB), wouldn’t be easy. It would be “politically difficult in view of the strong educational support and the generally favorable public image which CPB has developed”, he prophetically predicted.

Public broadcasting’s educational component — seen only at PBS; NPR can’t rely on that argument — has repeatedly saved public broadcasting. In 1969, when President Nixon tried to slash funding by half, public-broadcasting executives sent Fred Rogers to a Senate subcommittee hearing to militate against it. That is, Mr. Rogers of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood fame, a children’s show that would become a staple at PBS.

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Rogers tugged at the heartstrings of the lawmakers, speaking earnestly about children’s emotional well-being and how TV programming could help. The chairman of the committee, Sen. John O. Pastore, began the hearing as an open skeptic. But by the hearing’s end, Pastore was telling Rogers, “Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars”.

In 2025, however, “for the children” appears to have lost much of its luster, and there is good reason for it.

First, PBS licensed its signature children’s show, Sesame Street, to HBO in 2015 for five years. Last year, HBO announced it wouldn’t renew the license, though it would keep episodes from the Sesame archive available on its streaming platform, Max.

The argument used against Mitt Romney in 2012 — that public-broadcasting critics want to murder Big Bird — no longer works. Indeed, when Paula Kerger, PBS’s CEO, testified before the House on 26 March, 2025, she mentioned Sesame Street precisely zero times. Nearly all the Democrats defending PBS funding had arrived at the hearing armed with posters of Big Bird, Elmo, and Bert and Ernie. They seemed unaware of the HBO deal, and the fact that PBS has cut back on children’s programming to attract grownups.

That is one of the reasons public broadcasting has lost the mandate of heaven. Another is that, in our internet age, there is a profusion of media channels, websites, and video channels that not only produce an unending stream of educational content, but also news and entertainment. Today, the United States boasts some 15,000 commercial AM and FM stations, more than 425 satellite-radio channels, and 4 million registered podcasts, with half a billion worldwide listeners.

But what seals the deal is the political bias. On this front, NPR and PBS have violated the public trust and have, therefore, forsaken their claim on the public money.

Uri Berliner, a liberal journalist who worked at NPR for 25 years, admitted as much in a 2024 essay. NPR, he said, had become a place that now offers only “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US population. … An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America”.

As with many things, it was Trump’s election in 2016 that sent NPR, liberal from its creation in the Seventies, irreparably off the rails. “His election”, Berliner wrote, “was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair”. Tough, “straightforward coverage” of Trump “veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency”.

As Berliner put it, NPR inaugurated the first Trump administration by tying its fortunes to the false claim that Team Trump colluded with the Kremlin. By Berliner’s count, the broadcaster granted no fewer than 26 largely uncritical interviews to Adam Schiff, the top Democrat making this claim. Schiff used this platform to spread another thing we now know was simply not true: that he had evidence of this “collusion”.

But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report concluded that no such collusion took place, NPR refused to admit error. It never went back to Schiff and demanded he account for the disjunction between his claims and reality. What Americans got instead was literal radio silence.

Not only did NPR remain unchastened by this error — it kept digging. When the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, NPR flatly refused to cover it. NPR’s managing editor responded to complaints by saying: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

Ah, yes, “pure distraction”: the fact, amply documented in the files and subsequently confirmed by other outlets, that Hunter arranged a 2015 meeting between his father, then the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine, and executives from Burisma, the shady Ukrainian energy firm that was paying Hunter some $80,000 a month to serve on its board.

On March 26, NPR CEO offered lawmakers several answers that strained credulity, as when she told Rep. Jim Jordan, “I’ve never seen any instance of political bias” at NPR. This, even as she conceded that NPR’s decision to suppress the Hunter Files had been a journalistic mistake.

In the pandemic, too, NPR again hitched its wagon firmly to the preferred progressive narrative — that the virus had a natural origin. At the time, the outlet trashed as “racist and xenophobic” the possibility that the virus had leaked from a lab in the Chinese that is home to one of China’s premier virology labs. Today, several US intelligence agencies conclude with varying degrees of confidence that Covid escaped from a lab.

Yet it was in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May 2020 that NPR and PBS did the greatest disservice to their listeners and viewers, let alone taxpayers. Without asking for evidence, they accepted the view that America is an oppressive society gripped by systemic racism, and that this calls for a systemic overhaul of American order.

NPR, or PBS, for that matter, could have acted to save the country from much of the damaging, self-inflicted hysteria that followed — simply by doing their job. Berliner observed: “We happen to have a very powerful tool for answering such questions: journalism. Journalism that lets evidence lead the way. But the message from the top [at NPR] was very different. America’s infestation with systemic racism was declared loud and clear: it was a given. Our mission was to change it.”

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The bias at NPR and PBS is also easy to quantify. The conservative-leaning Media Research Center has been doing tallies of it for years, and the results demonstrate Berliner’s allegations. The PBS NewsHour, for example, routinely books many more liberals than conservatives. Over a four-month period from November 2022 to February 2023, MRC found that liberal Democratic guests outnumbered conservative Republican guests 3.7 to 1. When elected officials and political appointees were removed from the guest count, the disparity was even more striking, reaching 5.7 to 1.

MRC analysts also examined weeknight editions of the NewsHour from January 3, 2023, through May 2, 2023, finding that, by a 5-to-1 margin, NewsHour promoted controversies involving congressional Republicans over those involving Democrats. Congressional Republicans faced 85% negative coverage, compared to 54% positive coverage of congressional Democrats, the analysis showed. NewsHour correspondents branded Republicans as extremists (“far right”, “hard right”, etc.) 20 times during this period. Not once were hard-Left Democrats so identified.

An MRC analysis also found that during last year’s political convention, PBS treated the Republican convention to 72% negative and 28% positive commentary. By contrast, the Democratic convention played with a home field advantage: it received 12% negative coverage, versus 88% positive commentary.

What we have at NPR and PBS is what Juan Williams — another NPR veteran-turned-critic, fired in 2010 — has called “an insulated cadre of people who think they’re right, and they have a hard time with people who are different”. According to Berliner, the NPR Washington bureau has 87 registered Democrats on staff, and zero Republicans. Fast forward a dozen years, and you find that conservatives have voted with their feet. In 2023, pollsters found that only 11% of NPR listeners described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, while a whopping 67% of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal.

The mandate has been lost. The CPB receives some $535 million from taxpayers every year. But this time, Trump has mounted an offensive that attacks that money from different perspectives. There is, for example, his 1 May executive order that President Trump titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of the Biased Media”. Trump has also zeroed out any spending on the CPB in this year’s budget, while his Federal Communications Commission is investigating whether these outlets are violating the noncommercial clause in the Communications Act by taking commercial sponsorships.

At least one of these approaches will work. Neither Fred Rogers nor Big Bird can save them now.

The Verify team deployed its OSINT (open source intelligence) skills and facial recognition software to compare images from the scene with social media profiles. Soon enough, they’d identified and named two of the alleged attackers. Yet despite having no less than four writers on the story — just one of many Verify articles to boast multiple bylines — this gaggle of reporters initially failed to spot the most important fact of all. 

That only became clear later, in a note added at the bottom of the BBC website once the story had been published. “An earlier version of this article identified the men in the car as of Asian heritage,” it said. “Humberside Police has since told the BBC they are Eastern European.” To put it differently, the victims on Humberside were as white as their attackers. Whatever else the incident was, then, it certainly wasn’t a straightforward case of white racism against non-white targets. Later, the BBC also changed the headline.

If journalism is the first draft of history, often produced at speed, it’s inevitable that reporters sometimes get things wrong. But just as the 6 August story suffered from a glaring and arguably story-ending error, BBC Verify seems to suffer more mistakes than most. Having examined more than 200 stories listed on BBC Verify’s website, and produced between its launch in May 2023 and 5 October this year, we found 12 that were later corrected, clarified or withdrawn. That’s about one in 20.

For an outfit like BBC Verify, an expensive new unit established to combat disinformation, that’s awkward enough. That’s doubly true when journalists elsewhere in the corporation face redundancy, with £24 million annual cuts to the BBC News budget forcing executives to axe well-regarded programmes and shed 130 staff. Yet beyond these individual embarrassments, or the strange focus on Verify to the detriment of other reporting, the real story here is what BBC Verify says about the contemporary BBC’s approach to journalism — and how it often seems to put shallow, memeable newsgathering ahead of the facts. 

BBC Verify was born in an age of disinformation, in which “fake news” spread by platforms such as TikTok has eroded trust in “legacy media” — and diminished its audience. A high-level BBC insider says that from the moment Deborah Turness was appointed chief executive of BBC News in 2022, she tried to persuade her senior colleagues that the way to restore both was to set up a unit to challenge the spread of disinformation and report the facts. She got her way, and BBC Verify was the result. 

Despite being founded around 18 months ago, Verify has quickly come to dominate BBC News output. Boasting over 60 dedicated journalists, it enjoys a special corner of the BBC website, with each story it publishes highlighted by a BBC Verify logo. Covering everything from war (“What satellite images reveal about Israel’s strikes on Iran”) to climate change (“No, Hurricane Milton was not ‘engineered’”), online content is dovetailed by Verified Live, which airs weekdays on BBC News. No less striking, Verify has also made stars of several BBC journalists. One example is Ros Atkins, the BBC’s analysis editor. Another is Marianna Spring, a disinformation correspondent who’s appeared everywhere from Breakfast to Radio 4, and so become one of the corporation’s most recognisable faces.

Given all this coverage, at any rate, it’s unsurprising that Verify should also enjoy praise from executives. “BBC Verify is transparency in action — fact-checking, verifying video, countering disinformation, analysing data and explaining complex stories in the pursuit of truth,” is how Turness put it. As Verify’s creator has added, its staff aren’t just ordinary journalists. Rather, they’re “a highly specialised team with a range of forensic and OSINT capabilities that enable them to go beyond conventional newsroom techniques”. 

Last month Turness sent a message to every BBC journalist making further grandiose claims. In the note, seen by UnHerd, she said Verify was “on the front line” of the corporation’s “fight for truth”, and its “forensic teams” were “setting the standard for transparent journalism”. Such enthusiasm is clearly echoed in the accounting department too: the BBC has said the salary bill for Verify’s 63 staff is £3.2 million a year.

Yet amid the plaudits and the paychecks, just how accurate is Verify’s reporting? 

Certainly, that the unit has had to correct, clarify or withdraw about one in 20 stories isn’t a good start. “The BBC claims that BBC Verify is on the frontline of the ‘fight for truth’ — but the fact it has been forced to correct 5% of its stories suggests otherwise,” explains Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television. “That is a very high number for any news organisation, and the BBC should be upholding the highest of standards.” 

Nor do things look much better once you dig a little deeper. Like the Humberside story, after all, some mistakes involve that most sensitive of subjects: race. On 25 February, for instance, BBC Verify published a troubling exposé. Its author, Maryam Ahmed, had used advanced statistical techniques to compare thousands of car insurance quotes, finding that drivers in racially diverse areas were having to pay much higher premiums — an average of 33% more than people from places that were mainly white.

It seemed the motor insurance industry was racist, for behind the disparity lay what the BBC called an “ethnicity penalty”. Even if differing levels of accidents, crime and economic prosperity were taken into account, “areas with a high number of people from ethnic minorities saw higher prices”, the article said. It went on to quote a demand from Citizens Advice that the Financial Conduct Authority “get off the sidelines and investigate why people of colour are being charged so much more”.

Seven months later, the BBC quietly replaced the article with an embarrassing statement. It now transpired there was no “ethnicity penalty” after all. The BBC “had not established why premiums were higher”, because it had failed to see “the limitations of the data we used”. The story “did not meet our normal editorial standards” and was therefore being deleted.

And if that’s echoed by errors in other domestic stories — among other things, that includes a muddle over high speed railways — the unit has arguably faced its biggest problems very far from Britain. Since the Hamas attack of October 2023, indeed, the Middle East has proved something of a theme for the unit: our analysis shows that in the year since the attack, about a fifth of the stories listed on its website have focused on the region. 

And if Cohen says this suggests an “unhealthy obsession” with events in Israel, some of Verify’s claims on this most controversial of conflicts don’t stand up.

Early in the war, on 17 October last year, an explosion at the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza triggered furious controversy, after the BBC correspondent Jon Donnison said on air that it was “hard to see” what could have caused it other than an Israeli airstrike. 

Israel insisted that the blast was caused by a Palestinian rocket, but according to Donnison, these might kill “half a dozen — maybe a few more”, and “when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza, we never see explosions of this scale”. In its reports that evening, the BBC echoed a claim by Hamas that it had killed 500 people. In fact, the hospital itself had not been hit: the blast was in the car park outside, and the death toll, according to both Western governments and Human Rights Watch, was far lower than 500.  

BBC Verify published three successive items on the event, culminating in a lengthy article on 26 October that carried the bylines of no fewer than 12 of its staff. 

By this time, the Biden administration and numerous independent experts had concluded that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket, launched from inside Gaza. Rishi Sunak, the then-prime minister, had told Parliament this was likely true, based on the “deep knowledge and analysis of our intelligence and weapons experts”. Yet BBC Verify continued to maintain the cause of the blast was still “contested” — and that, as Hamas still claims, it might have been an Israeli strike. 

Verify’s assertion relied on analysis by an organisation called Forensic Architecture, which the BBC somewhat obliquely described as a “UK-based organisation which investigates human rights abuses”. 

What it failed to mention was that Forensic Architecture’s advisory board includes Ryvka Barnard, the deputy director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign; and that it has a long record of issuing reports critical of Israel. At the same time, Forensic Architecture has often worked with Al Haq, a Palestinian group designated a terrorist organisation by Israel. After the October 7 attacks, meanwhile, Al Haq staff issued numerous statements describing them as legitimate acts of resistance. One of its leaders urged his social media followers to support the “jihad”. 

Despite all this, Verify’s initial story is still online — complete with the claim that the origin of the hospital blast remains “contested”. That’s even as the story now includes a clarification at the bottom conceding that Forensic Architecture itself now admits “they had been wrong” about the specifics of the attack.

Nor is this Verify’s only Gaza story to be based on dubious sources. On 1 March, it published a report into the deaths of 112 Gazans, who’d died the previous day while food was being distributed from a convoy of aid trucks. Hamas claimed most of the dead had been shot by the IDF; Israel that they’d been crushed in a stampede.

The six named Verify staff accredited in its report analysed satellite photos, videos and drone footage. It seems OSINT wasn’t much help, as they still weren’t able to draw any definitive conclusions. In the end, Verify relied on an old-fashioned human source. A Palestinian named Mahmoud Awadeyah told the reporters he’d seen what happened: a deliberate attack on desperate civilians by Israeli soldiers.

Beyond Awadeyah’s testimony, Verify’s story contained no other evidence this was true. More to the point, other research suggests that he may not be a reliable source for such serious allegations. For one thing, he has worked for Tasnim, a news agency controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. On the same day as the murder of seven Jews outside a Jerusalem synagogue, meanwhile, Awadeyah tweeted about “A state of rejoicing, exuberance, and mosques confirmed with exuberance.” The same message included an emoji of a contented-looking face with a halo. He’s also posted photos of himself with Khalil Al Bahtini, a leader of the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and mourned his “sincerity and loyalty” when the latter was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Twelve days after the Verify piece was published, the BBC appended yet another “clarification” — noting that “this piece has been amended to make clear Mahmoud Awadeyah’s current employment” for a Lebanese news station called Al Mayadeen. For its part, Verify also noted Al Mayadeen’s sympathies to groups fighting Israel. But even that’s not the full story: Al Mayadeen openly supports Iran, Hezbollah and the murderous Assad regime in Syria. 

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Cohen, for his part, is amazed that the BBC didn’t feel the need to explain that an eyewitness source was employed by a pro-Iranian outlet. “This is a good example of bias by omission,” he says. “Without all the facts and context clearly presented, the BBC is misleading audiences.”

And if Verify has been caught out by its sources in other areas too — an expert quoted in support of a wealth tax has campaigned for just such a policy, even as his background wasn’t made clear — reporting on riots or war at least feels worthy in principle. 

Elsewhere, though, the unit seems content paddling in distinctly shallow waters. On 7 May, for instance, Spring presented a filmed segment describing a fake picture on Instagram. This was significant, she said, because AI-generated forgeries often involved politicians, and so could potentially influence elections. In the event, though, the picture she highlighted wasn’t of Donald Trump or Joe Biden — but rather of the singer Katy Perry, doing nothing more than standing in a floral dress she hadn’t actually worn. Undaunted, Spring justified her prime time report by saying it was “a reminder to put our social media sleuthing to the test”.

Nor is this the only story that feels like it could have been left to the tabloids. On 17 October, BBC Verify published a story about a supposed “wave of cases” involving an alleged drug called Devil’s Breath. The article explained that it was apparently a travel sickness remedy, which could “be administered to victims in the street, without them realising they have been drugged”. Perhaps it can. Yet Verify admitted there was “no evidence” it had been administered in the cases it examined, though it “has been used in robberies in Ecuador, France and Vietnam”. Even if it had been used in Britain, meanwhile, this would have been “difficult to establish”.

Sometimes, Verify even “proves” things that no one seriously disputes. One example came on 7 September, when it published images showing Israel had been building a new road along the border between Gaza and Egypt. Three weeks later, it analysed videos of the airstrike that killed Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. The fact that solar panels were seen facing away from the bombed building suggested that the attack had come from the south: in other words from Israel. Who knew?

Combined with those monumental bylines — even a straightforward story about flooding in Libya involved a dozen staff — and that £3.2 million wage bill begins to feel oddly high. Indeed, Verify might cost the BBC even more than that. Notwithstanding the unit’s focus on transparency, when we asked the corporation about the rest of its budget, for costs such as travel and OSINT software, a spokeswoman said they weren’t available because they’re “accounted for as part of the overall BBC News budget”. 

Such munificence might matter less if the BBC was rolling in money. As it is, the corporation is seriously cash-strapped, a situation that’s obliged managers to cancel some of its most respected shows. Newsnight, for one, is now a shadow of its former self, shorn of filmed reports and investigations. HARDtalk, an in-depth interview programme, is vanishing too, despite first going on air back in 1997. Together with those 130 redundancies, and the high-level BBC insider is unsurprisingly upset about the corporation’s apparent focus on BBC Verify, especially when they suspect it’s indulged as Deborah Turness’s baby. “Because she is the head of news, it can only ever be declared a success,” he explains. “Its triumph is pre-ordained.” It hardly helps, the insider adds, that other sections of BBC News actually have to correct stories far less often than Verify — even as they “they don’t presume to be more truthful than anyone else”. 

Nor do things seem likely to change going forward. In late October, mere days after BBC director-general Tim Davie made a speech about the growing threat of “misinformation” from foreign powers, the corporation had ordered four of its most seasoned foreign correspondents back to Britain to save money. All had years of experience, backed by foreign language skills, of reporting on authoritarian regimes including China, Russia and North Korea. Now, though, they’d been told to cover news in Britain.

Within the BBC, the news was received with dismay. The Times quoted a staffer saying they had been “told to return at a time when the amount of propaganda we are up against is astounding. None of them costs very much money and strategically, it doesn’t make sense when you look at the big, looming stories.” But in the new BBC, it seems that on-the-ground reporting, battling to get at the truth, is destined to be replaced by analysis of videos shot by amateurs on mobile phones — all carried out by BBC Verify in London.

Certainly, the corporation clearly remains optimistic about the unit. 

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The Miliband files

By David Rose

We asked the BBC to comment on everything in this article. Its spokeswoman told us: “By their very nature, BBC Verify stories are heavy in facts and detail on contentious topics which can sometimes require clarifications and updates, and occasionally corrections, which we do in an openly transparent way. Often pieces are updated to show our workings to audiences — showing them how stories develop as new information comes to light. We do not recognise the flawed calculations that attempt to describe updated pieces with transparent workings as corrected articles.

“We are proud of the vital work that BBC Verify is doing, and our audience research shows that people value this offering and are actively seeking out BBC Verify stories to help them understand events.”

Regarding the false claim that the victims of the attack on the car during the riots were of Asian heritage, the spokesperson said: “The story used a range of technology, on the ground reports and social media to piece together how the violence escalated in Humberside that day. When we became aware of the new information we amended the story swiftly and transparently. We stand by the story as an accurate account of what happened.”

As for the now-deleted article about “racist” car insurance, the spokeswoman said that “we have been transparent in saying this story did not meet our normal editorial guidelines and why we withdrew the article”. She also defended the report claiming Israel had massacred Gazans when they tried to get food, despite relying on a single source who’d worked for a pro-Iran TV channel. “The fact,” she said, “that someone has expressed an opinion on social media doesn’t automatically disqualify them from giving eye-witness testimony.” 

Not everyone at the corporation is so bullish. Our BBC insider was unimpressed by these comments, saying he was dismayed that even when Verify had admitted that fundamental elements of major stories were wrong, they’d nonetheless stayed online. As he puts it: “This is misleading and dishonest.” 

Beyond the finances, questions about the unit surely remain. Scanning our analysis of the stories on BBC Verify’s website, it’s hard to avoid the impression that it’s selective with its targets: evidence, perhaps, of a certain Left-leaning bias. It doesn’t, for instance, examine claims made by Hamas with anything like the frequency and rigour it applies to Israel. During the UK election, meanwhile, it dismissed Reform UK’s manifesto by saying its promises had been described as impossible by “experts”, “economists” and “analysts” — without naming or quoting any of them. As was noted last week, meanwhile, it failed to measure the Budget, and the tax increases it contained, against Labour’s pledges during the election. 

Especially when the corporation is tightening its belt elsewhere, it’s little wonder Cohen remains sceptical. “At a time when the BBC is having to cut jobs and save a lot of money,” he concludes, “the track record of BBC Verify seems very hard to justify.”

***

This article was first published on 4 November, 2024.

“More or less, more or less,” said Trump, a little timidly.

It could have been any eager kid explaining a new technology to someone almost four times his age, but what Trump said next encapsulated so much of what he has brought to American politics. “It’s the new wave,” he said, to which Ross enthusiastically agreed.

Trump’s podcast blitz over the last few months — on Kick with Ross, on X with Elon Musk, on YouTube with Lex Fridman and Theo Von, and most recently on Ben Shapiro’s podcast — showcased his ability to adapt to new media forms. This started in the Nineties, when he rose to political prominence as a regular guest on talk radio. He then became a nationwide celebrity through his starring role on reality TV’s The Apprentice. He ran for president in 2016 largely through his Twitter account and, when that was disabled in 2021, switched to his own social media platform, Truth Social. His 2024 campaign strategy hinges on his ability to reach low-information voters who wouldn’t normally pay attention to politics. (Von is a comedian and Ross an online gamer.) From the standpoint of communications, his approach has been astonishingly successful and may well return him to the White House. Really, the entire Trump phenomenon is just media studies — but why, with Kamala Harris only just appearing podcasts now, have his political opponents been so slow to learn its lessons?

Every time I try to understand our era, I find myself — like the kind of person who pulls out their pocket Bible on any occasion to check the relevant verse — reaching for Martin Gurri’s 2014 text, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri, a former CIA analyst turned media theorist, outlined the dominant dynamic of our time: it is “an episode in the primordial contest between Centre and Border” but with a new array of weapons made available to the Border. “Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest,” he wrote.

In the past, the Border had to make do with penny presses, alternative weeklies, late-night radio stations or, simply, the power of “word-of-mouth”. But, with the public-to-public traffic of social media, the Border developed an ability to communicate with itself at a staggering volume and to change the underlying dynamics of political discourse. For Gurri, 2012 was the watershed year, in which the two-way traffic of social media became a social force of its own, eclipsing the standard establishment media organs and creating an entirely different communicative discourse that was ripe for political exploitation. Gurri self-published The Revolt of the Public and the book passed largely unnoticed, but after Trump’s 2016 victory Gurri’s now-dug-up thesis was the only explanation that really fit.

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Trump had said as much in a 2013 meeting with Republican supporters — a meeting reported on years later by Politico — in which he laid out his playbook for his longshot presidential campaign. “I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me,” Trump said. When told by an attendee that the only possible way to run was through lavish spending on paid advertisements, Trump said, “I think you’re wrong” — he would reach a “mass audience” entirely through the new possibilities afforded by earned media.

Initially denied the obvious entry points to airtime in his presidential run — he lacked endorsements and funding, and was far behind rivals like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker in access to conservative media — Trump made adroit use of the new technology. Twitter seemed juvenile for a presidential candidate — nobody else was really using it — but it allowed Trump both to make himself relatable and to take his case directly to voters. He became the protagonist of the election, and, when the establishment did what it could to sideline him, he turned the establishment into the foil of his story, attacking Megyn Kelly for her coverage of him.

Trump’s use of Twitter (and Truth Social) is, of course, well known. What’s vastly underappreciated, though, is the extent to which he’s consistently been ahead of his political rivals when it comes to social media and been able to use that playbook for other forms of new media. As a centrepiece of his 2024 campaign, Trump has, as The New York Times somewhat disparagingly put it, “embarked on a cavalcade of interviews”, appearing on podcasts, live streams, and basically any form of new media he can access.

That really shouldn’t be such a big deal. 360 million people use Twitter. 540 million people listen to podcasts. The only ones who don’t, it seems, are the grandees of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden never made effective use of social media — up until Biden’s announcement of not seeking a second term — and, even Kamala Harris, who is closer in age to digital nativity, has been a less-than-enthusiastic adopter. Meanwhile, Trump’s streamed conversations over the last month brought somewhere on the order of 100 million views.

In that same time period, when Trump was embarked on his “calvacade”, Harris made one — count it — large-audience media appearance, in front of the friendly audience of CNN. She appeared in person at a large number of rallies and was also interviewed by comedian Rickey Smiley, an ABC affiliate, and a Phoenix Univision station — none of those with anything like the reach of the podcasters Trump appeared with. The YouTube stream of the Rickey Smiley interview, for instance, has attracted a pitiful 7,000 views. Her paid ads have been saturating the airwaves, she can rely on near-universal support from establishment print media and favourable coverage from network TV, with the exception of Fox. She has an army of surrogates pushing out the campaign’s messages across a variety of media sources. And her debate performance, unlike Trump’s, only proves her confidence with established media forms.

The problem is that none of this messaging takes advantage of the unique resources of new media. New media — whether podcasts or social media — is all about casual, easygoing, personality-driven conversation. In Gurri’s terms, what is happening is that the entire society is going through an emperor-has-no-clothes realisation. The immediacy of digital resources makes social media users — who are also voters — highly sceptical of anybody who over-ceremoniously cloaks themselves in the mantle of authority. In the Twitter era, everyone — the world’s richest man, world leaders, sports stars, celebrities, whatever — is reduced in the end to a common denominator: they are individuals sitting behind a device and tapping into it, just like anybody else. From the perspective of “authority”, that’s something close to an existential threat — a difficulty in reestablishing the lineaments of majesty. But, from the perspective of a democratic politician who relies on popularity and relatability for legitimacy, it should be a golden opportunity. And, for every day that Harris doesn’t appear on general-interest podcasts, she is, essentially, leaving votes on the table. The Harris campaign seems finally, belatedly, to be recognising what should have been obvious a month ago, with Harris appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast and with the campaign announcing a media blitz which included an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But it may be already be too late. For every day that Harris hasn’t made a new media appearance, she has missed a chance to set the narrative for the campaign.

There is nothing whatsoever that Trump does that digital media users can’t do as well. Anybody under 40 or so can do it in their sleep. But the Democratic Party still hasn’t managed a generational handoff from the Clinton era. They both don’t recognise the power of the new modes of communication and don’t know how to exploit it. Those who do — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have a vast leg-up compared with the rest of the party. And, really, that is the entire explanation of the AOC phenomenon. She tweets like a pro, she’s relatable, and she makes herself the protagonist of her story. It’s not a hard playbook to emulate, but you need to be digital media-conversant to emulate it.

Instead, though, the Dems have moved in the other direction. They have come to rely on their stranglehold over traditional media. They have newspapers, network TV, public radio. They have a war chest that gives them an advantage in all traditional ad markets. And none of that is to be underestimated — that arsenal of communicative technology has enabled them to make inroads particularly with seniors, a traditionally Republican bloc.

What the Democrats, like some red-coated, overly regimented colonial army, fail to recognise, however, is that this is asymmetrical warfare. None of their preferred modes of communication make inroads into the younger or low-information voters who are, at this stage, most likely to swing the election. The Republicans already have talk radio and Fox-world. Through Trump’s media dexterity, they have done very well in social media and, now, on podcasts.

When we assess the results of this election, what we likely will assess isn’t issues or even messaging but modalities of communication. The parties have swerved into very different communications bubbles. This has been the case at least since the era of media revolutionary Rush Limbaugh and talk radio’s shift towards conservatism, while print media and network television tended to skew more liberal. But now, with media ever-more-siloed, those distinctions are only exacerbated across a variety of forms. What the Democrats are still failing to get through their heads is that it’s the newer, more dynamic communications technologies where the more effective persuasion can take place — and which require an aggressive, personable, let-it-all-hang-out approach. Harris should be more than able to hold her own in those formats. But if she doesn’t visit them, she’ll effectively be passing over undecided votes — and those votes will cost her the election.

Only hours later, some Twitter wag superimposed a map of the Mediterranean over the continental United States, and got 10,000 retweets after adding the caption: “Scientists say this map represents the US in 30 years if we don’t reverse climate change.” Happily, Reuters Fact Check were on hand to point out that this was inaccurate.

Today a new breed of media prefects are waiting to weigh in on whether the President shat himself, or whether the Adriatic will drown the population of Cincinnati. Fact-checking sites have exploded: from PolitiFact to News Guard to the European Journalism Training Association’s EU Fact Check. But as ever with bodge jobs, they are a solution to the problems created by the last bodge job.

Fifteen years ago, in a kinder gentler age of the libertarian internet, a few amateur sleuths over at Snopes would bust urban myths about disappearing hitchhikers or In The Air Tonight. They didn’t “check facts” so much as deliver zingy reports on the genesis of rumours. But more and more, the fact check has become the epistemic peg around which everything else is expected to pivot.

Social media giants, as the Facebook leaks revealed, are very aware that they’ve built a world that thrives on cheap talk and rumour. They know they can’t put that genie back in the bottle without dismantling their entire business model. So in a world that requires politicians to puff their cheeks and fume about how something must be done, the giants have taken to paying for fact checks. These are the tithes they pay, the indulgences they gain. Chucking some change at fact-checking is very cost effective way of buying up the most facile tier of public opinion, and keeping the regulators from the door that bit longer.

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Take the British fact-checking company, Full Fact. In 2019, it was paid £1.1 million by Facebook, and £206,500 by Google, a sum that has allowed them to take on a staff that would be the envy of many of the newsrooms they pass verdicts on. It is only a small irony that, after reducing reporters to desk-bound re-writers by stripping newspapers of their funding model, Big Tech is paying to have some of their reporting fibre reinserted, by recruiting a new breed of professional to back leap in afterwards.

Full Fact says that its funding doesn’t compromise its integrity. But the fact that the boilerplate California progressives over at Facebook and Google chose to fund them in the first place obviously does. How could they not make decisions based on keeping the giants on side? The Intercept journalist and professional gadfly Glenn Greenwald picked up on this principal-agent problem only a few weeks ago, tweeting that:

Two of the hugest scams are "fact-checking" agencies and those that purport to fight "extremism" online. They all push the same ideology, are run by the same small set of people (see below), and are usually funded by the same small handful of billionaires: https://t.co/te8BxuYtXL

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 13, 2021

Greenwald was picking up on comments from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about NewsGuard. As the two dissidents point out, as well as Big Tech there is Big NGO: overly moneyed world changers such as Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society group, give conspicuously. It’s hard to imagine anyone in their NGO echelons arguing for, say, “closed borders” or “foreign aid reductions”. And it is just as hard to imagine the fact-checkers they have funded actively aiming to check a certain kind of fact that is values-aligned.

During the summer of George Floyd, for instance, fact checkers raced to the scene of facts that supported the BLM cause. For instance, they dismantled “a bar graph showing ‘murder of blacks and whites in the US, 2013’ broken down by the races of the perpetrators”, as Reuters Fact Check described one anti-BLM meme. “While the graph itself is accurate, the way it is presented is misleading,” they then concluded. Some might have said the same thing about the way they headlined the piece: “Misleading bar graph presents distorted interpretation of black and white murder rates.”

But even beyond how the tech giants select their checkers, who funds them, or what that funding model incentivises, there will always remain a simple question of irreducibility. At what point does the eternal human mist of subjectivity, data and language ever actually congeal into one perfect cube called a “fact”?

Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams, both professors at Cornell University, lay out some of this in Scientific American. Confronted with a crowd bearing placards, they noted, experimental evidence suggests that those of a certain political bent will see a mob; those of another will see a rights struggle.

This experimental evidence closely correlated with the real-world evidence last year, during the BLM Summer: while 69% of Republicans considered the videotaped demonstrations in Portland, Kenosha and New York to be riots, only 30% of Democrats did. When Keynes said “When the facts change, I change my mind”, he forgot to add that when the mind changes, the facts go with it.

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The litany of comedy fact checks is long. “After about five years, approximately half of [German] refugees are employed” is rated by EU Fact Check as “mostly true,” even though 51% are unemployed — and even of the employed, only 68% are actually in full time work. The reason for the rating is apparently that the timeline of the study doesn’t exactly coincide with the length of the claim. “Does the timeline of events on Jan. 6 prove Trump could not have incited the attack?” CNN’s Fact Check asks this week. “This is misleading,” it happily concludes.

And the full weight of systemic and cognitive bias on display is evident in one immortal zinger that came from Associated Press’s Fact Check Unit a year ago:

“President Donald Trump claimed accomplishments he didn’t earn on the pandemic, energy and veterans at a Republican convention finale that also heard Black Lives Matter baselessly accused of coordinating violent protests across the country.” 

Often, the outcome simply depends on the framing. If asked to “prove” something “false”, the conditions will be very different from if you are asked to “prove” it to be “true.” Many will unconsciously adjust the settings to match the outcome preferred.

A hundred years ago, Ludwig Wittgenstein eviscerated the “logical positivist” philosophical movement, which wanted to create an algebra of human meanings. He showed how there was no single way of coding a statement so that it could be parsed as “true” or “false” that didn’t in turn leave it subject to huge error bars of ambiguity. If only someone had passed the message onto the fact checking industry, it might have saved everyone some time.

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Are the conspiracy cranks a little bit right?

By Gavin Haynes

If there’s no such thing as objectivity, there’s still impartiality. And fact checkers can’t even manage that. They were meant to bring back the rigour that had been throttled out of journalism. Instead, they’re most comprised of sweaty 23-year-olds in graduate jobs rummaging through the usual partisan sources, then comparing them with the often progressive-partisan fact mills of Wikipedia then spitting out the appropriate Woozle. No wonder many have intuited that a red flag from a fact checker actually denotes “things that might be true but are unsayable in the present climate”.

One solution proposed by the Cornell duo of Williams and Ceci involves leaning into that polarised political climate. Rather than having a single set of fact checkers, you should have two rival teams, recruited precisely for their ideological differences. But even here, the authors are quite gloomy in their prognosis. We shouldn’t imagine that this will get us to the “truth”, they warn. But it will at least reveal the underlying human biases that might be skewing our perception of it.

That might turn out to be a more useful function than they realise. The problem that confronts all of us is to neither lapse into cynicism about the existence of facts, nor slip into hubris about our ability to see them. In order to do that, we need to treat fact-checkers not as arbiters, but as just another branch of the media-political system that it seeks to impose its writ upon. Perhaps sensing that the game is up — or merely sensing that they have to expand to fit the donor funds on offer — fact checking orgs have increasingly begun to write what are essentially articles. In other words, they’re ripe to be red flagged, ripped apart or rinsed by others.

For a year, beer, wine and spirits had been illegal throughout the United States. From a public health perspective, it seemed a reasonable enough measure. That alcohol was a dangerous substance was clear: disease, violence, poverty and crime were intimately bound up with it. Even now, despite its failure, it is known as the “noble experiment”. But was it right to prevent people from making drinks they not only enjoyed, but that also served important cultural and religious purposes? Not for the first time, Americans found themselves torn in a balance between freedom and security — nor for the last.

Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China. Faced with this threat, the world’s governments responded by closing schools, banning people from meeting, forcing entrepreneurs to shut their businesses and making ordinary people wear face masks. Like prohibition, this experiment provoked a debate. In all the democracies of the world, freedom was weighed against what was perceived as security; individual rights versus what was considered best for public health.

Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word “experiment” had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered.

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This experiment was judged early on as “a disaster” (Time magazine), a “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times), “deadly folly” (the Guardian). In Germany, Focus magazine described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake. But these countries — all countries — were also conducting an experiment, in that they were testing unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of a virus. Sweden simply chose one path, the rest of Europe another.

The hypothesis of the outside world was that Sweden’s freedom would be costly. The absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would “save lives.”

Many Swedes were persuaded by this hypothesis. “Shut down Sweden to protect the country,” wrote Peter Wolodarski, perhaps the country’s most powerful journalist. Renowned infectious diseases experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists from all over the country warned of the consequences of the government’s policy. Researchers from Uppsala University, the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm produced a model powered by supercomputers that predicted 96,000 Swedes would die before the summer of 2020.

At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.

But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.

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This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist. When the Wall Street Journal recently published a report from Portugal, it described how the country “offered a glimpse” of what it would be like to live with the virus. This new normal involved, among other things, vaccine passports and face masks at large events like football matches. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that in Sweden you can go to football matches without wearing a facemask, or that Sweden — with a smaller proportion of Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic — had ended virtually all restrictions. Sweden has been living with the virus for some time.

The WSJ is far from alone in its selective reporting. The New York Times, Guardian, BBC, The Times, all cheerleaders for lockdowns, can’t fathom casting doubt on their efficacy.

And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach.

DeSantis’s counterpart in New York, the embattled Democrat Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was offered a book deal for his “Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”. A few months ago, he was forced to resign after harassing a dozen women. But the result of his “leadership lesson” lives on: 0.29% of his state’s residents died of Covid-19. The equivalent figure for Florida — the state that not only allowed the most freedom, but also has the second highest proportion of pensioners in the country — is 0.27%.

Once again, an underreported fact.

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From a human perspective, it is easy to understand the reluctance to face these numbers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of people have been deprived of their freedom, and millions of children have had their education gravely damaged, for little demonstrable gain. Who wants to admit that they were complicit in this? But what one American judge called the “laboratories of democracy” have conducted their experiment — and the result is increasingly clear.

Exactly why it turned out this way is harder to explain, but perhaps the “noble experiment” of the 1920s in the US can offer some clues. Prohibition didn’t win because the freedom argument prevailed. Nor was it because the substance itself had become any less harmful to people’s health. The reason for the eventual demise of the alcohol ban was that it simply didn’t work. No matter what the law said, Americans didn’t stop drinking alcohol. It simply moved from bars to “speakeasies”. People learned to brew their own spirits or smuggle it in from Canada. And the American mafia had a field day.

The mistake the American authorities made was to underestimate the complexity of society. Just because they banned alcohol did not mean that alcohol disappeared. People’s drives, desires and behaviours were impossible to predict or fit into a plan. A hundred years later, a new set of authorities made the same mistake. Closing schools didn’t stop children meeting in other settings; when life was extinguished in cities, many fled them, spreading the infection to new places; the authorities urged their citizens to buy food online, without thinking about who would transport the goods from home to home.

If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.

It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again.

This is an edited translation of an article that first appeared in Sydsvenskan.

This mindset has been on full display this very week, during which the American press has offered readers and viewers pretty much nonstop coverage of an utterly stupid controversy. If you’ve been lucky enough to remain unaware of it, the basic gist is as follows: on October 30, Associated Press reporter Colleen Long tweeted that the pilot on her Southwest Airlines flight from Houston to Albuquerque had signed off after landing with the phrase, “Let’s go Brandon” — to the shock and horror of several passengers, who let out “audible gasps” upon hearing it.

“Let’s go Brandon,” in case you missed it, is a Right-wing meme that originated at a Nascar race. The crowd was engaged in a raucous chant of “Fuck Joe Biden!” which was clearly audible in the background of an NBC Sports interview with Brandon Brown, a charismatic underdog driver who had just won his first race — but the interviewer claimed, bizarrely, that the crowd was actually shouting, “Let’s go Brandon.”

Whether she genuinely misheard the chant or was only pretending to, the incident went viral. First, Right-wing Americans cited it as an example of the mainstream media’s untrustworthiness — which they believe is pervasive — when it comes to any story that’s unflattering to Democrats. But then, inevitably, the phrase became a meme: a fun, new, coded way to say “Fuck Joe Biden” without actually saying it.

In the weeks since, “Let’s go Brandon” has popped up in a number of places, including an October 21 speech on the House floor by Rep. Bill Posey of Florida. But it’s this alleged airplane incident, and the response to it, that reveal something truly fascinating about its place in our cultural moment.

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Based on nothing but Long’s twitter thread — in which she describes demanding access to the locked cockpit in order to confront the pilot — the media sphere erupted with a response that one might generously describe as disproportionate (or, less generously, as a hysterical pearl-clutching panic). Former federal agent and CNN analyst Asha Rangappa compared the meme to an ISIS loyalty oath. Others suggested the phrase indicated a state of impaired judgment, public drunkenness, or maybe even dangerous rage. One widely shared comment, purportedly from an anonymous pilot, stopped just short of painting the accused as a Trump-loving suicide bomber who might well crash the plane to make a political point.

Even the more restrained critiques were illuminating in their tone. Consider this representative tweet from Regina Marston, a 2020 Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives:

Let me be clear @SouthwestAir we need a firing right now of the pilot who thought he was going to disrespect the @potus while being paid by you. Figure it out. #BoycottSWAirlines

— HereForTrumpGoingToJail (@RegMCali) October 31, 2021

It’s important to note that all this conversation and coverage surrounds an incident that may not have even happened. Nobody apart from Long seems to have heard the pilot’s comment, and it’s easy to imagine a misunderstanding. Long was working on a story about the “Brandon” meme, and would’ve been on high alert for anything that sounded remotely like the phrase. But the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros were facing off in baseball’s World Series the night of the flight: if I had to bet, I’d put my money on the reporter imagining “Brandon” when the pilot said “Let’s go Braves” (not a political comment, but a good-natured dig at all the Houston-based passengers who would’ve been rooting for their home team.)

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But let’s leave aside the question of whether this even happened: it’s become irrelevant. Let’s also leave aside the question of what an appropriate response would be, if it had. Let’s forget about everything except this, the heart of the complaint: that a man with a PA system and a captive audience of a hundred or so air travellers used this platform, however briefly, to slightly disrespect the president. And in response, the people in charge of our national conversation have called him a terrorist and demanded the man be fired… whoever he is.

What?

We’ve just come off four years of barely-veiled innuendo about the size of Trump’s hands; of cheering on the Congresswoman who publicly referred to him as a “motherfucker”; of cartoons and T-shirts and statues and giant inflatable blimps depicting the president as a big fat babyman with a tiny little wiener. We defended the comedienne who posed with a latex mock-up of the President’s severed head. But suddenly, in 2021, “Let’s go Brandon” is a step too far?

It is a plot twist that beggars belief: a progressive Left that once prided itself on speaking truth to power — in a country founded on cheeky irreverence for authority, no less! — transformed virtually overnight into a pack of quavering church ladies who’ll thank you to watch your language, mister.

The hysteria over “Let’s go Brandon” is the most recent and potent example of the incredible thin-skinned-ness of today’s Left, but it’s also part of a trend. Biden has been by turns evasive, irritable, or simply absent when it comes to interacting with the press since his inauguration — and the press, which prided itself on its antagonistic relationship with the White House during the Trump years, has been comparably obsequious to the new administration. (White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki even received a glowing profile, complete with photos by Annie Liebovitz, in Vogue.) Comedians lampoon him less, and less cruelly, than they did his predecessor; some prefer to mock the President’s critics, rather than the man himself. Even the invocation of “terrorism” in response to the pilot’s alleged comment isn’t without precedent; since the January 6 Capitol riot, a with-us-or-against-us mentality has emerged amongst many pundits who are liable to paint anyone who opposes Biden as a de facto Trumpian insurrectionist.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

Some will say that this is pure, fearful authoritarianism. Like a substitute teacher who senses herself on the verge of losing control of her unruly classroom of snot-nosed 12-year-olds, the American Left cannot, will not, tolerate insubordination. Not now, not after we came this close to another four years with Trump in the White House. Not when our democracy itself is at risk!

But it’s that terror, that sense that the balance of political power continues to hang by a thread, that reveals a deeper truth. Republicans might be the ones who pushed the false narrative of a stolen presidency, who rushed the Capitol to interrupt last year’s election certification, who continue to grumble about how Joe Biden doesn’t really belong in the White House.

But Democrats do not contradict this narrative — and in fact are only strengthening it — when we insist on protecting Joe Biden from the ordinary irreverence that we’ve always displayed for our political leaders. Being able to say “Fuck the President,” even in so many actual words, is one of America’s most fundamental freedoms, a fact that anyone who wants to be president has always been expected to both understand and respect. And when we suddenly try to change the rules for Biden, it only betrays a bizarre lack of confidence in his ability to fulfill the requirements of the office — and reinforces the decidedly Trumpian narrative that he’s something less than a legitimate Potus. It says that his hold on power is so tenuous that we have to protect it at any cost, even if it means punishing ordinary Americans for what would under any other circumstances be protected, even celebrated, speech.

“This is not normal” was a continuous refrain after 2016, a phrase we uttered over and over during Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House. And it was true: Trump was a uniquely terrible president, one who made an insane, albeit unsuccessful, play to hang onto power after the American people voted him out. But Biden? Biden represented the triumph of democracy over this bizarre threat. Biden represented a return to business as usual. Biden was elected like any other president, inaugurated like any other president, and, despite an unprecedented tantrum from his predecessor and the unparalleled pressures of a global pandemic, has governed during his first year in office like any other president. Biden, we sighed with relief, was going to make American normal again.

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But the fact that the President’s supporters don’t seem to accept he’s one of the most powerful men on the planet? That’s not normal. Nor is their insistence on treating his presidency as if it’s perpetually on the verge of collapse — to the point where “Let’s go Brandon” represents an existential threat that must be fiercely and forcefully stamped out.

Perhaps this is what happens to a resistance so drunk on its own disempowerment that it doesn’t know how to rule responsibly — a movement so invested in its underdog status that it never considered what to do when it wins. This wildly reactive attitude took over in the wake of 2016, when Trump’s election win was unthinkable, impossible, unacceptable; it meant that something had gone horribly wrong. In the four-year war that ensued, we became not just reactive but myopic: our orange enemy loomed so large in our imaginations that we couldn’t see anything else, not even the horizon beyond him. Beating him was all that mattered. We didn’t even want to win; we just wanted him to lose.

And he did. But much like Trump himself, too many powerful people on the Left have spent the past year acting as if they don’t entirely believe it.

The problem is, Trump can afford to keep pretending that the 2020 election result might not stick. Democrats, on the other hand, are running out of time to embrace reality. Once, we spoke truth to power; now, we have the power. We have the presidency. We have two short years remaining to get things done in Washington before the next election cycle fully kicks in. And if we don’t accept this, if we don’t learn to tolerate the annoyed, angry — even profane — dissent of the losers who have now found themselves pushed to the political margins, it may be a very long time before we get another chance at power again.

When Antony Blinken was selected as Secretary of State, Foreign Policy magazine hailed it as a “return to normalcy for weary diplomats”. Finally, when President Biden was elected, the New York Times raved that it represented an end to “four tumultuous years under Trump”;  the Los Angeles Times’s editorial board welcomed his election as a victory “for the American people”.

Biden, Blinken and Sullivan — three men who, less than a year ago, were cheered on as the sensible, cool-headed triumvirate capable of saving the West. Today that promise has been sullied. Instead, they will be remembered as three of the key figures responsible for the tragedy now unfolding in Afghanistan.

Until the sudden and complete collapse of the Nato-backed government in Kabul, the Biden administration had enjoyed its very own “special relationship” with the American media. They were frequently thrown soft-ball questions. They were always allowed to point to the villainous Donald Trump whenever they needed a scapegoat. The media corps is always on their side — and who can blame them? You can’t ask tough questions while munching on cookies from the Press Secretary’s mother-in-law. That would be rude.

To listen to Biden’s media cheerleaders over the past seven months has been about as exciting as reading Pravda. “America is back. Trump was an aberration. We are going to bring Americans together and heal. We’re giving people hope and change. Build back better. Let’s get high on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).” And so on. God knows it was tedious. But Biden’s team was more than happy to stick to this hymn sheet. Nobody leaked.

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

You would have thought that the new administration would have been able to exploit for just a bit longer the narrative of an experienced, selfless, prudent President Biden — the steady hand after the wrecking ball. Where Donald Trump was off-putting, rash and rude, Joe Biden could so easily be presented as cool — those Aviators, man! — thoughtful and cooperative. In short, Biden was poised to become to the United States what Queen Elizabeth is to the United Kingdom: a rock of reliability and continuity, an embodiment of national pride and humility all at once.

Instead, seven months into the administration’s tenure, the Biden administration hunkered down and made a decision that would erase years of progress. It’s all too easy to picture the various individuals, all at the height of their professional careers, huddled together in the Situation Room. Some old and wise. Some fresh-faced and gung-ho. All fooled by the conviction that they can do no wrong.

While Team Biden already resorted to its standard fallback of pointing the finger at Trump — who, admittedly, initiated negotiations with the Taliban and made the original deal to exit Afghanistan — it is the current President who accelerated the plan for full military withdrawal before even attempting to repatriate all American citizens, evacuate our Afghan allies or secure any guarantees on human rights (particularly for Afghan women and girls). It was Blinken who told Senator Lindsey Graham during his confirmation hearing that any US agreement with the Taliban should “absolutely” be “conditions-based”. Where are those conditions now?

Just weeks ago, Biden assured us there would be no images of Americans climbing on roofs to evacuate in helicopters like in Saigon. Now, with the August 31^st deadline looming, it seems increasingly likely that some Americans might not make it out at all. Those who have applied for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) feel hopelessly abandoned. Our Nato allies look on with horror.

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America's spiteful foreign policy

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Speculation over what compelled Biden’s national security team to withdraw so suddenly without a proper contingency plan remains ongoing. Theories range from shrill claims about how “these men must be evil” to “experts” praising what they deem a calculated, realist approach to a never-ending war that was sapping attention and resources away from the bigger threats posed by China.

The more convincing argument, however, is more straightforward: The Biden administration screwed up because they had grown accustomed to uncritical support from the press. Instead of upholding their traditional role of checking and vetting individuals and decisions, for seven months the media has scarcely offered up a critical word of Biden. It was almost the exact opposite for Trump, who came in for relentless criticism — some of it fictitious.

Of course, nobody enjoys being hauled over the coals by the press corps. But it focuses the mind — unlike canine adulation. If enough people tell you that you’re going to be the most transformative president since Lyndon Johnson, it’s easy to forget how Johnson’s presidency ended.

That honeymoon period is over now. The situation in Kabul is now so dire that there is no option but to report on the failures of the administration. Even our new pedigree of activists journalists, for whom reporting is a form of proselytising, can no longer play defence for the President because the images coming out of Afghanistan are indefensible. When they learn that a toddler of one of our Afghan interpreters has been crushed to death in the vast and desperate scrum outside Kabul airport, Americans are rightly angry.

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Bernard-Henri Levy

And so Biden now cuts an altogether different figure. After his briefings, he scurries away, fearing an inquisition. Meanwhile, his press secretary is starting to look like all press secretaries: her jaw set, her eyes tired, her implausible talking points delivered almost defiantly.

For Afghanistan, the return of a critical press corps comes too late. But for Americans there is a lesson to be learned. Perhaps if the liberal media had done a better job during confirmation hearings and appointments, the situation in Afghanistan could have unfolded differently, with more effective leaders at the helm. Perhaps if earlier policy blunders had been subjected to closer scrutiny, this one might not have been so casually made.

“Democracy dies in darkness” was one of the many facile slogans adopted by the anti-Trump press in 2017, as if only their fearless reporting stood between America and a 1930s-style fascist dystopia. But as we are now witnessing, competent government instead dies when the lights are dimmed to flatter a new administration. When journalists and editors suspend their critical faculties, tragedy is bound to follow.

If we do end or ease the Covid lockdown, it probably won’t end up being on the advice of epidemiologists or even economists — it’ll be because the way the media shapes the story brings an irresistible pressure to bear. “How we end lockdown” is now the main topic of conversation. And though there’s a range of views represented in the conversation, the fact that we’re having the conversation at all creates its own momentum.

The idea of the Overton Window — a term minted to describe the range of acceptable opinion within a given community — is relevant here. At present the parameters of the debate are “stay the same”, which is by default the extreme left-hand curtain on the Overton Window, and “open everything back up for business” which is by default the other end of the scale: meaning that “moderate opinion” is, rhetorically at least, somewhere in the middle.

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Why I'm reactivating World of Warcraft

By Sam Leith

Why are we having this debate now? It’s because we need to have a debate and that’s the only one in town. That applies to social media as well as the so-called MSM — and there’s an argument that the news reflects public impatience as much as it shapes it. But with “stay as we are” as the dreary old fixed option at one end of the scale, the moderate middle will only be pulled further out as contrarians and freethinkers push the other end of the window further and further in the hope of having something fresh to say.

I don’t make, or pretend to make, any judgment on the science. It may, for all I know, be the case that we should long since have galloped out of lockdown and even now be handshaking and air-kissing our way back to prosperity. But, for all I know, it could equally well be the case that we should continue doing exactly, but exactly, what we’re doing now for the next six months. And if the latter is, objectively, the case, it’s going to be near to impossible for politicians to argue for it — and to keep arguing for it.

The problem I point to isn’t to do with virology. It’s narratological: it’s to do with the shape of storytelling and the weird metabolism of the media cycle. News has its own imperatives, and they are nearly completely independent of the real world. Every news editor’s question is: “How do we take the story on?” The answer can never be: “We can’t.” If there are no new facts, there’s got to be a new analysis, a new spin, a new controversy, a new debate. A story big enough to stay on the front page needs to find a way of staying on the front page.

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By Freddie Sayers

We are simply incapable of running a front page that reads: “Same as yesterday.” It’s close to unthinkable. Indeed, we’d unthinkingly risk lives to avoid it. We all hear a lot about news media’s inbuilt negativity bias (“if it bleeds it leads”). But what you might call the stuff happening bias — the very reason news is called news — is dismayingly easy to forget or discount.

That’s why, as crime reporters know, a week or two into a high-profile missing persons investigation where there are no new developments, the story tends to pivot to asking questions about “flaws in the investigation”. Then we move onto wild theories, monstering suspects with weird hair and all the rest of it. The Daily Express has spent more than 10 years splashing Madeleine McCann despite little or no new information coming to light.

With Covid, we had the calls for lockdown and the arguments about that. We had the lockdown itself. We had the stuff about Blitz spirit, and the debate about whether the stuff about Blitz spirit was appropriate or not. We had the righteous howl-rounds shaming people playing frisbee in the park or walking on the Brecon Beacons. We had the righteous howl-rounds shaming the police for being too mean to people playing frisbee in the park or walking on the Brecon Beacons. Then we got hung up on death statistics. As they went up, and up, they fed the beast excellently. But now that the curve is flattening, they’re getting a bit ho-hum: 400-odd citizens dying of one disease in 24 hours? Not such a big deal when we had 800 two weeks ago. “How do we take the story on?”

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Why the English sacrificed liberty for lockdown

By James Kirkup

We had, as all that petered out, the beginnings of the blame-game: did the government act too slowly? Was Dominic Cummings on the wrong committee? And if you don’t think that stuff affects government, I have a bridge going cheap. Why else is Matt Hancock plucking round-numbered testing ambitions out of the air and making himself a hostage to them? Why else did we announce that we were spending zillions on “game-changing” home tests before we discovered they didn’t work? Why else did we get flares sent up about headline-friendly, household-name companies like Dyson being hired to make ventilators — which, again, turned to be a distinctly half-cocked initiative? Why else, as the bodies mount up in morgues, is Downing Street spending its time issuing detailed denials of Sunday Times articles?

I kind of knew something was up when I was asked, as a freelance, to contribute to a feature on what I’m most looking forward to doing once lockdown was over. Y’know: go to the pub, fly to Malaga, give my old mum a hug, have a fight at a football match or what have you. And I got this request on week one or week two of lockdown. The following day another outlet asked me to contribute to a near-identical feature. Everyone’s done one of those by now.

I remember thinking even then: guys, you’re shooting your bolts a bit early on all this. If you run all your lockdown features in the first two weeks, what‘s going to be next? It’s the same for all media. We’ve already burned through Grayson Perry’s art class, Kirstie Allsop’s craft class, Jamie’s bloody tin can recipes. We’ve winkled out Vera Lynn. We’ve had the Rolling Stones playing a Zoom gig. Every books page has run its “shelf isolation” feature on lockdown comfort-reading. Every cookery page has done its make-your-own sourdough.

The idea that lockdown might be boring — might, in fact, need to go on for much, much longer than it retains its novelty value — is scary to many of us but it’s really, really scary to news and features editors. And that means it’s scary to politicians. Which means that, one way or another, and whatever the papers tell you, what happens over the next few weeks isn’t going to be guided by the logic of science or economics, but by the logic of narrative.  That logic is the logic of the small child in the back of a car kicking the front seat and saying: “Are we there yet?”

And that’s something all of us should find really, really scary.

We’ve never met, but we do have a connection. We’ve both lived in the same house on Heathbank Road in Stockport. The Sweets moved out in 1983; you moved in about three years later when you started working at BBC Manchester. Coincidence? Well, yes. Even David Icke would have trouble drawing a sinister line between those two dots. But it’s a coincidence that means whenever I clock you on the telly, I think of my mum and dad.

I thought of them this week, when I saw you on ITV, sharing the contents of your inquiring mind. I found myself remembering a taxi ride I took with my mum in September 2017. We were going to visit my dad after his cancer operation, and the driver wanted to tell us why he’d voted for Brexit. The EU, he said, was a secret plot to re-establish Nazi rule across the continent, and it had to be stopped. As you might appreciate, this wasn’t what either me or my mum wanted to hear at this moment. After we came back from the hospital I rang the cab firm to ask them never to send that driver to us again — rather, I suppose, as hundreds of people rang your employer this week to complain about you.

Let’s remind ourselves of what happened, shall we? On the Easter Monday edition of This Morning, your reporter Alice Beer was debunking one of the more exotic problems of the current crisis — the spate of attacks on 5G phone masts, carried out, it would seem, by people who believe them to be exacerbating or even facilitating the spread of Covid-19. You agreed emphatically with Alice, so I think we can assert that you don’t really believe that a virus can be transferred from bats to humans via radio waves. But the caveat you issued did leave some room for doubt. “What I don’t accept,” you said, doing that stern look I think you may have copied from Huw Edwards, “is mainstream media immediately slapping that down as not true when they don’t know it’s not true … it’s very easy to say it is not true because it suits the state narrative.”

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How Boris became the body politic

By Matthew Sweet

I detect several problems here. The first is the idea that there is any measurable distance between you and the mainstream media. Eamonn, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are the mainstream media. You are to television what the individually-wrapped Weetabix is to a hotel breakfast bar — always present, whether requested or not, and rarely the subject of a strong opinion.

The second problem resides in that little cluster of negatives with which you adumbrate your position on the limits of knowledge. There are, I suppose, an infinite number of things that we don’t know are not true. We don’t know, for instance, that you are not a homunculus operated by a highly-trained owl, though we would be suspicious of anybody who suggested this was a question that merited investigation. It’s harder, however, to push a proposition about corona and the phone signal into this category — or, indeed, any proposition about the health dangers of 5G — because, unlike the possibility that you are a bird-driven human simulacrum, science has already chewed this over very thoroughly, and found no evidence that any such dangers exist.

So I wonder why you said this? Perhaps you read a May 2019 piece in the Daily Mail, quoting the research of the Californian academic who described 5G as a “massive public health experiment”. (But, not, I’d guess, the subsequent article in Scientific American that concluded that his work “pivots on fringe views and fatally flawed conjecture, attempting to circumvent scientific consensus with scaremongering.”) Maybe you’ve been monitoring the Twitter feed of Piers Corbyn, the meteorologist brother of the former Labour leader, through which he shares his view that Bill Gates and George Soros have faked the corona pandemic as part of their bid to surveil the world’s population with 5G and cull it with vaccines.

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Or maybe you’ve been streaming the 5G-themed fireside chats hosted by the American writer Naomi Wolf, in which she declares that “there’s almost no objective reporting in mainstream media about the real dangers of 5G,” and warns that “your DNA changes to a precancerous condition when you’re around these cell towers”. Her own reporting in this field includes publishing a link to an approving account of a man named Mark Steele, who is convinced that Gateshead council is poisoning its electorate with 5G transmitters hidden inside the streetlamps. (No such transmitters exist.) Dr Wolf also believes that 5G may be responsible for the headaches and tinnitus suffered by her neighbours in New York. “Everybody who lives in my apartment [block],” she says, “is very much more uncomfortable.” I suppose that’s one explanation.

Conspiracist thinking thrives in anxious times. Corona has made it bloom like mould on toast. The Times caught two British academics from Russell Group universities sharing speculations that the virus is a biological weapon. A journalist for Metro announced that he’d submitted an FOI request to St Thomas’s NHS Trust, suspicious that Boris Johnson had somehow faked his stay in the intensive care unit. (“The PR timing,” tweeted Marcus J Ball, “is just too perfect.”) London Live, the cable television station associated with George Osborne’s London Evening Standard, made the bizarre editorial decision to air an 105-minute interview with David Icke, in which the former Coventry City goalkeeper was permitted to serve a Covid-scented platter of half-digested matter from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I’ll throw you a bone, here, Eamonn. Intelligent people are not free from these predilections. The Nobel prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis doubts the link between HIV and Aids and strongly suspects that he was once abducted by extraterrestrial racoons. So your willingness to leave a space for conspiracy theories on This Morning does not necessarily mean that you are an idiot. And such an instinct may not always be misguided. Conspiracist thinking can sometimes be virtuous. Ask Bob Woodward, who investigated Watergate, or Chris Mullin, who led the campaign to prove the innocence of the Birmingham Six.

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Those who engage in it, however, need to protect themselves against its corrupting effects. The philosopher Quassim Cassam is, I think, our wisest writer on this matter. I’d heartily recommend his work to you. He points out that conspiracy theories can reduce our confidence in knowledge that there is no good reason to doubt. That Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, for instance, is a bare historical fact. But if you swim in the discourse that claims otherwise, you may find yourself describing the history of the Apollo missions as, let’s say, a “state narrative”.

Likewise, there is no reasonable evidence that the 5G phone signal carries a health risk. But there is a discourse that asserts the opposite — based on unsound extrapolations from weak studies, which have been amplified into certitudes by unreliable commentators. Now, like the Moon landings, George Soros, Zionism, Pizzagate and Atlantis, 5G has entered the repertoire of things that conspiracy theorists like to talk about — and will go on talking about until, I suspect, the arrival of 6G.

On Tuesday, as ITV totted up the complaints, you issued a statement suggesting that your remarks had been misunderstood. You reiterated your rejection of any link between Covid-19 and 5G, but then, astonishingly, repeated your original error. “Many people,” you said, “are rightly concerned and are looking for answers.” Well, there are people think that the Rothschilds were responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight 370, and we would know what to think of a broadcaster who thought such a view worth airing.

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Cassam’s book, Vices of the Mind (2019), notes that psychologists have tended to see conspiracist thinking as a problem of mindset. He prefers to regard it as an epistemic vice. A form of intellectual masturbation. And perhaps, if we think of it in this way, it might help to reduce its dangerous allure. So those inclined to regard you as the Noam Chomsky of ITV Daytime, critiquing the MSM between the Danone adverts, might be better simply to think of you as a man who gave into a weakness and discharged something unwelcome in front of his work colleagues.

Nobody would judge you for doing this at home and in private. Visit all the websites you please. Feel free to watch terms such as #soros and #EU and #fourthreich tumble from the hashtag tombola of Piers Corbyn’s twitter feed. And if you want to chat with other people online who are into this kind of stuff, then fine, it’s a free country. But for shame, Eamonn, for shame, not on the This Morning sofa. Not with your wife sitting next to you, and my mum and dad watching at home.

All the best, Matthew

At the absolute heart of our current political and cultural turmoil is the issue of authority. Epistemic authority, if you want to be fancy about it: the difficulty of knowing what’s true, and who we can trust to tell us the truth. This ties together the widespread mistrust of “elites” and the “mainstream media”, the fear about the way in which data can be used to manipulate us, the notorious rejection of “experts” and the universal scourge of “fake news”.

So if you were looking for a book that touches on this issue, but does so in an original enough way to mark it out from its hordes of competitors – and an enjoyable enough way to be read on a sun-lounger – you could do a lot worse than Michael Blastland’s thought-provoking The Hidden Half: How The World Conceals Its Secrets.

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What's the point of political fiction?

By Sam Leith

There are scores of books – from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow to Hans Rosling’s Factfulness – that investigate the cognitive biases and blind spots in the human brain, which form the basis for behavioural economics and the dark psychological arts of political campaigning. We’ve all now read a lot about the recency effect, availability biases, confirmation bias, anchoring and all the rest of it; we’re quite happy to trust the idea that our own minds are untrustworthy.

Blastland’s approach differs a little bit. Instead of concentrating on how our brains lead us astray, he looks instead at how much more mysterious and unknowable the outside world actually is – even were we able to look at it straight.

And, most winningly of all, he does so with special reference to a species of parthenogenetic crayfish.

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Here’s a thing. In 1995 in an aquarium in Germany, this crayfish called the marmokrebs appeared out of nowhere. It hadn’t teleported in: it had come into being through (we assume) a random mutation. And the first thing scientists noticed about this new species was that there weren’t any males. Every marmokrebs was genetically identical: a clone of a single ancestor, the marmokrebs Eve.

This offered scientists a fantastic opportunity to disentangle nature and nurture. If members of the species are all genetically identical, any differences must – as anybody would happily concede – down to environmental influences, right? So experiments were made in which marmokrebs were raised in utterly identical controlled environments – same water pH, same food, same light, same temperature, the whole works.

And here’s the marmalade-dropper: these genetically identical, identically raised crayfish were wildly, wildly different from each other. They varied in size by as much as twenty times; they had different numbers of mouthparts and wholly different markings; they reproduced at different times; they exhibited entirely individual behaviours and preferences; they showed preferences for different foods.

In practically every respect, they were as different as could be.

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So what caused these differences if not genetics or environment? Answer: we don’t know. And most laypeople – myself included, before I’d read Blastland’s book – didn’t even know we didn’t know. You, like me, probably thought that the argument in science was between genes and environment; not between genes and environment and… this other thing. Yet this other thing – this hidden half, called “enigmatic variation” – doesn’t just apply to crayfish. As much as half of human variation can’t be accounted for, writes Blastland, by either genetic or environmental factors.

The story is a caution against the idea that such knowledge as we have is a stable or reliable thing. And from there, Blastland roams across vast areas of inquiry, showing us how little we actually know.

You all know by now, for instance, that economic forecasting isn’t hugely reliable; perhaps it seems obvious that that’s in the nature of the thing. Animal spirits, irrational exuberance and all that, right?

But economic reporting, it turns out, is just as dodgy. Not only do we not know what’s going to happen, we don’t know what did happen. ONS figures for the economy two or three years ago continue to be revised in light of what has followed – and are often subject to confidence margins that can make the difference between a boom and a recession (Blastland cites one where a fall in unemployment of 3,000 was sombrely reported with a confidence margin of +/-77,000 – i.e. the figure could be a rise of 74,000 rather than a fall of 3,000).

And then there’s the “replication crisis” in the social sciences, where results on which whole subsequent fields of research have been built turn out to be, literally, junk science. Again, as many as half of the accepted results in the whole of social science or medicine are feared to be unreliable or plain wrong. The experiments simply don’t replicate. Even medicines that we know work may only work for a tiny percentage of patients – and we can’t predict which ones and we don’t know why.

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How to end Westminster's tribal warfare

By Polly Mackenzie

Blastland’s book is invigorating, though, because it’s not making the case for disregarding all our knowledge about the world, rejecting any sort of expertise or academic data and going with our tribal instincts. Rather, he argues that we need to be humbler in our approach to what we do and don’t know and the methods we use to arrive at our conclusions.

Politicians, scientists and reporters should put aside the blustering pretence of absolute confidence and – by sharing their doubt and caution – become more trustworthy. The first step to understanding the world better is acknowledging the limits of our current understanding. To be able to say: it’s more complicated than it looks. The wise man, as it’s sometimes said, knows how little he knows.

Patreon, for those who haven’t heard of it, is an online membership platform where people can seek crowdfunding from fans. There are ‘creators’ who use the platform to get people to support them, and there are ‘supporters’ who donate to those whose work they favour. To an extent, Patreon, and companies like it, have filled the space that the internet destroyed as it popularised the idea that you can get almost anything you like for free.

So companies like YouTube, for example, allow people to infringe copyright by ripping videos from actual ‘creators’ (musicians, writers, public speakers and others). Nearly all the benefit goes to the platform; a tiny amount (through advertising) in very specific and approved cases potentially goes to the person who has posted it, and zero goes to the person who has actually created the content. This is the way that the internet has been for many years now, and it has come to be accepted as though it was part of nature, rather than the greatest intellectual property heist in history.

Enter Patreon, which has become popular because it fulfils the function of providing salaries to people the internet has already taken salaries away from. Journalists, who would once have been paid for their work when they delivered it, can instead be supported through the site. Bands and other acts who have lost the money they would have made in record or CD sales to free online streaming services can similarly make up some of that shortfall on Patreon.

Suggested reading

The growing power of the YouTube Right

By Gavin Haynes

It also secures funding for figures who might have had trouble breaking through in the old media landscape. It is in the nature of such things that anybody who has a large (or potentially large) following, but has been unable to find a place in the mainstream, is likely to be edgy – unlikely to crop up in the broadsheets or be invited on terrestrial television discussion shows.

But it is precisely these ‘edgy’ figures who have given Patreon such a headache. Take the Canadian blogger and activist Lauren Southern. Her provocative stunts (she has since branched out into documentary making) and statements all coming from a vantage point that might be described as ‘alt-light’, were never going to sit comfortably with the deciders in Silicon Valley.

Sure enough, eventually she did something which handed Patreon a reason to ban her from their platform. Southern became involved with a group called “Defend Europe” which was sailing the Mediterranean with the purpose of encouraging shiploads of migrant vessels to go back to the north African shoreline whence they came.

There was some dispute between Southern and Patreon over the ban. They claimed they blacklisted her because she was using the funding to embark on a mission which was “likely to cause loss of life”; she said she was only reporting on the group’s activism and hadn’t used any of the Patreon funds in order to do so and so was not in violation of their terms of service.

Suggested reading

Sam Harris - An atheist rock star

By Douglas Murray

But whatever the truth of the matter, you do not have to agree with Southern’s actions or her interpretation of events to recognise that Patreon’s move to bar her from their platform was a highly political one. No action had been taken by the website against groups openly supportive of illegal immigration, so taking a stance against someone clearly opposed to it opened them up to charges of clear bias.

The ban proved to be an early warning sign. At the time, back in July 2017, a number of prominent Patreon users, including Sam Harris, asked the question: if Southern wasn’t satisfying their ethical standards, then who might next fall victim to the ‘purge’? In response, Patreon’s founder and CEO Jack Conte gave personal assurances that there were specific reasons why Southern was a Patreon persona non grata and insisted that others should have no such fears.

But then, just before Christmas last year, Patreon closed the account of the controversial commentator, Carl Benjamin, also known online as Sargon of Akkad, who has almost 900,000 YouTube followers and who was reportedly earning around $12,000 a month from donations. His content roves over a lot of terrain, from political correctness to how to date women and more. It is not to everyone’s taste, but it is demonstrably to a lot of people’s taste.

In justifying their decision to ban him, Patreon claimed he had been found guilty of using “racial and homophobic slurs as insults in a conversation shared online”. In his rebuttal, Benjamin makes the claim that the conversation in question – the contents of which he disputes – was not featured on Patreon and did not have any link to its platform. Nevertheless, the ban remains in place.

In an interview with Dave Rubin, in 2017, Jack Conte had sworn that decisions to expel people from his platform were taken only on the basis of behaviour and not on the basis of political ideology.

Yet the decision to expel Benjamin from the platform without any appeal looked like a specifically ideological move. It also followed hard on the heels of the banning of other controversial Right-wing figures, including Milo Yiannopoulos and James Allsup earlier in 2018.

It was at this point that a movement away from the platform began with the announcement, by Sam Harris, that he was leaving the site. “Although I don’t share the politics of the banned members,” he wrote, “I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon’s ‘Trust and Safety’ committee.”

https://twitter.com/SamHarrisOrg/status/1074504882210562048

Then, at the beginning of this year, Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson (who has been one of the most successful and high-profile users of Patreon) jointly announced their withdrawal from the platform.

In none of these cases has the choice been made easily or glibly. It takes time to grow support on a crowd-funding platform, and switching to another platform will doubtless mean that some of those supporters will be lost along the way.

It remains to be seen whether Patreon will do anything to stem the flow and whether other platforms will be able to match its success. But in the meantime there are a number of important points to be made about its online experiment.

Patreon should have seen this coming. It should have anticipated – just as Facebook should have – that it was going to become an arbiter of what is or is not acceptable speech. As Conte’s interview with Rubin showed, these companies are now attempting to solve dilemmas which, with a little foresight, could have perfectly easily been avoided. If they had stuck to only banning people if their activities were illegal, or if the ‘Trust and safety’ committee’s guidelines had been explicit from the outset rather than a wildly evolving work in progress, then users could have known what they were signing up to and the company would have been within its rights to expel those who broke the rules.

Suggested reading

What's the point of the Intellectual Dark Web?

By Douglas Murray

The second point is that we are seeing John O’ Sullivan‘s law in action in the tech world. That law (which states that all institutions that are not explicitly Right-wing will drift to the Left over time) would seem to be playing out at some of the most important companies in Silicon Valley. And given that Twitter, Patreon and various other online companies started from a fairly Left-wing position, it’s unlikely their direction will be reversed.

Doubtless the political slant has been reinforced by the Hoovering up of all those political activists out of office since the Democrats lost the White House. These people need to find something to do to justify their salaries and it seems their idea of ‘doing’ is shifting the rules regarding acceptable speech. In one particular political direction.

This might all seem a bit inside baseball. But, in fact, it is one of the most important speech wars of our time. A journalist or artist who successfully uses a platform like Patreon will swiftly exceed the salaries available in the struggling older media. In time, this could well challenge the grip as well as the attractiveness of what was regarded as the consensus on a whole range of issues. And that’s why the flight from the site matters. Patreon provided a base for those who wanted to challenge a whole set of dogmas. Let’s hope they can be challenged from elsewhere.

Marco Rubio
US Senator

In the American Senate, the most typical sources for unconventional reporting are my colleague’s stories from back home. Here are a few media outlets to which I also turn:

Our national political reporting frequently tries to find conflict or a political horserace to every story. That can be frustrating to those who just want well reported facts about what is actually happening in our country and communities. It’s why I’m a huge supporter of local news. There isn’t a better source for Florida politics than Sayfie Review. It’s a one-stop shop for everything happening in the Sunshine State, from the Florida Keys to the Panhandle.

The policy quarterlies: National Affairs and American Affairs. In today’s minute-by-minute news cycle, publications that take a step back to understand broader political undercurrents are essential. National Affairs has been my go-to journal for new conservative policy concepts and ideas for years now. American Affairs is the most interesting new publication on the Right, dealing seriously with what nationalism might contribute to our political moment.

The sports site: ProFootballFocus provides insightful analytical information on NFL players. Sometimes the brand name athletes are not the best on the field. Like all analytical tools, PFF numbers have their limits. But as a fan of the science of football it is a valuable site to gain insight on both current players and college prospects.

Helen Lewis
Associate Editor, New Statesman

Every year, I try to give up Twitter, and every year I fail. But my efforts are helped by Nuzzel, an app which shows the most popular links among your friends over the last four, eight, or 24 hours. It’s a useful way of finding what everyone is talking about, without getting sucked into the maelstrom. Even more helpfully, it also digests the most popular links from Friends of Friends, which is a good way to find articles you might not otherwise have seen.

I’m also a big fan of podcasts (I co-present the New Statesman‘s weekly politics show with Stephen Bush) because you can listen to them while cooking, cleaning or running (ha). I plan to catch up on the second series of Slow Burn, about Monica Lewinsky, when I get a minute. America is currently streets ahead of Britain in terms of longform political podcasts – I also dip into the Daily from the New York Times, The Axe Files with David Axelrod and Pod Save America.

I like newsletters, too: Caroline Crampton’s No Complaints is particularly good if you like offbeat stories and medieval manuscript gifs; for celebrity reflections, I enjoy Anne Helen Petersen of Buzzfeed. My own newsletter, The Bluestocking, is where I do behind-the-scenes commentary on my writing, and post too many articles about (separately) Jane Austen and Facebook.

Munira Mirza
Deputy Editor, All in Britain

I’ve been reading (and occasionally writing for) Spiked since it began in 2001. With a commitment to “fighting for humanism, democracy and freedom”, they have been the most consistent champions of free speech in the British media and also foretold the dangers of identity politics. It’s thought-provoking writing across a range of subjects.

I’ve loved watching a new series called Triggernometry. Two affable comedians have a go at serious, lengthy political interviews and it really works. Guests to date include David Goodhart, Joanna Williams, Helen Pluckrose (and me).

Arts and Letters Daily is a treasure chest of articles and essays compiled across the English-speaking media. You can find real diamonds on a diversity of topics – from the poetry of Allen Ginsberg to the semiotics of sleep. The criteria seem to be “whatever makes your brain fizz”. I’d recommend it as a full-fat, luxurious alternative to Twitter over the Christmas season.”

Suggested reading

Let's celebrate the pilgrims, not demonise them

By Munira Mirza

John Rentoul,
Chief Political Commentator, The Independent

You may remember a thing called Google Reader, which was a blog aggregator. It was a website that looked a bit like email. It was ugly but simple, and it told you when a blog or news source had a new post. That was in the heyday of blogs, a brief flowering of eclectic commentary before Facebook and Twitter really took off.

Anyway, Google Reader was much loved by a smallish band of devotees, including me, but was discontinued by Google because it was trivial, non-core and had no prospects of making money. So these days I use an aggregator called Feedly, which does roughly the same thing, using the same semi-obsolete RSS feeds, most of which still work.

That’s how I keep track of Tyler Cowen, Chris Dillow and Mike Smithson, who keep the tradition of blogging going. Cowen in particular, an American polymath, has a genius for spotting fascinating new research in economics and behavioural psychology.

Those are the unconventional media sources that leaven the current obsessions of the parliamentary lobby.

Torsten Bell
Director, Resolution Foundation

With Brexit dominating so much of the news coverage, it’s tempting to escape it all with a good (and ideally very long) novel. But there are plenty of other ways to hear about new thinking and alternative perspectives.

Wonky blogs are a great place to learn about new research, often with handy summaries that may be more use than long papers that are a little too ‘academic’. I’d recommend VoxEU as a good start for economics-related content.

For podcasts, I’d recommend this Tim Harford classic on Radio 4 and Gary Gibbon’s excellent Where Next? on Channel 4 – or if Brexit has kindled a new found interest in international trade, you can try Soumaya Keynes’s (of the Economist) Trade Talks.

Finally, crowdsourcing. At RF we have a culture of sharing around the best reads, which I summarise in a weekly email. Word of mouth (or email at least) beats Twitter hands down.

Bidisha
Broadcaster and journalist

When I’m not ‘wording’, I’m a fine artist making films and photographs. My 2019 resolutions are to make my second film, Cold Reading, following my debut An Impossible Poison (2017) and launch my first photo book, The Last English Dancing Season.

To that end, The Artists Information Company is invaluable as sprawling site of news, reviews and blogs about contemporary art.

I also love the film journal Another Gaze which examines the work of women directors and supports women film critics. When I’m feeling isolated as an artist, I go onto Twitter and follow the #WomensArt hashtag which connects me with the work of amazing visual artists from all eras and countries.

Suggested reading

The growing power of the YouTube Right

By Gavin Haynes

Gavin Haynes
Editor-at-large, Vice UK

Bill Simmons’s fabulously over-resourced Grantland used to be the most anarchic yet carefully curated thing on the net, a place where you had Carles from HipsterRunoff churning out a thousand surrealistic words about the Tour de France. Then ESPN turned off the money hose, and now he has The Ringer, which is still a great grab-bag of meaty pop culture dives but has less of the ring of blank cheques to it.

TrendHunter is still an interesting place to get lost in. It’s an endless rain of gadgets, fads and conceptual architecture.

David Fuller, a former Channel 4 producer, has perked up my eyeballs recently with long form chats with the likes of essayist and technologist Jordan Greenhall.

Popular Twitter account I,Hypocrite offers an excellent weekly video digest of all those talking point news clips that you read about but never got round to watching. In common with many creators, he has become nervy about YouTube’s censorious direction, and fled to grey-net competitor BitChute.

Digg has fallen off most radars in the past decade, but their daily email digest generates more click-throughs from me than anything else. It’s like Buzzfeed for people who haven’t been brain-damaged by the past decade of the internet.

Finally, Reddit/relationship_advice is the need to know place if your significant other is faking a pregnancy, has suddenly discovered scat, or overslept for your granny’s funeral. A classic case of people who shouldn’t be advising anyone advising people whose relationship troubles are so deep they are beyond advice. All together now: “DUMP HIM!”

Emma Barnett
Radio presenter and journalist
New writing and plays at the Donmar Warehouse and Royal Court. For example – the Donmar’s season on power and the first grime musical at the Royal Court left me fired up and gave me windows into new worlds and struggles.

The Slow Burn podcast by Slate – the luxury of taking a deep dive into an old news story you thought you knew is akin to a long hot soak in a much-needed bath.

Steven Pinker
Author and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard

Our World in Data is a site that portrays our world with data rather than with headlines. The view is utterly different.

News is about what happens, like wars and epidemics, not what doesn’t happen, like peace and health. And it’s about what happens suddenly, whereas the world is often transformed gradually in increments that add up to momentous change.

The economist Max Roser has assembled an astonishing array of datasets about the world, with visualisation tools that make them easy to grasp, and concise commentaries that highlight the major trends and developments and explain why they happened. One comes away from the site with a radically different and far more accurate image of the world and times we live in.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Oliver Kamm

Christina Sommers
Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

” The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” This quotation is ubiquitous and usually attributed to Albert Einstein. But there is no evidence he said it. According to the indispensable website Quote Investigator (QI), the closest match first appeared in a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet. After that, it flouted around self-help circles for a few years. By 1990, newspapers began attributing it to Einstein. Now it’s an internet staple,

QI’s long list of fake quotations is a revelation. Edmund Burke never said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Still, the faux aphorism is a favorite on social media. Everyday, throngs of Twitter and Facebook users pass it along. Someone needs to direct them to Quote Investigator.

Peter Oborne
Journalist and author

I find Conflicts Forum, run by Alastair Crooke and Aisling Byrne, essential for understanding the emerging world order. Their subscription press service has a brilliant knack of pinpointing illuminating articles in unlikely places. In addition, Crooke provides a weekly essay which contains the best and clearest geopolitical analysis you will find anywhere. He has been proved right about events time and again.

Middle East Eye, a site I also write for that was founded three years ago, goes from strength to strength. It provides an illuminating new perspective on the Middle East, and its reporting is rigorous and impartial. MEE led the way on the rise of Mohammad Bin Salman, leading onto the Jamal Khashoggi tragedy.

Voice of Rohingya, a Twitter account (@VoiceRohingyaa) gives an appalling insight into the genocide against the Rohingya people. Finally, for British politics I love the Full Fact fact-checking service, while Hugo Dixon’s Infacts is consistently illuminating on Brexit.

Katharine Birbalsingh
Author and headmistress of Michaela Community School

When I want to read interesting viewpoints, I tend to turn to Quillette, the Australian online magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, the American online magazine.

I like Quillette because they are brave enough to question the usual dogma that weighs us all down. I may not agree with everything they say, but they certainly make me think. The Atlantic Monthly comes at news from the other side politically and from the other side of the world. I like the longer style essays that allow the author to delve deep into a subject. Again, I don’t always agree with the writers, but I enjoy the mental stimulation.

I also like watching The Rubin Report on YouTube, where David Rubin interviews someone for an hour about their area of expertise. He always chooses out-of-the-box thinkers and the interview style is conversational and inviting. I look forward to the holiday where I can really indulge in these three things!

Suggested reading

Today's laptop activists seek attention, not truth

By Tanya Gold

Jim Waterson
Media Editor, The Guardian

I always used to read the print edition of York Evening Press after school and I still check its website first thing every morning. Despite relentless cuts by owner Newsquest, it’s a pretty good model of what a local newspaper should be, with reporters who know the community. If you’re a lucky enough to still have a decent local newspaper, then read it obsessively. You’re likely to pick up on trends and stories that London-based papers miss.

Transport shapes everyone’s lives, shapes where people work, and can make a massive different to quality of life. Also, trains are brilliant. London Reconnections is one of the best written most in-depth sites around. Their post explaining Uber’s business model in the capital is well-sourced, meticulously researched, and clearly written.

A culture magazine funded as a corporate project by a shaving business should be absolutely terrible. For some reason MEL Magazine isn’t and it consistently features weird, considered takes on modern online life. And they haven’t ever tried to sell me a razor.

Elizabeth Oldfield
Director, Theos

The podcast I reliably go to when I want to feel informed, inspired and better equipped be some use in the world is OnBeing.

Created by Krista Tippett, a former New York Times journalist and diplomat, it intelligently explores matters of faith, moral imagination and what a wise life looks like now. In our noisy information environment most outlets fight for attention by being louder, shorter, simpler and seemingly shallower.

Refreshingly, Krista has grown a faithful and engaged audience by interviewing the hidden influencers, the people too busy making the world a better place to spend time on self-promotion. Listening to it helps snap me out of imposed urgency and reminds me of the fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?

Sarah Sands
Editor, BBC Radio 4’s Today

On Twitter, I follow mostly individuals, usually reporters, often the number two or three in the pecking order who are doing a lot of unseen work. For political websites, I’m not wildly unconventional. I go to the usuals: from Politico and the FT, to ConservativeHome, Slate, and The Hill to name a random a few.

Otherwise, I read National Geographic, and look at BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner’s Instagram for bird pictures and sunsets. I also like Eyob Derillo at the British Library on ancient illuminated manuscripts.

When it comes to podcasts, Brexitcast and Beyond Today from the BBC, as well as David Axelrod’s The Axe Files. Finally, Dead Ringers and anything to do with Tom Service on BBC Radio 3.

George Nixon
Producer, UnHerd’s Confessions

Anything that does serious financial journalism, from Trump’s trade war to the black market in sand, and puts it in plain English is a godsend. Planet Money does it best. My favourite is #870 on Trump vs Red Tape, which features every regulation Potus has axed since taking office, set to the sound of REM’s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”.

What turned a star NFL Tight End who played in the Super Bowl into a convicted double murderer who hanged himself in his cell? Gladiator, a podcast from the The Boston Globe, is a series which produces more questions than answers. But the tragic story of Aaron Hernandez, of how a troubled background and superstardom can be a toxic mix, is compellingly told. Hernandez once busted someone’s eardrum as a 17-year-old university freshman in a row over a bar tab, only for the charges to be dropped after the university’s lawyers got involved. The lesson: when you’re a star, some actions don’t have consequences.

And UnHerd’s own Peter Franklin shares five tips on how to use Twitter without losing your mind

Ah, Twitter! Is there any social media site that’s more hated by its own users? We’re all addicted, of course – but here are some harm reduction tips for 2019.

Firstly, don’t argue with strangers. Obvious really, but all the same, just don’t.

Secondly, and further to the above, turn off your mentions – or at least restrict them to people you follow.

Thirdly, though Twitter is a truly horrible forum for debate, it’s a brilliant noticeboard. Try following fewer individuals (especially ranters, emoters, edgelords and news junkies) and follow more publications (especially those that publish and link to the work of thoughtful, insightful writers).”

Here are a couple of suggestions:

The New York Times is not exactly the most unheard-of publications – but for links to some of the impressive analytical journalism and infographics available in the world today, follow @upshotNYT and @NYTgraphics accounts.

On the other side of US political aisle, but very reasonably so, is the Institute for Family Studies. For links to eye-opening social research (and to brilliant writers and researchers like @lymanstoneky and @wilcoxNMP), follow the Inst. Family Studies account.

Breaking my rule about individual accounts, I can gratefully recommend Sunder Katwala’s – who manages to tweet about Brexit, immigration and other divisive issues without being divisive. I don’t always agree with him, but his tweets are a peaceful island in a roiling, angry, snarky ocean.

Fourthly, get a reader app like Pocket that allows you to quickly download articles from Twitter links.

Fifthly, once you’ve got something grown-up to read, get off Twitter.

Suggested reading

On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

Five days after Trump’s victory, the New Yorker ran a piece by Hua Hsu in which he argued that mainstream media attempts to understand the concerns of Trump voters were a kind of normalisation validating “an identity politics that is often rooted in denying other people’s right to the same”.

In his piece for The Atlantic magazine at the end of May 2016, David Frum spoke of the “broken guardrails of democracy” and how the American republic, “long safeguarded by settled norms, was now shattered by the rise of Donald Trump”. This backlash to nationalist populism focuses on one broken guardrail in particular: the loss of traditional gatekeepers to news and information, due to the decline of old media and the advent of social media. The 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis took this logic to its ultimate conclusion, by arguing that new media has enabled post-truth politics and the creation of mass false consciousness.

Further reading

Trumpism: America's new religion

By Peter Franklin

Many advocates of the normalisation narrative also stretch the ideas of Karl Popper to argue that the best way to defeat intolerance is by becoming more intolerant. Only by becoming more (politically) intolerant can (social/cultural) tolerance prevail. Only via authoritarian means can liberal ends prevail.

In recent weeks, we have seen the current shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, call for social media companies to ban anonymous accounts, the former shadow education secretary Lucy Powell call for closed forums on social media to be eradicated, the deputy leader of the Labour party, Tom Watson, call for a social media regulator, and the President of the EU commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, argue that “press freedom has limits”.

These arguments have found a receptive audience among Left-liberals already inclined towards political intolerance.

The political scientist Rob Ford discovered via his research that 57% of Lab voters would be upset by a Ukip-voting in-law joining the family – putting intolerance of Ukip voters above intolerance of potential in-laws with criminal records (51%.) Noah Carl, a post-doctoral researcher at Oxford University, has listed the various pieces of evidence supporting the contention that people with Left-wing or ‘liberal’ views are more likely to block or unfriend their ideological counterparts on social media than those with Right-wing or conservative views. YouGov have also recently published research demonstrating that Labour and Remain voters are more likely to have politically homogenous friendship groups than Conservative and Leave voters.

Further reading

The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

Of course, we shouldn’t confuse the response to normalisation with the idea itself – however, that too is deeply flawed. The actual evidence that nationalist populism has metastasised because of the advent of new forms of social media is extremely weak. Multiple studies have shown that the role of digital misinformation is greatly exaggerated. Only 21% of all American adults are on Twitter and only 15% of Republicans follow Donald Trump, for instance. In the UK, only 17% of the population use Twitter. Studies have found that political polarisation is more acute among low-level internet users, and that social media can reduce polarisation rather than exacerbating it.

The normalisation narrative therefore grants an illusory sense of control; ie, the false hope that the liberal Left can defeat populism by doing something about social media. As the Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch Tweeted in January:

7/6 Suspect we obsess over social media filter bubbles and not socio-geographic bubbles of physical world coz it's comforting — but wrong — to think FB & Twitter can fix society, when actually it's about us spending face-time w/ people who have different worldviews (god forbid)

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) January 17, 2018

The normalisation narrative reinforces the political intolerance of the Left, closing off the constructive criticism and reality-testing required to adapt to new political terrain. It should worry Left-liberals that evidence points towards the fact that Leave voters characterise Remain voters more accurately than Remain voters characterise Leave voters.

By encouraging suspicion of alternative viewpoints, the normalisation narrative makes it harder for Left-liberals to think their way through the current crisis, which they believe is characterised by a turn against the ongoing march of liberal progress. If you believe in the pre-Darwinian idea that history has a telos and that it is one of liberal progress – “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice” – the only logical conclusion to draw when people vote the wrong way is that they were receiving the wrong information (and that, therefore, the information providers somehow must be to blame).

Further reading

The left-wing zealots are threatening our freedom

By Paul Embery

The evidence suggests otherwise, but Left-liberals cannot hear it from their own padded echo chambers. Instead, they receive distorted information about the world around them from social media sites such as Twitter, because they disproportionately dominate it. This leaves them at a disadvantage in terms of receiving accurate information as to what the rest of the population actually thinks.

Rather than seeking to regulate cyberspace, they might find it more profitable to speak to people in the real world with whom they have political differences. We live in a country in which 25% of all graduate jobs are to be found in one city and so Left-liberals – predominantly university-educated and metropolitan – might want to think twice before they cut themselves off even further from their compatriots.

Claire Enders and others have used the term sovereignty before in the debate about the UK and digital to press the case for proper national oversight and regulation of digital services and content.

It’s a compelling case, at least in a democracy – I’m less comfortable when Xi Jinping uses the phrase cyber sovereignty to justify the suppression of free speech in China.

But I want to use the word sovereignty more expansively to refer to our ability in the UK to fully express ourselves and our many stories and opinions and traditions to each other and to the world.

If you claim that the concerns which led to the Brexit debacle relate to political rather than this kind of cultural sovereignty, my reply is that it’s impossible to separate the two, that national self-expression – recognising your language, your life experience, your community in the prevailing culture – is not just an important element, but a necessary pre-condition for national self-determination and a sense of individual and collective agency.

A society which loses its shared culture loses much of its sense of distinctive identity. A society in which different communities and groups can no longer listen to and come to understand each other’s pasts and presents shouldn’t be surprised if mutual incomprehension and division are the result. If you doubt that any of this connects to big politics and national well-being, you’re not paying attention.

Our culture comprises much more than media. Language, literature, education, theatre, music, dance, the visual arts, much else besides. But I doubt anyone would dispute the centrality of media – digital media, regular TV and radio, movies, newspapers and magazines, local and national – in British life.

But to state the obvious, many of these categories – and therefore much of our cultural sovereignty – are now under economic and audience threat from a process of digital disintegration and reinvention that is still accelerating, in many areas just getting going, and particularly from its globalizing effects, which are driven not just by the borderless character of digital distribution, but by its intrinsic scale economics.

It’s hard for anyone other than the US or China to produce global digital platforms. The UK hasn’t produced one. Nor has any other European country, with the arguable exception of Sweden and Spotify. British creators make first-class programmes for Netflix, Amazon and the other American streamers, but there’s a crucial difference between producing great content to fit someone else’s creative agenda, and commissioning and controlling it yourself. It’s the commissioners who decide what gets made – and reap most of the economic upside. If real scale is what it takes in digital content distribution, we don’t have a horse in that race either.

Indeed one of the triumphs of British policy-making over the last decade or so has been to hobble the chances of the UK’s only credible global contender – the BBC – of fulfilling its full potential to bring British talent and British ideas to the world’s audiences. More on that later.

Sky – another transnational broadcaster with a strong track record of digital risk-taking and innovation – won’t face the same obstacles. I’m sure it will continue to commission plenty of outstanding British shows. But it’s also a fact that Sky is no longer an independent publicly-quoted British company, but itself a unit within Comcast, another of those US megaliths, which quite understandably has global ambitions and priorities of its own.

The media world has changed greatly in the seven years since I moved to New York. Local and regional media has its back to the wall, the long-term future of national newspapers and public service and ad-funded commercial TV is in question. What hasn’t changed much, if at all, is British public policy about media.

Policy-makers have largely concentrated on tightening the funding pressure and other constraints on the BBC further, refining technocratic regulatory theory, and pondering such weighty matters as whether the Times and Sunday Times of London should be allowed to share some editorial resources, the answer – after much deliberation – being a cautious yes. One can be forgiven for wondering if that is a complete solution to the crisis threatening to engulf British journalism.

No doubt the relevant government departments and regulators do plenty of good work too across this difficult and rapidly evolving terrain.

I want to say to them: policing the beach for litter is a virtuous activity, but it’s time to glance out to sea. That grey band on the horizon is a tsunami.

*

The idea that Netflix and others are changing the game in broadcasting is hardly news of course. It was a big theme of last week’s RTS Cambridge convention. As for digital disruption of newspapers, that’s been with us for years.

What I hope to bring to the party is my experience of leading a large-scale and generally encouraging response to the digital tsunami. I hope that this experience – with real audiences, a real creative organisation, real technology and real dollars – will help convince you that successful transformation is possible, at least for legacy players who accept the daunting investment and drastic change required. It’s also, I believe, a useful perspective from which to view and propose changes to current policy. 

I’m going to proceed as follows. First I’ll talk about the perilous and seemingly intractable set of threats that faced The New York Times when I walked into the lobby as chief executive in late 2012. I’ll tell you how we responded, draw some general lessons from that – lessons which in my view are just relevant for TV, movies, radio and music as they are for the news business – and apply them to today’s UK media landscape. Finally, I’ll turn to the question of public policy.

So let’s start with The New York Times. In 2012, it was still a profitable, cash-generative company. Its journalism was as strong as ever. It had been an early investor in digital and its website was still recognised as a market leader.

But pretty much every economic indicator was trending down. Print advertising, which had collapsed during 2008/9 was still falling like a stone. The number of print subscribers was also falling, albeit more gradually. Newsstand sales were plummeting. To everyone’s consternation, after years of growth, digital advertising was going into reverse. Even the digital subscription model – launched the previous year, and the company’s great hope – seemed to be running out of steam at around the 600,000 subscriber mark. Innovation had stalled. Strategy was at a stand. It remained a largely analogue company not just in revenue but in spirit and expertise.

Terrifyingly, it was nonetheless one of the highest performers in the entire US industry. Since 2004, more than one in five US newspapers have closed. Employment in the industry fell from over 400,000 in 2000 to 140,000 last year – a nearly two-thirds attrition. It’s not just the closures – even the survivors have been savaging headcount. More journalists have lost their jobs in recent years in America than coal miners.

The economic object of any legacy media digital strategy is to develop digital products and services which can grow revenue and profitability aggressively enough to offset the inevitable declines in print. Most American newspapers were finding it impossible to do meet this brutally clear benchmark. They still are.

A significant recession in the next year or so will likely decimate the survivors and leave great swathes of the country without professional newspaper journalists and the civic accountability they provide. One can’t look at this country or much of Europe and not fear something similar.

The New York Times did have important advantages. Its brand heritage and the obstinate determination of the board and controlling Ochs-Sulzberger family interest not to savage the newsroom, no matter how bleak the forward economics looked. That digital head-start. Its untapped global potential.

All strengths to build on, though quite how was as yet unclear. Wall Street, not known for its sentimentality, had reached its verdict – which was that The Times was the best of a bad lot. The stock price which had touched $50 a share at its peak was now stuck at around $8.

So what did we do? Over the next few years, we devised and executed a strategy which had the following elements:–

First, we believe in journalism. It’s what we stand for. It’s the only thing we have to sell. So – unlike almost everyone else – we’ve invested in journalism.

We now have around 1,750 journalists working for The New York Times. That’s three hundred more than in 2012 and the greatest number in the company’s 170 year history.

Heavy investment in content is Netflix’s strategy. It’s Disney’s strategy. They know that distinctiveness – providing something clearly different, more valuable, more trustworthy than what’s available for nothing on the web – is essential. Distinctiveness is a no-brainer if you want to succeed as a provider of high quality digital content of any kind.

A good slice of our investment has gone into building classic journalistic breadth and strength. Take investigations. You’ll be familiar with some of Times’s work in investigative journalism – Harvey Weinstein and Bill O’Reilly, Trump’s taxes and so on – but what I want to stress is the sheer number of original stories The New York Times delivers every week, a drum-beat of high impact headlines previously unknown anywhere in digital, print or broadcasting.

We’ve also invested in new specialists in critical areas like tech and climate – on which we delivered more than 800 stories last year – as well as video, audio and other new forms of story-telling.

By contrast, instead of investing, most of the world’s news organizations have either chosen or been forced to try to cut themselves to a digital future.

That may drive higher short-term profitability, but it’s a strategy that leads off a cliff. You can’t degrade your journalism and keep your audience, let alone sell them subscriptions.

This is unavoidably a capital-intensive period in media. You have to invest not just in content, but data science, digital product, engineering. We now have around 900 specialists – in addition to that big newsroom – working on our digital machine. Most are new to the company.

There is a difference – one we had to learn – between “trying digital”, meaning letting a handful of people play around the edges of the business, and trying as if the company’s life depended on it. Which it does. You have to throw everything and almost everyone into the fight.

This level of commitment is hard for publicly-listed companies who find themselves competing for creative and engineering talent – and for the best intellectual property assets – with tech players who typically have vast cash reserves or access to seemingly unlimited venture capital.

But building an ark doesn’t come cheap. Not if you want it to float.

Next, we believe in developing close, long-term relationships with the most engaged consumers of our journalism with a current hypothesis that the single best way to turn these relationships into revenue is by converting these loyal users into paying customers.

Until fairly recently, very few people in news publishing believed that either. People just wouldn’t pay for news on digital devices, we were told. Many were amazed when The New York Times reached even half a million subscribers. Now most print and many digital players are trying to follow us.

Meanwhile in ad-funded TV or radio almost no one on either side of the Atlantic is contemplating more than a marginal shift towards direct end-user subscriptions. Some have instead been licensing their libraries to Netflix and the other streamers  – in other words, taking cash in return for helping to build the very platforms that wish to replace them. It’s only recently that legacy players have spotted the strategic danger of that tactic.

A relationship strategy depends less on raw page-views and click-rates than it does on engagement and frequency – in other words, how deeply and how often a given reader uses you. So we poured people and money into the task of improving the digital experience of The New York Times and optimising the pay model and our subscription tactics.

From 2014, we focused most of our efforts of the mobile phone experience, because that was where the users were. Peak time for news use on mobile phones is 7 am, so the whole circadian rhythm of the newsroom had to change.

We invented new regular experiences – morning and evening briefings, a mini-crossword every morning, for instance – to encourage return visits. One way to think about our breakthrough podcast The Daily is as a habituation tool – it now reaches two million listeners on a typical day, ten a month, and it’s still growing.

We’ve experimented everywhere and with everything. At any given moment we now have multiple simultaneous separate experiments running in the field.

We’ve launched successful new products – our digital crossword and cooking products are in their own right two of the news industry’s largest subscription products – and unsuccessful ones.

We started taking international digital sub growth seriously – they’ve grown ten-fold since 2012. Audio arrived – The Daily is only one of our podcasts – as did VR, AR, and this year TV with The Weekly.

We changed everything that needed to change. A generation of new leaders came in. We massively expanded training. As the business changed, so too did large parts of the employee base. In some departments, the need for different skills and expertise mean as much as an 85% change in the workforce.

Today growth in digital revenue comfortably outstrips print losses. Company revenue is now growing quarter after quarter. At the end of our most recently disclosed quarter, we had around 5 million total subscriptions, triple the highest number ever achieved in the print era. We plan to double that again to ten million by 2025. Far from plateauing as the model enters its ninth year, in recent quarters the rate at which we’re adding net new subs has accelerated again.

Our projections suggest the ultimate size of our global subscription base could be far larger even than that ten million.

In 2015, we set ourselves the challenge of doubling digital revenue from $400 million a year – the figure then – to $800 million by 2020. We expect to hit that target well ahead of time. The stock price has more than tripled.

We’re not there yet – no one in digital is there yet, perhaps never will be there, if there means a secure and stable end-state – but we’re on our way again.

*

But how applicable is this experience to media more broadly? In my view and despite the unique features of The Times, very applicable. First, it helps us dispel some persistent myths.

Digital advertising can support quality journalism on its own. No it can’t. It was never going to. Most of the spoils of advertising go to those who control distribution. Once that was newspapers and magazines. Now it’s the major Silicon Valley platforms. The distribution advantage we once enjoyed with our presses and our trucks has already shrunk. In due course it will disappear entirely.

We’re building a different kind of distinctive digital advertising at The Times based around strategic partnerships with the world’s biggest brands. It’s showing real promise.

But that’s an option only available to a handful of publishers. Unless the others can pivot away from dependence on advertising, to subscription or other revenue streams, the future looks bleak. And that includes not just legacy firms, but former digital darlings like the Huff Post, Buzzfeed and the rest, players who today have begun to resemble legacy publishers but without the actual legacy.

The fact that TV advertising has not yet gone through the same scale of disruption, is only a timing issue. It’s inevitable as audiences switch from privileged tradition distribution channels to digital. The same economic logic applies.

Linear broadcasters everywhere are also undergoing the same ominous early stage audience-loss that hit the west’s newspapers years ago – particularly the differential flight of the young.

Effective counter-measures are possible. The Daily is by many measures the most popular news popcast in the world, but it’s also reaching and deeply engaging a substantially new audience for The New York Times. Three-quarters of its audience is 40 or under. 45% are 30 or under.

I grew up in broadcasting being told that very few young people would ever listen to serious speech audio. It’s rubbish and probably always was.

Bucking the trend requires not only investment but creativity and lateral thinking. Yet the reality is that any media company which fails to crack this problem, and can no longer replenish its audience, doesn’t have a long-term future. The effects won’t be immediate – older audiences are typically very loyal – but it’s ultimately non-survivable. It’s as simple as that.

Myth number two: it’s all Google and Facebook’s fault. They stole our business and something must be done about it.

Now it’s convenient to have someone to blame for your woes – and it’s true that policy-makers and regulators across the western world have any number of searching questions to put to these two giants about their business practices.

Yes, Google and Facebook should do more to help news publishers and other providers of civically and culturally valuable content. Google has taken some modest but promising steps, Facebook is talking seriously about doing the same.

But let’s be realistic. The true source of legacy media’s tribulations is not these two companies – and wouldn’t be solved if they were regulated more tightly, or even replaced by other search and social providers. The true culprit is the internet itself.

It was the internet which allowed hundreds of millions of users to switch from old media distribution channels to digital. It was the internet which robbed newspapers – and is now robbing linear TV – of the advertising pricing-power that went with the old privileged distribution.

And the politician or regulator has yet been born who can uninvent that magnificent and scarifying Pandora’s box. We’re stuck with it and therefore might as well make the most of it.

So for those brave souls – whether in news or entertainment – who opt to truly take the plunge, what are the fundamental conditions for success?

Scale. You need scale of audience, scale of engagement, scale of subscriptions. The goal is to reach the point at which operating leverage begins to rise – in other words, that moment in a company’s arc of digital growth beyond which investment and other costs no longer need to rise at the same pace as revenue, and the fundamental profitability of the business starts to increase. 

Say we spend x hundreds of millions of dollars on journalism at The New York Times to serve five million subscribers. We won’t have to spend 2x to serve ten million. Nor 2x on product and technology or many of the company’s other expenses.

Some costs will no doubt continue to rise but, going forward, margin – meaning the gap between total revenue and total cost – will grow wider and wider. We see not just a viable fully digital news business in prospect, but an increasingly profitable one. But it’s impossible without scale and without that high initial investment.

The next condition is a super-clear value proposition for your customers, one that meets real-world demand and reflects real-world media consumption.

At The New York Times, we know what our mission is: to seek the truth and help people to understand the world. Our research suggests enormous and growing global demand for serious news. I’ve already talked about how we hope to satisfy that demand and about the critical role of quality and originality in our offering.

We’re not alone. It’s no coincidence that all the really successfully digital subscription models come from titles at the very top of the market. The future looks much tougher in the middle and bottom of the market. If your journalism isn’t special enough to sell to consumers, and you’re losing out in the ad market to the major digital platforms, I don’t see how you keep your head above water.

Some of the same dynamics are playing out in the unfolding global battle for the future of TV.

The streamers may drive much of their current consumption with reruns from conventional broadcast, but they’re putting their commissioning dollars into the kind of distinctive, ambitious programming which used to be reserved for premium cable and satellite – HBO or Showtime, say – or indeed the BBC and Channel Four. So it’s not reality shows and soaps, but Fleabag and The Crown. The best US linear players are fighting back with the same: The Terror, Chernobyl, even Game of Thrones.

Perhaps you saw some of these pieces on conventional British TV channels. That too is a timing issue.

For now it makes sense for the streamers to co-produce and share rights in the country of product. Don’t expect that to last. Soon they’ll want it all. Given the struggle that is now gaining momentum – they’ll probably need it all too.

Conventional broadcasters – and I include conventional cable and satellite players – who do not have a compelling pure-play digital strategy of their own risk being priced out of the best talent and best content. Even in their hey-day, they’d have struggled to compete with these giants. Now with ad revenue – and in the case of the BBC, licence-fee – squeezed, their financial firepower is waning.

Note also the impact of all this on some of the traditional arguments for public service intervention.

The great programmes I mentioned come out of a British creative culture and talent base which the UK PSBs have nurtured and sustained and conditioned audiences to expect. But will that role still be as critical in the future as the global players ramp up their investment in exceptional, high-risk work?

One could ask a similar question about purely financial support for the UK production sector. Last week at Cambridge, Reed Hastings announced that Netflix is spending half a billion dollars this year on British film and TV. Does that mean that the BBC’s and Channel Four’s investment is becoming less vital?

Finally, there’s trust. According to data Ed Williams of Edelman presented at the RTS last week, Netflix’s net trust score in the UK is now on a par with the BBC’s and a point ahead of Channel Four’s. If the PSBs ever enjoyed a special status with British audiences when it came to trust, that too seems to be in question.

Now, as you’ll hear, I believe the case for public intervention in media is stronger than ever – and indeed that, in many categories, aggregate market failure risk actually growing. Nonetheless the case for it needs, not just to be restated, but refined and sharpened. 

The third lesson and condition for success is the how of building an effective digital media operation. It requires what is in many regards a new organisation.

Much of your existing tech and data architecture should go in the skip. Everything needs to be rebuilt. So too those traditional functional departments with their hierarchies and territories.

At The New York Times, we organize now around specific digital missions – engagement, subscription growth, for instance – with multi-disciplinary teams drawn from many fields working under unified leadership to achieve specific strategic goals. They test, they learn, they make most of the decisions usually without needing sign-off either from department heads or senior leadership.

Most legacy media structures are still shaped around the old, rather than the new business. They still operate with traditional pyramidal command-and-control. This is one of the main reasons why many are seeing such desultory results from their digital businesses.

You can’t invent the future if you’re spending 80% of your time on legacy operations. Hive them off even if they drive most current revenue and profitability. Everyone knows them backwards. Get a handful of trusted colleagues to look after them so that everyone else can concentrate on the harder task.

And, if you’re a leader, get retrained yourself. You can’t wing this stuff on instinct and vague memories of business school when the world was young. At The New York Times, we leaders are literally back in the classroom doing graduate-level classes in statistics and data science so that we can understand our own business better.

Of all the ills afflicting the world’s legacy media companies, ignorant, risk-averse, outwardly arrogant, inwardly defeatist leadership is probably the most lethal. No one can bluster or lobby their way out of this one. God knows, enough still try.

*

So how does Britain’s media industry look when we consider it through this rather stark lens?

The good news is that the future of the UK’s pool of talent, its writers, actors, directors, producers, designers and crafts, even the very best of its journalistic talent, looks better than ever.

The independent production sector posted a record £3 billion in revenues last year. There’s no reason why, given the growing global appetite for it, this inward investment shouldn’t grow much further.

Unfortunately, that’s where the good news largely runs out.

The media world is dividing into potential global winners, probable survivors, and the rest. The UK certainly has possible survivors – among national newspapers, the Daily Mail and Guardian for instance. But with due respect – and notwithstanding the sizeable international audiences which several UK newspapers have built up – none looks like a potential global winner.

None has achieved the digital transformation of a Schibsted, or the digital diversification of a Naspers or Springer. Their heritage is domestic, and most have yet to change that or even their print-centric ways of working.

I don’t see how all the current national titles survive. At regional and local level, it looks like something close to a wipe-out without dramatic intervention.

The UK’s established broadcasters still have deep roots in the national consciousness. They still command big audiences. Their current schedules – and extensive libraries – still speak to many of those aspects of collective identity and national self-expression I mentioned at the start.

But none looks strong enough to be a true contender in the coming global contest. All are seeing adverse trends which are familiar from other digital disruptions – trends that can quickly turn from disquieting to terminal.

We’ve talked about the loss of the best talent and projects to the digital insurgents, and the inevitable loss of linear advertising revenue. Both are already realities in UK broadcasting, as is the arterial – and, as I said, ultimately insupportable – loss of young audiences.

BBC1’s average age is 61. It’s the youngest of the BBC’s television channels. The average of the audience for the main Channel Four – the youthful, edgy alternative to the BBC – is 55.

Effectively reaching younger audiences is creatively hard and culturally difficult even for relatively recent legacy arrivals. For the BBC, it’s also harder to justify to an Establishment which tends to assume that if it’s aimed at the young, it must be nakedly commercial.

But BBC 3 bucked the trend. At its peak, it had a larger share of 16-34 viewing than Channel Four, and a reach among that audience of nearly 30%.

And yet when the BBC was forced to shed a television service for financial reasons a few years ago, it was one selected. Online only, its reach among 16-34s has declined to less than 10%.

The switch to digital was ultimately inevitable given the young’s progressive move from analogue. But that broadcast window was still helping it build precious familiarity and loyalty. And it was an important signal to this audience about the BBC’s commitment to them. Removing it was a fateful signal too.

The BBC as a whole should be a shoo-in as a probable global winner. It’s the only British media brand with truly global recognition and potential. Its international audience runs in the hundreds of millions. Its indispensable presence in the lives of most British households is a testament, not just to its heritage, but to the talent it still attracts, and the creativity and excellence it still fosters.

But – at a moment when Britain contemplates setting out on a brave new voyage in search of new friends and new global markets – we can’t put Britain’s media flag-carrier on the list.

That’s because of an essentially hostile public policy stance on the BBC, which began to coalesce more than a decade ago but has hardened notably in recent years. One of its fruits was the 2015 settlement which included the disastrous withdrawal of Government funding of free licence-fees for the over-75s.

In their excellent forthcoming book, The War on the BBC, Patrick Barwise and Peter York chronicle the orchestrated campaign that led to this moment, a campaign that involved politicians, commercial media interests, think-tanks and other lobbying organizations, as well as the popular press. The campaign was grounded in gross distortion, exaggeration and straightforward lies – the carnard, for example, promoted among others by the Daily Mail that the BBC spends less than half of the licence-fee on programmes. The true number – even on the narrowest reasonable assumptions – is 78% of the total.

The last words uttered in the outstanding HBO/Sky coproduction Chernobyl are the question: what is the cost of lies? Unless policy towards the BBC changes – a policy to a significant extent predicated politically on lies and distortions – we may soon find out. If one was a conspiracist, one might even wonder if the players behind the campaign that led up to the 2015 settlement weren’t using it as a test-run for a more ambitious project.

The question of funding is only one of the blockers which the BBC faces. Equally damaging has been an officious governmental and regulatory environment which has sought to stymie or limit digital transformation and innovation by the BBC as much as possible.

The threat of the global TV streamers, not just to the BBC but to every British broadcaster and channel operator, wasn’t just foreseeable. It was foreseen.

In 2007, just before we launched the BBC iPlayer, I had a conversation in Silicon Valley with Reed Hastings, who was then about to unveil Netflix’s own streaming service. A important moment for him, just as the iPlayer was for us.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering, Mark,” he said to me in a rather Reed-like way: “you’ll never beat my algorithm. Why not just give us all your content instead?”

Reed is one of the most impressive business leaders I’ve met. Particularly since I’ve been at The New York Times, he’s given me regular doses of candid and incredibly useful advice.

However, I came back to the UK from this and other meetings on the West Coast with the clear conviction that streaming would change consumption of TV out of all recognition; that we absolutely must double-down on the iPlayer; and that we should also urgently find a global streaming solution not just for the BBC but the whole of British television.

Why shouldn’t the UK’s broadcasters develop their own collective worldwide platform to project British talent and British content to audiences everywhere?

This idea – which we named Project Kangaroo – quickly gained the support of the other UK PSBs, but was blocked in early 2009 by the UK Competition Commission which cited domestic market competition concerns. Another eight years would go by before the launch of the altogether more modest Britbox.

In the breakneck rush of digital transformation, eight years is an eternity.

I’m not suggesting that Kangaroo could have achieved the scale of a Netflix. I do believe it could have given the UK far more agency and economic upside in the world streaming market than it enjoys today. Its fate speaks to a peculiarly British approach to the BBC and media policy more broadly: which is talk global but act parochial. Indeed in our blinkered discourse about media, the more extravagant the talk of global opportunity, the more narrow and inward-facing the true worldview tends to be.

If we’re serious about opening up new international market opportunities, why wouldn’t we unleash our only truly global media brand and exploit it, not just to bring a British perspective to audiences everywhere, but to introduce and project the work of the rest of the British creative sector as well?

Because it might offend local political influencers. Because our approach to digital competition regulation hasn’t caught up yet. Because moving quickly and boldly is rather un-British and probably best left to Americans and other foreign types.

All these controls and obstacles have a similar effect: which is to discourage and punish innovation and, as far as possible, to keep the BBC locked up in its traditional broadcasting box. This despite, or perhaps because of the fact that everyone knows that linear broadcasting is time-limited and will one day come to a full stop.

Radio will probably fare better. It’s sticky and relatively cheap to make. It’s readily relocatable to digital devices and environments. In some countries, including this one, it may be the last life-line for those without the money to pay for high quality news, music, documentary, entertainment.

But even here talent may become a problem. In the US, we’re already seeing a brain-drain of some of the brightest creative talent into the flourishing, and increasingly lucrative world of podcasting.

And for ITV, Channel Four and other broadcasters who today depend disproportionately on advertising for their revenue, I don’t see much alternative to the kind of root-and-branch transformation we’ve undertaken at The Times.

I don’t know what the new revenue mix should be, between subscription, free, sponsorship, e-commerce, retrans and other rights fees, and digital diversification. But they still have time to find the answer – although, as in the earlier cases of music and newspapers, it may be less time than they think.

*

So how should British policy-makers respond to all this? To provide a context for my answer, I want to turn briefly back to another pivotal moment in British history – the end of the Second World War – to lay out two contrasting views of the future of Britain and of its culture.

The first is the most famous dystopia of them all, Nineteen Eighty-Four. When the Berlin Wall fell, many people assumed that – whatever its literary merits – Nineteen Eighty-Four had lost much its predictive power. History, you will recall, was now over.

Things look a little different today. The geopolitics of our world has surprising echoes of Nineteen Eight-Four’s, which you’ll remember consists of three vast vast superpowers – Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia – each with its own hermetically-sealed political and social operating system.

On the home front in the novel: fake news, constant surveillance, the secret collection of everyone’s data, the internet – you’ll remember that the “telescreen” in Winston’s flat has a connected camera – and of course Prolefeed, an endless stream of mindless entertainment to tranquillize the public.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, UK has lost its freedom and identity. Now it is Airstrip One, a military platform from which Oceania can wage its wars. Insofar as its citizens enjoy any intellectual or creative autonomy, it is underground, furtive, mortally dangerous.

Compare that with this other notable – and almost exactly contemporary – vision of future national culture:

By provision of concert halls, modern libraries, theatres and suitable centres, we desire to assure our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation. How satisfactory it would be if different parts of the citizenry would again walk their several ways as they once did. Let every part of merrie England be merry in its own way. Death to Hollywood!

Britain is still at war with Japan. The gigantic task of post-war reconstruction has yet to begin. But John Maynard Keynes is talking arts policy on the BBC’s Third Programme. It’s July 1945 and he is the first Chairman of a new institution, the Arts Council.

In those days, even a world war couldn’t stop imaginative British policy-making.

Perhaps you find Keynes’s words paternalistic. They’re certainly awkward and redolent of the elitism which critics of the BBC and other public cultural intervention have always latched on to, sometimes with justice.

But the vision is still captivating. It recognises that national culture isn’t one entity but a manifold of different experiences and stories and traditions. It isn’t just heritage, but alive. Keynes doesn’t suggest it should be imposed on the population, or even merely made accessible, but chosen, owned, even in a sense controlled by them.

It’s a vision in other words of cultural sovereignty, which is not in fact a post-war liberal invention but part of a centuries-old British understanding of the societal centrality of culture which stretches back, past the founding of the BBC and the early 20^th century national development of repertory theatre, to the mid-Victorian establishment of free public libraries, perhaps even the creation of the British Museum.

And then Keynes cries: “Death to Hollywood”.

I don’t think he’s really wishing murder down upon America’s global entertainment machine. Then, as now, Hollywood was capable of outstanding, original work. Then, as now, British audiences loved it.

No, I think Keynes is merely suggesting that something vital would be lost if Hollywood product was all that the British public saw. In his conception, a central purpose of the Arts Council was to make sure that our own talent and our own voices were not entirely replaced by what were – even then – global players.

It wasn’t the fault of Hollywood that it couldn’t do justice to the richness and plurality of the British experience. It wasn’t their job, any more than it was their job to fully reflect the culture of Nebraska or Rhode Island for that matter. But there was a risk, Keynes implies, of a crowding out – of attention, of funding, of talent. Not quite Airstrip One, but perhaps the fateful first steps in that direction.

This is the central argument for public involvement and intervention in culture and media today. It’s not enough to say that it’s to guarantee that the public have access to high quality content. Nor even that it’s about trust in some generic sense of the word.

It’s specifically to ensure that – alongside all the other content, great or otherwise, that they consume – the British public can still find news, drama, comedy, documentary and arts content which is commissioned out of and whose principal mission is to speak directly to this culture, these communities, these ways of life.

Experience suggests that original programming conceived with this end in mind often has a truthfulness and energy about it which allows it to play brilliantly in other countries too. There’s no reason, in other words, why it shouldn’t play a significant part in that global commercial opportunity for the creative industries. But that’s a secondary benefit. The priority must be to serve audiences here.

So, as Lenin used to say, what is to be done?

First the BBC. Please don’t wreck it, we’ve only got the one. The over-75s policy is blatantly expedient and self-evidently flawed. At the least, having agreed to give BBC the freedom to reform the entitlement, let them get on with it without hindrance or sniping from the sidelines. At best, rethink the whole thing.

For all the reasons I’ve suggested this evening, the UK needs a liberated, properly-funded BBC. By no means in all but in many categories of media, market failure – the economic justification for public intervention – is already growing and will worsen in the years ahead. At present, public policy seems to hold that the correct response to a failure of private provision – say, of regional and local news – is to restrict public provision of it as well.

Even for those who only accept market failure arguments for the continuation of public service broadcasting, this defies logic and risks exacerbating the loss of the quality and choice still further. By all means require that the BBC does what it can to help local commercial media, but give it the means and the regulatory room to do more.

The BBC has proven itself more adept at digital innovation and broad transformation than most private media companies  – the iPlayer is only one example. Give the Corporation greater freedom to accelerate its own pivot to digital, but look to it to build digital products and platforms which can be used by the rest of the industry too.

Rethink the BBC’s global role. At present government funding for the BBC’s international services is heavily concentrated on the world’s geopolitical hotspots. Our interests – both diplomatic and trade interests – are much wider than that. Leverage the BBC and use it as a calling card for the whole of the UK creative sector in the world’s markets, and indeed for the UK itself.

Channel Four remains an essential creative alternative to the BBC and an enduringly valuable creative catalyst of the entire industry. No brand is better placed to begin to turn the tide when it comes to younger audiences. But Channel Four needs a serious digital strategy and the wherewithal to deliver it – a job not just for Horseferry Road but Ofcom and government.

The shift of the BBC and Channel Four out of London and into some of the UK’s other great creative cities is essential if the whole country is to make a successful digital transition. Tony Hall is quite right to deepen the BBC’s national and regional commitment still further.

Government should encourage the whole media industry to play a bigger role in growing national capabilities in digital technology and infrastructure. We need a multi-sector partnership – to include the UK’s universities – to develop and train many more data science and applied machine learning specialists, digital product UX and design professionals, and to build on existing British strength in many of the creative digital crafts.

In media, the future belongs to those who can do great work in the boundary between content creativity and tech innovation. The UK’s great success in gaming and CGI suggests we have a competitive edge here that we should exploit.   

The other broadcasters must find their own commercial path to the future, much as we’re having to do at The New York Times. But let’s learn the lesson of Project Kangeroo and let them collaborate more freely with each other – and with the BBC when it can help with innovation and scale.

And let Fleet Street find its own path without regulatory distractions. Over time questions of standards and ethics should sort themselves out, at least among the survivors. Quality content is the only kind that works in subscription models – and the best advertisers are also becoming choosy about where their brands appear.

The UK and its constituent nations need a comprehensive rescue plan for local and regional journalism. No western country has cracked this yet.

Mixed private and public provision, scalable tech solutions, community involvement, higher education, philanthropy, the support of the BBC – the solution will probably have many elements and certainly shouldn’t solely consist of a large public cheque. But without a policy impetus and careful coordination, the present downward spin will continue. Here more than anywhere time is running out.

Like that moment in the late 1940s, this is not the worst but the best time to address the really big questions about the future of our culture, and the place of the media within it. It would great if we could recapture at least some of the ambition and panache of that glorious post-war zenith of policy creation, but what we need most is action and practical changes of policy.

It can be done. Successful navigation of this digital storm is not just possible but may even lead to stronger, better, more sustainable business and institutions. In recent years we’ve begun to prove that at The New York Times. And, to the consternation of cultural pessimists everywhere, we’re doing it by turning the quality knob up rather than down.

No one wants to see the UK turn into a cultural Airstrip One. But with newspapers struggling and broadcasters outgunned, it’s a clear and present danger. The global digital giants do a great job of providing new choice – and often real quality – but it’s vital that British audiences still get access to great news, drama, comedy, documentary made first and foremost for them.

But it won’t happen if we carry on like this. It won’t happen if public policy keeps its head down, or maintains a set of hackneyed free market assumptions about the digital future which haven’t changed much since they were articulated in the 1980s. If we want to save our cultural sovereignty, government media policy needs a fundamental change in direction.

Instead of the policy of no – no, you can’t – no, that’s too dangerous – no, one of our political backers wouldn’t like it – it needs to turn to a policy of yes. Yes to the power of British creativity. Yes to the future.