“Hello CQ, hello CQ. This is Two Emma Toc, Two-ooo Emma Toc. Writtle calling… Well, I think we’re ready to begin now, and the first thing I’ve got to introduce is a record entitled — Why are records always entitled, why aren’t they just called something? So here it is, a record entitled…”

Four years earlier, Captain Peter Eckersley had been a wireless operator in the Royal Flying Corps. Now, as an engineer with the Marconi Wireless Telegram Company, he was launching Britain’s first weekly radio station, broadcasting under the call sign 2MT (“Two Emma Toc”). Eckersley was a joker, a character, a bit of a card. And every Tuesday, radio enthusiasts across south-eastern England would tune their sets to catch his latest offering: a quiz, perhaps, or a spoof weather forecast.

Eckersley and his pals put on Britain’s first ever radio play, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. They persuaded some of the capital’s most popular singers to trek out to Writtle and perform into the ether. On one memorable occasion the world-famous Danish-American baritone Lauritz Melchior even agreed to trudge across the fields to the Writtle army hut and sing to an audience of… hundreds? Thousands? Who knows?

What happened at Writtle a hundred years ago isn’t just a lovely little tale about the triumph of the amateur spirit. It’s the origin story of one of Britain’s most beloved and controversial institutions, the BBC, which celebrates its centenary this autumn. And since the BBC’s future has never been more contested, with Boris Johnson’s government publicly contemplating the end of the licence fee and a turn towards a subscription model, it’s worth looking back at how it all began.

To its defenders, the BBC represents the collective national good over selfish private interest. But is that really true? If you were feeling cynical, you might argue that it began as a commercial monopoly to promote the interests of the major electronics firms. Its champions celebrate it as modern history’s greatest vehicle for popular cultural uplift. But you could just as well see it as a massive exercise in selling radios.

More from this author

Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

To the BBC’s fans that probably sounds like sacrilege, so let’s go back to that man in the hut. Peter Eckersley didn’t just happen to work for Marconi. The fact that he worked for the Marconi Company, one of the most innovative, ruthless and expansionist firms in the land, was absolutely crucial. Since the end of the First World War, Marconi’s engineers had wasted no opportunity to promote the latest wireless technology. It was Marconi, for example, that organised Britain’s first live radio broadcast on 15 June 1920, when the soprano Dame Nellie Melba performed at its Chelmsford factory. This was a landmark in broadcasting history, with people reportedly tuning in from as far away as the Champs-Elysées. These days, though, the BBC makes little of it. Why not? Alas, it was sponsored by the Daily Mail. Quelle horreur!

You can draw a line directly from Dame Nellie’s performance, via Eckersley’s hut, to the formation of the British Broadcasting Company on 18 October 1922, and the Marconi name is there at every turn. In one crucial memo, the firm’s publicity manager, Arthur Burrows, argued that they could make an awful lot of money through the “radiation” of entertainment to the public, rather than by merely selling hardware to the government. So perhaps, in some parallel universe, there’s a Britain in which the Marconi Company really did establish its own private radio service, and where the papers are currently badgering the Marconi streaming giant to cancel Jimmy Carr.

But as we know, things didn’t work out like that. In a world obsessed with the danger of political and cultural disorder, the men who ran the General Post Office were anxious to avoid the “chaos” of the United States, where hundreds of radio start-ups had blossomed in 1921 and 1922. What was more, state control had been legitimised by the experience of total war, covering everything from military conscription to pub opening times. Much better, they thought, to have a single authorised broadcaster, a state-approved consortium: a British Broadcasting Company.

So in the autumn of 1922 the six largest firms, led by Marconi, formed a monopoly, authorised by the General Post Office and funded by a 10-shilling radio licence fee. And everybody won. The BBC set out on the path that would lead to Fawlty Towers, I, Claudius, Blake’s 7 and Eldorado. Arthur Burrows became its first director of programmes. Eckersley became its first chief engineer. And Marconi sold thousands and thousands of radios.

Why isn’t this story better known? The BBC’s centenary website, barely mentions it at all. Its timeline begins in the autumn of 1922, erasing poor Dame Nellie and skipping the Writtle story entirely. The explanation is obvious. The Marconi story just doesn’t fit. The history of the BBC is supposed to be an object lesson in paternalistic liberalism and public service, but the Marconi story is all about private enterprise. Marconi meant novelty; Marconi meant disruption. But today’s BBC is the guardian of continuity, a reassuring comfort blanket in a world of change. How do Dame Nellie and the Daily Mail fit into that?

More from this author

How to bring down a Prime Minister

By Dominic Sandbrook

It’s easy to see why the BBC has forgotten its entrepreneurial prehistory. By the time of its 20th birthday in 1942, it had transcended its buccaneering origins to become a genuinely national institution, the voice of a people standing together against the horrors of Nazism. For the next few decades, it was one of the chief pillars of the social democratic consensus, the broadcasting equivalent of the NHS.

This BBC didn’t just influence the national conversation; it was the national conversation. Famously, the very last show Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise made for the corporation, which went out on Christmas Day 1977, was watched by more than 20 million people. The supporting cast — Elton John, Michael Parkinson, Penelope Keith, Richard Briers, Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Frank Bough, James Hunt, Angela Rippon — was a Who’s Who of the British imagination, every name immediately recognisable. When you walked down the street the next day, almost half of the adults you met had seen it.

In his novel The Rotter’s Club (2001), Jonathan Coe uses that Morecambe and Wise Christmas special as a symbol of national consensus, the teenage hero realising that everybody he knows is watching it too. “It came to him,” writes Coe,

“that he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets… all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of… oneness, that was the only word he could think of, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter.”

There’s an underlying melancholy to that scene, though. By the time Coe wrote The Rotter’s Club, the BBC’s paternalistic monopoly was already under siege. The first blow came in 1955 with the launch of ITV, followed by the advent of Channel Four in 1982. British Satellite Broadcasting arrived in 1986, Sky three years later. We all know the rest: the internet, Amazon, Netflix, Disney. Or to put it another way, change — the kind of technological and cultural innovation previously embodied by the men in that Writtle hut.

It’s change, not Conservative hostility — and certainly not Nadine Dorries — that represents the real threat to the BBC’s survival. In the last few weeks its defenders on social media have circulated a wonderful advert from 1986, in which pub bore John Cleese curses the licence fee and wonders what the BBC “has ever given us for fifty-eight quid”. Up pops a host of famous faces — Sir Michael Hordern, Barry Norman, Alan Whicker, Sir Patrick Moore — to put him right.

It’s heart-warming, nostalgic stuff. But to anybody under the age of 30 it must be completely irrelevant. Most of those people have long since died, retired or been cancelled. They’re relics of a vanished age.

It’s telling, then, that when people try to defend the BBC, they typically point to Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who — two shows that, one way or another, could have been watched by Sir Winston Churchill in his dotage. Strictly’s current incarnation dates from 2004, but in its original form, as plain Come Dancing, it dates from 1949. As for Doctor Who, it dates from 1963 and is now attracting its lowest audience since the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. In a bid to revive its fortunes, the BBC have just persuaded its former writer Russell T. Davies, who ran the show more than a decade ago, to return to the helm. You can’t get much more backward-looking than that.

Suggested reading

Why the BBC is still selling Savile

By Tanya Gold

I take no pleasure in pointing this out. For anybody like me, born in the Seventies or earlier, a world without the BBC seems unimaginable. I have merely to hear the opening bars of Grandstand, a staple of my Saturdays for decades, and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But Grandstand has been dead for 15 years, rendered obsolete when the BBC’s commercial rivals snapped up all the sports rights. And although Match of the Day endures, it’s easy to imagine a future in which Amazon bags the Premiership highlights. How long before that jaunty theme music vanishes forever? Five years? Ten?

Against that background, talk of the current government’s “attack” on the BBC strikes me as fundamentally inconsequential. Even if Boris Johnson’s successor kneels in penance outside Broadcasting House and promises to preserve the licence fee till the end of time, the basic problem remains: the BBC was designed for radio and television sets, not for mobile phones and iPads. It’s a national institution in a globalised world, a product of the twentieth century struggling to stay afloat in the twenty-first.

A few weeks ago a YouGov poll found that only one in four people aged 18-30 watch the BBC every week. A third of them never watch it at all. No doubt some will graduate to the BBC’s output as they grow older — but surely not all of them. What about today’s primary-school children? Will the Marvel and Mandalorian addicts be watching Newsnight in the year 2040? Will they really still be clinging to Grandad’s comfort blanket?

To some readers, I know, this probably sounds like heresy, a premature obituary for a much-loved institution. But I do like the BBC. (I don’t “love” it, obviously, because I’ve worked for it, and nobody who’s been a victim of its taxi-booking system is ever going to love it.) And because I’m a nostalgic, backward-looking sort of person, I want it to survive. I adore In Our Time, I love The Apprentice (I know, ridiculous) and I still watch Doctor Who, albeit out of a joyless sense of duty.

Much of what the BBC does, it does brilliantly. I’ll be sorry, then, when it goes. But it will go, eventually. Or rather, it’ll probably fragment into its constituent parts, some of which will charge for subscriptions. No doubt it’ll be a gradual process, and many people will barely notice. On Twitter, the BBC’s champions will lament the death of a common national culture. But our common national culture has been fragmenting for decades, which is why Jonathan Coe lamented its passing more than 20 years ago.

Cultural moments come and go. Institutions are born and they die. In fact, everything dies; that’s how history works. The future belongs to the ambitious, the disruptive, the change-makers — people like the engineers in that hut. But these days, people like that don’t work for the BBC. They work for Amazon.

But in Washington, the seeds of today’s political discontent were already being sown. Two years after Clinton had swept to power, the Republicans took both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Never again, battle-hardened Republicans promised to themselves, would they stay locked out of power for that long.

In its place spawned a new grassroots conservatism that was angry and uncompromising, finding its voice in a conservative “under-media”, as Andrew Breitbart termed it, that included Drudge Report (1995), Fox (1996) and Newsmax (1997). But it was Fox, which first aired 25 years ago today, that dominated, providing an outlet to a white Middle America that felt neglected and ignored by Washington and the established media.

Politics was indeed becoming angrier, but a deeper, spiritual malaise had also been spreading beneath the surface. The cultural and sexual revolution of the Sixties, Vietnam, Watergate and the oil price crisis chipped away at the post-war building blocks of American society, particularly in the heartlands where wages were stagnating and jobs were moving offshore. By 1994, trust in the Government sunk to its lowest point ever.

This was the environment into which Fox was born. Its benefactor, Rupert Murdoch, was so desperate to seize it that he offered to air Fox for free — and even paid cable companies $20 a subscriber.

Suggested reading

Can the South escape its demons?

By Joel Kotkin

But to fully understand how Fox became the news empire that it is today, you need to understand the man central to the entire operation. His name was not Rupert Murdoch, but Roger Ailes. The Chairman, as he became known, was a grotesque figure whose jowls would expand like a toad’s vocal sac when he was irate (an employee once put a frame around a hole in the wall and wrote: “Don’t mess with Roger Ailes.”).

This anger — part pathological, part driven by what he saw as a corrosion of American values — informed much of Fox’s coverage. This became clear from the very first sequence of the channel’s launch: criminals, flag-burning, and protests formed the basis of Fox’s nightly news coverage. These were topics that the liberal media refused to cover, argued Ailes, and America wanted to hear them. As he later said:

“I’ll tell you what television didn’t do at the time. … It didn’t reflect what people really thought. I mean, they’re sitting there saying, ‘Wait a minute, New York’s going broke, Los Angeles is broke, the United States is broke, everything the government has run is broke, Social Security is broke, Medicare is broke, the military is broke… Why do we want these guys making all these decisions for us?’”

A former Nixon operative, Ailes learned from his boss how to mine and re-package feelings of resentment back to his base. He cultivated an us-vs-them mentality among viewers (and voters) that put them on a permanent war footing. Using tough, earthy language, news anchors would speak to viewers like they were foot soldiers, warning them that Christians were under attack, liberals were starting a war and the media was out to get you.

Crucially, there was always an enemy, which again stemmed from Ailes’s own paranoia. In fact, so petrified was the Chairman of being attacked by gay rights activists in the 1990s that he installed bomb proof glass in his office window. When Fox was first established, he situated its newsroom in a windowless bunker replete with an in-house research unit — known as the “brain room” — that required special security clearance to gain access. “The brain room is where Willie Horton comes from,” said one Fox insider. “It’s where the evil resides.”

Suggested reading

How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

Indeed, there was something faintly ridiculous about the whole thing. On the Fox sofa would sit a chopstick-thin blonde wedged between two Irish-American walruses telling viewers that their country was under threat. They were, in effect, trying to mobilise a patriot army, even though the median age of that army was 65. Programmes would therefore be interrupted by commercials (of which there were many) that were largely geared towards class action hip-replacement lawsuits and wonder drugs for erectile dysfunction. It was like an army general having to remind his soldiers to check their catheter bags before going to battle.

But there was a scintilla of self-awareness too; a nod and wink to the camera that this was entertainment as much as it was news. In fact, Fox had one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN, and the organisation did very little in the way of original reporting. Instead, it decided what the news was, telling its viewers what to care about, and sometimes even waiting for Democrat leaders to respond to a story before it took the opposite line (as it did with Obama and the George Zimmerman shooting).

All the while, Fox’s influence grew, far outstripping that of its rivals. By 2008, it had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, pulling in over two million viewers a night. Politically, it was pushing viewers to the Right, too. One study showed that in districts where Fox News was available, there was a Rightward drift in voting patterns while another found that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.

Such was Fox’s influence that Republican leaders would beg Ailes and other executives to ordain them; even Barack Obama — who faced grim levels of racist coverage before and during his presidency — held a behind-closed-doors meeting, agreeing to do more interviews in exchange for dialling down his coverage. “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us,” said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. “Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.” Having tipped the electoral balance in George W. Bush’s favour by prematurely declaring him president in 2000, this was undoubtedly true. Ailes, too, was keenly aware of this fact. By 2010 Fox’s power was so great that the chairman declared that he wanted to “elect the next president”.

Yet it was not until Trump that Fox and the White House became almost inextricably linked. Throughout Trump’s presidency, it was never quite clear if Fox was the tail wagging the dog or the other way around. Between 2018-2020, Trump live-tweeted Fox news programmes 1,100 times, so much so that Fox and Friends began talking to Trump rather than about Trump. On one occasion, the hosts of Fox and Friends asked the President to flash his lights on and off in the White House if he was watching.

More from this author

You can't cure racism

By James Billot

This close relationship between the President and network was bound to turn ugly if and when the two fell out. This occurred after the 2020 election when Trump deemed Fox to be insufficiently zealous in toeing his stolen election line. He called on his supporters to instead watch OAN and Newsmax, two Right-wing insurgents that made Fox look like C-Span: in one viral OAN clip from last month, a presenter pulled the plug on an interview with a veteran for criticising Trump, as well as his predecessors, for the country’s military problems in Afghanistan. He then pledged his allegiance on camera to the dear leader.

But Fox’s rivals were not just queuing up on the Right. During last year’s election, moderates and Democrats also flocked to MSNBC and CNN, which led to Fox suffering its worst ratings in 20 years. For the most part, though, Fox remains dominant. In recent months, it has restored its position at the top of the leaderboard, securing an average prime time audience of 2.4 million nightly viewers.

And so Fox News remains king of Red America. It’s certainly helped that every week, liberal late night talk show hosts laugh at the dumb rubes featured on Tucker Carlson Tonight or the Ingraham Angle. But what they don’t understand is that this mockery and condescension were the basis for Fox’s birth: a platform for disenfranchised, disillusioned conservatives who felt looked down upon by coastal elites and Washington. Every sneer, jibe and insult since only justifies Ailes’s project. This is Fox’s world; America just lives in it.

As seen and heard from abroad, that essentially means the BBC World Service. Given its impressive figures, any government, not just one facing the uncertainties of Brexit, would see the potential.

The BBC World Service currently broadcasts in more than 40 languages to a global audience — across radio, television and internet — now estimated at 426 million a week, with a target of 500 million. But the television audience for English-language programmes has overtaken the English-language radio audience worldwide, and — along with digital — it is growing faster. So far as international broadcasting is concerned, the present and the future are television.

But how well equipped is BBC World Service television — now, after various name changes, officially called BBC World News — to spearhead a UK “soft power” offensive? Having regularly viewed both the BBC and its competition during frequent travels in recent months, I would sadly submit: not very.

With its global reach, its glorious history, and the advantage that the UK is home to the English language, the broadcaster is lauded as unique to “brand” Britain. Times have changed, though, since the BBC World Service (then radio only) ruled the airwaves, and the now 30-year old BBC World Service television looks distinctly unimpressive from abroad.

Suggested reading

How Lefty luvvies lost the plot

By Gareth Roberts

So why did the BBC’s global television service lose its edge? A more pertinent question would perhaps be whether it was ever the world-beater it claimed to be in the first place. Since its creation, in 1991, it is probably fair to say that a large part of its reputation was borrowed: it was automatically identified with the BBC World Service radio and allowed to bask, to an extent, in reflected glory.

But there were always big differences between the radio and television services. Where the radio had a long and distinguished history, and was funded until recently by a grand-in-aid from the Foreign Office (while running itself editorially), the TV arm was denied either government or licence-payer funding. It was set up, instead, as a commercial proposition, relying largely on advertising and subscriptions.

Because it uses many of the same correspondents and resources and benefits from the BBC brand, it has generally been treated with the same respect as the BBC World Service radio. But this respect hasn’t always been warranted. There have been questions, for example, about sponsored programming. But it has bred a certain complacency about the competition. For years, BBC World Service TV has been comparing itself favourably with American international broadcasters, such as CNN — which is not hard to do; the bar is not high —  while ignoring the growing appeal of European stations.

From what I’ve seen, the chief competition to the BBC today comes not from the US, but from the two premier European services: France 24 and Germany’s Deutsche Welle. While not a national broadcaster, the Lyon-based Euronews is up there, too.

Suggested reading

10 things I hate about Germany

By Peter Franklin

All three broadcast internationally in English (often with native English-speaking presenters) as well as in other languages. France 24 has French, Arabic and Spanish, and a combined audience of 61 million; DW has Arabic as well as German, and a combined audience of 135 million (compared with 101 million for BBC World Service television which broadcasts only in English). Both are growing fast.

Taking these stations as the competition, then, BBC World News falls down on a host of comparisons, starting with the absolute basic: timely and worldwide news coverage. BBC World News boasts that it breaks more stories from more places than any other channel. How much of a recommendation that is, however, depends on what those stories are and how they are treated.

Travelling in Italy over Christmas, and in East and Central Europe during the autumn, I found the BBC to be slower on fresh news than the competition, and to have less hard news in the overall output than soft-ish and often repeated features. If I wanted to switch on and know what was happening, France 24 was a much better bet.

A specific example was coverage of the Russia-Ukraine end-of-year prisoner exchange, which on the BBC lagged far behind the actual news and was given little context. US shootings took precedence – even though the service was billed BBC World News Europe.

There was a qualitative difference, too, in the content and tone of features. The ratio of relatively timeless features to news seemed greater, sometimes much greater, on the BBC than on the other channels. A striking proportion of the BBC’s output also seemed too focused on aid projects of various kinds, with a fairly obvious, but unspoken, didactic streak. Even more striking, compared with France24 and DW, was the paucity of features about life in Britain. Both European stations gave substantial glimpses of how life is lived in their countries and looked — sometimes critically — in the mirror.

To be fair, BBC World News did relay some of the crucial parliamentary sessions live, during the Brexit debates. Then again, so did most other international stations, as events in the UK were seen as having global significance. It was a pity, then, that BBC World News did not make a bigger effort to interpret what was happening for the benefit of non-UK viewers.

There are two other points that might be more important for viewers abroad than BBC HQ in London might think. First, quite a few of the presenters and reporters could do with smartening up. Some look downright scruffy, compared with their French and German counterparts. You may object on the grounds that sartorial negligence never harmed anyone. But when you switch from DW to BBC World News and the BBC guy’s shirt is unironed and the trousers don’t fit, I’m sorry, but authority is lost.

Which leaves my final point. The service doesn’t capitalise sufficiently on what could and should be one of the BBC’s greatest strengths vis-a-vis the competition: a wealth of native speakers to choose from. If you watch the BBC abroad, you might expect presenters and reporters to speak comprehensible English. Of course not demanding that everyone should speak the Queen’s English c. 1930, old Etonian or extreme RP. Nor am I saying that English shouldn’t be accented. But the presenter should be understandable. Someone who isn’t shouldn’t be reporting in the name of the BBC.

Suggested reading

Sorry, Auntie, you had it coming

By Robin Aitken

Both France 24 and Deutsche Welle employ fluent English speakers for their English-language channels. So why can’t the BBC, with all the advantages that come from being the home side linguistically, do the same?

Perhaps, then, the top brass should set aside a few hours to view the competition in real time (I wonder if they ever have). That should focus minds.

But tweaks to the programming and a decent wardrobe consultant alone will not do it. These are pretty cosmetic fixes. BBC World Service television is not going to be an effective instrument of “soft power” unless there some rather more fundamental changes.

The first would be to bring World Service radio and televison under the same funding structure and editorial direction, so that it functions as one. At the moment, they are separate, with the radio and its foreign language services funded by the licence-fee and World Service television a commercial entity, funded by advertising and subscription, as it was when it was first set up.

The argument against bringing World Service television in-house was always the cost. But this could be changing. Five years ago, the then Government agreed to a BBC request for more money for its international services — to the tune of £89 million a year — to be spread across World Service radio, television and digital. This would suggest that World Service television is not quite as separate or self-sufficient as it was. With a government that is loosening the purse-strings generally, the time could be ripe for this change.

Suggested reading

Statistically, you shouldn't believe the news

By Tom Chivers

The second would be to define the mission of this new unified service more clearly – as entailing the projection of a distinct view, or views, from London. This would have to be handled carefully, as it could encounter staff resistance.

While France 24 and Deutsche Welle are both directly state-owned and their staff well understand that they work for a state broadcaster, I suspect many BBC World Service staff — and I say this as a World Service staff member myself long ago — do not see themselves in the same way. I suspect, too, that they would take a dim view of the idea that the prime purpose of the BBC’s international services was to promote UK “soft power” as a potential threat to their much prized independence.

This could be an obstacle, but it is not insurmountable. The BBC is both aware of, and takes a certain pride in, being seen as a flagship of the UK’s “soft power”. But it regards this as a product of its quality and editorial standards, rather than the reason for its existence. There is no reason to alter this. What could and should be changed is to ensure that those standards are coonsistently upheld across all its international services — radio, television and digital — and that the voice of the BBC abroad is one that comes identifiably from the UK.

International broadcasting, especially television, is highly, and increasingly, competitive. The UK, through the reputation of the BBC World Service had a head start. It cannot afford to rest on its laurels.

Some things, though, never change. Then, as now, Oliver Letwin was in the news. He’d just given a speech on the theory of Cameron Conservatism. It still makes for a thought-provoking read. The timing, however, was spectacularly unfortunate.

Letwin’s central argument was that “politics — once econo-centric — must now become socio-centric”; or, as he also put it, “instead of being about economics, politics in a post-Marxist age is about the whole way we live our lives; it is about society.”

Yet, as he spoke those words, the first dominoes were falling in the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08. By September 2007, it engulfed the Northern Rock building society — a shocking event, but a mere curtain-raiser to what was to come. The credit crunch turned into a banking meltdown which turned into the Great Recession which turned into the long, hard slog of austerity (punctuated by the Eurozone crisis and the immiseration of Greece).

Suggested reading

The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

Contra Letwin, politics became intensely, almost exclusively, “econo-centric”. It stayed that way for years. Today, though, it’s as if it never happened. If, outside the business pages, the state of the economy is considered at all, it is usually through the lens of a hotter story.

What explains our economics amnesia? Is it because the problems of capitalism were all sorted out five years ago and we can afford to worry about something else? Or were the problems massively over-hyped ten years ago — meaning there was nothing to worry about in the first place?

Or, much more likely, have we been so distracted by the political consequences of the last financial crisis, that we’ve left ourselves unprepared for the next one?

*

If you’ve forgotten what we argued about before Trump and Brexit then, trust me, it was economics. The subject dominated the headlines and the leader columns. Any journalist who knew the difference between a debt and a deficit saw their careers flourish.

Robert Peston, officially BBC business editor (later economics editor), became king of the news. Economists like Thomas Piketty became best-selling authors. Books about finance and financiers were made into Hollywood movies. Central bankers, meanwhile, were treated as if they were film stars.

Of course, the experts did have some uncomfortable questions to answer, like “why didn’t you see this coming?” But mostly they got away with it because the media and the politicians hadn’t seen it coming either. In any case, the hard questions soon moved on to the future of the capitalist system. For instance, did it have one? At very least, it became acceptable — indeed, fashionable — to express doubts about the neoliberal version of capitalism.

The “before” and “after” of this shift in mood was a wonder to behold. On the eve of the crisis, Oliver Letwin could confidently state the following:

“…the capitalist/socialist debate has in general ceased to dominate modern politics. From Beijing to Brussels, the free market has won the battle of economic ideas.”

As it turned out, the debate wasn’t quite done-and-dusted. The country didn’t turn to socialism, but with private banks being taken into public ownership it was clear that the world had changed. The Conservatives took too long to realise this and it cost them dear. Gordon Brown regained a brief moment of relevance (“this is no time for a novice”) and Vince Cable seized the intellectual initiative.

Suggested reading

Where did the Church's land go?

By Giles Fraser

Meanwhile, on the streets, the Occupy movement was physically bringing capitalism to a halt, if only in some city centres. But, crucially, it wasn’t just the Left on the warpath. The conservative heartlands were up in arms too — with elements of the media giving voice to their anger.

An ingenious piece of research helps to quantify this phenomenon and the economics news boom more generally. You can read about it in a post by Tony Curzon Price and colleagues on the Rebuilding Macroeconomics blog:

“We collected the entire online corpus of the Daily Mail money section since 1998 — 240,000 articles. We used Google’s text analytics tools to extract entities like firms, places and subjects from the articles. We used Google’s emotion detection tools to identify the valence and stridency of the emotions in each article.”

What they found was a huge increase in stories about “rip-off” companies:

“Before 2004, there were about 10 rip-off stories a week; this rose slowly to around 15 before the GFC, when it rose rapidly to around 30, peaking in 2010. It then fell back but has settled at a level above 20 rip-off stories per week.”

The peak in coverage coincided with a peak in the emotional negativity of the articles. Furthermore, as a breakdown of the subject matter reveals, it was news about the financial sector driving these trends.

*

And yet what did all that fear and anguish amount to? For all the earnest discussion of radical reform, capitalism today doesn’t look much different from capitalism before the crash. Nationalised banks have returned to private ownership, while those in charge escaped with their riches and all but one of their knighthoods. Move along, nothing to see here.

The news agenda did move along. By the middle of this decade, non-economic events were grabbing our attention: conflict in the Middle East, the refugee crisis, the rise of populism at home and abroad.

In 2015, Robert Peston quit his role as BBC economics editor to become ITN’s political editor. It was a canny move — because, in 2016, the Trump and Brexit earthquakes remade the landscape. It was all about politics now; the economics news boom was well and truly over.

Suggested reading

The global economy has gone mad

By Peter Franklin

We now study the minutiae of Parliamentary procedure, not the minutes of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. Where we once put names to faceless bankers, we now make celebrities out of EU bureaucrats.

Books that explain politics have displaced books that explain economics. For instance, the super-productive Mr Peston hit the shelves with How Do We Fix This Mess? The Economic Price of Having it All and the Route to Lasting Prosperity in 2012, then changed tack with the compactly titled WTF? in 2017. Or take the example of another former BBC economics editor, Evan Davis, who offered us his Made in Britain: How the Nation Earns Its Living in 2011, but followed up with Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It in 2017. 

Arguably, the book of the financial crisis was The Big Short by Michael Lewis, which was published in 2010. He stuck with finance and economics with subsequent books, but with The Fifth Risk in 2018 he too had switched to politics (specifically a study of the machinery of government under Donald Trump).

Even among anti-capitalist protestors, we’ve seen a shift in focus. The radical egalitarians of Occupy have given way to the radical environmentalism of Extinction Rebellion.

*

Of course I don’t mean to suggest that we’ve stopped talking about the economy altogether. You can read all about it in the business section of any newspaper that still has one. The Economist still covers economics. The money pages of the Daily Mail are still about money, even if the tone isn’t as angry as it used to be.

But however good the specialist coverage, it is the mainstream news agenda that really matters. For all the importance of the internet and the detailed information it can provide on almost any topic, it is worth remembering that somewhere in the offices of every powerful man and woman on the planet there will be a table on which the day’s newspapers are laid out. It is the front page headlines that the decision-makers see every time they walk past, not the inside page analysis.

If the economy gets a look-in at all, it is typically within the context of higher profile issues. In Britain that means Brexit. To see what I mean, have a look at the blog of the BBC’s current economics editor, Faisal Islam. It started in July of this year, and, as of the 25 October, there have been nineteen posts so far. By my count, sixteen are mostly about Brexit; only one doesn’t mention Brexit at all.

Of course, Brexit matters a lot — not least to the economy. But the unrelenting media focus means that we’re not paying attention to important economic developments that have little or nothing to do with the B-word.

For instance, any story about a car factory closing or being scaled back in the UK turns into a slanging match over the impact of Brexit uncertainty. Meanwhile, we miss the much wider story about the technological disruption of automotive manufacturing around the world. What may turn out to be one of most consequential developments of the next decade — Germany’s industrial crisis — doesn’t get the attention it merits.

Suggested reading

What if Germany's economy toppled?

By Peter Franklin

And that’s not the only story we’re missing. In August this year, global investment in negative yield bonds hit $17 trillion — a truly bizarre and worrying phenomenon, and yet one that most members of the news-consuming public will be completely unaware of. That’s bad, because if we don’t hear about it then our politicians won’t care about it. Conventional monetary policy has basically collapsed, but it hardly features on the political agenda.

I wonder how many of our 650 MPs know what a negative yield bond is or could provide a cogent explanation of their attractiveness to the money markets — and what that says about the state of the global economy?

I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it’s roughly as many MPs who knew or cared about what was going wrong the last time it all went to shit.

It’s time for some time travel. You’re walking down a London thoroughfare in about 1700. From a building nearby you can hear laughter, both derisive and uproarious, mixed with shouting, hacking coughs, swearing and occasional weeping. You push open the heavy oak door and enter. It’s crowded, people squashed together on long wooden benches set out on jagged floorboards. Everyone is talking, everyone is drinking — but there is no alcohol. The air is heavy with the scents of tobacco smoke, sweat and coffee grounds.

Only, wait a moment. Has there been a glitch in the space-time continuum? Because under that periwig over there, eyes wide, gesturing wildly with her pipe, isn’t that Carole Cadwalladr? What about those two raggamuffins who just burst in breathlessly, greeted by a massed cry of “What news have you?” and shouting the latest on Walpole and the Act of Settlement, then rushing out again; they may be a little besmirched and ragged, but aren’t they Beth Rigby and Laura Kuenssberg?

Ranting in opposite corners, jabbing their fingers accusingly across the room at each other, that must be Kevin Maguire and Rod Liddle. And the urchin with his nose pressed up against the window, stamping his foot and raving that everything and everybody inside is awful and simultaneously demanding to be let in: yes, it’s little Owen Jones.

Suggested reading

How I was cancelled by Doctor Who

By Gareth Roberts

It strikes me that the era of the London coffee house and our own times are linked — both were/are milieus formed out of unique cultural and technological circumstances. Both are characterised by novelties in the means of communication and consumption that reorganised the public sphere with disconcerting rapidity and sent everything and indeed everybody up in the air, leading to howls of outrage, denunciation, and calls for regulation. Both are very, very shouty.

The London coffee houses were the result of a blend of innovations. As trade boomed, coffee and a taste for it were imported. The first house opened in 1652, serving up what was described as a “bitter Mohammedan gruel” — 15 years later there were almost a hundred, by the close of the century an estimated six times that number. At the same time, cheap mass printing became possible, with the first examples of what we would recognise to be newspapers being produced, and sold, much more cheaply.

In 1711 The Spectator launched, with a stated aim to include women among its readers and bring ‘philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools, and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffee–houses’  — hence the name of the Spectator’s modern-day gossipy blog. All the newspapers fed into and fed from the opinions of the coffee house in a perfect symbiotic relationship.

Education became more widespread as the middle class expanded and got more prosperous. And suddenly, everybody had an opinion and somewhere to read it, speak it or counterblast someone else’s. The low price of admission — a one-off, one-penny entrance fee — meant almost anyone could enter and discuss politics freely. In 1726, the visiting Swiss nobleman César de Saussure wrote, in a tone of scandalised amusement, that “workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms to read the latest news”.

Suggested reading

Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

Unsurprisingly, these changes sparked an opposing uproar, with concerns about seditious behaviour and inflammatory language (you can see where this is going). King Charles II attempted to close down the coffee houses by royal proclamation in 1675, and at about the same time came the notorious ‘Women’s Petition’ against the “excessive use of that newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called coffee“. Both were unsuccessful.

After a rocky couple of decades, the coffee houses lost their shock value and became an established part of London life — no longer actively contentious, though never entirely respectable. What did for them in the end was another shift in technology and consumption: the arrival of tea, which unlike coffee you could prepare yourself and drink at home, as well as more substantial and reliable newspapers.

I think that right now in 2019 we’re at a comparable stage to those times, possibly more akin to the earlier, outraged petitioning and royally-proclaiming phase of the coffee house era.

It’s astonishing to think that widespread internet access in the Western world only occurred 20 years ago. The apparent ubiquitousness of Twitter in our public discourse (apparent, as only 24% of the UK population use it at all, a figure worth remembering) is even more recent. We are newbies to all this, taken very much by surprise.

I can’t think of a scenario from 20th-century science fiction — and frankly I’ve watched and read rather a lot of that — that came anywhere close to an accurate prediction of Twitter or social media in general. It’s rather sweet to see again episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from the Nineties on Netflix, made just a few years before this explosion, in which the characters share information by walking to each other’s workplaces and handing each other iPads. They live in a permanently fraught state of contentious politicking but — incredibly to our eyes — they never worry, or have to worry, about gossip, rumours and fake news, despite being surrounded by computers. The social media revolution, like the coffee houses, caught everybody napping.

Suggested reading

How politics is poisoning the truth

By Graeme Archer

The world has never been more peaceful, prosperous and tolerant, and yet we obsess about race, gender and inequality like never before. Everything is related in exactly the same tone of urgency and importance, which makes it impossible to substantiate what is actually urgent or important. In an impossibly crowded and loud public sphere everything, of necessity, has to be loud or sentimental to claim attention.

The attention paid by sinking legacy media outlets to mini-controversies on Twitter is fascinating — the so-called ‘Black Ariel’ effect, whereby a handful of tweets, or even a single tweet, is drummed up in an online headline as a major outrage, causing more clicks, more heat, more emotion. Much ado about literally nothing at all.

You don’t have to squint very hard to see the perukes on everybody’s heads, and there’s a distinct whiff of ground arabica beans.

But the coffee houses became a normal part of the scene and faded away. At the moment, in the heat of the Twitter uproar, we can’t imagine the same thing will happen — or how — to the current mode of our public sphere, but it almost undoubtedly will. Censorship is one possibility. Even today Chinese politicians don’t have to worry about people tweeting mean things about them on Twitter, as the Party went boldly on past the point where Charles II retreated, and blocked the whole damn thing in 2009.

My hope is that, just as with the coffee houses, we’ll find a way to acclimatise and muddle through. The current calls for more civility in discourse from public figures, often made hilariously by the very worst offenders on this count, are to my thinking on a hiding to nothing. All that has changed really is that people can now say to your virtual face the kind of thing they were shouting at your face on their television screen in 2006.

Perhaps a younger generation of politicians and public figures who have never known different, who can’t remember a time when people didn’t have an outlet to be rude or horrible to them directly, will just shrug and ignore that. When you get past a certain level of renown maybe turning off your notifications from people you don’t know is the best idea.

Meanwhile there’s some joy to be taken from the madness, maybe. Maybe there’s some amusement to be had from the great pompous asses of the day, the Bercows, Linekers and Graylings. We look at Hogarth’s coffee house scenes, and we don’t see the sturm und drang that surrounded that period. Perhaps people in the 24th century will look at depictions of 2019 and feel affection and a certain nostalgia for a lost age of rollicking, spluttering and pretended outrage.

Suggested reading

On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

It is therefore no surprise that when the folks at Our World in Data compared the media’s coverage (specifically, in the New York Times and The Guardian) of various causes of death with mortality statistics for the general population they found a mismatch. They also looked at causes of death through a third lens – online searches by the public.

Further reading

Don’t sweat the small stuff, or why the ‘New Optimists’ are only half right

By Peter Franklin

The findings are summarised on the site in an article by Hannah Ritchie:

“…around one-third of the considered causes of deaths resulted from heart disease, yet this cause of death receives only 2-3 percent of Google searches and media coverage… just under one-third of the deaths came from cancer; we actually google cancer a lot (37 percent of searches)… but it receives only 13-14 percent of media coverage…”

This is pretty much as one might expect. Specific incidences of death caused by a common disease do not generally make the news – except in the case of famous individuals.

As for online searches, one would expect the public to turn to ‘Dr. Internet’ if they have concerns about their own health or that of people they know – and, given the wide range of possible symptoms and warning signs associated with cancer, it’s not surprising that it prompts a disproportionate share of searches.

Then we come to the most dramatic findings:

“…the largest discrepancies concern violent forms of death: suicide, homicide and terrorism. All three receive much more relative attention in Google searches and media coverage than their relative share of deaths. When it comes to the media coverage on causes of death, violent deaths account for more than two-thirds of coverage in the New York Times and The Guardian but account for less than 3 percent of the total deaths in the US.”

Ritchie says that compared to what actually happens in real life, homicide is over represented in the newspapers by a factor of 31 and terrorism a factor of 4,000.

Ritchie does acknowledge what she calls the “very nature of news”. As the word makes clear, news is all about novelty and therefore the unusual, the sudden and the spectacular. This, she says, leaves most of us “with a skewed perception of the world; we think the world is much worse than it is.”

Further reading

I'm Lionel, I'm a news-aholic

By Lionel Shriver

Commenting on the Our World in Data study, Bill Gates was moved to tweet the following:

“I’m always amazed by the disconnect between what we see in the news and the reality of the world around us… we must fight the fear instinct that distorts our perspective.”

But is it right to pathologise what Ritchie calls a “strong bias for outlier events”?

Weighing in on the debate, Nassim Taleb slammed the “naive empiricists” who equate the future significance of a danger with how common it happens to be over a particular period of time.

The most egregious example of this fallacy is a cheap trick that’s often pulled by faux sophisticates in the commentariat. This is how it works: firstly, look up the stats for some rare, but crushingly banal, way to die – like falling off a ladder or accidentally drowning in a bathtub. Then, tell your readers that they’re still more likely to die that way than be knifed by a mugger or blown-up by terrorist. Then reassure everyone that the country is not, in fact, going-to-hell-in-a-handcart and that all is well in the liberal paradise. Finish with a condescending quip about Brexit voters – and you’re done. File that column, sit back and bask in the respect of your peers.

Taleb exposes the flaws in this ‘thinking’. He does so by distinguishing between two domains of probability, which he calls ‘Extremistan’ and ‘Mediocristan’. Terrorism is an example of a risk that belongs to Extremistan. It may, at present, be small – but it has the potential to become massively and unpredictably more significant.

A single act of terror can pitch a nation into a series of foreign policy disasters, as with 9/11 and the US. An escalating campaign of terror (and counter-terror) can bring fear and division to an entire society as in Northern Ireland during the Troubles; or, yet worse, develop into a full-scale, bloody civil war – as it did in Syria. Crime, too, poses potentially systemic risks. If it gets out of control, the harm is not just to the immediate victims, but everyday life and long-term prosperity across an entire neighbourhood, city or country.

Further reading

If you want to get ahead, take a risk

By Timandra Harkness

The same cannot be said of bathtubs or ladders. We may have the luck to live in a time and place where they kill more people than terrorists do, but the risks associated with their use belong to Mediocristan. This means that the most extreme scenarios really aren’t that extreme at all – society will not be rocked to its foundations by an uncontrollable epidemic of bathtub drownings, for instance.

Could it be that the general public has an instinctive sense of the risks that have the greatest potential to turn into catastrophe? If so, in pressing our buttons, the media is not whipping up scare stories – but acting as a means by which legitimate public concerns can be identified, amplified and pushed up the political agenda.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Part One

New Year, New Media – part one

By Various

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Now read Part Two

Test article

By Various

Four years earlier, Eliot been made redundant and went straight into the first job he could find: a temporary administration assistant for a lingerie manufacturing company based in Leicester. Life looks rather different now. Since then, he has found himself in the middle of the swirling, dangerous waters of geo-politics. He found evidence of cluster bombs in Damascus and those responsible for the downing of commercial airliner MH-17. And as of this month, Eliot and his colleagues claim they have uncovered the true identity of the would-be Skripal assassins, Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and Dr Aleksandr Mishkin.

Further reading

Analogue dictators are no match for digital detectives

By Ian Birrell

“I had some time on my hands…” he began. Bored at work, and with Libya in upheaval, he started arguing on Guardian comment threads. He would get in to work at 7.30 every morning, and do a sweep of all the latest reports, and then post on the comments thread of each story, linking to additional information that supported or disputed the story. The difference was he turned to sources that most journalists at that time neglected and overlooked.

From shaky YouTube videos panning across dusty, arid landscapes to fighters posting grinning selfies on Twitter, the war was being chronicled online. Eliot saw that this new information often wasn’t forming part of the journalistic picture of the war that most people were seeing. “I got a reputation” he told me, “for being the first person to post every day with a list of links and other details I had gathered together.” It was a humble beginning. 

At the very end of 2012 Eliot had his first break. He was an obsessive and regular observer of the YouTube channels used by the Syrian opposition. “One”, Eliot said, “was a video of cluster bombs.” The Syrian government was denying that it was using cluster bombs in the conflict, and Eliot’s finding was first written about by human rights organisations and then the mainstream press.

Still combing through hours of YouTube footage, in the New Year of 2013, Eliot found another surprise. “I’d been watching videos from Syria every day and trying to ID new and interesting weapons and some stood out like a sore thumb,” he said. He collected them on a spreadsheet, looking for more videos from the same sources and taken from the area where the new weapons had appeared. He blogged about it, and a week later Eliot received a call from the New York Times. They had been following up what Eliot had found, and realised it was a huge story.

Suggested reading

The dangerous power of the clickbait king

By Carl Miller

The weapons were Croatian, and officials had admitted to the newspaper that they were part of a smuggling operation. It was the first real evidence of a foreign nation arming the Syrian rebels. Rather than running on the blog, on 25 February 2013, the New York Times ran Eliot’s discovery, acknowledging him, on their front page.

Then, on 17 July 2014, a Boeing 777 disappeared mid-flight somewhere over eastern Ukraine. Operating as Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, its remains were found shortly after. The MH-17 had crashed, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board.

The day of the crash, amid the furious accusations that Russia and Ukraine were already throwing at each other, Eliot wrote a post on his blog, Brown Moses. He had found a single video, quickly taken down after the crash, that showed, in the far distance, a squat green military-looking vehicle slowly driving up a two-lane road. Eliot thought the vehicle in the video was a BUK missile launcher, a military anti-aircraft weapon capable of downing a civilian airliner. He shared the video, and the network of like-minded people who had gathered around him sprang into action. They called themselves the Bellingcat Investigation Team, or BIT.

BIT spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours poring over videos and photos looking for other sightings of the BUK launcher. A picture dated the day of the crash captured it rumbling along a road on the back of a red low-loader lorry. One of their biggest tasks was to work out the exact time and location of these sightings, and an investigator followed the same route virtually, somehow discovering the precise location by finding the same combination of power wires, poles, cables and the silhouette of the treetops. It was in the city of Donetsk, one of the major sites of fighting during the war.

Suggested reading

How social media makes fascists of us all

By Jamie Bartlett

It was exactly this painstaking and forensic research – wading through satellite imagery, tallying the location of bins, plotting the layout of pathways – that led to further sightings tracking the BUK’s progress. Month after month, they laboriously built up a picture of what had happened. Through this intricate, detailed form of online detective work, they developed a good idea of where the BUK came from and where it went afterwards.

For three years, BIT kept on the story pursuing not only the BUK but also the military personnel they thought were on the convoy. Eliot was interviewed as a witness by the Joint Investigation Team, the international task force set up to investigate the tragedy. Then on May 24, 2018, the Joint Investigation Team released their conclusion – and it was the same as Bellingcat’s.

Eliot’s story and his rise represents something even bigger than the revelations he has helped uncover. It is a story about how the Fourth Estate is being both destroyed and reborn.

It shows how social media has completely transformed journalism. Eliot tapped into the wealth of ‘open source’ information that digital networking platforms make available, meaning that citizen investigators can, at times, know more about what is happening than a war correspondent shouting dispatches to the camera above the sound of shelling.

Suggested reading

In defence of the Fourth Estate

By Ian Birrell

And the power of BIT’s revelations was revealed in the subsequent attempts to smother the truth and undermine the people who were looking for it. On an anniversary of the downing of MH-17, a series of blogs sprang up, he told me, offering ‘revelations’ and insults against Bellingcat. A series of apparently volunteer Russian investigators formed into something called ‘anti-Bellingcat’, alleging that they’d falsified online sources.

A network of mainstream media sites, paid propagandists, unpaid fellow travellers and bots were ready to pump out information calling Eliot’s findings into question. This was information warfare, a digital extension of the actual warfare Bellingcat exposes.

Eliot and his fellow citizen investigators started out at a time when traditional newspapers were experiencing a painful commercial emasculation. British newspaper ad spend had fallen from $4.7 billion in 2000 to $2.6 billion by 2015. Over roughly the same period, the number of journalists in the UK shrank by one third, and 181 local newspapers in the UK had shut down. The journalists that survived often had to write ten times more stories than they used to, with little time for exhaustive investigative work.

Or to put it another way, just when militaries began to understand that wars had information at their heart, journalism was at its weakest ebb. Elliot was entering a world where state-sponsored actors were increasingly masquerading as journalists and members of the public, yet mainstream media had fewer journalists to hold them to account.

Suggested reading

Can journalism survive the onslaught of social media?

By Emily Bell

Bellingcat isn’t, of course, doing anything that professional journalists can’t. They don’t have special skills or technology that are unavailable to others. In this world swollen with information, they have one precious asset that professional journalists too often lack. Something that was probably more important than anything else in telling the difference between good and bad information, and especially bad information masquerading as good: time. In that sense Bellingcat is a return to the basic art of journalism – tracking down the truth has always been time-consuming, tedious graft.

The journalism of the future will increasingly be about helping readers navigate the terrible information – and outright disinformation – that exists online. A journalist’s role will be as much about verifying and curating information as generating it, and the tools and methods that Eliot and Bellingcat have so visibly showcased point the way. But while the essence of investigative journalism hasn’t changed, who can do it has. For it is increasingly people outside of commercial news who have the time it takes to chase the truth down.

More from this author

How technology sidelines the citizen

By Carl Miller

Sometimes this realisation comes suddenly, with some shocking event.

In the UK, the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox in June 2016 was just such a moment. Britain had been in the middle of a heated national debate about its membership of the European Union. Cox’s brutal murder reminded people that the use of terms such as ‘traitor’ among others might have effects beyond the realm of the rhetorical. And so, for a moment, the dial was turned down. Not on anyone’s orders, but through the agreed restitution of a common custom – not least manners.

Less tragic and dramatic attempts to do the same have included the occasional calls from leaders of the opposition (including Ed Miliband) to put a stop to ‘Punch and Judy politics’ such as that practised at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Suggested reading

Activist journalism is feeding us fake news

By James Bloodworth

Recently, the feeling that the debate has gone rancid has begun to grow, without there being any specific trigger event. And a striking development is that broadcast media (not before time) would seem to be recognising that it bears some responsibility for this.

For years, the business model for political television and radio – in the UK as well as in the US – has been a search for the ‘gotcha’ moment. Not just the exposure of a guest for not knowing what they are talking about, but the search for almost any memorably awful or triumphant moment. This has turned political discussion and debate into a kind of performance art in which the interviewer as much as the guests are auditioning to become the star.

It is programming in search of the YouTube excerpt; it is discussion in the hope that a couple of minutes of the show will go ‘viral’ on social media. If whole careers could be lost, or at least deeply damaged, from such moments, then the incentive is that whole careers can also be made.

Only recently, Ash Sarkar, a contributor to a fringe blog leapt to some form of media celebrity for shouting “I’m literally a communist, you idiot” at Piers Morgan on morning television. Programme makers are always on the hunt for these moments: searching not to find compromise, but rather to provoke fiery antagonism.

From the same author

Why you can’t rely on the news media to understand… Abstract principles

By Douglas Murray

Programme makers, over the past decade, became desperate for people to discuss their programmes on social media, to ‘get in touch’ and become engaged. By doing so they encouraged the idea that interaction – any interaction – was a good idea. They invited guests on who they knew would not throw any light on the situation, but would be able to throw a great amount of heat around.

Before Ash Sarkar, the same programme makers gave us Katie Hopkins. Hopkins would be invited on in the hope that she would create a ‘scene’ that would then trend on social media. Whether viewers liked it or not wasn’t so much the point. The point was to provoke a reaction.

Now the bubbling concern at this form of performance art appears to have surfaced at the head of various news organisations. And one result of this was revealed this week when the BBC unveiled its new lunchtime political discussion programme. The presenter of ‘Politics Live’ is Jo Coburn. She is one of the best in the business and provided expertise as well as continuity – she also presented the predecessor show. But the programme did have a stated intention of doing something different. And the way in which this was most visibly demonstrated from the outset was that the entire panel consisted of women.

Aside from Coburn, there was the former Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, the current Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, as well as journalists from the Telegraph, Guardian and BBC. The line-up was a statement in itself, hidden away in which was the never quite articulated suggestion that women are a civilising influence and can – simply by their presence – help ‘detoxify’ matters.

From the same author

There's a moral vacuum in public life. We need a set of standards that we can agree on

By Douglas Murray

Though this idea was unspoken, the show did state at the outset that it wanted to make a point against the toxicity of the present debate. All of the panellists agreed that things had got worse, and the main evidence for this was that a lot of people get a lot of horrible messages sent to them on social media.  There also appeared to be consensus that their treatment was particularly bad because they were women.

Bemoaning the low state of political discussion – let alone bemoaning the state of political discussion on social media – is exceptionally easy. What is far harder is finding a way to work out meaningful political disagreements in a way which is not antagonistic. And that was something which the new show understandably failed to do. It was inevitable the cosy consensus would have to be broken at some stage.

Both Rudd and Thornberry are experienced politicians. Both are also ultra-partisan hacks. That isn’t to insult them, but simply to state the obvious. They are programmed, or have programmed themselves over the years, that when in discussion with their political opponents, they first refute any meaningful allegation of their opposite number and then try to score a political point of their own. Both have spent recent years bound by ministerial responsibility (in the case of Rudd) and its shadow cabinet equivalent, which means that ministers (and shadow ministers) cannot throw colleagues to the wolves: rather they must always defend everything and anything done by one of their colleagues, and attack their political opponents.

More from this author

Communism's forgotten victims

By Douglas Murray

Rudd broke the consensus of the BBC’s new programme – as someone was going to have to do – when she finally fingered a specific culprit.  She pointed out that the atmosphere of intimidation and more around MPs has got far worse since the creation of the Corbynista grass roots group Momentum. Naturally Thornberry could not agree to this. And so she said so, in the process opening herself up to accusations of partisan point-scoring

On one level, what Rudd said was unarguable. The party conference season is coming up again and this year, as last, one thing can be said with confidence (as the Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch pointed out in her warm-up speech for the Prime Minister at last year’s Conservative conference): it is inconceivable that young Conservative activists will be standing outside this year’s Labour party conference waving placards at attendees, spitting at them in the street and shouting ‘scum’. Yet it is very likely that this year, as last, Labour party supporters will be outside the Conservative party conference doing just this.

So how do you make the point without being partisan? You could perhaps pretend that incivility has no especial drivers but that it is just something in the atmosphere. You might identify some actual causes of the breakdown but cite others which are slightly specious in order to demonstrate some degree of even-handedness. Or a third option would be to make your points – and more importantly concede similar points – whether they are politically advantageous to your own political side or not.

Further reading

Why you can't rely on the news media to understand... ordinary people

By Liam Halligan

The trouble with breaking the current discussion paradigm is this. The first of these options cannot be sustained for long. At some stage people have to get specific. The second option allows for a type of noble lie to be practised (on the one hand we have Momentum, on the other hand aren’t those young Conservative activists just as big a problem?). And the third, which is the only one that would allow anyone to get anywhere, seems to be impossible in a two-party system.

There is one extra layer to this complexity, and that is this. The viewing public now see things that the politicians cannot admit. So the viewing public would have known that Thornberry probably has serious reservations about Momentum among other things going on in her party. But they know she has chosen her side and cannot let go.

Likewise, they know that Amber Rudd most likely feels very sore about having to resign earlier this year and is currently appearing on the media to maintain her profile in order to be able to return to cabinet as soon as possible. So the likelihood is that she will concede nothing major and want to make some partisan gains.

All of which returns us to the problem that broadcasters like the BBC, despite this relaunch, still cannot address. Which is how do you inform the public when the public are free to say more than their elected representatives? Unless that issue is addressed no broadcaster can get near the problem they are trying to grapple with.

Recommended reading

Don’t believe what those idiots are telling you about echo chambers

By Peter Franklin

Writing for CapX, the pollster Matt Singh adds a third concept – the “salience gap”.

This one is about what those claiming expertise in the field of communications call ‘cut through’. To make an impact, a message has first to be heard; then it has to be trusted; and, finally, it has to be thought both relevant and important –i.e. salient.

Singh calls this the salience gap because of the chasm between the preoccupations of a small group of politicians and political journalists and what the general public considers to be worth paying attention too:

“Imagine being on an island where more than one in five people have never heard of Cambridge Analytica, gammon is an old-fashion pork cut, 78 per cent of people don’t talk about politics most days, and 99 per cent of people don’t watch Prime Minister’s Questions.

“In fact that island exists, and you may well be on it now. It’s called Great Britain.”

Recommended reading

The tragedy of the ‘gammons’

By Peter Franklin

The gammon controversy was a small, if nasty, storm-in-a-teacup stirred-up by, and largely limited to, political Twitter in the UK. However, the Cambridge Analytica story had trans-Atlantic repercussions:

“For weeks this story occupied the news, and political Twitter. It would be difficult to go near either, at any point during that period, without hearing the story or the fierce debate that it prompted.

“Yet when we asked the public, in polling conducted at the height of the scandal and published here for the first time, 21 per cent said they had not recently heard any news story about social media or data privacy. “

They probably did hear or see something about it, but clearly it didn’t register. What’s more the true number is probably higher than 21%, because, as Singh explains, there are always some people who claim to be familiar with a news story even when they’re not.

Then we need to add in those who do genuinely recall the story, but don’t consider it that important:

“But even if the public know about a story, do they care? Theresa May’s disastrous 2017 speech to the Conservative Party conference was covered extensively, and many politicos took to Twitter to describe it as an ‘epitaph’ to her political career, while in reality it made almost no difference.”

It made no difference, because what made Theresa May’s speech “disastrous” was that she had a coughing fit. The commentariat saw it as symbolic; the public saw it as a bit of bad luck – not that most of them pay much attention to party conference speeches anyway.

Even when some event does move public opinion, the effects are usually short-lived – leaving a tiny number of stories with a lasting impact.

Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of Britain from 1902 to 1905, may have been the last politician to acknowledge this truth. It was he who was supposed to have said: “Nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all.” Refined flippancy was very much Balfour’s thing, but in respect to the discipline of ‘news management’ he wasn’t far off.

In our own time, the more thoughtful kind of politician will privately admit the same thing, but that doesn’t stop politics – and, more seriously, policy making – from revolving around stories that make no real difference to public opinion, let alone the true state of the world.

Why do they do it, then? Why, given what people like Matt Singh can tell them about its ultimate insignificance, do the politicians, the press officers, the journalists, the lobbyists and the PR industry continue to chase one another’s tails?

Sophocles is said to have likened the male libido to being chained to a lunatic. Contemporary politics is chained to another lunatic – obsession with the news.

It has massively biased the culture of politics to those whose thoughts and actions are fast but shallow, attention grabbers with nothing to give.

Recommended reading

Test article

By Lionel Shriver

“We will also engage with and publish voices from the right. In an age of tumultuous change, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.” Indeed, and what do Left and Right even mean today?

“We will get out of the big cities and the big institutions.” Because the economics, cultures and politics of medium-sized towns really aren’t the same as in international urban capitals.

And we will “stay with stories for the long-term.” Because what persists is more important than anything that hits the headlines today but is often, justifiably, forgotten within days.

Those four quotes don’t come from UnHerd’s launch day and our critique of a media class that is ideologically too uniform, remote from the values of ‘flyover country’ and biased towards what’s happening now, rather than what’s heading at us from upstream – but they could have done.

They actually come from Kath Viner, Editor of The Guardian. They were part of a ‘long read’, that she wrote in the middle of last month; “A mission for journalism in an age of crisis” and which, two days ago, was published as a podcast. Although the woman who had previously been her paper’s US editor did tell her morning editorial conference that she thought Trump would win, it’s good to see a newspaper recognising that newspaper cultures aren’t currently as connected to all communities as they should be.

Recollecting how her two-centuries-old publication has consistently seen opportunity for progressive reform in challenging moments in history (notably for the betterment of working class conditions in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre) she argues that The Guardian can use the current crisis to challenge the economic order ushered in by Margaret Thatcher. And she certainly does think our times demand serious change. She talks of the internet having been taken over by bullies, racists and mysogynists; of sky-rocketing inequality; of ballooning depression and mental illness; an “epidemic” of loneliness; and of the disappearance of public amenities like libraries and parks. She sounds like one of the 67% of people who think the world is getting worse (a finding analysed by Douglas Murray last Friday).

Her commitment to reorientate her journalism will be helped by the improvement in The Guardian’s finances. A series of Osborne-ian austerity measures (it practises what it doesn’t preach) have cut the paper’s losses in half and are on course to be eliminated in the next 12 months. And with an inherited billion pounds in the bank The Guardian is well-placed to continue to compete with the New York Times to be the global Left’s newspaper of choice.

With ad revenues collapsing because of the way Facebook and Google are able to offer superior targeting to advertisers, Kath Viner is pleased that the paper’s pursuit of voluntary gifts has been successful enough to avoid a compulsory paywall. In her essay she acknowledges periods in The Guardian’s history when advertisers have influenced editorial. Let’s not believe, however, that it’s as simple as devilish commercial advertisers versus angelic paying readers.

Will The Guardian embrace positions that it concludes are necessary to heal broken Britain if they risk upsetting their supporters? The danger in this era of dwindling sales with newspapers becoming more sectional than truly national is that they come to depend upon unrepresentative groups. When titles are fighting for their survival and cannot afford to lose readers at a faster rate than demography is already causing, it becomes tricky for The Times, for example, to do anything other than back Remain when that was the view of about three-quarters of your readers. When Guardian readers and supporters are enthusiastic about Jeremy Corbyn it’s commercially dangerous to suggest his Left-wingery could be a bit too Left-wing.

In my own dealings with Kath Viner I’ve found her to be interested in ideas from outside the ‘progressive wing’. We’ve spoken on a number of occasions, for example, about what a compassionate conservatism might look like. If her new approach to journalism leads her to believe that the welfare state was reckless to shun William Beveridge’s warnings about doing nothing to damage the relational institutions at the heart of community, will she be willing to argue that progressivism needs to be more Methodist than Marxist?

Time will tell but it was disappointing to learn at the weekend that Giles Fraser would no longer be gracing the newspaper’s pages when it’s relaunched as a tabloid in the middle of next month. It would be unfair to read too much into one change in personnel but I’m just a little bit suspicious that the religious Brexiteerism of the “Loose Cannon” was, perhaps, a little too religious and Brexity for a secular, Remainy subscription base.