Alan Rusbridger, fresh from parsing Ezra Pound in the cloistered calm of Cambridge University, enters journalism as a cub reporter for the Cambridge Evening News sometime in the mid-70s. I would have liked to be more precise about the big day for a cub with such a prodigious future: he became editor-in-chief of the Guardian in 1995. In the succeeding 20 years, he transformed the printed newspaper and created a 24/7 news operation, overtaking the New York Times as the biggest serious English-language newspaper operation in the world. Yet the landmark date he began as a trainee reporter eludes detection in Breaking News and Wikipedia, too. I conclude the reticence must be the author’s nod to Pound, who wrote in his Cantos: “And even I can remember/ A day when the historians left blanks in their writings.”
Enough to say that Rusbridger, when he gets going, leaves no blanks. He has written a book of breathtaking range. Three books neatly linked, you might say: a memoir; adventures remaking and remaking the Guardian; and a penetrating examination of the corruptions of social media. As editor-manager, he was present at the creation, the blink-of-an-eye transition from the immutable hot metal of newspapers to the churn of digital, from verifiable hard facts to a universal bazaar of rumour, half-truths and full-blown falsehoods given spurious authority on our backlit screens. We are privileged to eavesdrop on editor Rusbridger’s bracing arguments with himself on how traditional media might best survive in our post-truth era. But history is not thereby denied knowledge of the potato resembling Winston Churchill brought in by a reader of the Cambridge Evening News, nor of the remarkable dog that made friends with an owl.
The young reporter learned his craft well. He still bears the marks of the lash for an error he made in a wedding report. Today he could say it was an alternative fact. It was altogether a “lovely time” to be a local newspaper reporter. Even so, early in his local career, he was doorstepped by a reporter and photographer from the Sunday Mirror, dedicated for days to doing a hatchet job on young Rusbridger’s love affair with a university lecturer. “We can do this nice,” said the Mirror man, “or do it nasty.”
It is intriguing that the two progenitors of the 2011 inquiry on press standards by Lord Justice Leveson both joined the Guardian as reporters on the same day in 1979: Rusbridger and Nick Davies. Rusbridger graduated to be a daily diarist, and followed in the Fred Astaire footsteps of Clive James and Julian Barnes as TV critic for this newspaper. He discovered he did not have the right temperament to “sit at home watching video tapes all day”. He was more excited by what his then editor, Peter Preston, and his young team of technocrats were doing in the basement in their PDU (Product Development Unit). They were deciding that the new big thing would be the internet. When the “unshowy, grimly obstinate, brilliantly strategic” Preston took Rusbridger to another basement, an unfashionable Italian lunch place in Clerkenwell, it was to say he was calling it a day, after 20 years’ editing. Rusbridger’s mission statement that had him voted in, at 41, committed him to getting serious about digital and boosting investigative reporting in news operations dedicated to openness, and, at some risk, without revenues from a paywall. His Guardian disclosed illegal torture and rendition, mass surveillance, corporate tax avoidance, toxic dumping.
But the stellar achievement was phone hacking, the exposure by Rusbridger and the valiant Davies of a criminal conspiracy at the heart of the most powerful media company, News Corp. This was a classic of investigative journalism, a dogged reporter picking up the scent of wrongdoing, rather than picking up a bunch of documents from a whistleblower. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp had come to feel it was above the law because it was. I found I was newly sickened by Rusbridger’s tautly compelling narrative of their investigation in the face of threats, smears, spying, the suborning of the police, and the hostility of other media companies and their editors. “These were,” he writes, “the most intense weeks of my life to date… Nick and I were hollow-eyed with adrenaline-suffused exhaustion.”
Rusbridger brings the same energy to examining the global tsunami of social media, Facebook and shock jockeys of hate radio: “The ability of billions of people to publish has created a vast amount of unreliable and false news.” You can say that again. Who knew the 140 hyper-partisan pro-Trump websites identified by BuzzFeed were being run from a single town in Macedonia, the former Yugoslav republic?
Rusbridger’s readiness in Breaking News to dive into the digital morass is admirable, even astonishing. He is newly installed as the principal of Oxford University’s Lady Margaret Hall, new to the chairmanship of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, a visiting don at a cluster of other universities. He is on the board of the National Theatre. He is writing a play about Beethoven. What’s he doing back at the coalface of journalism? Why get your hands dirty, Alan, trying to find truth buried in digital pit heaps when you could be at the piano mastering Chopin’s Ballade No 1 in G minor? (He’s been there, done that.)
It’s not an exercise in masochism. In Breaking News, he does the public a service, tracking a story deployed by President Trump in his campaign to demonise immigrants with a lot of help from his friends at Fox News. We enter the labyrinth when the Fox commentator Tucker Carlson gives time to a gonzo documentarian, one Ami Horowitz, who had declared that there had been “an absolute surge in gun violence and rape” in Sweden because of its immigration policies. The pivot point is the usual one, that this outrage has been ignored by mainstream media. Trump fed Carlson’s recycled and unchecked Horowitz to his 40 million or so Twitter fans. Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader and friend of Trump, promptly announced that Malmö had become the rape capital of Europe.
If true, it’s certainly newsworthy. But Rusbridger followed the spoor. A little later, ex-Ukip figure Godfrey Bloom, a former member of the European parliament, retweeted a sensation from someone called @PeterSweden7. The tweeter was at boiling point – wouldn’t we all be? – that a rapist of a teenager in Malmö had “poured lighter fuel in her vagina and set it on fire. MSM is quiet. RETWEET.”
Rusbridger found MSM (mainstream media) had not been quiet. The attack on a 17-year-old had been widely covered by the maligned press. And there was no mention of lighter fuel or vagina. He held his nose, stayed on the case and viewed @PeterSweden7’s tweets: “The globalists (mainly Jews) are the ones bringing Muslims to Europe”. Rusbridger managed to winkle out that @PeterSweden7 is Peter Imanuelsen, a 22-year-old photographer.
At last, perhaps, a source of proof for the horror story? Not so fast. Imanuelsen mentioned a Facebooker, one Tino Sanandaji, who claimed two sources. Who? One “an unnamed police source, one a friend of the family”. How reliable were they? Sanandaji was “fairly sure”. But here we are up another alley. Sanandaji denied his original Facebook posting had mentioned “vagina”. His word had been “underliv”, Swedish for abdomen. It became “vagina” only when featured on the “alt-right” website Breitbart.
Back goes Rusbridger to the pollinators of unchecked information. It did not bother them at all. “Godfrey Bloom told me his attitude was the same as all other users of Twitter: ‘It’s a lavatory wall’.”
The bright dawn of the internet foreshadowed an Athenian democracy based on equal knowledge shared by citizens of goodwill. It didn’t happen. Legislators made a hostage of an unknowable future. Dazzled like rabbits caught in the headlights of “new tech”, they gave giant social media companies immunity from liability for whatever their customers post or tweet, true or false, virtuous or vile.
So Facebook and Google and the rest are free to circulate falsehood, free to poach information hardly won by newspapers, and free of course to sell advertising, while depriving newspapers of the revenues to do the real work of covering the world, and risking lives to do it. Rusbridger remains cool in his examination of digital systems. I’d like to see the juggernauts made to accept the same responsibilities as newspaper and magazine and television editors. I confess to not having the author’s Asquithian conviction that we had better just wait and see how things develop, but the brilliant Breaking News is essential – and entertaining – reading for anyone who cares a whit about the hallmark of a democratic state being more than a lavatory wall.
Sir Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times and the Times, is the author of Good Times, Bad Times and My Paper Chase and last year’s Do I Make Myself Clear?
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