The catalyst for the discourse was former Elle fashion editor Stacey Duguid, aged 52, a high-octane glamourpuss whose candid social media posts about her own precarious employment situation have gone viral. As she told The Times, in the past 18 months she has applied for “everything from a brand director on six figures to a part-time job taking photos in a warehouse”, all to no avail. She says she is now on universal credit, and has had to sell her jewelry on Vinted and put her Menorcan holiday home on the market.

As usual with articles aimed at the female market, there are a number of things going on here at once. Come for the inspirational taboo-busting and rejection of societal shame; stay for the schadenfreude; leave with vague anxiety that you too might soon be on the scrapheap. But in Duguid’s case, the reality is surely more complicated than recent coverage suggests. By her own account, this is not her first midlife crisis. Three years ago, she wrote an eye-wateringly frank book about the wild aftermath of a divorce. It included tales of drinking on the day job, drug-fueled one-night-stands with much younger men, and being told by otherworldly voices to make expensive clothing purchases on credit. She joked at the time that it should have been called Cocktails, Cock and Coke: A Middle-Aged Adventure. It is not inconceivable that prospective employers have read it too.

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But perhaps she has identified a more general phenomenon. Other stories have followed, of former high-flying ladybosses sending out hundreds of applications into the void, while burning through their savings and feeling humiliated. One theme is the impossibility of remaking oneself from scratch in middle age. Steph Walsh, 50, who once earned £120,000 as a chief of staff but now scrapes by making video animations and getting gifts from relatives, told the The Times: “I reject the narrative of midlife reinvention; there should be no need for it at all and women more than men have to absorb the consequences.” Duguid herself says that “we can’t just simplify things to a midlife image overhaul”.

This seems true, despite the fact that Duguid is, precisely, using the moment for an image overhaul. She has created a new organization, The Encore, to fight for women “overlooked by hiring processes that seem designed to screen us out, and silenced by a shame that was never ours to carry”. Meanwhile Walsh says she is now writing a book about redundancy and the “fallacy of midlife reinvention”, which also sounds like midlife reinvention to me. Both women appear to be following a well-worn path for corporates who encounter career adversity: reframe the moment as a learning opportunity for others, then make capital out of that.

Another example is journalist Eleanor Mills, a former editor at The Sunday Times before she was axed at 50. After a self-described period of panicking and weeping, she started an organization called Noon, aimed at demonstrating that “midlife is an age of opportunity”. “Long lives mean we will all have to get used to reinventing ourselves”, she says on the website. The organization runs meetups and retreats for distressed gentlewomen — more diplomatically referred to onsite as “queenagers” — hosted by the sort of LinkedIn denizen with big jewelry who says she is passionate about transformation, life balance, and finding joy in everyday moments. Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that the main option for the newly unemployed menopausal high earner is to recreate yourself as a life coach or therapist for other newly unemployed menopausal high earners. There is surely a limit to how long this scheme can go on.

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It’s also tempting to wonder whether there is a real problem to be addressed here. Unemployment and unexpected penury are blights on any life, at any age; but I’m skeptical there is a burning issue for (formerly) well-heeled middle-aged women in particular. The economic inactivity rate for women aged 50 to 64 is higher than that for men in the same age group, but economic inactivity is not unemployment: a large chunk of this, according to ONS figures, is women (and men, for that matter) who are deemed too ill or disabled to work. Another chunk is women “looking after home or family”. I have trouble believing this is a huge problem for boardroom types, tending as they do to pay others to do that kind of thing. Perhaps the corporate world is not well set up to accommodate hot flashes, brain fog, or mad dashes up the motorway to deal with health crises of aging parents; but still, I’m fairly sure provision is better than for the average supermarket or care home worker.

The main allegation of Duguid’s is that women like her are being winnowed out of the application pool by AI systems, before any human eyes have seen their scintillating CVs. But again, this is a problem that affects a much wider group of job seekers — perhaps even most these days. The real worry is the reliance of employers on a small set of AI systems, so that the same algorithms are relentlessly applied, removing the element of serendipitous chance that used to be ineliminable in hiring. Young people are also said to be struggling with the brutal impersonality of the machines. It seems very bad for a 20-something not to be able to get a foot in the door, thanks to the bots; much worse than to be pushed out of it in your fifties at 100K.

Indeed, though it perhaps seems cruel to kick struggling women when they are down, there is a whiff of selfishness about this discourse. When Duguid tells the interviewer of a “former executive for a high street brand” she knows who is now on universal credit, or of a “chemical engineer who is cleaning holiday lets for cash”, the unfortunate implication is that this is all shockingly beneath such highly credentialed people, though perfectly fine for the plebs. Mills writes on her website that when she lost her newspaper job, she felt “raw, naked … I’d worn a big velvet cloak of status for two decades, now it was gone”. Shame is a constant theme of the narratives we are offered. What seems to really sting is not the lack of income, but the lack of validation: if I am not impressing someone with my glamorous job, do I really exist at all?

If this is right, the worry is unsurprising. For decades, university-educated women have been encouraged to think that breaking the glass ceiling is more validating and meaningful than washing the kitchen floor; and also to think that the kind of part-time job that allows you to prioritize family and domesticity is embarrassing and meaningless. Of course the idea is absurd; there are very few things done for large amounts of money that make life meaningful. Still, assuming that you are very attached to being the sort of woman who changes her work handbag every season, it is bound to come as a shock to find you are an expendable drone like the rest.

Duguid says she is now “botoxing” her CV, taking out any references to age and experience that might meet the disapproval of the machines. I would probably do this too, were I frustrated enough (though admittedly, I probably wouldn’t give newspaper interviews citing my age and work history at the same time). But there is something very queasy about it. For the truth is that, once you have reached a certain level of seniority in a career, you can’t reinvent yourself as a fresh-faced ingenue, even metaphorically speaking. You are far too well-defined in your character, skills, and preferences; too inflexible in your personality. Employers are not wrong to be wary of formerly senior applicants for entry-level jobs, for they are unlikely to be a good fit. And in any case, we oldies need to leave those jobs to the young people.

In years to come, as AI conquers various sectors and competition for fewer desirable opportunities increases, we can look forward to the grim possibility of PR battles between various interest groups, each telling highly emotive tales about who is struggling most. We should probably remember that some will have an advantage over others here. Free-falling from the climbing frame can certainly be terrifying — but a fat media contacts book and a holiday home in Menorca can help cushion the fall.

If it’s happening to Lorenz, it will be happening to everyone downhill from her, too. Certainly, there are plenty of people who will attest to that. Most of them have noticed an obvious problem with the business model: there are only so many paid subscriptions a reader will spring for. Eventually, Substack was going to hit a demand ceiling.

Back in 2017, Substack solved a particular problem for a particular type of journalist at a particular time. We were a few years into Black Lives Matter, and, of course, the first year of Trump’s first term. The Great Awokening was well underway, and over the next few years, culminating in the summer of 2020, the media industry would come to resemble a grumpy religious sect, with its theological dogma and mechanisms for punishing dissent. It became a suffocating place for anyone who wanted to think the least bit freely.

In Substack, journalists who refused to bend to the new rules had a refuge to escape to. That is the story of how Bari Weiss founded the biggest media outlet on the platform, The Free Press. Substack served that early generation of writers well: they became its poster children and its evangelists.

But while it solved a problem for journalists, it did not solve the problem of journalism: which is that its business model was shattered two decades ago and is yet to be fixed. In the 20th century, journalism was propped up by mass advertising, which, as Andrey Miroshnichenko has pointed out, was effectively a tax on corporations to sustain the jobs of journalists. Companies couldn’t find their customers without getting their brand names in front of them, and the only way to do that was by running advertisements in the newspapers that showed up on everyone’s doorstep each morning and on the TV shows that were piped daily and nightly into their living rooms.

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This was the marketing equivalent of trawling: it caught a lot of fish by casting a net wide enough to scoop up everything in its path. It was inefficient and expensive, and it produced enough revenue to sustain an entire profession of reporters, editors, producers, and news anchors. The peak of profitability for The New York Times was at the cusp of the emergence of the internet — 1999, when it reported net income of $447 million. Last year, conversely, that figure was $334 million.

But along came Facebook, and suddenly, instead of trawling, advertisers could fly fish, but on an industrial scale. Targeted advertising allowed them to individually pick their customers from the teeming mass of humanity on the internet, and for a sliver of what it cost to run a TV commercial or run a newspaper ad. Today, digital advertising costs from $3 to $10 for every 1,000 customer “impressions”, versus $22 to $1,300 per person reached via traditional media. Moreover, it’s far harder to find your most receptive consumers with a billboard or TV commercial than a social-media ad, and far, far harder to measure its impact in real time.

Mass advertising quickly became a relic of the 20th century, and the economic floor it was holding up for the journalism industry collapsed. By 2017, The New York Times‘s net income was just $4 million, and that wasn’t even its worst year (in 2011, it actually lost money). In the 12 years following 2008, newsroom employment dropped by more than a quarter. Laid-off reporters were as mundane a part of this new landscape as the 20-something software engineers making doctors’ salaries.

Substack created an alternative to this business model by shifting the journalism tax from advertisers directly onto consumers. Now, instead of indirectly subsidizing reporters’ careers by buying products from the companies that market them through print ads and TV spots, readers could pay them directly via the online marketplace of journalism that is Substack.

The problem with this model is obvious: it will never come close to producing revenue on the scale that mass advertising generated for media corporations. From the perspective of advertisers, of course, that’s a good thing: their profits aren’t being siphoned off by an industry they have nothing to do with. From the perspective of news consumers, though, it sucks. It means less journalism, and journalism of a much lower quality.

The upside, some might argue, is that journalists are now truly independent. When you’re not controlled by editors and producers who answer to corporate bosses who answer to shareholders, you can report candidly without fear of professional repercussions. There isn’t an upper floor of suits to stop you from running a story on the corruption of defense contractors because the toothpaste company that’s the network’s biggest primetime advertiser owns an overseas subsidiary that manufactures land mines. Or, to take a real example, a parent company that censors your reporting on the tobacco industry out of fear of a potential lawsuit that could disrupt a pending corporate merger.

Your only bosses are your readers, and what they expect of you is honesty and integrity. The incentive to do good journalism aligns with the incentive of making money. That’s the theory, at least.

But that theory both overstates the level of corporate control over the old model and understates the malign influences insinuated into the new one. Noam Chomsky might have you believe that New York Times editors and NBC News producers once quaked in fear of the punishment they would face from their industrially polluting advertisers if they reported too honestly about industrial pollution. As Chomsky wrote in his 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: “Television networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and would have to be carried at a financial sacrifice, and that, in addition, they may offend powerful advertisers”.

But the nice thing about mass advertising was that there was so much of it that individual advertisers rarely had that kind of clout.

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There may have been some vague sensibility among media professionals about not wanting to fall too far afield of the establishment, but that wasn’t rooted in anxiety over advertiser boycotts; it was rooted in publishers sharing the same alma maters as Congressmen and corporate executives and their kids going to the same private schools. In an exception that proves the rule, the 2017 Steven Spielberg movie The Post portrayed former Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham as a national hero for putting the public interest ahead of her personal relationship with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when she approved publication of the Pentagon Papers.

If anything, the pressures that the new model exerts on journalists are more direct and specific. Journalists who work for major media outlets are salaried employees; journalists who sell Substack subscriptions are small-time entrepreneurs. At least in establishment media outlets, there are institutional divisions between the editorial side and the business side. When you’re selling your reporting directly to readers, by contrast, there is no firewall in your brain that separates the part that’s thinking about what you’re reporting and how you’re reporting it from the part that is thinking about how this story will affect your subscriber base and thus your bank account.

Altogether, this makes Substack ripe for audience capture. You have very good reasons not to report on stories that might upset your readers or to arrive at conclusions that might anger them. You have equally good reasons to serve them slop that confirms their priors. After years of watching your subscriber graph go up and down, and the Stripe payments to your bank account get bigger and smaller, eventually you shape your newsletter into a product. And since your newsletter is, effectively, you, you have made yourself into that product. You might not have to worry about some corporate suit telling you what you can or can’t say, but that’s only because you are that suit and you’re telling it to yourself. The call is coming from inside the house.

If Taylor Lorenz’s experience is indicative of a larger pattern, these perverse incentives are only going to get worse as people’s paid subscriber bases dry up. Substack’s executives would have you believe that the consumer market for email newsletters is only getting bigger. But it’s easy to imagine another possibility. As Scott Carney has written, Substack is growing its user base principally by attracting more people to Notes, its Twitter knock-off. The theory appears to be that people will come for the social media and stay for the paid newsletters.

But that doesn’t seem to be working out, particularly for Substacks that aren’t already on the leaderboards (why do they even have leaderboards?). People who like to scroll aren’t necessarily people who pay to read long-form essays. My own paid subscriber count has proceeded along the same downward path that both Lorenz’s and Carney’s have, even as my tallies of free subscriber and “followers” (whatever that is) have stacked up. If that’s happening for many others, we can expect that as paid subscribers become scarcer, the incentives to gain and retain them will become harder to resist. More and more Substack writers will conform to the demands of the market by flattering their readers, avoiding risky topics, arriving at prefabricated conclusions, and repeating formulas that have worked in the past. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

In other words, Substack hasn’t fixed the broken media model: it hasn’t even attempted to. All it has done is giggify it. That has given some established reporters the freedom to do their own thing and made a handful of already famous and wealthy journalists even more famous and wealthy — good things, I guess. But it has also likely further degraded the already broken-down institutional structure of the journalism profession. That might bring joy to a few nihilists who simply despise the establishment media, but that doesn’t make it progress. It just makes it another step towards the death of the craft.

***

This essay was adapted from Leighton Woodhouse’s Social Studies Substack.

The contrast is exemplified by two of the papers’ most prominent writers: the Times’ Russian-born columnist Masha Gessen, who just won the Pulitzer for commentary, couldn’t be more different from the Post’s Marc Thiessen, who’s gaining a lot of attention these days as President Trump’s favorite print columnist. Gessen is a cosmopolitan progressive; Thiessen is a conservative Catholic and former Bush administration official. 

The two should be at odds, and in some ways, they are. But when it comes to foreign policy, they sing almost exactly the same hawkish, pro-empire song, albeit in slightly different keys.

Start with Gessen. There’s a pattern of immigrants coming to America, then asking the US government to start wars with their native lands. In 2022, for example, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov called on the West to throw Russia “back into the Stone Age.” Or take Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-born human-rights defender who spent recent years calling for a Western military attack on her homeland — only to retract her endorsement once that happened and produced predictably disastrous outcomes. 

Standing at the summit of this genre is Masha Gessen — or “M. Gessen,” as she now prefers to be called. (Gessen, who was born female, identifies as both non-binary and trans — I won’t explain how that works because I really don’t know.) Her Pulitzer citation this week lauds her for an “illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.”

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Four of Gessen’s seven prize-winning essays compare the Trump administration to Russia and Vladimir Putin. In these “illuminating” essays, Gessen argues that the Supreme Court ruling allowing Trump’s executive order to only list two sexes on US passports is just like a Russian bureaucrat who wouldn’t allow her to reclassify her ethnicity from Jewish. In another, she alleges that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr’s overzealous targeting of Jimmy Kimmel was parallel to Putin’s seizure of power in Russia. And in still another, she asserts that we are entering a specific authoritarian “moment” in America that recalls Putin’s abolition of elected governorships of oblasts, the war in Georgia, and killing of Alexei Navalny. Finally, Gessen compares Soviet Russia to today’s United States, contending that “it was, apparently, possible to maintain a sense of facts and values — not only not to obey in advance but not to obey at all. If that was possible in the Soviet Union half a century ago, then it is certainly possible in the United States today.”

It is true that Russia is not the most “inclusive” country in the world for LGBT people like Gessen. It’s a society operating on a totally different set of mores — a reminder of the vaunted “cultural differences” respected by liberals in the case of nations they like, and only anathematized for nations they don’t like. Add to this Gessen’s fearmongering that the United States is becoming totalitarian, like Russia, and she is offering classic, 2016-style Trump Derangement Syndrome, rallying the liberal base to fight absolute evil in order to vindicate absolute good. Ironically, this bankrupt, hate-baiting approach comes at a time when there are legitimate and even bipartisan reasons to be disappointed with President Trump — the economy, the war in Iran.

Gessen-ism, then, goes something like this: Russia is terrible because it denies that I’m trans; America and liberal democracy are great because they let me be trans; Trump is turning America into Russia; so we should arm Kiev and send more Ukrainian men into a meat grinder so that I can be trans. 

Such an approach ignores the plentiful evidence of Western provocation of Russia, not to mention a pre-Trump consensus to do so: NATO’s official stance since 2008 that Ukraine will join the alliance; the fact that the late Sen. John McCain traveled to Ukraine during the 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution and promised that Ukraine’s future would be with Europe and thus the West; Obama diplomat Victoria Nuland’s infamous leaked phone call boasting that Washington would be in charge of the Ukrainian transition and “fuck the EU.” There has always been a clear Washington objective to turn Ukraine, a neutral buffer state, into an American client. For Gessen, this is not relevant. The world is a big battle between Putin-style authoritarianism and Democratic Party-style social progressivism, and the latter must triumph — popular will and the realities of foreign policy be damned.

Gessen’s is a pro-war flavor that appeals to the progressive, trans-rights absolutist, still woke-ish readership of the Times. But the incredible power of the American media’s system for “manufacturing consent” — if Epstein-obsessives will forgive the Noam Chomsky reference — is that it does so in ways that are appealing to partisan sensibilities, while enforcing the same bottom line: an expansive American empire is good; war is necessary; the economic status quo should go unquestioned and unchallenged. 

Which brings us to The Washington Post — a paper that is now markedly different from The New York Times. Since Bezos took active interest in the paper he bought years ago, and influenced by his alliance with the Trump White House, the Post has become noticeably Right-coded. In a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Feb. 26, 2025, Bezos announced that “we are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Since then, the Post has staffed its editorial-page with lots of establishment conservatives, while more progressive-minded staff have quit or been ousted. 

Yet notwithstanding these partisan and ideological differences, the foreign-policy bottom line at the new Washington Post is remarkably similar to the one at the Times.

Behold Marc Thiessen. Unlike Gessen, Thiessen is a native-born American, a devout Catholic, and a rock-ribbed conservative: he served as George W. Bush’s director of speechwriting between 2007 and 2009 and joined the Post as a columnist shortly thereafter. Put another way: while Bezos has made the aims of the publication narrower and more explicit, the Post was pushing a hawkish line even before Bezos’s acquisition in 2013 and his editorial interference beginning in 2025. 

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In 2014, Thiessen argued that the United States should not have pulled out of Iraq. Recently, he went on Fox News to recycle Iraq War talking points for use in Iran, insisting that America should just kill any leaders who don’t want to make a deal. Even more bizarrely, in early March, Thiessen wrote an op-ed stating that the “Trump Doctrine” — expressed via the war in Iran — somehow ends forever wars, perhaps in a vain attempt to sell this war to a New Right that has grown skeptical of foreign entanglements. 

But Thiessen is not against forever wars — he loves them, and he’s even defended torture by the CIA. He’s obviously overjoyed that Trump, who ran on a largely antiwar and populist platform, has ended up reverting to the old ways of the Republican Party and effectively destroyed, at least for the time being, any New Right governing agenda embracing restraint abroad. For instance, Thiessen declared in a Trump-lauding piece that Ukraine was one of the president’s great accomplishments in 2025. He had in mind not Trump’s early attempts to achieve a negotiated settlement to the conflict, mind you, but the president’s willingness to maintain and even expand arms transfers: “He is doing more to help Ukraine than Biden ever did.” 

Browse Thiessen’s Post profile, and you will find that almost every single article is about how Trump took a hawkish stance and why it was so great. While engaged in a journalistic enterprise that looks like the diametrical opposite of Gessen’s — not Trump-bashing, but Trump-praising — he is, in fact, reinforcing the same policy agenda.  Unfortunately, the Thiessens of the world have understood just how well Trump responds to flattery. 

Because of that, Thiessen is now a frequent mention on the president’s Truth Social posts. On April 23, Trump commented on a Thiessen op-ed about how he didn’t need a deal with the Iranians: “Very true!!! President DJT.”

Thiessen and Gessen represent opposing American political ideologies, and wholly different reads on Trump. But to the hawkish uniparty, that doesn’t matter. The goal has always been a Pride Parade, whether in Tehran or Moscow (preferably both). That, we are told, is freedom. It’s why you must shut up about gas prices. Heads they win, tails you lose.

Understand this grubby, ink-stained world, and it’s tempting to see the 1986 Wapping Print Strike as inevitable. The battle between Rupert Murdoch and his unionized printers ended with those old-fashioned presses replaced by sleek digital alternatives. Yet if the shift looks inevitable in hindsight — as a victory for technology over tradition, of progress over Luddites who refused to move with the times — there was nothing unavoidable about its broader impact. Not only did Murdoch’s new presses mean a radically slimmed-down workforce, it also altered the whole tenor of Left-wing politics, and we’re still living with the consequences today.

Before Wapping, print unions dictated which papers got printed, when and by whom. When, in May 1984, The Sun tried to run a photo of Arthur Scargill with the caption “Mine Führer”, the printers downed tools. When the edition was eventually published, there was a blank space where the picture should have been, accompanied by a text reading: “Members of all The Sun production chapels refused to handle the Arthur Scargill picture and major headline on our lead story. The Sun has decided, reluctantly, to print the paper without either.”

Possibly because of the sector’s heavy unionization, there was an “us-and-them” feel to journalism: with the editorial staff on one side, and printers firmly on the other. Even a paper’s editor wasn’t allowed to set foot in the machine room, which was strictly reserved for unionized workers. But when Sun journalists went on strike, printers walked through their picket lines day after day. Because of the specialist knowledge required, because of the urgency of getting a paper out on time, and because of decades of bargaining, it was just assumed that printworkers controlled newspaper production, and that’s how it was always going to be. They were in charge.

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During the Wapping dispute, though, the nation watched as printers were powerless to stop even a single copy of a single edition of a single paper going on sale. They stood not just defeated, but delegitimized, the fragile limits of their powers starkly exposed. Combined with the failure of the miners’ strike, this loss swept away the Labour-aligned trade union movement which had defined postwar Britain.

At the center of events was Brenda Dean, the media-friendly leader of the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades. A huge print union — it boasted over 200,000 members in 1980 — Dean was elected SOGAT’s head the year before the strike began. She also had the distinction of being the first woman to be elected as the leader of a major industrial union anywhere in the world, in a sector entirely dominated by men. Dean was herself elected on a program of industrial reform, and soon became a formidably articulate voice on British TV screens. Acutely conscious of her image, she spent time ensuring that her appearance was always immaculate, turning her bright blue dress into a signature look.

Opposing her was Murdoch. Initially inheriting a single Adelaide newspaper from his father in 1952, he soon created a thoroughgoing Australian media empire. In the Sixties, Murdoch moved into the British market, buying The News of the World and then The Sun, which he turned from a worthy (if boring) Leftist broadsheet into a mass-market tabloid. By the early Eighties, he had added The Times and The Sunday Times to his stable, giving him a powerful foothold across the British press.

But by the time of Dean’s election, Murdoch’s patience was wearing thin. He knew he needed to eliminate the unions, and he used their willingness to strike against them. Aware that he couldn’t construct a state-of-the-art computerized printing plant in secret, he told the world that his new Wapping facility — a decisive move away from the old Fleet Street model — would be used to print an entirely new paper: The London Post. He then goaded his printers into a strike, offering them far worse terms and conditions than they were used to. As soon as the strike began, he sacked the printers en masse, replacing them with workers he’d secretly trained in Southampton. Murdoch must have imagined that the dispute which followed would last only a few months. Brenda Dean had other ideas, rallying her members with a cry of “Mr Murdoch is trying to smash our union!”

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She had a point. Murdoch aggressively road-tested Thatcher’s new anti-union legislation. Among other things, strikers were now forbidden from picketing anywhere other than their old places of work — the now dormant facilities in Fleet Street. So-called “secondary action” was made illegal too, meaning non-printworkers couldn’t refuse to handle Murdoch papers. And once the demonstrations at Wapping began, the Metropolitan Police were quick to ensure that the lorries left the plant safely. In the interests of that safety, hundreds of people were injured and one teenager killed.

Yet after months of militancy — and a year of Murdoch’s four papers being printed in Wapping — it became clear that SOGAT’s battle was lost basically as soon as the digital presses started rolling. It wasn’t simply that the new technology was more efficient, allowing the same output with a fifth of the workforce. More fundamentally, the dispute cost the unions their authority. It taught employers that confrontation worked, and that a determined proprietor, armed with new machines and new legislation, could execute a complete end-run around organized labor.

And where Murdoch started, others followed. By 1990, every national newspaper which had previously been printed using hot metal on Fleet Street had moved to computerized facilities, often in the Docklands. Other unions found their hands were tied by the new legislation too. The Liverpool Dockers strike of 1995-1998 remained almost entirely isolated; in the Seventies, it’s easy to imagine other workers downing tools in solidarity.

Altogether, these actions tipped the economic balance of power away from workers and towards employers, eroding participation in collective bargaining arrangements. As for the country at large, it was hard not to feel as though socialism had lost the intellectual argument. In earlier decades, capitalism and socialism were the titans fighting for Britain’s soul. Yet once both the miners and the printers had taken on the Right and lost, it became clear that organized labor could no longer set the agenda.

This unsurprisingly had an impact on the Labour Party. It had, after all, been founded by trade unions. But after Wapping, union membership declined sharply, and the tone of Labour’s rhetoric shifted from opposing plutocratic tycoons to merely tempering their influence. The 1983 manifesto talks about large-scale nationalization, even (perish the thought) withdrawal from the EEC. Compare that to its 1992 successor, which emphasizes competence and fiscal responsibility. Then, in 1997, Tony Blair won the vote to replace Clause IV of Labour’s constitution, dumping a commitment to public ownership that had endured since 1918.

1986 may not have been the only pivot on which this new world turned, but it was surely decisive. From then on, the Left stopped arguing that a socialist Britain was a fair and prosperous Britain, and was instead reduced to trying to curb capitalism’s worst excesses. As for Rupert Murdoch, he didn’t just win the strike. He helped re-write the political map of the UK. In the Print, the play we’ve written about the dispute, isn’t just an account of a thrilling battle for power. It’s also a warning.

In 1986, computerized presses meant that 1,000 people could produce four national newspapers. With the rise of the internet, that looks almost quaint. Now we barely need newspapers to be printed at all, as most journalism is consumed on screens. And now, in 2026, we face another turning point, as AI means people are barely even needed to write the articles. The unions of the Eighties might have been flawed, overreaching and at times even absurd — but they had the power to stop a runaway train in its tracks if necessary. We might soon look back on that power with envy.

***

In the Print is showing at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington until 3 May.

Stoppard, though, was multiply disqualified from the Nobel. First, there were the scores of plays, film treatments and bon mots, all too obviously designed for the enjoyment of others. Popular without being populist, Stoppard’s career consisted in exercising an astonishing capacity for giving pleasure to millions of people. His plays were precision-made exhibitions of his own striking capacity for a kind of high-intellectual screwball: hard to devise, but not hard — not really, despite what people say — to appreciate.

That that is not a glib trick, but an unusual gift, is suggested by how few writers show much inclination to follow his literary or commercial example. Part of Stoppard’s trademark effect was to flatter his audience in the presumption that they were in on the joke, however esoteric. That alone — Stoppard’s talent to amuse — would have registered as a big no-no to the Swedish Academy.

It can’t have helped, either, when it came to judging his literary accomplishment, that Stoppard was so obviously at ease with his own talent and success, seeming to find it neither a burden nor a distraction. He was a global star, would commute if need be by Concorde, and each summer hosted legendary fête champêtres to which he would invite Harrison Ford, Alfred Brendel, Mick Jagger, the Duchess of Devonshire, and no more than 500 or so other close friends. “There is a god,” Stoppard once reflected, “and he looks after English playwrights.”

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The hidden desire of Tennessee Williams

By David Mamet

Perhaps the Swedish Academy, party to a widespread but pretentious prejudice, felt that true artists are not supposed to be so glamorous and palpably well-adjusted, nor so candidly attuned to the possibility of commercial reward. When asked by the press to explain what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, his first major theatrical hit, was “about”, Stoppard is said to have replied: “It’s about to make me very rich.” At the height of his fame he became the well-rewarded script “doctor” of Hollywood producers — not just for Shakespeare in Love, for which he asked, and received, a $1 million repair-job fee — but also blockbusters such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

That the last in that franchise is arguably the best is in no small part due to Stoppard’s expert doctoring. Not every job had so much room for remedy. While he was working on Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, he was less a script doctor than a battlefield surgeon. But even here, his trademark humor remained. Teased about whether Shakespeare would have written screenplays, Stoppard replied unembarrassedly. “No, he’d have rewritten them.”

And then, to pile discredit upon discredit in the eyes of the Swedes, there was Stoppard’s first career as a journalist, and worse still the damaging fact that he seems to have enjoyed it. According to an early interview, young Stoppard conceived of himself, in the late Sixties, as having “no higher ambition than to make a gaudy mark in Fleet Street”. Reporting on a regional paper, he felt delighted by the decidedly parochial glamour of “flashing his press card at flower shows”.

He was, briefly, the only motoring correspondent in the land unable to drive (“I used to review the upholstery”). And even then, too, there were early symptoms of the incipient dilettantish condition that critics would later claim to detect in his plays. Applying for a job at the Evening Standard, Stoppard found himself put on the spot by then-editor Charles Wintour who, perhaps doubtful of the true extent of Stoppard’s declared interest in current affairs, asked him to name the sitting Home Secretary. “Look,” came the prototypically Stoppardian parry, “I said I was interested in politics, not obsessed by them.”

Yet for the Swedish Academy, there remains something worse, much worse, than all these faults — the easy fame, the non-neuroticism, the indiscriminately wielded and brilliant talent. That was Stoppard’s resolutely anti-political aesthetic self-conception. Art, according to him, was not politics by another means. In contemporary theater, it is difficult to think of another writer who proved so clearly their ability to take art seriously without moralizing on its importance.

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The ability to articulate a robust aesthetic theory is not a precondition of artistic virtue. But Stoppard’s was remarkably accurate in broad outline, and one he established early in his career. He was suspicious of the facile subjectivism about values that had been popularized in Britain by A.J. Ayer’s account of logical positivism, and which Stoppard ridiculed in his play Jumpers. In later life, he explicitly identified himself as a value “realist” in the philosopher’s sense of the term. He loathed communism, not least for its gratuitous imposition of extraneous social objectives onto the autonomous domain of intellectual creativity, and was repulsed by the homegrown anti-Western demonstrations of 1968. By the Eighties, Stoppard had committed the ultimate act of bien pensant sacrilege: he had expressed a sneaking admiration for Margaret Thatcher.

Stoppard was essentially a bourgeois artist, proudly owning the implications of the label, progressive literary cliches be damned. His discomfort with smuggling social commentary as literary creativity was an intrinsic, rather than incidental, feature of his outlook. Stoppard’s signature love of verbal play and “brittle” dialogue — his effort to make already erudite characters speak a notch or two more quickly and intelligently than anyone would in real life — was a natural development of his dislike of “the political”. At the same time, his rejection of naturalism was controlled enough to prevent his work degenerating into what he referred to, with apparently equal disdain, as “that child’s garden of easy victories known as the avant-garde”.

In a remarkable New Yorker profile of Stoppard, written by Kenneth Tynan in 1977, the playwright’s self-image as defiantly antithetical to political art seems to continually prickle his interviewer. It is “deeply embarrassing”, Stoppard insists, when a piece of work fallaciously assumes that it must be important simply because it gestures at some urgent social or political issue. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he adds of the heyday of kitchen-sink realism, “because when I started to write you were a shit if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that.” “[My plays] must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness,” he adds with Wildean flair. “I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.”

By contrast with Wilde, too often seduced by the allure of paradox to articulate his background ethic in a clear way, Stoppard could easily switch into admirable frankness: in the end, he announced, he stood for “Western liberal democracy, favoring an intellectual elite and a progressive middle class and based on a moral order derived from Christian absolutes”. Many literary elites have attempted, both in Stoppard’s day and sense, to tell themselves a more extravagant story; Stoppard may have had too much intelligence, and easy access to his own mind, to sustain that kind of self-deception. “It’s a sheer perversion of speech,” he insisted, “to describe the society I live in as one that inflicts violence on the underprivileged. What worries me is not the bourgeois exception but the totalitarian norm.”

Already pronounced in Stoppard’s day, the collective cultural obsession of filtering aesthetic appreciation through a narrow range of social and psychological preoccupations has become one of the basic tenets of progressive art. It is tempting to think that many of these assumptions are now so widespread as to be scarcely noticeable, all while silently guiding judgments of comparative prestige, worthy subject-matter and literary seriousness. Stoppard’s shimmering, abstract verbal play could be all too easy to dismiss as symptomatic of a limitation, somehow meretricious or shallowly cerebral: making his plays, as one reviewer put it, into wonderful “Fabergé Easter eggs”. Though never Nobel-prized, the degree to which Stoppard was generally prized by the public suggests they didn’t poo-poo that dazzling gift.

This is not a coincidence, or bad luck, or the work of the Corporation’s enemies. Rather, it is the clearest possible evidence that there is something rotten in the very core of the organization. Davies says he’s going to hang on to ensure a smooth succession; someone else will have to rescue an Auntie in distress. But unless there is now root-and-branch reform at the Corporation, it is difficult to see how this damaging cycle of failure can be broken.

The dossier that triggered Davie’s resignation, along with that of Deborah Turness, BBC News’s chief executive, was put together by Michael Prescott for the Editorial Standards and Guidelines Committee. Prescott was an independent advisor to the committee; he resigned earlier this year after presenting his damning evidence of journalistic malfeasance.

As the BBC never tires of telling us, it is devoted entirely to truth-telling, even setting up a special unit — BBC Verify — to establish the veracity of claims. Prescott’s dossier mocks those pretensions, showing the BBC to be a whited sepulchre: proclaiming its virtue while churning out propaganda. A more thoroughgoing betrayal of the BBC’s journalistic credo would be hard to imagine.

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Given all this, Tim Davie’s resignation was probably inevitable. After days of silence, he was at some point going to have to break cover and explain himself. But in light of Prescott’s dossier, his position was indefensible. How, after all, can you defend your organization when it’s been caught out so badly? The doctoring of quotes, which Panorama was revealed to have done to Donald Trump, was exactly the kind of thing that was routine in the Soviet Union; every honest BBC journalist (and there are plenty) should feel soiled by association with that kind of technique.

Even so, Davie and Turness might have survived had they acted quickly. Both of them, along with some other senior figures, had been in possession of the facts since May. Why was no action taken? Prescott himself says that when he presented his evidence he was met with defensive indifference. Presumably they hoped and believed his dossier would never see the light of day. When, last week, it did, in the pages of The Daily Telegraph, the BBC’s response was calamitously stupid. Its first comment was “we do not comment on leaks”; can you imagine what the BBC’s response would be if a government tried that line out? However, when Trump himself stepped into the fray, there was surely no alternative: Davie had to go.

There will be no shortage of applicants to replace him — leading the BBC is one of the glittering prizes in British public life — but no one will succeed in the job unless there is radical change. This crisis should be viewed as an opportunity to put things right. Now is the moment to begin a long-overdue process of reform. Firstly, the Corporation must come clean about the problem it faces; it cannot go on repeating, ad nauseam, that “we are independent, impartial and truthful” — how can we believe them? In 2007, I wrote Can We Trust the BBC?, based on my 25 years as a BBC reporter. My answer then, as it is now, is that you cannot trust the BBC to be impartial because it is staffed, overwhelmingly, by young-ish people who are liberal-Left in outlook. They are highly educated, and many are hyper-political and hyper-sensitive, quite happy to activate complaints on the basis of micro-aggressions, trigger warnings and cultural appropriation.

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The new DG (very possibly a woman) will get nowhere with reform until that bias in BBC newsrooms is admitted. If this first, difficult step is taken, then the hard work can start. Proper reform must overcome the BBC’s extreme reluctance to submit to outside scrutiny; it is very jealous of its prerogatives. A common feature of all the recent scandals is that they have all been handled internally. Complaints from outsiders go through a bureaucratic grinder, complainants rarely get satisfaction, and most find the process utterly frustrating. Dismantling this mechanism and letting outsiders sit in judgment would go some way to restoring trust.

When there are major journalistic lapses, meanwhile, it would be much better if a panel of tough, independent people — preferably a mix of journalists, lay people and perhaps a lawyer or two — got to assess the evidence. If there has been wrongdoing, it would be admitted quickly and openly, and those responsible would be disciplined, or indeed sacked in the most serious instances. If such a process had been employed in response to the Prescott dossier, the BBC would now be in a very different place.

Then there is the question of recruitment. The Corporation’s newsrooms are largely Left-liberal mono-cultures. “Impartiality”, if it can ever be achieved, will certainly never be realized in an organization where there is no proper diversity of opinion — or at the very least an open-minded curiosity, rather than suffocating group-think. This needs to be addressed.

None of this is easy, and the steps I suggest would meet fierce and determined resistance. That resistance is already in full voice, as Today program presenter Nick Robinson encouraged another BBC presenter, David Yelland, to hammer home the message that Davie’s resignation was evidence of a “coup” at the BBC, and that sinister Right-wing forces were meddling in Corporation matters. Mark Damazer, a former controller of Radio Four, was also wheeled out to tell us that the BBC is staffed by journalistic paragons who, day-in-day-out, reflect the world with pristine impartiality. This first reaction to Davie’s resignation is discouraging: once again the BBC is rejecting, even in the face of hard evidence, that it has any problem with impartiality. Instead, it attacks its critics.

The latest irritating BBC promo — the one that bigs-up the bravery and resourcefulness of its journalists — contains the line, “This is our BBC”. I think this is meant to sound inclusive. But it sounds more like the BBC is saying it belongs to its staff: which is exactly the nub of the problem. To succeed, rather, the BBC needs to think and sound more like the country it serves, not like the progressive bully-pulpit it has become. And if this opportunity for meaningful reform is ignored once again, the 18th Director-General risks being the last.

In 2022, Barrett (Shalit is her maiden name) sued The Atlantic for defamation and breach of contract. This summer, the parties settled the suit, to the tune of more than $1 million. (Some of the counts were dismissed.) Nonetheless, “The Mad, Mad World of Niche Sports” remains retracted on The Atlantic’s website, available only in the oddly purgatorial form of a PDF, and an edited version of the original editor’s note that accompanied the retraction remains, and still represents the magazine’s core claims against the writer.

For a freelancer to sue a billionaire-owned prestige outlet and receive a decisive settlement is an unusual occurrence, and seems to suggest missteps on the part of The Atlantic. The publication prides itself on having the highest journalistic standards. Its current website displays a marketing banner touting “Accountability. Transparency. Independence.”  If The Atlantic’s claims against Barrett were so transparent and accountable, why did it settle? And if they weren’t, why did the publication make them in the first place?

At no point has The Atlantic disavowed the basic premise of Barrett’s story: high-level participation in niche sports, once a promising strategy to land a spot at an elite college, has become an arms-race among wealthy families, with diminishing results. Instead, the conflict has centered on a welter of supposed factual errors suggested by Erik Wemple, then The Washington Post’s media critic, in a series of columns about the piece. The publication has also questioned the accuracy of Barrett’s representation of “Sloane,” a Connecticut sports mom who participated in the story on the condition that she and her college-hopeful children would not be identifiable. Concerned that the publication was not honoring its commitments, Sloane misled The Atlantic’s fact-checkers in the 11th hour, and entirely withdrew her cooperation with the magazine post-publication. 

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On one side is the narrative presented by The Atlantic in current and past versions of the editor’s note that accompanied the story’s retraction, and in an internal memo to staff from editor Don Peck. In this telling, The Atlantic fell victim to a serial plagiarist and journalistic untouchable, and only realized this thanks to Wemple, who is now a media reporter for The New York Times.

On the other side is Barrett, who contends that “my niche-sports article was published in October of 2020, at the zenith of America’s great racial reckoning and at the height of social justice-infused callout campaigns,” as she told me. During this time period, elite liberal publications such as The Atlantic were highly sensitive to protecting themselves from allegations of racial wrong-think. This, according to Barrett, “created a perfect opening for The Washington Post — a publication that is unique among major journalistic outlets in allowing its pages to be used to settle scores and malign those who have hurt the newspaper — to attack me.” Wemple, reached via telephone, called this idea “preposterous.”

Nonetheless, at the time he penned a series of critical stories on a single magazine article, questioning the facts in Barrett’s story, doing re-reporting of his own, and assailing her credibility, repeating claims that she had in the past “embellished quotes and exaggerated details,” “stretched quotes and embroidered details,” and “mishandled quotes and story points.” Barrett denies all such allegations, calling them “pure innuendo and insinuation” and “made-up nonsense.” 

Barrett is known to many as a notorious media figure of the Nineties, when her meteoric career fresh out of college as writer for The New Republic and other prestige venues was marred by a plagiarism scandal. She was shown to have lifted minor, boilerplate-type sentences from other writers’ work in four brief instances. She was also an enfant terrible of sorts in the Washington of the period, and a frequent target of media-gossip columnists. Her work did draw many allegations of factual inaccuracies. These often, however, seem to be of a vague or misleading type when you really look into them. Defenders — among them, Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic’s literary editor in those years — have represented much of the controversy as a natural result of a journalist doing hard-hitting reporting.

Detractors, not least David Carr, the legendary media critic, have called Barrett “tremendously self-involved,” “not particularly self aware,” and “a one-woman journalistic disaster area.” (To be fair, she was notoriously disorganized, overcommitted, and late with her deadlines.) Carr has been posthumously canonized, but during his time as the editor of the Washington City Paper in the Nineties (where Wemple also worked), he kept up a steady stream of extremely nasty Barrett-bashing via a regular feature he called “That Darn Ruth.” Some of Carr’s commentary, such as calling Barrett “a kinder-genius, complete with frilly socks” and remarking on the color of her lipstick, seem to bear out her remarks to me that part of her negative reception was due to misogyny.

On the telephone, Barrett is an overwhelmingly voluble conversationalist, and seems to have been driven at least a little crazy, a la Bleak House or Kafka, by defending the details of her case. She provided me with hundreds of pages of documents, including her complaint, a memorandum opinion and order from the federal trial court, an “omnibus write-up” on the case, a summary of the omnibus writeup in case I didn’t want to read its 51 pages, PDFs of relevant articles, screenshots of text messages with editors, and more. These documents presented a compelling counter-narrative to the one put forth by The Atlantic.

The Atlantic editor’s note currently attached to Barrett’s retracted story on the magazine’s website begins: “After The Atlantic published this article, new information emerged that raised serious concerns about its accuracy, and about the credibility of the author, Ruth Shalit Barrett. We have decided to retract this article. We cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the piece in its entirety.” 

The note goes on to explain that Barrett was complicit in a deception perpetrated by Sloane, regarding the number of children she had, which Sloane included as a masking detail. And it reports “several” additional errors: a thigh injury should have been described as a “skin rupture” rather than “a deep gash”; a lacrosse family was erroneously said to live in Greenwich, Conn., when in truth they lived in another town in Fairfield County; and some private backyard hockey rinks characterized as “Olympic-size” were “large, but not Olympic-size.”

The note also mentions incidents in “1994 and 1995 in which plagiarism and inaccuracies were found in Ms. Barrett’s reporting,” and explains that “we decided to assign Barrett this freelance story in part because more than two decades had separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic and because in recent years her work has appeared in reputable magazines. We were wrong to make this assignment, however. It reflects poor judgment on our part, and we regret our decision.”

In previous versions of the note, The Atlantic claimed that Barrett “left The New Republic” in 1999 “after plagiarism and inaccurate reporting were discovered in her work.” Both the previous and current versions of the note mention that the story ran under the byline Ruth S. Barrett, asserting that the magazine “should have included” the name that she used in her byline in the Nineties, strongly implying that the Ruth S. Barrett byline was an attempt by Barrett to conceal her identity.

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Barrett, in her complaint against the magazine, contended that she overlooked the deception of the magazine’s fact-checkers by the source, Sloane, in order to honor her agreement to keep her source confidential, and that her behavior was justified, given the magazine’s failure to honor its commitment to sufficiently mask the source’s identity. The court did not deny the truth of this claim, but dismissed the count regarding it.

However, the court accepted the statements of fact behind several other counts: the magazine originally misrepresented the circumstances of Barrett’s departure from The New Republic in 1999; and the author has never sought to conceal her identity via her byline. Barrett explained in her complaint that she’d written under the name Ruth Shalit Barrett or Ruth S. Barrett since her marriage in 2004. She also provided me with the receipts to prove that she added the “S.” to The Atlantic’s proposed byline of “Ruth Barrett” to render herself more identifiable. 

The court agreed with the plaintiff that The Atlantic’s statements could have been “capable of defamatory meaning,” and that “a reasonable reader could infer two negative narratives, both of which ‘imply unstated defamatory facts’: first, that Ms. Barrett sought to conceal her identity and distance herself from her work in the 1990s; second, that her history was sufficiently unsavory to warrant her doing this,” according to an opinion of the trial court allowing some of her claims to go forward before a settlement put an end to the matter.

The Atlantic settled just before Barrett’s lawsuit reached the discovery phase — that is, just before its editors would have had to start turning over their emails. In public statements it has presented the incident as a result of the magazine’s high-mindedness and high standards. 

To momentarily pierce the veil of bullshit: the factual inaccuracies revealed in the magazine’s correction are extremely minor, could easily have been corrected in an online version of the piece, and do not seem to justify a major retraction. Such things are pretty common, even in exhaustively fact-checked stories at premium outlets like The Atlantic, and are not usually the occasion of high-profile defenestrations.

The deception of the fact-checkers is a blacklisting-level offense, possibly, depending on the writer’s clout and the publication, but again, it and the other minor alleged errors don’t quite seem to warrant the total demolition of Barrett’s reputation carried out by the editor’s note and retraction. Nor does it account for the publication’s other acts of apparent bad faith. For just one example — there are many — The Atlantic editor’s note even today mentions allegations by Sloane’s attorney that Barrett made additional mistakes in her story.

In a letter presented to The Atlantic’s attorneys by Barrett’s attorneys, portions of which were made available to me, Barrett claims to have conclusively demonstrated to the publication that these allegations were unfounded. She provided The Atlantic with documentation on two details questioned by Sloane’s attorney: the existence of a beach house and a makeshift basement fencing strip; and she had receipts that editor Don Peck had received the evidence. So why is a transparent and accountable publication still mentioning these allegations in its editor’s note, except to make Barrett look bad?

The editor’s note’s declaration that “we cannot attest to the trustworthiness and credibility of the author, and therefore we cannot attest to the veracity of the piece in its entirety” suggests an answer. A magazine article is, by definition, a quantifiable event, whose veracity is not a mystical quality, but in fact can be determined through the well-established practices of sourcing and fact-checking. The Atlantic fact-checked Barrett’s story before publication, and then again, by its own account, did so forensically, afterward. Despite Wemple’s exhaustive spit-balling and The Atlantic’s very best efforts, the only “errors” it has exposed are of a flimsy and irrelevant nature: a “skin eruption” rather than a “gash,” whatever that means, the square-footage of a hockey rink, and so on.

The writer’s “trustworthiness and credibility,” however, is a different matter. These qualities depend not on her work, but on public perception. The magazine’s suggestion is that Barrett’s history and reputation — exceedingly well known before the article was published — disqualified her from inclusion in its pages. However, it might be more fruitful to look instead at the particular conditions of 2020.

Wemple wrote multiple stories for The Washington Post about Barrett’s piece at the time of its publication. The first, entitled “Ruth Shalit Just Wrote for The Atlantic, Would Readers Know it From the Byline?,” appeared on Oct. 24, 2020, and appears to be the origin of the byline scandal. Wemple’s story also made reference to a legendary and controversial 13,000-word feature Barrett (then Shalit) wrote for The New Republic in 1995 that was critical of racial diversity initiatives in The Washington Post’s newsroom.

Barrett’s 1995 story was a tour de force, and made many well-sourced points on the divisive nature of diversity initiatives, the negative consequences of choosing applicants by race rather than by merit, and the irritating and demoralizing banalities of diversity training. The writer was 24 years old when the piece appeared, and her wunderkind-reporter status was obviously deserved. She reached the prescient conclusion that when newsrooms make the promotion of social justice a priority, they hamper the production of news and fundamentally distort its contents.

In the 1995 essay, Barrett acknowledged the Post’s troubled racial history — an all-white newsroom, protests over racist coverage — but quoted multiple staffers anonymously and one on the record with concerns that its commitment to establishing proportional representation was diluting the talent in the newsroom. Given the size of the candidate pools, she demonstrated, proportional representation with top talent was “flamboyantly unrealistic” and she confirmed this with quotations from a memo by the paper’s own recruitment expert. Moreover, these measures weren’t making anyone happy. Both white and black staff members were now complaining of discrimination. 

This is not to say that the purity police came for Barrett in 2020 as retribution for a 1995 story. However, one might suspect that she was both denounced and purged for racial wrong-think  — which is to say, purged because it was possible, and it was a fun thing to do at the time, and made the purgers feel more secure about their own jobs. The mere mention of a story like “Race in the Newsroom,” in Wemple’s column would not have been lost on editors at The Atlantic in 2020. Wemple responds that it is “simply not true” that racial politics in 2020 had anything to do with his reporting on Barrett. “I do my work the same regardless of what decade it is,” he said. 

In a Nov. 2 follow-up story for the Post, Wemple mentioned an anonymous staffer at the magazine who “raised concerns” in a meeting about the “racial implications” of a passage of Barrett’s story on teen sports, and who “pointed to a connection between that language and the mentality suffusing the author’s long-ago investigation of the Post.” A little more digging reveals a story in The New York Times in 1995, quoting a black reporter from The Washington Post as saying, “the article was the most racist piece of so-called journalism I have read in modern times.” What magazine, in post-George Floyd 2020, would have felt safe platforming Barrett?

 Bottom line: the core of Barrett’s story on niche sports was beyond reproach — and in fact her findings were validated in 2023 by a group of economists at Harvard. And her 1995 reporting was a textbook example of a lost form of hard-hitting investigative reporting. It’s The Atlantic’s failure that it published a true story only to retract it. 

It’s disappointing to see The Atlantic violate its own standards and the standards of journalism to distance itself from Barrett. The original editor’s note appears to have been written not to present a fair portrait, or even the correct facts about Barrett’s history, but in order to align with the publication’s politically motivated and cancel-culture-safe inner truth. The current version of the note does the same thing in even more disjointed fashion. Anna Bross, senior vice president of communications for The Atlantic, commented via email that “the story remains retracted and that will not change.”

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This kind of activist journalism is poor journalism, and is exactly what Barrett’s article in The New Republic predicted would happen as the profession moved to prioritize “diversity” as a social-justice cause. Muddled prose, exaggerated smears, and the weaponization of fact-checking are the tools of the trade, and present a desired truth, instead of the real one.

Barrett has been a victim of this since the beginning. For just one example, “Race in the Newsroom” has been widely reported to contain errors. And it did. Barrett lists four in one of her documents. But the errors are also widely mischaracterized.

In the most serious, she wrote that a city contractor named Roy Littlejohn “served time” on graft charges during the notoriously corrupt reign of DC Mayor Marion Berry. Wemple mentioned this in 2020, writing that “Littlejohn wasn’t even charged with such an offense.” Carr did the same in 1999, noting that “nothing of the sort happened.” Actually, something close to it did happen: Littlejohn was the target of an undercover probe for corruption. Barrett — a 24-year-old reporter, working on a 13,000 word piece, on deadline, made a regrettable error. But suggesting that “nothing of the sort happened,” without more, wasn’t quite right, either.

“The Post’s response to ‘Race in the Newsroom’ was the dawn of fact-checking as a pretext for discourse policing,” Barrett wrote to me in a text. “Rather than address the substantive critique I was making, WaPo sent legions of fact-checkers after me to assert that the piece was riddled with staggering errors. [Their] claim that my article was rife with errors was itself false. But this was the view that congealed and took hold.”

Barrett, an investigative reporter of great capacities, left Washington in 1999, after smear-level media association of her with an unrelated journalism scandal (that of fabulist Stephen Glass, also an employee of The New Republic) made her position untenable. In 2020, she was writing about sports moms — and even this wasn’t allowed. Her silencing has been a loss to the profession, and has been a forerunner of the wider silencing of discourse we see today in the legacy media. Only the bad reporters and craven insinuators are left, and they remain un-fact-checked.

It seems that Richardson bought into the theory circulating on the Left that Robinson was a Groyper — that is, a devotee of the far-Right provocateur Nick Fuentes — who killed Kirk for the sin of insufficient reactionary radicalism. Even in the fog of speculation and conjecture that necessarily follows such a shocking event, informed observers recognized that this theory was, generously, bereft of evidence. At the same time, evidence was already accumulating that Robinson had Left-wing motivations.

The evidence became too clear to deny after the release of court documents spelling out the broad contours of Robinson’s rationale, with his mother telling police that he had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented” over the last year. But Richardson, rather than admitting she had misjudged, remained defiant, writing the day after the documents were released that Robinson’s motive “remains unclear.”

It may seem unfair to pick on a single blogger who twists the truth when American politicians and professional pundits crank out countless lies and distortions daily. But if you aren’t familiar with Richardson, you might know someone who is. Her Substack newsletter, Letters from an American, is the world’s most popular, boasting more than 2.6 million followers as of September 2025. That’s the equivalent of nearly a quarter of The New York Times’s combined digital and print subscribers — for a single person. There may be few other media outlets with more influence on liberal-leaning Americans.

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Letters from an American is difficult to place on the traditional establishment-anti-establishment axis, though. On the one hand, Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College with an enviable record of academic publications that receive laudatory coverage in legacy media outlets. On the other hand, the nature of Substack means that she is only accountable to her audience, not peers, fact-checkers, or big-money supporters. She’s a credentialed expert, yes, but she’s also a free agent.

In his 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch portrayed institutions like academia and mass media as epistemic (knowledge-generating) machines. At their best, such institutions use checks and balances to keep their participants honest and trustworthy. Yet public confidence in these systems continues to wane, with many believing their self-regulatory mechanisms have broken down.

“Liberals read, conservatives watch TV,” asserted the UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania in an influential 2021 essay that explores why, in his view, Democrats are more resistant to mendacity and petty misinformation than Republicans. Conservatives in the MAGA era derive their beliefs directly from President Trump or grassroots sources, while liberal opinion comes from “an intermediate class of activists, lawyers, journalists, professors, and bureaucrats,” avers Hanania.

This intermediate class, which in many cases is synonymous with “the experts,” is epistemically regulated by institutions, and operates with an institutional halo, even if it also propagates its own crop of partisan distortions. At their best, mediating institutions on the Left suppress the spread of misinformation among the grassroots of their own side; at their worst, they legitimize unfounded rumors and conspiracies. One of numerous examples: the notion, promoted by some 50 former intelligence officials and parroted uncritically by mainstream outlets, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.

For years and even decades, such incidents have led most Republicans to conclude that “expert” regulatory mechanisms are hopelessly broken. Now, some Democrats are now joining forces with them. Before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race in 2024, many Democratic partisans claimed that The New York Times and other mainstream organs were waging a vindictive campaign against him, sabotaging the party’s chances by insufficiently lauding the strength of the economy or reporting on allegations that the 46th president was in mental decline. If in 2020 the calls for “moral clarity” in journalism (that is, explicitly biased reporting) failed to take full root, the demand for institutions to cater directly to progressive biases remains persistent among many of the most avid consumers of Left news media.

For some time, the centrifugal force of audience preference on the Left has been counteracted by inertia and the deference given to those with legacy credentials. But with the rise of Substack and Bluesky, Left-wing partisans have more tools than ever to isolate themselves in like-minded informational bubbles. This means that the same forces that have turned many Right-wing institutions into obsequious Trumpist organs over the last decade are now working their evil magic on the Left.

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Some traditional informational gatekeepers have also spread misinformation about Kirk’s assassin. Joan Donovan, a Boston University professor and “nationally recognized online disinformation researcher,” told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that the messages Robinson carved into the bullets indicated he was a Groyper. Even more ludicrously, an article in the Left-wing Byline Times claimed that the “Slav squat” costume Robinson donned for Halloween in 2018 indicated he had been “radicalized by far-Right online movements,” an insight probably derived from a now partially-deleted Twitter thread written by a random video editor. As someone who was, like Robinson, a 15-year-old boy immersed in online culture in 2018, the “Slav squat” is  instantly recognizable as a wildly popular apolitical meme. But most have stuck — perhaps grudgingly — to the facts of the case.

In this context, it becomes easier to understand the role that Richardson’s Substack is playing. Avid consumers of political news may playfully characterize themselves as masochists, but they also fall victim to the powerful lure of reinforcing one’s own beliefs. Where The New York Times hesitates because of its reporters’ adherence to institutional standards, a dozen independent outlets will compete to capitalize on the gap in demand for affirmative party-line narratives. Richardson has seen the most success among the lot by combining her legitimate credentials and level-headed language with a post-truth appreciation for catharsis over factuality.

But it’s not just Richardson who has worked to subvert the authority of traditional informational gatekeepers on the Left in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination. On Bluesky, where many influential progressive commentators now make their home, friendly pushback against the Groyper theory by the intellectually honest is greeted with derision. And the fallacies of online bullshitters have already “trickled up” to infotainment purveyors like Jimmy Kimmel, who asserted in a Sept. 15 monologue that “the MAGA gang” is “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

According to a Sept. 14 poll from YouGov, 40% of Democrats believe that Tyler Robinson was a Republican. Hopefully, this number will decrease as information about the case disseminates more widely, and the American Left will avert, at least for now, the great informational crack-up that has already struck the Right. But there is no guarantee the faltering influence of fact-based institutions will hold forever. While ABC suspended Kimmel’s show in response to his remarks and pressure from the Trump administration, such coercion will only help to build his image as a martyr for the truth.

So, a cautionary word to conservatives: if you dislike the liberal mainstream media, just wait until you meet the liberal post-mainstream media.

I know Hatef very well, and not just because it became the longest-running weekly in my native Guilan province. It was run by my mother — and my father, until he died suddenly in March, at the age of 57. And so, in the most literal sense, I grew up with Iranian journalism, and all its triumphs and challenges. I saw censorship and financial hardships, outdated labor regulations and corruption.

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Local firms were often reluctant to put ads in the magazine, while provincial authorities ran a covert sabotage operation against the magazine. It was just too disobedient to be given any extra lifeline. Whenever Hatef ran a story revealing institutional malfeasance, legal repercussions inevitably followed. In June 2001, for instance, the Guilan University of Medical Sciences filed an official complaint after it reported that the number of HIV patients in the city of Astara had reached alarming levels.

It’s hard to get published here. Publicly distributed literature requires a license from the Ministry of Culture. Once that’s granted, a committee for “supervising the press” actively monitors what the newspaper, magazine or website publishes. This ensures they can be disciplined appropriately when needed, and that nothing that “disturbs the public opinion” makes it to print. Those red lines are defined and readjusted rapidly: editors and reporters are supposed to have the presence of mind to know what can go out, and what should be bowdlerized.

These days, for instance, when the morality police harass women in public, newspapers are expected to either ignore them or else rehash the official talking points if something unpleasant happens: underlying health conditions; suicide; drugs. Nor can the country’s costly nuclear program be criticized. All a journalist should write is that this is an entirely peaceful scheme meant exclusively for electricity production.

And for those who go too far? The supervisory committee has been responsible for shutting down hundreds of newspapers and websites. There’s no comprehensive inventory of the publications that have been shut down, though history offers something of a guide. Right after the revolution, in August 1979, over 20 newspapers were banned following an order by Tehran’s revolutionary court. That included Yoldash, printed in Azeri, which was closed for running a caricature of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In April 2000, when Mohammad Khatami was president, a hardline judge called Saeed Mortazavi announced the closure of 18 newspapers overnight. To justify his spree, Mortazavi cited legal passages stating that “criminals” and “clinically insane” individuals weren’t entitled to possess instruments (read: newspapers) that could cause “accidents”.

Mortazavi didn’t stop there. By February 2004, he had personally overseen the closure or license revocation of some 90 publications. His rampage against the reformist press came on the heels of remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, whose incendiary broadsides against newspapers as the bulwark of “the enemy” at home were construed by the judiciary as a declaration of war against the nonconformist press. Mortazavi, the so-called “hangman of the press”, was himself imprisoned, in 2018, for his role in the torture and killing of four political prisoners arrested during the 2009 Green Movement. But he was released before his two-year term ended.

In a press freedom factsheet released in September 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimated that “at least” 52 newspapers had been banned by the Islamic Republic since 1979. And while print reporters can plausibly get something out, their colleagues in multimedia journalism have even less space. The tentacles of state media are so far-reaching that the idea of being a television or radio reporter presupposes that you’re an employee of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the entity supervised by the Supreme Leader and with an absolute monopoly on multimedia broadcasting rights. Private broadcasters don’t exist.

The punishment for any infraction, meanwhile, can be worse than unemployment: the Islamic Republic is notorious as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. In 2022, it imprisoned at least 62 reporters. At the same time, journalism education is uncharted territory, and the most distinguished journalists are self-taught, often with degrees in other fields.

Against these odds, though, a sliver of independent, pro-reform newspapers remain. And dailies such as Shargh, Ham-Mihan or Sazandegi have been a thorn in the side of the theocracy. Military commanders, and even the ayatollah himself, launch occasional tirades about newspapers being “counterrevolutionary” outlets betraying their country.

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Independent journalists have broken some big stories. Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi rattled the conscience of a nation with their courageous reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Iranian morality police in September 2022. They spent 17 months in prison for their work of journalism before being “pardoned” earlier this year. Years earlier, Banafsheh Samgiss, another prominent journalist, was imprisoned after reviewing a book about the role of women in Iranian music.

More to the point, the fact that this sort of reporting is sometimes taken seriously, and generates universal interest, suggests that Iranians indeed appreciate solid independent journalism. Just as important, the striking sensitivity of the Islamic Republic leaders to a free press suggests that they understand critical voices can cut through indoctrination. If people are made aware of what it’s like to live in a democracy, there’s a chance they’ll revolt for change.

Not that we should exaggerate. Many Iranians remain skeptical of domestic reporting regardless of its provenance, even stories emanating from non-governmental media. No less important, state censorship has been so forceful that many Iranians now look for their news abroad: according to one recent poll, a quarter of respondents don’t have any trust in domestic journalism.

Indeed, an increasing number of Iranians rely on diaspora media. That includes Telegram channels run by exiled dissidents; Persian broadcasters in Western capitals; and social media stars who speak the same language as their cynical followers, both literally and figuratively. Crushed by bad governance, jaded Iranians are looking for reports that don’t wrap words in journalistic euphemisms. Rather, they want journalists who have both the ability and inclination to call a corrupt politician a “bastard”.

So if the free press has never been stronger, might the media ultimately foment a more fundamental transition: including revolution in Iran? Let’s face it, over the long sweep of history, journalists have rarely precipitated radical political change absent other ingredients. But in the face of rising international isolation and domestic asphyxiation, even as the specter of a full-fledged war looms large, one fact about Iran has hardly ever been contested. A dynamic if ailing civil society, including a press that raises a voice of dissent whenever possible, prevents the country from becoming the North Korea of the Middle East. I’m sure my father would be proud.

Secrets, lies and half-truths, too, have always been part of government, and under discussion in the press. This was true even in the postwar years where there was a relatively greater culture of public deference towards politicians. It was, after all, the legendary 20th-century Times journalist Louis Heren who wrote: “When a politician tells you something in confidence, always ask yourself ‘Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’” Yet the act of exposing a politician for lying had its own rules of engagement. The traditional avenue for an allegation was generally via the British press and broadcast media, which exposed it to editorial scrutiny, the attention of lawyers and a significant degree of financial and reputational risk for the accuser. It could even lead to a judicial or public inquiry.

The operations of the British “legacy media” have of course not been an unbroken chain of good behavior, but there has nonetheless been some framework of accountability. Regulatory bodies such as the Press Complaints Commission and, after 2014, the Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) rein in press operations, along with libel laws and, when necessary, the police and criminal courts. A number of British tabloid journalists went to jail over the phone-hacking scandal. As a last resort, the public could boycott a publication, and inflict lasting commercial pain: Liverpudlians were so incensed by The Sun’s front-page coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy — a splash egregiously entitled “The Truth” which wrongly blamed fans for the disaster in which 97 people died — that sales in Merseyside remain very low even today.

Yet online, this system for restraining or punishing the most extreme false allegations has now been sharply eroded. The overheating, unchecked rhetoric of rumor and smear is a swelling presence in modern British politics, and there is every likelihood of it intensifying. In recent months, much of it has been directed personally at Keir Starmer, and already it has begun to warp and destabilize British democracy itself.

Some of the elements in this contemporary collapse were introduced decades ago. The rise of celebrity culture in the Nineties and Noughties, along with a plethora of magazines that detailed every supermarket trip and gym visit of a cast of briefly famous characters, attuned the public to a heightened churn of gossip. When newspapers entered the game, most notably with MailOnline’s “Sidebar of Shame”, the primary focus remained on figures from the entertainment industry — but the appetite for gorging on fast-moving trivia had been created.

The advent of social media in the early 2010s then further accelerated the circulation of both hearsay and personal vituperation. This time, self-righteous fury entered the equation. For a period, X became the chief conduit for the policing of acceptable speech, with perceived transgressors singled out as objects of outrage by a “progressive” online mob. The effect could be personally devastating: in one early Twitter storm, in 2015, hysteria was unleashed upon the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Sir Tim Hunt for making some silly passing remarks — which he meant to be humorous — about women in science labs. During that same speech, he had also actively exhorted women to enter science as a career. He was nonetheless asked to resign from his role at University College London, as well as several other research positions. A growing nervousness spread throughout institutions, particularly academia and publishing, that any digression from a progressive-approved line on issues such as sexism, racism or trans rights could be career-threatening.

Then came the 2016 Brexit vote, which sparked a series of political crises that made normal, day-to-day governance extremely difficult. The survivor of Conservative Party dramas emerged as Boris Johnson, perhaps the first prime minister to envision politics — as he had journalism — primarily as a form of entertainment. He kept the British public supplied with an excess of narrative and a paucity of workable policy. Truth and public trust were casualties of his premiership: the “Partygate” revelations appeared to confirm that there was one rule for the political classes and quite another for ordinary citizens. Louis Heren’s maxim had rarely seemed so apposite.

This was the state of the nation when Elon Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, in October 2022. The prospect of libel payments didn’t daunt him: by December 2024, he was the first person in the world to have attained an estimated net worth of over $400 billion. From a technical rather than a media background, he had long demonstrated no awareness of any responsibility to restrain his speech or accusations, either on the grounds of accuracy or civic responsibility. Confronted with anyone who offended his mercurial sensibility, his instinct was to trash-talk, escalate and inflame. He had already emerged unscathed after one defamation case in 2019, in which he dubbed Vernon Unsworth, a cave diver who bluntly dismissed Musk’s intervention in a cave rescue plan, “pedo guy”. Unsworth, not surprisingly, sued. But he lost: Musk had accepted that the slur was baseless, but managed to convince the US jury that in South Africa, where he grew up, “pedo guy” was just a regular insult without specific connotations. Unsworth’s lawyer said afterwards that the verdict had sent a signal “that you can make any accusation you want to, as vile as it may be and as untrue as it may be, and somebody can get away with it”. The observation was prophetic.

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Since securing his close alliance with Donald Trump — and the apparent license to do exactly what he wants — Musk has heightened his explicitly political interference in the governance of other countries. In Britain at least, he inherited a user base that was already receptive to gossip, accustomed to intemperate expressions of online rage, and with a post-Covid, post-Johnson collapse of trust in politicians. Musk took things further. By ceasing moderation on X, he has permitted a constant wash of unverified rumor to ebb and flow over Labour politicians, leaving a stain behind even as it recedes. In the aftermath of the horrific Southport killings, the rumor mill began working overtime among Right-wing accounts, grinding “I know something you don’t know” in numerous different styles. In response to some of the false accusations about the killer which helped to trigger riots in the streets and attacks on police officers and mosques, Musk posted: “Civil war is inevitable.” Reform UK leader Nigel Farage went so far as to speculate in a video that “the truth is being withheld from us”.

In early January this year, Musk began vociferously tweeting about what he called “the Pakistani-ancestry grooming gangs” scandal in Rotherham, Rochdale and other towns, which stretched from the late Eighties until 2013. His tweets on the topic were mixed up with expressions of support for Reform UK and far-Right activist Tommy Robinson, who is currently in prison for contempt of court. On 3 January, Musk posted: “Starmer was responsible for the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years. Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.” This wild statement was not only wholly unfounded, but a brazen inversion of the actual truth. While many in authority do bear culpability, most notably the local police and councils, those most closely involved in the story say that Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, was instrumental in bringing the perpetrators to justice. Andrew Norfolk, the former Times reporter who spent years exposing the crimes, said: “I want to put the record straight on this. It was Starmer who changed the rules to make more prosecutions possible. That happened and there was a huge increase in convictions.”

At this point, one might reasonably have expected British politicians of all parties to unite in some kind of staunch defense of actual evidence and objective truth. Chillingly, that did not happen. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, in tandem with Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, has developed a habit of using Musk’s lines of argument as political ammunition. Not only did she taunt Starmer in the Commons with a petition — boosted by Musk — calling for the Prime Minister to resign, but she and Jenrick both fed the X-based rumor factory by publicly hinting that there were important facts the public was not being told concerning the Southport case.

Those British politicians who are tempted to hitch a ride on Musk’s bandwagon, rather than defend the honest ground of political opposition, might heed the warnings from history. In the early days of the French Revolution, for example, a sudden explosion in newspaper titles and a collapse in regulation created a febrile, sparring press that might almost be seen as an early prototype of X. Between July and December 1789 alone, a total of 250 newspapers sprang up for public consumption, each vigorously competing in the battle for attention. While many were vehicles for astute debate and analysis, they also became mouthpieces for various factions, promoting denunciations against political rivals. Sometimes, claims carried a measure of truth; often, they didn’t. The thickening atmosphere of violence and suspicion began to exert its own dynamic force upon society.

Smears were used as a way of hobbling troublesome rivals. The radical newspaper editor Jean-Paul Marat helped to finish off the career of firebrand activist priest Jacques Roux by falsely alleging that he was a “venal intriguer” whose real name was the Abbé Renaudi. The lawyer and journalist Camille Desmoulins destroyed the reputation of a former friend, Jacques Pierre Brissot, in a scathing pamphlet called “Brissot Unmasked”. When he saw Brissot later being sentenced to death, he reportedly cried in remorse: “My god, I’m sorry for this!” When Maximilien Robespierre backed the Law of 22 Prairial in June 1794, rumor and accusation became the only things needed to secure a conviction, since the suspect’s right to a defense had been discarded. Most of the newspapers which had fed debate had been shut down and silenced, one by one. Marat, Roux, Brissot and Desmoulins were all dead.

The separation of accusation from verifiable evidence, or from any potential restraints upon the accuser, is a dangerous game that rarely ends well. It is even more disturbing when regularly practiced by the US President’s right-hand man. To play along with it for temporary political advantage — helping to dissolve the very principles that have reliably underpinned the British parliamentary and justice system — is to play with fire. The rise of rumor is closely related to the collapse of objective truth, and the slide of political systems from rational persuasion of the electorate to a feverish struggle for domination. Musk’s revolution, one way or another, will devour its children.

When Sala was first arrested, the Iranian authorities could only offer a bland statement that she had “violated the laws of the Islamic Republic.” In the past, they would have trotted out the usual accusations, of espionage and conspiracies to overthrow the system. This time around, though, the judiciary assured the world that it was meticulously examining the Italian’s case — and her release came soon after.

“She gave voice to Iranian women fighting against the obligation to wear the veil, of course, but also to members of the establishment,” says Luciana Borsatti, the former ANSA bureau chief in Tehran, noting that Sala also interviewed figures like Hossein Kanani Moghaddam, one of the founders of the Revolutionary Guards. But Sala’s coverage of Iran was notably subtle: it gave voice to those Iranians who oppose the current system but also reject the kinds of strict sanctions encouraged in the diaspora. She was eager to report fairly on Iran, and had been accused by hardcore exiles of not being sufficiently critical of the regime. Yet even she found herself detained, held in solitary confinement over Christmas.

In theory, the Islamic Republic’s constitution protects free expression. Borrowed from the French Fifth Republic, it states that nobody should be interrogated for holding an opinion, that nobody can be deprived of the right to peaceful assembly, and that journalists are free to publish materials unless they threaten the tenets of Islam or violate public rights. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in 2018 that whoever claims they’re discriminated for their views is just “lying” — a shameless lie in itself, but revealing about the way the prickly way the regime deals with criticism.

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Nor does the Islamic Republic seem much more self-confident when it comes to foreign journalists. Granted visas lasting a mere eight days, even as they’re subject to strict surveillance, the best most correspondents can do is report on what they see. There’s certainly plenty to cover. Inflation is skyrocketing and people cannot afford groceries. Iran is sitting on the second largest natural gas reserves in the world, but can’t heat up people’s homes. In a country where the number of female university students has long surpassed that of their male counterparts, women are still being dragged through the streets, and verbally abused for strands of hair sticking out their headscarves.

For describing all this, Sala found herself in jail, even as unabashed anti-regime activists can apparently outwit the intelligence services with ease. One excellent example here is Catherine Perez-Shakdam, a French Jew who posed as a friend of the Islamic Republic before securing an audience with the ayatollah himself. It all speaks to the essentially arbitrary nature of reporting in Iran — foreign correspondents have little idea whether they’ll make it home safe, let alone secure a decent scoop for their troubles. That’s even as reporters risk becoming pawns in broader geopolitical games. As Sala discovered, she was detained in Iran for hijinks in Milan: not because of anything she actually did, but because of the flag on her passport.

So why do reporters come? Part of the answer surely involves basic journalistic principles of honesty and truth. For Sala herself, an attachment to Iran clearly matters too — even if not everyone is quite so thoughtful. The truth is that much foreign journalism on Iran condemns the country to stereotype. Much outside reporting is so cliched, in fact, that millions of Westerners were lately astounded to discover that, far from being an Arabian Nights fantasy, it actually snows in Iran. If you ask Iranians, they’ll acknowledge having long felt dehumanised that a country they cherish, for its heritage, arts, culture and food, is merely framed as a vast missile factory, where people wake up fantasising about yellow cake and go to bed dreaming of enriched uranium.

These challenges aside, it’s testament to the strength of feeling here that even foreigners caught up in Iran’s capricious security state want reporting to continue: albeit with proper safeguards. Kylie Moore-Gilbert, formerly a University of Melbourne lecturer, was invited to visit Iran in 2018. She was there to attend a conference, but soon found herself arrested and imprisoned for over two years. Despite her experiences, Moore-Gilbert is forthright. “There is no substitute for in-depth, on-the-ground coverage,” she tells me. “I do not believe any journalist can truly understand a country or its people if reporting only from abroad.”

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So how can Iran’s story be told? Perhaps local journalists could take up the slack: some routine reporting on human rights or the economy could be done by Iranians themselves, but published by media organisations abroad anonymously. But it’s not that simple. Moore-Gilbert puts it this way: “I think there is a real risk that the chilling effect of Cecilia and other journalists’ arrests inside Iran will lead to less informed coverage on this country at a critical time in the country’s domestic and global political standing.”

It’s a fair point. After the Sala fiasco, foreign correspondents encouraged to visit Iran after the election of the centrist President Masoud Pezeshkian may reconsider their plans. Journalist colleagues in Europe and America have said as much. One French friend said she dreamt of living in Tehran, but has to forget that now. Another contact, a British charity worker, says it’s a shame she can visit every country in the region: except Iran.

There is no easy solution here. The people of Iran are condescendingly told, both by the international community and their fellow Iranians in exile, that they should keep fighting for their freedoms. I doubt courageous young Iranians would disagree — it’s just a shame a dwindling number of Western journalists are willing to write by their sides.

Having gratifyingly removed a leader who had become dangerous and unstable, the media, like a grizzly bear that kills its first human and will only eat human flesh from then on, shifted its purpose from investigate, report and expose, to search and destroy. In the process, it has normalised disaster thinking about American life, from the most ordinary experiences — love and work — to the highest echelons of human activity. If America is on the verge of political calamity, it is because for the past five decades, the media has kept the country on the edge of its seat expecting no less.

Unable to come up with another Watergate, the media tried to force every story it could into the Watergate template. Someone big had to be exposed as doing something really bad, with the result that they had to be made to fall exceptionally hard. There was some precious, honest, public-spirited journalistic work as a result. But the media, as befit its proud new image as heroic saviour of democracy, gradually robbed democracy of its vital essence: the freedom to live life privately, secretly, incalculably. (When Socrates said that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, he did not have in mind 24/7 cable news.)

It was, of course, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in particular, whose doggedness exposed the connections between the Republican burglars of the Democratic National Headquarters and figures close to the paranoid, self-destructing Nixon. Their bestselling memoir, All the President’s Men, along with its blockbuster movie, made the men’s names synonymous with Watergate and media heroism. Never mind that had it not been for countless law enforcement figures, politicians and the Supreme Court, which ordered Nixon to give up the notorious tapes that incriminated him, Nixon might well have never been impeached. Woodward and Bernstein caught but the tip of the iceberg, yet it proved enough to keep the self-celebrating media’s champagne cold for two generations.

Like parents who refuse to allow their adult children to grow up, the liberal media has spent 50 years in a stage of arrested development. It continues to pretend that the country is a wayward child of the Sixties and Seventies, in need of the corrective hand of death-defying journalism. Indeed, the “woke” turn in the liberal media, now in the process of artfully incorporating criticisms of its pious effusions into its pious effusions, was really just an attempt to find a dramatically clear-cut moral issue, like Watergate, to get all heroic about, again. This desperation has been all the more intense since the media itself was discredited by its advocacy of the invasion of Iraq: having exposed the politicians as scoundrels, the credulous, war-mongering media got themselves indicted as same by the bloggers. Now, alternate universes of news on social media proclaim little Watergates every day.

In 2016, it was breath-taking to watch the media hurl itself at Trump in the hope of recapturing its pursuit of Nixon. It was hardly a coincidence that the movie The Post, about The Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, came out just over a year after Trump was elected.

Yet the Nixon era seemed like innocence itself, as the epithet “Tricky Dick” mutated into “Hitler”, “Tiberius” and “Peron” as monikers for Trump. We longed for the bad old days, when the humble legwork of reporters like W and B, and sober, investigative columns by the likes of Jack Anderson, had not yet given way to the sniping, middle-school groupthink that too often passed for reporting after Trump’s ascent. In the Watergate era, the media exposed Nixon as a petty criminal. Now, in its longing to recapture its glorious past, the media has pummelled the petty criminal from Queens into a kind of Christ. Where Proust had his madeleine, nostalgic American journalism has its Trump.

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Trump gave the “failing media”, as he calls it, a second life. But it was Nixon who elevated the media into a role that it had long hungered for: democracy’s indispensable eyes and ears. The invitation rang out among the protestors at the Chicago convention in 1968. “The whole world is watching” was an ironic slogan from a New Left that sought to deflate self-centred American arrogance. But the whole world cannot watch unless it has a medium to watch on. Enter TV news, and a new era of media domination.

Nixon himself, in his famous “Checkers” speech of 1952 — where he successfully debunked accusations of misusing campaign funds — made an end run around the dominant print media of the time by delivering his speech on television, just as Trump when he entered politics made an end run around TV and print journalism by resorting to Twitter. John F. Kennedy later used his photogenic charm to vanquish Nixon in the first televised debate in 1960, and TV news later helped serve as handmaiden to Nixon’s demise.

But the new media reality of constant vigilance and the pursuit of truth and justice had been established. Before Nixon, the news was just the news. There had been newspaper crusades; there was Edward R. Murrow’s truly heroic pursuit of Senator Joseph McCarthy. But the American press had never taken down a president. That was big game.

After Watergate, the press acquired a gravitational force usually possessed by sheerly political forms of power. It possessed a level of authority and reality all its own. Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of the Superman comic strip, had known what they were doing when they made Superman’s alter ego a newspaperman named Clark Kent. They knew that the newspaper editors they were hoping to convince to publish their comic strip harboured their own alter egos as the Supermen who would protect the republic from harm.

Today, the media obsession with Nixon, sensationally lucrative and ego-gratifying, has mutated into a trillion-eyed media obsession with everything. The effect has been to turn democracy against itself. Here is Edward Shils in his classic work, The Torment of Secrecy, explaining why, “without the willingness to disregard much of what our fellow citizens do… there could be no freedom”:

“Democracy could not function if politics and the state of the social order were always on everyone’s mind. If most men, most of the time, regarded themselves as their brother-citizens’ keepers, freedom, which flourished in the indifference of privacy, would be abolished, and representative institutions would be inundated by the swirl of plebiscitary emotions — by aggressiveness, acclamation and alarm.”

Well, nowadays, most people, modelling themselves on the aggressive, acclimating and alarm-ringing media that Watergate created, regard themselves as just that. With Watergate, the American media established a style of never disregarding what our fellow citizens do, no matter how trivial or irrelevant. Of course, this has been taken up with fury by social media, where reducing the secrets of politics to everyday stuff is on everyone’s mind every minute, day and night. And once you declare secrecy an intolerable torment — the secrecy of the “deep state”, of hidden thoughts, of words and actions buried in the past — then any seeming exposure of truth has the liberating force of not being a secret. Exposing a secret has now become the sole criterion of truth. Even if it is a lie. Especially if it contradicts an official fact, which is by definition, something born in the realm of official secrets. Populism is thriving now not least because at the heart of populism is an abhorrence of secrets, which for some time has been at the heart of culture.

Unlike Trump, Ivy-educated, born to wealth, bathed in wealth, schooled and quickened in the sybaritic dens of sophisticated New York, Nixon was a born populist. Trump falsely believed that the 2020 election was stolen from him because he felt entitled to remain president; Nixon believed the Kennedys stole the election from him in 1960 because he felt humiliated by coastal elites all his life.

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His pursuit of Alger Hiss for betraying American secrets to the Russians probably had as much to do with Hiss’s elite WASP background as with his treachery. Nixon’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction during his Checkers speech when he, accurately, accused Democrat presidential candidate, and mandarin of mandarins, Adlai Stevenson of misusing campaign funds. The root of Nixon’s populism was his feeling of smallness, of being an impostor always grabbing for more.

Yet this product of a world-historical inferiority complex established the Environmental Protection Agency, passed the Occupational Health and Safety Act, signed the Equal Rights Act into law, temporarily imposed wage and price controls, expanded the Food Stamp programme, and tried, unsuccessfully, to pass the Family Assistance Plan, which was an attempt at a guaranteed basic income that even Biden never pretended to espouse. He decreased troop levels in Vietnam, drastically reduced American casualties and extricated the country in 1974 from a war that had been created by liberal idealist opportunists, a war that had started with “military advisors’ in 1961. Even as he illegally expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos; even as he authorised Kissinger, long American high society’s favourite war criminal, to commit or enable atrocities in Cambodia, Chile, Bangladesh, Cyprus and East Timor; even as he tried to destroy his critics — he called them “enemies” — at home.

Nixon is routinely referred to as an enigma, a mystery, a cipher, a fungible opportunist. This is accurate, probably, but it is a tedious and tired narrative line that illuminates very little.

Fundamentally, Nixon was a watershed figure who led America away from any sort of shared reality into the obscure recesses of the American mind. That is to say, you couldn’t make sense of America during Nixon’s reign unless you turned away from the chaos in America and towards what made Nixon tick. That was when mind began to trump matter; when who a leader really was started to matter more than the context they acted in. That is another shift in the direction of populism. Populists prize personality, the more intriguing the better, in their leaders above all else.

After Nixon Aenigmaticus, the political question of our time is not: What does this person believe? No one, after all, believes anyone’s profession of belief anymore, least of all a politician’s. No, after Nixon, the question of our time, when it comes to democratic leaders, is not what, or who. It is when, and how, will a particular “who” begin to unravel. And, depending on your goals, or mere desires, what you can do to hasten it along. We are all our brother-citizens’ keepers now. We are all, that is to say, Woodward and Bernstein. Thanks to the self-anointed hero-journalists of yore, we are condemned to ceaseless, remorseless vigilance — all in the name of democracy.

This was part of an email sent to UnHerd at the start of January from an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index. It was their justification, handed down after a series of requests, for placing UnHerd on a so-called “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers.

They provided examples of the offending content: Kathleen Stock, whose columns are up for a National Press Award this week, Julie Bindel, a lifelong campaigner against violence against women, and Debbie Hayton, who is transgender. Apparently the GDI equates “gender-critical” beliefs, or maintaining that biological sex differences exist, with “disinformation” — despite the fact that those beliefs are specifically protected in British law and held by the majority of the population.

The verdicts of “ratings agencies” such as the GDI, within the complex machinery that serves online ads, are a little-understood mechanism for controlling the media conversation. In UnHerd’s case, the GDI verdict means that we only received between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of our size. Meanwhile, neatly demonstrating the arbitrariness and subjectivity of these judgements, Newsguard, a rival ratings agency, gives UnHerd a 92.5% trust rating, just ahead of the New York Times at 87.5%.

So, what are these “ratings agencies” that could be the difference between life and death for a media company? How does their influence work? And who funds them? The answers are concerning and raise serious questions about the freedom of the press and the viability of a functioning democracy in the internet age.

***

Disinformation only really became a discussion point in response to the Trump victory in 2016, and was then supercharged during the Covid era: Google Trends data shows that worldwide searches for the term quadrupled between June and December 2016, and had increased by more than 30 times by 2022. In response to the supposed crisis, corporations, technology companies and governments all had to show they were taking some form of action. This created a marketplace for enterprising start-ups and not-for-profits to claim a specialism in detecting disinformation. Today, there are hundreds of organisations who make this claim, providing all sorts of “fact-checking” services, including powerful ratings agencies such as GDI and Newsguard. These companies act as invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising.

How this works is relatively straightforward: in UnHerd’s case, we contract with an advertising agency, which relies on a popular tech platform called “Grapeshot”, founded in the UK and since acquired by Larry Ellison’s Oracle, to automatically select appropriate websites for particular campaigns. Grapeshot in turn automatically uses the “Global Disinformation Index” to provide a feed of data about “brand safety” — and if GDI gives a website a poor score, very few ads will be served.

The Global Disinformation Index was founded in the UK in 2018, with the stated objective of disrupting the business model of online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding. Alongside George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the GDI receives money from the UK government (via the FCDO), the European Union, the German Foreign Office and a body called Disinfo Cloud, which was created and funded by the US State Department.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, its two founders emerged from the upper echelons of “respectable” society. First, there is Clare Melford, whose biography published by the World Economic Forum states that she had previously “led the transition of the European Council on Foreign Relations from being part of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to independent status”. She set up the GDI with Daniel Rogers, who worked “in the US intelligence community”, before founding a company called “Terbium Labs” that used AI and machine learning to scour the internet for illicit use of sensitive data and then sold it handsomely to Deloitte.

Together, they have spearheaded a carefully intellectualised definitional creep as to what counts as “disinformation”. Back when it was first set up in 2018, they defined the term on their website as “deliberately false content, designed to deceive”. Within these strict parameters, you can see how it might have appeared useful to have dedicated fact-checkers identifying the most egregious offenders and calling them out. But they have since broadened the definition to encompass anything that deploys an “adversarial narrative” — stories that may be factually true, but pit people against each other by attacking an individual, an institution or “the science”.

GDI founder Clare Melford explained in an interview at the LSE in 2021 how this expanded definition was more “useful”, as it allowed them to go beyond fact-checking to targeting anything on the internet that they deem “harmful” or “divisive”:

“A lot of disinformation is not just whether something is true or false — it escapes from the limits of fact-checking. Something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful… [GDI] leads you to a more useful definition of disinformation… It’s not saying something is or is not disinformation, but it is saying that content on this site or this particular article is content that is anti-immigrant, content that is anti-women, content that is antisemitic…”

Larger traffic websites are rated using humans, she explains, but most are rated using automated AI. “We actually instantiate our definition of disinformation — the adversarial narrative topics — within the technology,” explains Melford. “Each adversarial narrative is given its own machine-learning classifier, which then allows us to search for content that matches that narrative at scale… misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-black content, climate change denial, etc.”

Melford’s team and algorithm are essentially trained to identify and defund any content she finds offensive, not disinformation. Her personal bugbears are somewhat predictable: content supporting the January 6 “insurrections”, the pernicious influence of “white men in Silicon Valley”, and anything that might undermine the global response to the “existential challenge of climate change”.

The difficulty, however, is that most of these issues are highly contentious and require robust, uncensored discussion to find solutions. Challenges to scientific orthodoxy are particularly important, as the multiple failures of the official response to Covid-19 amply demonstrated. Indeed, one of the examples of GDI’s work that Melford highlighted in her LSE talk was an article about the Delta variant of Covid-19. “This is a Spanish language site talking about how a third of deaths in the United Kingdom from the Delta variant are amongst those people who are vaccinated, which is clearly untrue,” says Melford. “It is Chipotle that has been caught next to this ad unwittingly, and unfortunately for them have funded this highly dangerous disinformation about vaccines.”

The statistic being reported comes from a June 2021 Public Health England report into Covid variants that sets out the 42 known deaths from the Delta variant from January to June: 23 were unvaccinated, 7 vaccinated with one shot and 12 fully vaccinated. In other words, 29% were fully vaccinated — around a third — and 17% partially vaccinated, making a total of 45% vaccinated. To further complicate the question, Melford misread the Spanish headline, and it actually referenced two thirds, or 66%, which is wrong again.

Examples like this are far from rare. The GDI still hosts an uncorrected 2020 blog about the “evolution of the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory” surrounding Covid-19’s origins, which concludes that “cutting off ads to these fringe sites and their outer networks is the first action needed”. This is despite the fact that Facebook and other tech companies long ago corrected similar policies and conceded that it was a legitimate hypothesis that should never have been censored.

***

In the US, a number of media organisations have started to take action against GDI’s partisan activism, prompted by a GDI report in 2022 that listed the 10 most dangerous sites in America. To many, it looked simply like a list of the country’s most-read conservative websites. It even included RealClearPolitics, a well-respected news aggregator whose polling numbers are among the most quoted in the country. The “least risk of disinformation” list was, predictably enough, populated by sites with a liberal inclination.

In recent months, a number of American websites have launched legal challenges against GDI’s labelling system, which they claim infringes upon their First Amendment rights. In December, The Daily Wire and The Federalist teamed up with the attorney general of Texas to sue the state department for funding GDI and Newsguard. A separate initiative to prevent the Defense Department from using any advertiser that uses Newsguard, GDI or similar entities has been successful, and is now part of federal law.

But GDI is a British company and, on this side of the Atlantic, the Conservative Government continues to fund it. A written question from MP Philip Davies last year revealed that £2.6 million was given in the period up to last year, and that there is still “frequent contact” between the GDI and the FCDO “Counter Disinformation and Media Development” unit.

***

Yesterday, I was invited to give evidence to the House of Lords Communication and Digital Committee during which I outlined the extent of the threat to the free media of self-appointed ratings agencies such as the Global Disinformation Index. The reality, as I told Parliament, is that GDI is merely the tip of the iceberg. At a time when the news media is so distrusted and faces a near-broken business model, the role of government should be to prevent, not encourage, and most certainly not fund, consolidations of monopoly power around certain ideological viewpoints.

But this isn’t simply a matter for the media. Both companies and those in the advertising sector also need to act: it cannot be good marketing for brands to target only half the population. Last year, Oracle announced it was cutting ties with GDI on free speech grounds, but as we discovered, it seems they are still collaborating via the Grapeshot plaform: is Larry Ellison aware of this?

At its heart, the disinformation panic is becoming a textbook example of how a “solution” can do more harm than the problem it is designed to address. Educated campaigners such as Clare Melford may think they are doing the world a service, but in fact they are acting as intensifying agents, lending legitimacy to a conspiratorial world view in which governments and corporations are in cahoots to censor political expression. Unless something is done to stop them, they will continue to sow paranoia and distrust — and hasten us towards an increasingly radicalised and divided society.

***

This article has been updated to reference the fact that Clare Melford misread the headline about deaths from the Delta variant, and it actually claimed 2/3 not 1/3.

A century later, the question of whether we the people have a right to know about justice remains unresolved. Despite our obsession with “transparency”, it is becoming increasingly hard to know what is going on inside Britain’s courts.

“Atrocious”, was how the chair of the Bar Council described our justice system earlier this week, in an interview with the Financial Times. But just how “atrocious” is impossible to glean. Over the past decade, court reporting has withered as funding dries up. And no company embodies this more than Court News UK, the last court reporting agency to operate from the Old Bailey, where I’ve spent the past three months following their reporters for a podcast documentary.

“There are huge black spots now,” says Guy Toyn, co-owner of Court News UK. “London is still fairly well covered. But go up to cities as big as Birmingham, or Nottingham, and there just isn’t anyone there to see what’s going on. Let alone regional courts.”

For the last 25 years, Court News UK has been run by two reporters, Toyn and Scott Wilford. In the early days, they worked from a “windowless basement” bursting with at least three other press agencies, several photographic agencies, and dedicated court reporters from the likes of The Telegraph, The Times and The Sun. “It felt like a Fleet Street annexe,” says Wilford. They wrote up reports, then sold them to national and local papers. “At one point we had 10 reporters and two photographers. You could literally get an order from anywhere — I think there’s a newspaper up in the Orkneys that was one of our clients. They all had budgets. All these local papers around London had budgets. So you’d have a running list of seven or eight murder trials and be thinking: God, how am I going to service all this…”

What happened next is a familiar story. First the internet, then social media, blew up their model. By the late 2000s, national papers began to cut costs, and local ones mostly went bust, folded into bigger consortiums that stripped out most of the on-the-ground reporting and stuffed what remained with clickbait. Court News’s rivals all went bankrupt. The staff of 12 at Court News shrunk to four. Increasingly, the recruits are smart first-jobbers, who can make do with the meagre pay.

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The world, in other words, moved on. Much of the journalism that has passed into history isn’t worth sentimentalising, any more than the passing of the lead presses that used to rumble the pavements of Fleet Street. But court reporting is not like most other journalism. It is an almost artisanal trade that relies upon reporters trained in shorthand and familiar with contempt and libel laws, who sit at the back of cases for hours while arcane points of law are expounded, spooling out pages of notes. Whereas many media businesses were supplanted by slicker models enabled by the internet, in court reporting there is simply no alternative to being there. The legal fraternity and the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) are not going to provide the information, let alone parse it.

This is because the legal world is curiously insular. The courts tend to treat any spectators as an unfortunate nuisance. For the English and Welsh system, there is one rudimentary website that lists the following day’s court schedule by the names of the defendants. It gives no sense of the charges. And it is subject to change. In fact, it is common to turn up at the appointed place at the right time and be greeted by an empty room — the proceedings were probably moved, but no one bothered to tell the non-lawyers. For court reporters, the only way to receive a full list of the charges ahead of time is still to seek out the judge’s clerk, ask for them in person, and hope that the clerk is well-disposed.

Lawyers have little incentive to fill in the gaps. Even policemen — once happy to have a quiet word with the press about a particular case — are increasingly mute, tied down by the politics of their press offices. There is also no way of obtaining trial information after the fact. As the BBC recently acknowledged, it is impossible to request a court transcript in this country unless you have several thousand pounds to hand. As recently as 2011, stenographers sat on every bench. In a charmingly English way, they were effectively privateers — you could approach them directly, and purchase from them a copy of the official record. But a modernisation wave swept all that away: today, court proceedings are recorded, but the recordings are property of the MoJ. Because it is illegal for private citizens to possess audio of a trial, obtaining a transcript requires hiring a transcription service, which would have to type up weeks of proceedings, with the bill dumped at your door. One rape victim was quoted £7,500.

This matters, not only because of the problem of informational black spots across the land, but because right now court reporters should also be bringing us news on the overall decline of the justice system. On this, the Court News owners agree: in all their 30-odd years of experience, the system has never before been this slow or this useless. “When I started in the Nineties, judges were much scarier. Dickensian, even,” Wilford says. “But they got things done, and there was no messing around. All these murder cases would tend to open on a Monday morning. Now, the whole process seems to have slowed down, so nothing ever seems to start on a Monday. Excuses are made, and then you still find yourself waiting for cases to start on a Wednesday. I think the public would probably be staggered to see how slowly it moves. There always seems to be some kind of administrative blunder in the offing, or prisons don’t seem to produce defendants when they should. Always something.”

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One afternoon, during the months I spent in their office, a Court News staffer came back fuming about the sentencing of a Tunisian illegal migrant who slashed his 19-year-old girlfriend’s throat. The trial concluded; he was found guilty. But arriving at the court, the reporter found that sentencing had been delayed for three months, and no one could work out why.

Wilford would often turn the air blue as fresh court dates rolled in, incensed by judges booking in hearings for 2026. In September 2023, I witnessed the sentencing of the accomplices of the crooked cop Frank Partridge, where an apologetic Judge Christopher Hehir gave all the guilty a sixth off their tariff — because their case had been pending since 2015.

Eddie Beaver, who Court News recruited straight from university 18 months ago, agrees that the system is broken. “If I can think of an example that perfectly encapsulates the current attitude of judges, it was when I saw an email that a member of court staff had received at the Old Bailey, and it said the Old Bailey is going to have a ‘new culture’. One where cases will be dealt with swiftly: there will be no dithering. With the caveat that: ‘We will begin to implement this new culture in three months’ time…’”

Many blame budget cuts for the collapse of the justice system. During the Coalition years, the low-priority Ministry of Justice was chopped by around 25% in real terms. “But people have always blamed funding,” Toyn points out. “Ever since I’ve been here, there’s never been enough money. The difference is this: a few years ago, if you had some sort of ridiculous delay, the judge would be extremely angry. I remember a judge — I think his name was Stokes. When the barrister used to come in and say, oh, you know, this isn’t ready, he’d say, exasperated, ‘Caaaaaan we get onnnnn…’ And these barristers would be absolutely terrified, quaking in their boots. Nowadays, it’s all very laid back.”

And with 11 justice secretaries in 14 years, it’s not a problem the Government seems interested in resolving. “It’s just not sexy, is it?” says Beaver. “No one ever got elected on a promise to make the courts work faster.” But is that any excuse? After all, justice should be seen to be done — even if it’s not being done very well.

By the time I became aware of her, in 2014, she had become notorious in circles where sex research and journalism overlap. What appears to have curdled her is the work of Ray Blanchard, the sex researcher who proposed the theory of autogynephilia, which posits that some trans women are motivated to transition by sexual arousal at the thought of being a woman. It is seen by some trans people as offensive because, in their view, it pathologises and/or sexualises their identity. An apparently smaller group of individuals, most famously Anne Lawrence, believe it accurately describes their own experiences.

Back in the Noughties, Blanchard and the psychology professor J. Michael Bailey — who popularised Blanchard’s ideas in his 2003 book The Man Who Would Be Queen — became the subjects of a smear campaign that, whatever one thinks of the theory, became abusive. Andrea James was one of the worst offenders. Her behaviour has been well-documented by the medical historian and bioethicist Alice Dreger, who in a 2006 blog post observed that “Ms. James was notable for the way she decided to go after Bailey’s children to extract revenge. She posted on the internet photographs of Bailey’s daughter and labeled her a ‘cock-starved exhibitionist.’”

After she published her blog post, Dreger described in an update how James sent a series of hostile emails, including one referring to her five-year-old son as a ‘precious womb turd’: “She also came to my departmental office (I was not there) and then emailed me, subject line ‘Mommy Knows Best,’ saying, ‘Sorry I missed you the other day. Your colleagues seem quite affable, and not as fearful as you. […] Bad move, Mommy. […] We’ll chat in person soon’.”

These incidents are described in more detail in Dreger’s book Galileo’s Middle Finger, published in 2015, by which point James’s influence appears to have waned. I began reporting on youth gender medicine around that time, and I didn’t get any sense that other prominent transactivists, or LGBT groups, took James seriously. Her name didn’t come up as someone you should talk to, if you wanted to better understand these issues. So why, a few years ago, did she experience a partial reversal in her fortunes?

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It all started in 2018, when The Atlantic published a cover story about the debate over youth gender transition — written by me. The story included quotes from a number of people, including teens, who explained how profoundly transitioning had benefited them. However, it also included quotes from detransitioners, and dug into some of the controversy over youth transition. James was outraged that I would shine a light on the subject’s nuances, trade-offs and difficult questions. From some trans activists’ points of view, it is settled science that youth gender medicine works — indeed, saves lives. To suggest otherwise is heresy.

Because of that view, plenty of people criticised the article, some harshly. But James’s response was something else. She was so outraged that she launched a Kickstarter called “The Transphobia Project”. It went live about a year after the publication of my article — which, in the FAQ section, she called “one of the most disgraceful moments in American journalism this century”, and credited with motivating her entire endeavour. As for the endeavour itself, she described it as “an interactive data visualization of the platforms and people creating biased content about gender identity and expression”. James explained how it would work: “Any time someone publishes media on these topics, a score called a t-index is generated for that work. That t-index also gets applied to the creator, any co-authors or editors, the platform where it appeared, and the organizations that support that platform. … Those with a high t-index become more prominent on the chart.”

And yet, nowhere on her Kickstarter does James clarify how her system would determine someone’s transphobia. Indeed, “appearing on the chart does not necessarily mean a person or organisation is transphobic.” In fact, if you look past the various buzzwords, it’s very hard to figure out what, exactly, the then-proposed project would do, other than show how various writers and editors are connected via the publications they work for (hardly a state secret). Yet despite the vagueness of The Transphobia Project’s actual, well, project, James enthuses on her fundraising appeal that it “will help us identify and expose bias, and maybe even get a few people fired along the way!”

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When The Transphobia Project’s Kickstarter launched, Donald Trump was still president, and liberal institutions were understandably preoccupied with his frequently ugly attempts to get journalists harassed and fired. James’s project didn’t hide the fact that it had similar goals, but, perhaps because James was going to target morally bad journalists for harassment and firing, rather than morally good ones, a cohort of progressives decided to hold her up as a champion in the noble fight against transphobia.

Kickstarter, for example, highlighted The Transphobia Project on its “featured projects” page, and published an article about it in the official Kickstarter Magazine by Rebecca Hiscott. In Axios, the respected tech writer Ina Fried published an article headlined, “Exclusive: Using data to track transphobia in media”. It was effectively a press release. The website Journalism.co.uk published a similarly hagiographic writeup by Daniel Green, which was subsequently promoted by Harvard’s Nieman Lab, one of the most important media-criticism institutions in the country.

None of the articles mentioned that the woman they were championing had once publicly called her enemy’s young daughter a “cock-starved exhibitionist”. None reached out to me for comment, despite James noting that my article had inspired the whole project (though Green, to be fair, posted part of my response at the bottom of his article after I complained). Nor did they interrogate James’s self-professed credentials. (I contacted all the authors — as well as Mike Allen, cofounder of Axios — to ask why they had failed to dig up James’s history of intimidating behaviour, and whether they planned any followup. I didn’t hear back from any, save for a brief note from a Journalism.co.uk editor who didn’t respond to my queries except to note that they wouldn’t be writing about James further.)

A close read of James’s proposal, combined with knowledge of her background, raised serious questions about whether she had the experience or technical chops necessary to pull off The Transphobia Project. And yet various outlets produced prime examples of a growing genre of journalism, geared not at establishing the truth, but at showing you’re on the right side of a raging controversy.

Probably partly because of this coverage, James’s fundraising was successful: 252 backers provided her with $23,302, more than ten times her $2,000 goal. The estimated delivery date, still visible on her Kickstarter, was July 2019. More than four years on, the Transphobia Project still doesn’t exist, and there is no sign James will deliver on her nebulous promises.

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But even if The Transphobia Project remains unrealised, James has been busy. In the past four years, she has vastly expanded and updated her website, Transgender Map. And what she has added is not more data analysis of transphobic networks, but rather shockingly detailed webpages on what appears to be every enemy she has accumulated in recent years — an ever-growing list. These pages include personal information not only about them, but also about family members who are almost always wholly uninvolved in the fight over sex and gender.

The page dedicated to one editor at a mainstream site — who doesn’t appear to ever have written anything about transgender issues, but has edited pieces James dislikes — not only lists their spouse’s name but is, in fact, one of the spouse’s top Google results. The journalist Helen Lewis, a friend of mine, said that her page initially included photos from her first wedding, which James took from Flickr. When Lewis made the page private, James noted the change. Indeed, she seems to keep a very close eye on how her victims respond to their pages. Many of the entries also include caricatures that James has commissioned, likely at considerable cost, given the sheer number of them. In one of the creepiest cases I found, James commissioned a cartoon of not only my podcast co-host, Katie Herzog, but also her wife, who is unconnected to any of this. UnHerd also has its own page, listing many of its contributors and editors.

Many of the people featured have been deeply disturbed by it. “Does anyone know who runs the TransgenderMap website?” asked Prisha S, a detransitioner, on Twitter. “There are web pages about detransitioners with personal info and hate. The page about me is the longest. Whoever runs it seems to hate me a lot. It’s freaky, honestly. Can anything be done?”

Being featured didn’t really bother me initially. But I did become concerned when I received an upset email from my brother asking why the site was showing up near the top of his search results. It transpires James had compiled the most detailed biography of me that exists on the internet, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with my output on youth gender transition. Bringing my family into her perceived conflict with me crossed what felt like a line that would be obvious to most people. The page included the full names of my mother, my father, both my brothers, and everything she could find about all of our work histories. She even included the date my mother died. While accuracy isn’t James’s strong suit — at one point my page stated I am half-Hindu — it felt like an intimidation tactic: Look how much I know about you.

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Recall that one of James’s goals of the Transphobia Project was “get[ting] a few people fired along the way”. The updated version of Transgender Map seems to be operating with very similar motives: the pages seem designed to trigger negative personal and professional repercussions.

“The first time my 11-year-old daughter googled me, this was the first thing that came up,” said Lisa Selin Davis, a friend of mine who has also written at length about gender identity and youth transition. “It includes the names of my children and two family members… It’s designed to silence and humiliate us. I can handle it, but it’s a little heartbreaking to me that my kid had to see this instead of anything else about me.”

Another one of James’s victims is Paul Garcia-Ryan. He is a therapist who trained at a leading gender-affirming clinic in New York City. He is concerned about the quality of care that gender dysphoric youth receive and is seeking to improve it. He recently spoke at the first conference held by the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), a group with similar aims, in New York. (I was in attendance as well.) This alone was enough to rouse James’s ire, and soon Garcia-Ryan discovered his newly published page, which falsely describes him as an “anti-transgender activist” and explicitly instructs any minors who find themselves in his care to break off their therapy with him.

“Efforts to damage the reputations of clinicians creates a chilling effect amongst medical and mental health professionals, deterring them from speaking up, even when their concerns are grounded in legitimate scientific, medical, and ethical considerations,” Garcia-Ryan said in an email. “Clinicians hold an enormous responsibility and thoughtful work with gender dysphoria requires professionals to be courageous and stand firm in their clinical integrity.”

James has targeted a number of other responsible and careful clinicians in the field of youth gender medicine. She has also created a page for Gordon Guyatt, a legend within the field of medical research. He is one of the founders of evidence-based medicine, a (genuinely) lifesaving movement to improve the quality of medical research. Because Guyatt spoke at SEGM, he’s now a transphobe, according to the unerring moral judgment of Andrea James. He is tarred as an “anti-transgender activist” — ironic, given that when I asked him about the claim that questioning the evidence for transgender medicine is itself transphobic, he replied: “You’re doing harm to transgender people if you don’t question the evidence.”

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But James’s website is more about rage than reason. Really, all it takes to land oneself on it is to have said something publicly that she disagrees with, or to have associated, in any way, with any institution or any person she dislikes. For example, she has a page dedicated to a European academic — a far-Left trans man who couldn’t be more in favour of trans people’s dignity and right to medically transition — simply because he has published some (rather excellent) work criticising certain mainstream strains of trans activism, including on this website. This is someone who has dedicated years of his life to radical trans activism, and now his second-highest search result in Incognito mode on Google Chrome is a webpage that suggests he is enabling transphobia.

Garcia-Ryan’s page ranks highly if you search his name, too. That’s the whole point: to scare people off talking about this issue. I’m telling you a tiny fraction of the stories I’ve heard from individuals targeted by James, many of whom don’t want to come forward. In short, very little has changed since Alice Dreger published her first long expose of the Michael Bailey affair back in 2008: “Almost universally those who wrote to me [about their run-ins with James] — including sex researchers — asked that I not ever quote them or mention them by name,” she wrote. “They feared being attacked by James, as Bailey and others had been.”

For that reason, and because of my own involvement, I have been deeply conflicted about writing this piece. But it’s a perfect 2023 story, in a way. It epitomises an approach to social justice and to journalism that is so anti-intellectual, and unforgiving that it’s impossible to imagine it making the world a better place. But perhaps most disturbing is that there’s no accountability. No one can control whether they’re included on James’s site. There’s no one to appeal to other than James herself, and she has proved herself time and time again to be unreasonable. (I emailed James about this piece. She sent a brief response, which didn’t address any of my points, and has not commented further.)

But our information ecosystem doesn’t reward reasonableness — it rewards reaction and outrage. And particularly when the subject is social justice, media outlets are all too eager to abdicate their basic responsibilities as guardians of the truth.

Rupert Murdoch, who has retired after 69 years at the head of News Corporation, is indisputably the foremost and boldest media proprietor in history. Lord Northcliffe and William Randolph Hearst would have been contenders for that title in earlier times, but Northcliffe died before the radio, film, and television industries were seriously established, and while Hearst was to some extent a multi-media owner, he was a pioneer only in some aspects of the newspaper business. Both men confined themselves to their native countries. Hearst is better remembered as a fantastic, almost Oriental art collector, builder of the most magnificent residence in the new world, and fabled star of public curiosity, especially as the inspiration for Citizen Kane. Northcliffe, to the extent he is still remembered, (he died nearly a century ago), is chiefly recalled for the madness of his last years; a few months before he died, he phoned the editor of The Times, which he owned, shouted “Are you a shrimp or a brewer?” and hung up without waiting for an answer. Such eccentricities have never been ascribed to Rupert Murdoch.

His father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a journalist and publisher most famous for his claims that Gallipoli was a bungled British operation in which Australians were sacrificed as cannon-fodder. He died in 1952, and Rupert, then a recent graduate of Oxford, where he was a strenuous supporter of the Labour Party, took over his father’s modest provincial Australian newspaper, The Adelaide News. He raised its profitability, made a number of acquisitions, and followed the path trodden by other Commonwealth figures, particularly Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Thomson, to Fleet Street. Not without controversy, he gained control of the mass circulation Sunday tabloid News of the World and then The Sun, which he converted to a tabloid, in 1969. He quickly demonstrated the flair he had developed in Australia for presenting witty, provocative, and sensational news for a popular readership.

The Sun, a derelict broadsheet, had been offered for sale for a nominal amount by the Mirror Group to spare itself the cost of redundancy payments in shutting it down. This decision by Mirror CEO Hugh Cudlipp was one of the most catastrophic misjudgments in the history of the British newspaper industry. On seeing the first copy of The Sun under new ownership, Cudlipp confidently stated that The Mirror had nothing to fear. Murdoch produced a much more flamboyant tabloid morning national newspaper with a populist, low tax and somewhat libertarian flavour that resonated more strongly than the socialistic class antagonism of The Mirror.

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The Sun eclipsed The Mirror in circulation in nine years, reaching and for a long time remaining at about five million daily — the Western world’s largest daily newspaper circulation. It was a renowned source of humorous headlines and stories; page 3 featured a sexy naked or scantily clad young woman. In advising against voting for the Labour Party in 1992, The Sun warned that, if it were elected, for the next four years “the page 3 girl will look like this”: an under-dressed woman of approximately 300 pounds on a bicycle. When a summer strike in the French ports for the cross-Channel ferries effectively stopped traffic to France other than by air, The Sun headline was: “BLOODY FROGS SCUTTLE OUR HOLS.” During the Falklands War, Private Eye spoofed that The Sun was offering a mini-metro automobile to any British soldier who “killed an Argie”. It did not seem implausible.

Murdoch became the tabloid king of the English-speaking world after buying the New York Post in 1975, America’s oldest daily newspaper, which he has gradually built up to be the leading and liveliest American tabloid newspaper. He bought the money-losing Times and the profitable Sunday Times from Thomson in 1981, after The Times had taken and lost a prolonged strike. One of his greatest and boldest initiatives was building a state-of-the-art printing facility at Wapping. It remained unoccupied for months as he tried to negotiate demanning arrangements with the printing and pre-press unions. The unions took no notice of the less tolerant regime for illegal work stoppages that the Thatcher government imposed, and when the unionised workforce struck, illegally, but as had been their custom, Murdoch fired them and replaced them at once with a smaller, carefully assembled workforce.

Despite prolonged and violent demonstrations, these workers were successfully brought in and out of the new plant in armoured buses and under heavy police protection until a severance settlement was reached. This was a glorious victory over the notoriously capricious Fleet Street shop stewards who for decades had delighted in taking newspapers down for frivolous reasons, insisting on hugely inflated numbers of employees and cash payments to phantom workers. He revolutionised the London newspaper industry and all of the other publishers followed him to new printing facilities and higher profits, (though I was the only one who publicly recognised our debt to him — I had bought control of the Telegraph Group in 1986).

His next pioneering initiative was buying up independent television stations in the United States, putting them together as a network, and buying the Twentieth Century Fox film studio and engaging in systematic integration by doing much of his own programming. At approximately the same time, he set up a relatively unregulated satellite telecaster in Britain and, after a good deal of skirmishing, merged with his chief competitor and became the controlling shareholder of British Sky Broadcasting, which after heavy start-up costs, became another enormous profit centre. Here again he was a pioneer and was one of the world’s greatest satellite television operators.

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He outlined to television veteran Roger Ailes his idea of a conservative American cable news network, to compete with the relentlessly leftist CNN and MSNBC, both owned by huge media conglomerates. In one of the most famous exchanges of modern media industry history, Ailes said that this could work; Murdoch asked how much it would cost and when the response came, “$800 million”, Murdoch replied: “What are you waiting for?”

Fox News was an overwhelming success from the start and has vastly outperformed its chief rivals. He has also persisted in the newspaper business and has been instrumental in developing digital subscriptions as a formula for rebuilding newspaper circulation. In 2007, he bought Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and has transformed it into a general interest newspaper that has severely challenged and somewhat displaced The New York Times as the country’s most influential newspaper.

Not everything has been a success. In unleashing cover price wars in the British national newspaper market in the Nineties, he damaged the economics of that industry without significantly improving his position in the quality newspaper market. Turning the Times into a tabloid is hard to justify. He lost over $500 million on the Internet site Myspace, and was probably taken for more than $2 billion on TV Guide by the venerable Walter Annenberg. He built his company on debt and had a severe financial crisis in the late Eighties. He has since sold most of his assets except for the newspapers and Fox News and the book publisher Harper Collins and now has a fairly conservative balance sheet, despite the recent loss of an astounding $787 million defamation action over the 2020 US election.

For a long time, most of his editors and close collaborators seemed to leave his employ involuntarily and often, as with Harry Evans (Times) and Andrew Neil (Sunday Times and Sky), acrimoniously. In the end, after receiving many favours from her, he deserted Margaret Thatcher, and except for Ronald Reagan, most other political leaders in all the countries where he has been active.

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Having known him intermittently for over 40 years, and competed with him in Britain and Australia, I’ve never had the impression that he is much interested in politics, other than in how they affect him, or culture, or hobbies, except perhaps motor-sailing. His company is his passion, occupation, and pastime. Although he has known an enormous number of prominent people, he is not socially ambitious, declined a seat in the House of Lords, and though well-educated, knowledgeable and always astute and perceptive, he never tries to impress anyone and is not prepossessing. He has a laconic sense of humour.

I have always thought him a cynic, and while he was not directly implicated in the hacking scandal over a decade ago in England, he is responsible for the News Corp culture of entitlement to do almost anything in pursuit of the corporate interest. A culture of total war and take no prisoners. But when I told him that I thought the animated Fox Television series, The Simpsons in which the family is a caricature of proletarian philistinism and the politician in the series is corrupt, was representative of his views, he strenuously denied it.

He is affable and courteous but not gregarious, and never pretentious or verbose; one of the few thoroughly ruthless and unsentimental people I have known. But he is a straight-forward businessman whose word is reliable. All four of his marriages have ended in divorce, but without serious indiscretions and no one knows what goes on in another person’s marriage and family. He is in excellent health and continues as the controlling shareholder of his companies. This is no time for anything remotely like an obituary.

Frank Kermode described Amis as “a literary critic of startling power” — and he was right. Amis later tried his hand at political writing, with a slightly absurd analysis of Stalinism in Koba the Dread and of 9/11 in The Second Plane. These were not successful.

Amis failed when he tried to write about politics, but when he wrote about literature, that “startling power” revealed much, especially concerning the nature of autocracy. This is because while style was the essence of good prose for Amis, it was also the essence of morality. In Experience he wrote: “I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified.” ​​For Amis, clichés of the pen stemmed directly from those “clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart” because a cliché was, above all, “used thought” — which poisons literature, but also politics.

To understand Amis the writer, look to his idol Vladimir Nabokov, a man on intimate terms with the perversion of politics after his family was forced to flee Russia following the 1917 October Revolution. In his essay, “The Creative Writer”, Nabokov set out his process of artistic creation, which he divided into two stages, vostorg and vdokhnovenie: “rapture” and “recapture”. The process starts with the pure flame of vostorg, in which the writer breaks everything down to first principles in a kind of “rapture”. Once this is achieved, he settles down to the actual composing of his work, relying on the “serene and steady” kind of inspiration, vdokhnovenie, through which he recaptures and reconstructs the world.

In The Rachel Papers, Charles Highway walks down an ordinary street in which everything seems alien: “demonically mechanical cars; potent solid living trees; unreal distant-seeming buildings; blotchy extraterrestrial wayfarers”. The same is true of The Information’s Richard Tull, who is “an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this”. He is, in the end, a man “harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles”.

For Amis, breaking down everything to first principles was a matter of perception: you have to recalibrate the way you see the world. Writing on Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, he provided the most succinct description of his literary credo: “Style, of course, is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception. We are fond of separating style and content (for the purposes of analysis, and so on), but they aren’t separable: they come from the same place. And style is morality.”

Amis always considered himself a satirist, which is to say a moralist, and his war against immorality revealed itself in another war: The War Against Cliché. Michael Crichton’s dinosaur epic The Lost World is for him a “strange terrain of one-page chapters, one-sentence paragraphs and one-word sentences” in which the reader encounters “herds of clichés, roaming free. You will listen in ‘stunned silence’ to an ‘unearthly cry’ or a ‘deafening roar’. Raptors are ‘rapacious’. Reptiles are ‘reptilian’. Pain is ‘searing’.”

Amis’s aversion to this kind of writing was almost pathological, and it is no coincidence that one of the hallmarks of his own style was his use of modifiers, which he unmoors from their usual contexts. So we get “gentle coma” and “grim approval” and “glare of congeniality.” He forced the reader to rethink first principles.

He does this because he understood that the dangers of bad prose are not merely aesthetic. “Cliché spreads inwards from the language of the book to its heart,” he wrote in an essay on Fay Weldon. “Cliché always does.” It is a mental rot that, like poison ivy, eventually smothers and poisons the body it is attached to. When you flick through The Lost World, you realise that you are not reading a novel in any real sense of the word (especially if you boil down the term “novel” to its first principles). What you are reading are strings of clichés held together by coordinating conjunctions and laughable dialogue.

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In Politics and the English language, Orwell described the act of “throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you… and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.” It is at this point, Orwell wrote, that “the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear”. For Orwell, “political chaos is connected with the decay of language”.

Amis never liked Orwell, throwing away 1984 after reading an unpardonable cliché — “ruggedly handsome” — on the first page. “The man can’t write worth a damn,” was his verdict. But I think the two men shared an understanding of what happens when, as Orwell wrote, language is reduced to thoughtless phrases bolted together “like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house”. Clichéd language is the perfect vessel in which to transmit an ideology that resists scrutiny and relies on obfuscation to promulgate. For both Amis and Orwell, bad writing is a form of unthinking that can end in a callousness to human cruelty and the horror it wreaks.

The true artist, by contrast, is committed to both vostorg and vdokhnovenie. Indeed, they must be because it is not enough to resist cliché. To break everything down to first principles, you must rebuild it anew; if you don’t, madness follows. In The Information, Richard Tull instinctively sees the world as an artist. Unmoored from its everyday context, a baby crawling towards him becomes “the size of a pig”, billowing “like a circus fatlady”. But he cannot write: Tull is missing the second half of the creative process, and it drives him nuts. If you commit to vostorg without vdokhnovenie, even a baby, that ultimate signifier of human innocence and vulnerability, can become a monster. And there is only ever one solution for dealing with monsters.

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Every dictator from Mao to Stalin to Putin has wanted to reduce everything to first principles; they embraced the mad rapture of vostorg, with its intense passion and heat. But that is only half of the process. As men, and they are always men, they were fed on bad literature, from the warped Marxist texts of Stalin and Mao to the nonsense history that Putin gorged himself on over lockdown before his invasion of Ukraine. They internalised this rapture, but they lacked the “serene and steady” inspiration of vdokhnovenie. They failed not just as politicians or artists but as humans. They cannot create; they can only destroy.

Rapture and serenity; destruction and reconstruction. Both are inherent to creativity. But both can become toxic when those who have the power to create do so through perversions of literature. Amis understood this perennial fact of politics, and this understanding informed both his literary criticism and his fiction: that debased words are just as potent as beautiful ones — and that they always end in horror.

The Guardian prides itself on being one of the most Left-leaning and anti-racist news outlets in the English-speaking world. So imagine its embarrassment when, last month, a number of black podcast producers researching the paper’s historic ties to slavery abruptly resigned, alleging they had been victims of “institutional racism”, “editorial whiteness”, “microaggressions, colourism, bullying, passive-aggressive and obstructive management styles”. All of this might smack of progressive excess, but, in reality, it merely reflects an institution incuriously at odds with itself.

Questions about The Guardian’s ties to slavery have been circulating since 2020, when, amid the media’s collective spasm of racial conscience following the murder of George Floyd, the Scott Trust announced it would launch an investigation into its history. “We in the UK need to begin a national debate on reparations for slavery, a crime which heralded the age of capitalism and provided the basis for racism that continues to endanger black life globally,” journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson wrote in a June 2020 Guardian opinion piece about the toppling of a statue of 17th-century British slaver Edward Colston. A month later, the Scott Trust committed to determining whether the founder of the paper, John Edward Taylor, had profited from slavery. “We have seen no evidence that Taylor was a slave owner, nor involved in any direct way in the slave trade,” the chairman of the Scott Trust, Alex Graham, told Guardian staff by email at the time. “But were such evidence to exist, we would want to be open about it.” (Notably, Graham, in using the terms “slave owner” and “direct way,” set a very specific and very high bar for what would be considered information worthy of disclosure.)

The problem is that the results of the investigation, conducted by historian Sheryllynne Haggerty, an “expert in the history of the transatlantic slave trade”, have never been made public. When contacted with questions about what happened to the promised report, Haggerty referred all inquiries to The Guardian’s PR, which has remained silent on the matter. (The Guardian was asked for comment and we were given the stock PR response The Guardian gave following the podcaster’s letter.) But what we do know is this: according to Guardian lore, a business tycoon named John Edward Taylor was inspired to agitate for change after witnessing the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when over a dozen people were killed in Manchester by government forces as they protested for parliamentary representation. Two years later, Taylor, a young cotton merchant, with the backing of a group of local reformers known at the Little Circle, founded the paper.

“Since 1821 the mission of The Guardian has been to use clarity and imagination to build hope,” The Guardian’s current editor, Katharine Viner, proudly proclaims on the “About us” page of the paper’s website. Part of this founding myth concerns one of the defining social and political issues of the day, slavery, which the Little Circle members, including Taylor, vigorously opposed as a moral affront. “The Guardian had always hated slavery,” Martin Kettle, an associate editor, wrote in a 2011 apologia on why during the Civil War the paper had vociferously condemned the North while equivocating on the South.

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That may be true, but it also presents an incomplete picture. The Manchester Guardian, as the paper was then known, was founded by cotton merchants, including Taylor, who were able to pool the money needed to launch the paper by drawing on their respective fortunes. While none of these men, many of whom were Unitarian Christians, is likely to have engaged in slavery, they didn’t just benefit from but depended upon the global slave trade that provided virtually all of the cotton that filled their mills. As Sarah Parker Remond, an African American abolitionist, said upon visiting Manchester in 1859: “When I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those 80,000 cotton plantations on which was grown the $125 million worth of cotton which supply your market, and I remember that not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”

Remond had ample reason for saying this. The relationship between the northwest English cotton industry and the American South’s slave society was one of mutualism. Of all the cotton in Manchester, 75% of it was sourced from Southern slave plantations. On the eve of the Civil War, Lancashire was importing more than one billion pounds of cotton from the United States per year, about half of the two billion pounds of cotton picked by Southern slaves annually. By buying slave-picked cotton at extremely cheap prices, Manchester’s cotton industry could use advances in manufacturing to profitably spin the cotton into textiles that were then sold back to the Southern slavers. Instead of trading slaves — a morally messy and economically-risky affair — Manchester’s liberal elite learned how to trade slave-grown cotton.

The trade in Southern-sourced cotton enriched the city, giving rise to the wealthy middle class of which John Edward Taylor and other members of the Little Circle were a part. On the back of this cotton surge, men such as Taylor — the son of a tutor, who apprenticed with a local cotton merchant — rose from humble beginnings to achieve affluence and national influence within a matter of years.

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So when the Civil War broke out in 1861, The Manchester Guardian found itself in a strange position. Its very existence was owed to the profits made on the backs of slaves, yet it could not morally support the South. But, because of its business interests, it also found itself unable to champion the North. To explain its at-times stridently anti-Union positions, the paper pointed to a smattering of statements by Abraham Lincoln indicating he would maintain slavery if it meant preserving the Union. The paper would go so far as to characterise Lincoln’s election “as an evil day both for America and the world”.

But there were other forces at work. For all their brotherly love, the Little Circle of Manchester elites believed that the power of democracy, and even of free expression, should be limited to a small elect who were educated and intelligent enough to be entrusted with such power. When it came to the masses, the Circle believed that “because most people had not yet reached the same moral and intellectual standards of the members of the Circle, it was suggested that the bulk of the population should be indefinitely denied access to the public sphere, or at least the right to vote…” To the founders of The Manchester Guardian, America was a lesson in the painful effects of too much democracy. According to its editorial spin, the Union had not gone to war in order to free a downtrodden class but to act upon its expansionist ambitions. This, in one view, was a way for the paper to advance its abolitionist position without putting its weight behind the idea that all people everywhere should be free and fully enfranchised — an idea the paper’s leadership considered dangerous.

The Guardian melded this political conservatism with its stance on free trade, and notably the Corn Laws, which the Manchester elite maintained was an unnecessary tax that hurt the poor. But they were doubtless also sharply aware that, if replicated in other industries (say, cotton production), such tariffs could threaten their businesses. What emerged from The Guardian’s moral contortionism was an argument claiming that the root problem in America was not that Africans were being enslaved by Southerners, but, incredibly, that the South had been enslaved by the North. The South, The Guardian held, could break its Northern bonds by establishing free trade with England’s industrial and commercial centres. As the paper wrote in May 1861:

“If the sentiments of the educated and higher classes of Southern society could find expression, we should be frankly told that in the emancipation of the South from dependence on the North, in the creation of diversity of employment for Southern capitalists and for the masses, and in the saving that would arise from direct Southern intercourse with Liverpool, Southampton and Havre, the day would not be distant when slavery itself would cease.”

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What emerges from this picture of The Manchester Guardian in its formative days is a cultural institution that was able to pull off a kind of moral arbitrage, turning slave profits into an anti-slavery position; espousing high-minded ideals on freedom without supporting the equality that freedom affords; and cannily leveraging the horrors of the Civil War to advance its most pressing economic policy: free trade. Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that in the two centuries since the paper’s founding, The Guardian has returned to the same issue that lies at the heart of slavery — race. For the past 20 years, The Guardian’s approach to the topic of race has been nothing short of total. Yet, like the current leadership’s 19th-century antecedents, it’s not clear that the paper sits on a foundation sturdy enough to support such an uncompromising approach.

Since the 2000s, The Guardian’s race coverage has left no element of existence, human or otherwise — as a piece on why driverless cars are racist attests — unbent by its racial prism. By The Guardian’s telling, post-Brexit Britain has been beset by a “frenzy of hatred”. British schools are racist. Twitter is racist. The Covid response was racist. Dog walkers are racist. Chicken is racist. Cricket is racist. And if you consider asking someone to explain why something is racist, don’t: it is, according to another Guardian piece, extremely racist.

But you need only look at the Executive Committee of the Guardian News and Media, the body that governs the paper, to see that, by the racial standards the paper has spent decades engendering, The Guardian has a serious problem: it is strikingly white. From the company’s CEO, Anna Bateson, to Viner, its chief editor, right down to its CFO, deputy editor, head of communications, and head of product are white. Now, the liberal democratic world in which The Guardian was fashioned would find nothing about this fact objectionable. These are simply individuals who seem to be doing their best to combat social ills. But that is not the standard The Guardian has held the world to. Social justice and racial equity, as expounded by The Guardian, hold that whiteness is inherently a form of racialised power, achieved through the subjugation of non-whites. And that’s where the charges levelled by the podcasters, who accused the paper of, among other things, “editorial whiteness”, gets thrown into stark relief.

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For all its talk of corporate equity efforts, according to an internal report from 2019, only 12% of The Guardian’s editorial team come from BAME backgrounds — despite BAME people making up 18% of the British population. The paper’s median ethnic pay gap has hovered around 15% over the past three years, which means non-white Guardian employees are paid “only” 15p less on the pound than white Guardian employees. For your average British company, this might be a stellar result. But for a newspaper that for the past two decades has made race into a defining issue in all of our lives, is it quite as acceptable?

It’s not difficult to imagine, then, how a group of black producers would see an environment like this as hostile. Surely, if The Guardian stood behind the decision to throw the statue of Edward Colston into the Bristol harbour, despite everything he did with his wealth, then it stands to reason that a newspaper founded by white merchants who made their fortunes milling Southern cotton should be similarly heaved overboard.

But that has not been The Guardian’s position — and this is where the paper’s blind spot for its own racial misdeeds threatens to morph into something more dangerous. In response to the podcasters’ letter, the newspaper did not bend the proverbial knee. Its editor did not step down. Its CEO did not announce a series of sweeping reforms. The company did not even issue the obligatory company-wide mea culpa lined with pledges to “do better”. Instead, it pushed back.

“We are concerned that some former colleagues and contributors have not had a good experience working with us, but we are disappointed they have chosen to write a partial reflection of their time at The Guardian,” the paper wrote in a statement. From its perspective, the onus is on the podcasters, who have told a tale.

While that kind of corporate crisis control would probably succeed for most companies, The Guardian is no longer most companies. It is no longer even a Left-of-centre publication pushing for progressive policies. It has slowly become a furnace of racial grievance which now threatens to consume the paper itself. For all its commentary on power and race, The Guardian is a powerful publication, able to make a single uncomfortable episode like this simply go away. But the bigger concern is whether it can satisfy the demands of an ethos that seeks to overturn institutions precisely like The Guardian, when they fail to live up to the social justice ideals they preach.

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When a Left-wing publisher released a collection of essays marking the paper’s  200th anniversary, what readers found was not a celebration but a critique of the institution. Capitalism’s Conscience, edited by a Guardian contributor, slammed the paper in one of its chapters as not just corrupt but a corrupting cultural institution that is guilty of white supremacy.

“[T]he Guardian has repeatedly given voice to racist and far-Right figures and ideas in interviews and articles,” claimed the authors of one chapter. “This platforming and the resulting amplification do not only fulfil the function of deflecting from liberal racism, but also allow the paper to represent its journalism as adhering to liberal principles of objectivity, balance and free speech.” On the face of it, the statement seems absurd. But looking at the political context the paper has engendered, it’s clear that, given the cultural conditions The Guardian has used its considerable influence to foster, it could not be any other way.

For its part, The Guardian has assured readers that the review is “largely complete and will not pull any punches in terms of transparency”. This may be cold comfort for the podcast producers charged with looking into slavery at the paper’s historical roots only to come away with allegations of racism in its present incarnation. Whether or not the review finds that Taylor had direct ties to slavery, the podcast affair shows that The Guardian has, wittingly or not, stumbled into a new and fraught chapter of its story, one even the most polished podcast productions will struggle to explain.

With fans like these, you might assume I would be supportive of the case currently being made by the BBC’s Disinformation and Social Media Correspondent for stricter regulation of disinformation and hate speech. In an interview and an accompanying feature published this week, Marianna Spring reiterates a narrative about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that she first aired on Panorama a few weeks back. According to Spring, online disinformation and hate speech is getting worse, and it’s the responsibility of social media platforms to regulate it more heavily.

Like me, Spring receives a lot of online misrepresentation and criticism in her professional role. Indeed, she frequently uses such experiences as a superficially compelling peg for many of her stories. Despite our similarities, though, I remain unconvinced by her case for strong regulation. More than that: through observing her output, I’ve become convinced that the BBC should not have a specialist “Disinformation Correspondent” at all.

In this week’s interview, Spring described her job for the BBC as “interrogating how mistruths or trolling or abuse online can affect real people, and then to investigate and hold to account the social media companies, policy makers, law enforcement…”. At face value, this may seem like a fairly standard quest for a journalist, albeit a noble one — a bit like investigating fraudsters or corrupt politicians, in order to bring their misdeeds and lies into the light.

But there’s at least one big difference. A journalist investigating fraud, but who accidentally misidentifies either what fraud is or the people committing it, doesn’t thereby become guilty of the very thing she is investigating. In contrast, a Disinformation Correspondent who misidentifies disinformation, either positively or negatively, runs the risk of disseminating disinformation herself — and is arguably all the more harmful because of the status implied by her position.

Perhaps it could be rejoindered that disinformation is not the same as misinformation. Whereas misinformation consists in the unwitting dissemination of false statements believed to be true at the time, disinformation is the knowing introduction of false statements with the explicit intention to deceive people. In other words, with disinformation, there is an intent to deceive. That’s a reasonable distinction to make as far as it goes; the problem is that it’s utterly useless in helping us analyse the growing problem with conspiratorial and magical thinking in the world. It also has no relevance to most of the things reported on by Spring.

The capacity of human beings to cling to incredible beliefs in a self-serving way, while being blind to blatantly contrary evidence, is well-established. And given this capacity, it’s very hard to know whether conspiratorial thinking has been propagated in the cynical knowledge of its falsehood. For instance, those in charge of Russian botfarms churning out what liberals call “pro-Putin propaganda” probably half-believe their own falsehoods. The originator of the New World Order conspiracy theory almost certainly believed his. Even bonkers theories like the lizard people one were probably started by the mad rather than the bad. Ironically, the persistent belief that there is a lot of disinformation in the world, in the sense of deliberately deceptive lies, is itself a kind of conspiracy theory. For some people, it seems much easier to believe in the organised and deliberate deception of others than in the chaos of accidental human fallibility.

In practice, then, any conception of disinformation as positively requiring intentional deception is going to be of marginal use to society at most. And it certainly seems unlikely that the BBC would ever have put someone in a full-time role to investigate disinformation, had this been the background idea. It’s far too niche.

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In fact, what Spring tends to investigate at least some of the time is disinformation in a broader and potentially more useful sense, meaning something like: widespread false or misleading beliefs, seemingly attractive to people for reasons that have little to do with the amount of good evidence available for them, and which cause significant social dysfunction. Whatever the reason for these beliefs, a neutral approach to evidence has taken a back seat to some other goal, and the process of producing them is no longer what epistemologists call “truth-tracking”. In this broader sense, spreading or believing disinformation is not just about misinterpreting evidence, but rather about ignoring certain inconvenient bits of evidence to fit with prior political, social, or emotional goals.

This is perhaps a more useful conception of disinformation, though admittedly not as snappy. The problem for Spring now is that it seems to apply to some of her own output too. This is understandable, given that, to paraphrase the King James Bible, it’s always easier to notice the motes in other people’s eyes rather than the beams in your own. Nearly everyone is subject to bias, like I said. But given Spring’s job title and growing influence, including a recent expert appearance at a Parliamentary Committee about online speech regulation, I still think it’s a problem.

Take the Panorama documentary. The narrative offered by Spring and the team around her was almost parodically absent of nuance, offering no attempted counterpoint to the extremely simple and obviously partisan fairy-tale it was thrusting upon the viewer. This story goes: a bad and foolish man took over Twitter (Spring barely suppresses her eyerolling as she talks about him); he laid off a lot of people responsible for dealing with “hate speech”; hate speech increased exponentially; regulators therefore need to do more to protect the ordinary people that suffer.

Basic critical questions one might have asked about this narrative were missing in action. The most obvious of these is what counts as hate speech. Throughout her work, Spring’s habitual examples (speech by misogynists, rape apologists, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers) tend to suggest she thinks hate speech is angry, threatening, and/or insulting speech produced by people with the Wrong Politics, causing anxiety and distress in more innocent people who don’t share their persecutors’ dodgy views. I’d be fascinated to know whether Spring assumes that the level of insult and aggression flung by online anti-vaxxers towards epidemiologists, for instance, becomes morally neutralised when directed instead towards radical feminists, Zionists, Tory politicians, or any other folk devils of the contemporary progressive mindset.

A second obvious question unexplored by Spring’s documentary is what negative consequences might follow when you devolve responsibility for what counts as hate speech to people working in Silicon Valley. For instance, gender-critical and radical feminists have been at the sharp end of regulatory decisions by Twitter for years now — many of them banned or censored for talking about the social importance of biological sex, or for saying it cannot be changed.

The crossover between tech bros and people of a transactivist or transhumanist persuasion is high. But in her work, Spring seems uncurious about any potential for political bias or self-interest in their decision-making — quite possibly because, like many others, her compass for what counts as hate speech has been significantly affected by exposure to the values of people working in Silicon Valley. Again, this is hardly a crime. Nobody forms their beliefs in a social vacuum. But as a Disinformation Correspondent, it might be good to have self-awareness about it.

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Is The Guardian sowing disinformation?

By Kathleen Stock

When it comes to examples of disinformation, meanwhile, Spring has a tendency to roll relatively reasonable cases of political wrongthink together with madly conspiratorial ravings, suggesting that she doesn’t really differentiate between them. If you start off as an anti-vaxxer or lockdown sceptic, she seems to imply, you might easily end up a climate-change denier, or even a believer in a New World order. When talking about QAnon supporters, she clearly feels it’s important to throw in that they are “pro-Trump” as well — as if being a member of QAnon wasn’t quite bad enough. Such clues to what Spring really thinks of them must be quite infuriating to the thousands of anti-vaxxers and Trump supporters who hold those positions for relatively non-conspiratorial reasons. And then there’s Spring’s tendency to turn stories about conspiracy theorists into suspiciously neat cautionary tales propping up preferred social values — such as in her documentary series about a conspiracy theorist called Gary, who didn’t believe in Covid until it killed him, quite conveniently for the triumphalist narrative purposes of many at the time. It’s almost enough to make you believe in the existence of a repressive liberal media elite.

So what should journalism do with the growing phenomenon of disinformation, if not this? In the old days, of course, we used to have lots of disinformation specialists. We called them investigative journalists. They covered stories in some depth, gave voice to a range of counterpoints, and tried to ensure that their personal views weren’t in the driving seat, even if they sometimes failed in the attempt. By their general example, they encouraged readers and viewers to trust them, or at least, not to virulently distrust them — not because they had the “right” political values, but because they had the right journalistic ones.

These days, though, slowburn investigative journalism is often too expensive, and doesn’t get the same clicks as a hot take. So instead, the idea of disinformation gets thematised as if it were a special kind of moral vice only committed by ill-intentioned or delusional others, to be rooted out and exposed by the intrepid journalist-activist on the side of the good. But good and evil are not so straightforward. In the long run, I suspect this vaccine may turn out to cause more epistemic illness than it prevents.

Meanwhile, at Merton, where Liz Truss read PPE in the Nineties, undergraduates still perform “The Time Ceremony” every autumn when the clocks go back. Between 2am British Summer Time and 2am Greenwich Mean Time, students dressed in full sub fusc (black tie and gowns) walk backwards around the Fellows’ Quad in order “to maintain the space-time continuum”. According to her biographers Harry Cole and James Heale, Liz Truss delighted in Merton’s eccentric ceremony. I wonder whether her thoughts turned to it at any point during her own liminal 44-day premiership, before it too collapsed into an extensionless point in political space-time.

The tricks being played on us by the accelerated pace of political upheaval are well in evidence in both Cole and Heale’s Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss, and Sebastian Payne’s The Fall of Boris Johnson, both of which enter a kind of warp-speed as their protagonists’ regimes spiral and crash. Great offices of state change hands like debased currency; in the last three years, we have practically doubled the stock of living ex-Chancellors. And remember when Grant Shapps was Home Secretary for six days? At times, it looked as if Andy Warhol’s prediction may become true of politics, if not elsewhere: in the future we shall all be Cabinet Ministers for 15 minutes.

What explains this unusual volatility in the political system? One widespread attitude expresses itself in the form of an exceptionalist view about the present: our politicians are peculiarly crap and ill-suited to govern. The watchword of this theory is “unprecedented”, and its characteristic mood is one of ahistorical sanctimony about contemporary political life. It is often difficult for these theories to rise above the flippant register of the sketch-writer’s caricature: Boris Johnson is a Machiavellian clown, psychologically incapable of telling the truth; Liz Truss is a Thatcherite human-GIF who loves pork markets. That is, the account struggles to actually explain the data in place of merely describing them.

Another more jaded mode of explanation is ahistorical in a different way. This outlook regards today’s problems as nothing special. Disaster and tumult are more or less eternally constitutive of political life. On the subject of Johnson and Truss’s downfalls there is little to add to Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure. While offering a useful correction to the former account, this view is also too complacent. It is, for one thing, often a little unclear what content there is supposed to be to the claim that all political careers end in failure beyond the banal truth that all political careers simply end.

In fact, there are several, somewhat novel, destabilising political phenomena described in the work of Cole, Heale, and Payne. Foremost among them is the manner in which the 24-hour online news cycle, with its insatiable appetite for a worsening situation, encourages a form of speculation on political confidence and capital. The combined desiderata of round-the-clock media scrutiny — a demand that officials be publicly accountable, and the lightning movement of news data — is an inherently unsteadying mixture. It is, after all, well-observed that social media can help to precipitate bandwagon-effects of popular resentment under repressive regimes; it would be curious if analogous effects were not also in play under settled liberal governments. Of course, the demand for accountability and a merciless attitude toward failure in public office are good things in their way. But almost no good thing arises without loss in some other dimension.

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Don't make me Prime Minister

By John Maier

At pivotal moments of collapse in both books, events outpace the ability of political actors to effectively manage them. The lumbering anatomy of Whitehall is not built for acceleration. It is difficult to imagine how, in a previous technological era, a spectacle as engrossing, damaging and chaotic as the cascade of resignations from Boris Johnson’s government could have been similarly achieved. In the age of paper and post, it took a bit of time to resign. In one revealing anecdote of Payne’s, the spectral figure of Charles Moore sidles casually up to Treasury Minister Simon Hart who is sitting on a park bench on Twitter. “Oh Simon, what are you up to this evening?” Moore asks. Hart responds: “If you wait 15 seconds, I’m literally resigning.”

There are, thankfully, some reliable frictions left in the political process. Professional vanity, for instance, provides some residual robustness in the face of even the most vividly disintegrating political fortunes. Brandon Lewis, for instance, “breezed into” Johnson’s strategy room, at a moment of high calamity, and surveyed the reshuffle whiteboard. “Sensing the weakness of the team that was being assembled, Lewis argued he should get a grander job and was offered Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.” He left, apparently pretty pleased with himself — much in the spirit of a passenger who’s just successfully upgraded their cabin on the Titanic — before resigning a few hours later.

The relation between Johnson’s administration in its final months and the media placed him in a posture of increasingly hopeless damage-control. According to Payne: “from October 2021 onwards, [Johnson’s] administration was… entirely focused on firefighting.” At moments when instantaneous response was needed, aides found the Prime Minister “was always away”. Channels of communication stalled. The chief problem, as Payne tells it, was not so much that Johnson’s Number 10 team were mendacious and corrupt, but that they couldn’t stay ahead of the story — whether it was Paterson, Pincher or Partygate — for sufficiently long to counteract it. One unwelcome effect of the emergence of these intense, and no doubt irreversible, political pressures is to increase the appeal of a certain virtue of bloody-mindedness in public life. It might be, however counter-intuitively, that increasingly stringent demands for transparency and integrity in public life end up favouring not the squeaky-clean class of politician, but those who are able to cultivate a calculated indifference to the rules in play.

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The Tories were destined for civil war

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Needless to say, politicians who possess these qualities won’t just exercise them when they’re useful; they’ll do so too when their effects are destructive or straightforwardly unhinged. Mere hours before his resignation, Johnson remained “determined to carry on through sheer effort of will”. “All my life,” he is reported to have said, “people have been telling me ‘you can’t do that’. And I’ve always proved them wrong.” The same morning, Michael Gove made his fateful visit to Downing Street, by that stage a bunker of panicked activity, and urged Johnson to stand down. The Prime Minister responded by relating a story, apparently in admiration, of an uncle of his “who had ‘failed to take his meds one day’… [and] so barricaded himself into the town hall with a shotgun. The uncle was eventually bundled out by the police. ‘That is going to be me,’ the prime minister said.” Returning to his Ministry from the meeting, Gove informed his staff that the Prime Minister had unfortunately “gone mad”.

As with Johnson, the portrait developed of Truss by Cole and Heale, is one of a political agent almost pathologically insensitive to the influence of other minds. Aides noticed how “very thick-skinned” she was, with this “delightful Terminator-like quality”. But, on closer acquaintance, her steady hand could be unnerving, even to allies. At the height of the income tax U-turn, with the pound crashing, allies “were struck by her ‘worryingly zen-like’ demeanour”. As David Laws recalled of Truss at her first department, Education: “I like Liz but she doesn’t listen very much, and when people try to make points, she just talks straight over them in a slightly irritating and rather ‘deaf’ way.” This quality of political “deafness” can of course be useful, allowing one to wilfully resist the demands of external opposition and public scrutiny that might move a less headstrong individual to self-doubt or compromise.

But as Laws’s description implies, there is a constructive ambiguity in Truss’s case as to how far her obstinately “deaf” temperament is actually under her control, or about how far it is a part of a more general strategy of calculated madness. Rory Stewart recalls his years under Truss at Defra as “traumatic”. There, watching her civil servants “you could see the panic in their eyes and them thinking ‘does she really want to do this?’” And according to Dominic Cummings, Truss is “about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament”.

To her credit, Truss occasionally reveals a degree of pragmatic awareness of the manner in which her political strengths entwine with her personal incapacities. Addressing close allies in the early stages of her leadership bid, “she was blunt and to the point, telling one visitor: ‘I think I would be a very good Prime Minister, there are just two problems: I am weird and I don’t have any friends. How can you help me fix that?’” Presented with the consequences of the mini-Budget, and the possibility of simply throwing the old steamroller into gear and ploughing on, Truss at last recorded a final and uncharacteristic twinge of self-doubt: “the problem is the last time I ignored all these people they were right.”

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The Tory Party belongs to Alan Clark

By John Maier

Some years after his own short premiership (366 days), Alec Douglas Home is said to have encountered an elderly woman at a train station who admiringly told him that she’d always thought he would have made rather a good Prime Minister. He reportedly responded, with good grace, that he actually had been, though admittedly only “for a short time”. Liz Truss can for the moment only dream of comparative levels of anonymity. As her short administration collapsed around her, though, I wonder whether her temperamental deafness proved something of a solace — as Truss addressed the nation outside Downing Street she seemed almost to be smiling. (“Don’t worry, I’m relieved it’s over,” she is reported to have told those on the inside of the black door, “at least I’ve been Prime Minister.”)

But the lessons from Johnson’s demise and Truss’s implosion, so far as I can see, are not as commiserative. Today’s political environment makes remarkable demands on the modern politician — demands of exertion, openness, imagination, resilience to criticism, and speed of response. It is sometimes difficult to see how any decent politician could be equal to meeting them, though it is increasingly clear how a bad one could be wilful enough to resist them.

Such a widely-held belief, put forward by Musk’s opponents and fans alike, illuminates the nature of the platform. It has become the precise opposite of its original stated intention, as a decentralised platform for the instantaneous dissemination of information. Instead, Twitter is a centralised platform for the creation and enforcement of ideological narratives. The fear of liberals, and the hope of some conservatives, is that under Musk’s ownership Twitter will cease to be a central pillar of “the Cathedral”, the ideological apparatus by which the liberal order maintains its hold on effective power despite the growing opposition of voting publics.

For Right-wingers, who see Twitter functioning as a mechanism to enforce the dogmas of liberal ideology, the hope is to seize the Cathedral; Conservatives, by contrast, hope to open it up to debate, using Twitter as a pulpit through which the congregation will select the best ideology on rational grounds. Both beliefs are based on a fundamental misapprehension of what Twitter is, and how it has achieved the cultural prominence it has. And both groups, as well as society as a whole, would be better served if the entire edifice was levelled to the ground.

Twitter’s rise to prominence was a product of a specific set of material circumstances, the unintended effect of the demolition of legacy media platforms by Facebook, which destroyed the advertising revenue on which their journalism depended. During the 2010s, media companies reoriented themselves towards “the pivot to video”, producing short-form audiovisual content designed to be shared on Facebook. When Facebook suddenly changed its algorithms to deboost such content, fortunes were lost and the rising stars of the new media landscape, like VICE and Buzzfeed, came close to collapse. The resulting jobless diaspora of online journalists swiftly congregated on one platform: Twitter.

Twitter is at heart nothing more or less than a tool by which commentators measure their social capital, a social credit system for insecure writers. The most dangerous creature on Twitter is, after all, the aspirant blue check, whose desperate clamour for attention drives so much of the platform’s pathologies. From the moment he wakes up until the moment he goes to sleep, the journalist’s day is bookended, and punctuated by the platform: he scrolls through Twitter on his journey into the office; then, sitting at his desk, the first thing he does is open his laptop to scan Twitter. Stories, interviewees, heroes and villains are all identified on Twitter. Often contractually obliged to promote their work on Twitter, it becomes reality to the journalist, especially the opinion columnist, whose requirement to produce copy frequently outruns their capacity to formulate considered opinions.

Likewise, the value of a news story is almost entirely based on whether or not people are discussing it on Twitter. Its baneful effects are visible everywhere: the precipitous decline of Channel 4 News as a platform for serious journalism began, in the mid-2010s, as it reoriented its focus towards producing shareable video content for Twitter, aiming particularly at middle-aged liberals outraged by Trump and Brexit, the demographic to which its editors belong. For the online BBC journalist, Twitter is used as a means to circumvent impartiality rules, using often the obscurest of Twitter accounts to voice sentiments they are banned from expressing themselves: when a BBC article tells you that something has “sparked online debate”, prepare for a lecture on the Twitter fixation of the day, in which the quoted account merely ventriloquises the barely-hidden political believes of the journalist sharing it.

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Do we need Caesar Elon Musk?

By Mary Harrington

All journalism is now a Twitter performance: the journalist writes primarily for Twitter, and not his readership, their published work functioning as an esoteric text demonstrating allegiance to an in-group and hostility to an out-group: the readership, and the company paying for it are mere spectators to the essential work of Twitter performance. It is for this reason that journalists have become so reviled: their role has become so oriented to the production of discourse rather than the description of reality that the gulf between them and their readers widens ever more: Twitter and journalism are both locked in a fatal embrace.

Because of its outsized role in the journalistic imagination, Twitter has come to consume politics, just as it has journalism. When the MP David Amess was murdered by a jihadist, the government turned it into a narrative about Twitter trolls: not only because it was easier for them to talk about — they would, horror of horrors, have been criticised on Twitter for talking about the actual problem — but because it is the only thing they care about. If they have tweeted their disapproval of something it is within their power to fix, like Conservative MPs moaning about the migrant crisis, politicians feel satisfied their work has been done: the point is no longer to change the world, only to create discourse about it. 

Conservatives, who feel shut out of Twitter’s system of reward and approbation, have found themselves particularly entranced by the platform’s spell. They frequently declare that Twitter is not the real world, but the truth is worse, that the real world has become entirely suborned to Twitter. Similarly, it is easier for the police to demonstrate their political allegiances on Twitter than to prevent crimes; if every British Police force deleted its Twitter account, it would instantly be held in much higher regard by the public. But then no-one’s reputation is enhanced by Twitter: reading the thoughts of historians, barristers or public health professionals on the platform is a genuinely nihilistic experience. All have had their repute levelled by the platform which erodes every institution it touches.

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Don't punish Kanye West

By Hadley Freeman

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan warned back in the Sixties, “the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village”. Anyone who has actually lived in a small, traditionally-structured village, and not merely fantasised about the premodern world on Twitter, will be aware of the claustrophobic intensity of such a state of being, the life monitored and circumscribed by village gossip and obscure feuds. As McLuhan remarked, “unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence”, forced on us by “the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another’s lives”. The spasms of moral panic that pulse around the world from their origin in America’s neurotic taste-making class are a result of the world’s opinion-makers being locked together in the Twitter panopticon. 

In viewing the Twitter blue check as a coveted badge of status, both Musk and his anxious critics are entirely mistaken. The best analysis tends to come from anonymous accounts, freed from the combination of fear and need for approbation which consumes the blue check: if Twitter were an entirely anonymous platform, it might be a better functioning clearing-house for information and informed commentary. Rather than the presence of bots being Twitter’s original sin, as Musk has claimed, its greatest flaw is that it has turned Twitter’s “power users” into effective bots themselves, their every utterance shaped by the need to navigate Twitter’s treacherous rocks and shallows. 

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You are already in the metaverse

By Jon Askonas

Instead, the true mark of success as a commentator is freedom from needing to be on Twitter at all: who knows what Cormac McCarthy, say, thinks about Trump, or Black Lives Matter, or trans toilets? Whatever his opinion, he would sink in our estimation even if we agreed with him. This is why the Twitter presence, let alone addiction, of the super-rich is viewed with simultaneous bewilderment and disgust by the platform’s most committed users, toiling away in the take fields.. Why would anyone be here if they didn’t need to? How much weaker and more pathetic does Putin seem for the growing fixation on American culture war issues that manifests in his speeches? Rather than being outside the system of America’s cultural power, he has revealed himself as trapped here with the rest of us. Who can doubt that if a nuclear exchange began, we would find out on Twitter — the shared countdown, the snarky memes — or that many would spend their final minutes composing the perfect final tweet, the one last dunk on their enemies or expression of tribal allegiance?

If Musk, as is likely, destroys Twitter as it currently exists he will be doing the world a great service. By wrecking the current function it performs for commentators, he will free journalism and politics from its concentration in a single online madhouse, and in doing so, no doubt entirely unwittingly, help decentralise the spread of information. Like Legion in the New Testament, Twitter’s constellation of unhappy, clamouring souls must be driven off a cliff. When he learns, as he perhaps already has, that the platform will never be profitable, he should smash his new train set. The greatest power that will accrue to him, and the greatest gift he can offer civilisation, is not reforming Twitter through tweaks here and there but by loading its servers into a Space X rocket and firing them into the heart of the sun, forcing us all, finally, to log off.

Anyone who builds a career out of watching such material, whether it’s for the purposes of documenting it, reporting on it, or inquiring into its wider causes and meanings, ought to have some thoughts on the moral ambiguities intrinsic to it. In his memoir, Unreasonable Behaviour, first published in 1990, the British war photographer Don McCullin explains how he was drawn to war by a sense of adventure and the belief that by documenting its horrors he could stir the conscience of those who could put an end to them.

But he soon came to doubt that conviction and to question the true nature of his motives: “If war had become so hateful to me, why did I not keep away?” Reflecting on his long and celebrated career, he can’t repress the nagging suspicion that war photographers are nothing more than glorified profiteers, coldly trading on other people’s unspeakable suffering and grief. “Yet, I ask myself, what has all my looking and probing done for these people, or for anyone?… What have I done with my life?”

Reading Unreasonable Behaviour today is a jarring experience, not just because of its raw honesty, but also because of the contrast it invites between McCullin’s temperament and his peers who now cover war and conflict. McCullin is ambivalent, self-reproachful, measured and stoic, whereas his successors tend to be self-righteous, ideological and fragile. When McCullin was asked about Covid, at the height of the pandemic, the then-84-year old contemptuously snorted: “I couldn’t give a sod about it.”

There are certainly no Don McCullins in the extremism profession today, where stupefying levels of self-aggrandisement are matched only by a stupefying absence of any self-awareness. Consider Vidhya Ramalingam, founder and CEO of a counter-extremism company called Moonshot. Referring to the Eradicate Hate Global Summit held in Pittsburgh last month, Ramalingam insisted that its purpose was “to stop an epidemic of violence that has cost us so many lives… We are the group that are going to stop this”.

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Don't fall for the Isis Matchmaker

By Simon Cottee

The self-promotion and self-regard on display here is really quite breathtaking. So, too, is the sense of unreality. How, you might ask, does Team Ramalingam plan to go about the task of stopping America’s epidemic of violence? By speaking at plush conferences about “novel forms of safeguarding”? By supporting workshops on the intersection between gaming and extremism? By posting insufferably smug tweets about men “taking responsibility” for male-dominated power structures?

Of course, all of this raises a bigger question: what is the point of the extremism profession? Ramalingam would say its overriding purpose is to make the world a better place; that it’s only by properly understanding how extremism works that we can identify effective solutions for combating it. Yet if you take even a cursory glance at the extremism profession it becomes glaringly obvious that the driving imperative behind it is not to eradicate extremism, but to hunt down, if not outright invent, new forms of it in order to drum up business from all the internet-scraping, report-writing, and digital counter-messaging that the industry trades on.

This explains why so many industry-insiders have embraced the concepts of hate speech and the related notion of “online harms”, and it’s why some extremism experts have heartily endorsed the notion that violent extremism has become “mainstream” in American culture and society. They have done so not necessarily because they are committed to radical activism, although some certainly are, but because the alarmist, progressive vision of a society saturated in mutual hatred affords so many opportunities for the extremism profession to engorge itself on.

The result is a curious, if mutually beneficial and lucrative, alignment, where the concerns of Left-leaning activists are leveraged and repackaged for profit by hard-nosed extremism hucksters who are now suddenly awakened to the lethal menace of Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate. At the same time, the radical activists have embraced the language of violent extremism — “mass radicalisation”, extremist “eco-systems”, dangerousness, vulnerability — to impugn their political enemies on the Right and to legitimise their social banishment through censorship.

Another curious aspect of this alignment is how readily so many extremism experts and scholars have embraced the infantilising trauma discourse of radical activists. This is a subject I address in my new book on the seductions and repulsions of violent online spectacles. If you spend all your time watching this stuff, out of choice, as many extremism experts do, you will inevitably run up against the suspicion that you might secretly enjoy it or have been irreparably desensitised by it.

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America needs to calm down

By Simon Cottee

Nobody in the extremism profession would ever dare confess to harbouring such feelings — and if they were to voice them they would be ostracised as a degenerate voyeur or sociopath. Instead, many claim to have been traumatised by what they have seen. And while I have no doubt that some have been psychologically or spiritually damaged by over-exposure, the invocation of trauma serves to deflect or neutralise any deeper inquiry into the murky business of tracking extremist material on the internet and the complex motives and emotions that it involves.

War, as many illustrious war correspondents have testified, can be a warping experience. In his memoir about covering the war in Bosnia in the early Nineties, Anthony Loyd remarked that although war didn’t fundamentally change his already black-pilled perspective on the world, it did serve to reinforce his “views about the pointlessness of existence, the basic brutality of human life and the godlessness of the universe”. For Christopher Hedges, the feeling was far more visceral and dramatic. Recalling a ruck he’d gotten into with an airline clerk on the way back from a particularly harrowing trip to El Salvador, where he’d been covering the war there between 1983 and 1988, he wrote: “Blood streamed down his face and mine. I refused to wipe the dried stains off my cheeks on the flight to Madrid, and I carry a scar on my face from where he thrust his pen into my cheek. War’s sickness had become mine.”

Similarly revealing is an anecdote told by Rukmini Callimachi, the New York Times journalist who made her name reporting on Isis, in which she describes hearing someone repeatedly banging on her apartment door late at night. She called the cops, fearing it might be an Isis operative paying her a menacing visit. (It was actually someone from the local water company.) Callimachi tells the story with humour, but the moral behind it is a serious one: to be exposed to carnage and chaos, all of the time and without let up, can seriously derange one’s perception, judgment and sense of proportion.

The best reporters are acutely aware of this danger and try, as best they can, to inoculate against it. Loyd, by his own admission, failed miserably on that front. Not only did the war in Bosnia wrench open the lid on the darker side of his mind; it also blew a gaping hole in his sense of professional detachment and made him contemptuous of the “complacency of Western societies”.

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Why ISIS love to kill

By Simon Cottee

This hints at a greater paradox that extremism professionals would do well to consider: that through over-exposure to the very worst places of the internet, they succumb to the very radicalisation dynamics that they’re trying to expose and hinder. When mainstream journalists think that MAGA is an armed insurgency or declare that, as one headline put it in Foreign Policy, “White Supremacists Want a Dirty Bomb”, or believe that a red dress or “ok” sign is a fascist dog-whistle, it becomes impossible to deny that some kind of warping has occurred. By staring too intently into the twilight world of online megadeath, mayhem and tribal hatred, they inevitably project this gruesome and fringe demiworld onto the real world that the rest of us inhabit. As the terrorism scholar Peter Neumann has observed:

“If people end up spending too much of their time in virtual communities, the online forums come to function like one of Edwin Sutherland’s “criminogenic environments”, in which deviant and extreme behaviours are learned and absorbed and in which extreme ideas come to seem normal because of constant interaction with people who hold similar—and similarly extreme—views… As a result, people acquire a skewed sense of reality…”

The irony, which seems lost on the extremism reporters and experts, is that this dynamic applies as much to them as to the extremists they spend all of their time “infiltrating”. Don McCullin knew all about the dangers of getting too close to his subject and, along with other like-minded war reporters, he has much to teach us about the ambiguities of their profession and their own conflicted relationship to it. The new generation of hate eradicators and extremism experts would no doubt benefit from reading them — although such are the exigencies of saving the world that they probably don’t have the time.

Unfortunately, it’s a correction that many people are probably never going to see — or if they do, they won’t believe it.

Like many stories of its oeuvre, this one began on Twitter, when Richardson’s godmother Lesa Pamplin claimed in a series of since-deleted posts that the young volleyball player had been subject to racist abuse throughout the game: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team,” she wrote. “While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

Pamplin hadn’t been at the game herself, but the claim was incendiary. The story was soon picked up by mainstream outlets, which treated the alleged harassment — and discovery of its perpetrator — as verified fact. From USA Today: “Brigham Young fan banned after directing racial slurs toward Duke volleyball player.” The Washington Post: “BYU bans fan, relocates volleyball match after racist slurs, threats.” The New York Times: “Racial Slur During College Volleyball Game Leads to Fan Suspension.”

Additionally, readers were warned that failing to believe this story, or even asking questions about it, was simply not an option. An op-ed from USA Today columnist Mike Freeman declared any doubts about Richardson’s veracity to be a “Right-wing conspiracy theory”, like QAnon or Pizzagate or 9/11 trutherism. Ditto the suggestion that she might have made a mistake: “The other conspiracy theory is that she misheard the word. That is a word you don’t mishear. You certainly don’t mishear it more than once.”

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JK Rowling sees through her enemies

By Kat Rosenfield

And yet, despite Freeman’s insistence to the contrary, not only is this a word that people do mishear, it has been only a year since the last high-profile incident in which someone misheard it in a similar context: in a raucous crowd at a sporting event, and, yes, more than once. In this case, the culprit was a man trying to get the attention of the Rockies mascot, whose name is “Dinger.”

That Richardson mistook another word for that word seems more likely than the alternative: that she fabricated the whole thing. But either way, it didn’t happen — and a responsible media class should never have reported otherwise so confidently, so soon. At the time, nobody present at the game had corroborated Richardson’s allegations, despite pleas from BYU’s athletic director for anyone who’d witnessed the incident to come forward. BYU and Duke athletic officials moved into the stands after the first alleged shout, but neither saw nor heard anything amiss. A review of video and audio footage also turned up nothing, and while the fan who was originally identified and permanently banned from BYU games was found in the footage, he wasn’t shouting slurs; he was sitting and playing with his phone. (BYU has unbanned him and apologised for the error.)

One potential solution to this problem, perhaps, would be a moratorium on teams with names or mascots ending in “-ger” (the BYU team is called The Cougars). Another would be to assume that in the year 2022, a person screaming something indecipherable in front of a crowd of thousands is in all likelihood not shouting a racial slur.

That is not to say that racism in American society has ceased to exist; on a systemic level, disparities continue, and the country still has work to do to level the playing field. But on an interpersonal one, America has never been less racist than it is today. A good proxy for how Americans feel about diversity on this front is the approval rating for interracial marriage, which was just 4% when the question was first polled in 1958. Last year, that number was 94%.

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And the brand of racism that involves using the n-word, let alone in public, let alone in front of thousands of people, is simply (and happily) not an accepted part of our social landscape — as evidenced by the immediate mass condemnation and punishment of anyone even alleged to have indulged in it. Not only can we safely assume that most people feel no yearning to shout racial slurs at sporting events, we might also assume that the handful of troglodytes who do will nevertheless have the good sense to to avoid indulging that urge, given the consequences.

It’s a riff on the old medical wisdom: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. And when you hear a word with a hard “-ger” sound being shouted in the BYU stands, think cougars, not, well, you know.

But in our present moment, thinking “zebras” is what everyone does, and it’s not hard to understand why. Within the past few years, it seems like the folks who drive the national discourse — the cable news hosts, the talking heads, the journalists on every beat — have all coalesced around the narrative that when it comes to race in America, things are worse than ever.

The story goes like this: underneath the veneer of polite American society lies a deep and roiling river of racial resentment, barely contained at the best of times and always on the verge of spilling over. According to this narrative, that resentment is the only logical cause of every toxic, awkward, or otherwise negative interaction between a white person and a non-white person. Asking where someone is from? Racist. Working-class economic anxiety? Racist. Being unfriendly? Racist, obviously, but then again, so is being too friendly.

The idea that American race relations are bad and getting worse has been fuelled in many cases by legitimate tragedies: the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; the murder of George Floyd in 2020. But rather than seeing something like Floyd’s death as a problem of police abuse, and one that might be solved by police reform, we were told that it was representative of the country’s true character. When Derek Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck, he was only making manifest the racist hatred that simmers inside all of us.

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And if you assume the ubiquitous presence of that kind of hate, then no alleged hate crime, no matter how over-the-top, is too outlandish to be believed — even if the allegations themselves are unsubstantiated or ambiguous. The hoofbeats you hear? Zebras, not horses. When Jussie Smollett claimed to have been assaulted on the street at 3am, in one of the most liberal cities in the country, on one of the coldest nights of the year, by two Trump voters who just happened to be carrying a noose in their back pockets, it was interpreted as a sign how bad things really were. When a sixth grader alleged that she’d been pinned down and had her dreadlocks forcibly cut by three white classmates, it was the same. When a journalist accidentally said “Nakers” (a spoonerism of “Knicks” and “Lakers”) while reporting on the death of Kobe Bryant, the internet went wild: obviously this was a pathetic attempt to get away with saying the n-word, as we had been reliably assured all white Americans are constantly yearning to do. When a 15 year-old in a MAGA hat smiled awkwardly at the guy chanting and banging a drum in his face, we knew we were witnessing an act of racial aggression. And when a looped string appeared — in a public park, or in a NASCAR garage — we knew, without a doubt, that it was a noose.

This is what happens to a society that has been primed to assume the worst — and then, when the worst turns out not to be the case, to simply point to the assumption itself as evidence that things are dire. When the “noose” hung in NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage turned out to be just a pull rope, the Washington Post scolded readers that this was no reason to feel relieved: being glad that this wasn’t a hate crime just indicated a state of “denial about the dreary state of the nation”. Don’t you dare imagine that things are getting better. Don’t you dare imagine progress has been made. Maybe this cry of “wolf!” turned out to be baloney, but the fact that you believed there was a wolf tells you everything you need to know.

Needless to say, it is not good for a society to exist in a state of such constant catastrophising vigilance for signs of racial resentment. Amid our obsessive fear of fake news, this is a particularly insidious sort of misinformation; it is the reason why, for instance, liberal Americans grossly overestimate the number of unarmed black men killed every year by police. The actual number in 2019 was somewhere between 10 and 30, but fully 53% of surveyed liberals assumed it was over 1,000, while 22% estimated the number at 10,000 or more. It is also why, even as Americans across the board report feeling good about diversity and warmth for their black countrymen, we nevertheless believe that other people’s racism is bad and getting worse.

But the worst harm is something more basic: it is bad for black Americans to be unreasonably terrified that they’ll be hate-crimed every time they leave the house. It is wrong to instil fear and pessimism and panic for the sake of clicks. And telling people that many of their fellow Americans secretly hate them and wish them harm, when this is not in fact the case, is morally reprehensible.

Nevertheless, Western media has repeatedly validated the claim, often celebrating it. The result is that in the minds of billions of people, China was uniquely successful at containing the virus. What few, if any, have realised is that among the many false narratives constructed and deployed by the Chinese government, Zero Covid has been the most successful — a fact evidenced by the widespread adoption and use of that patently self-contradictory term itself.

Like any global, historically significant false narrative worth its salt, Zero Covid has not been monolithic in its claims. Rather, it has been modulated by the Chinese propaganda apparatus, with, of course, the witting or unwitting collaboration of Western media that has been essential to its success. The most recent manifestation of the Zero Covid false narrative is one that speaks to its daring and sophistication — the idea that, in response to criticism and pressure, the Chinese government came to terms with the fact that it could not cope with the swell of Omicron cases and so needed to ease restrictions.

The new “China is easing restrictions” phase of the CCP’s Zero Covid campaign began to emerge in March when a high-ranking Chinese health official began arguing in the Chinese business news outlet, Caixin, that China should fight the disease “more sustainably”. “We should carve a very clear path and not spend all our time debating whether we should continue zero Covid or coexist (with the virus),” wrote Zhang Wenhong, a senior infectious disease specialist known as the “Chinese Fauci”. Zhang followed up with another opinion piece a week later: “China’s Pandemic Fight Can and Should Allow for Normal Life.”

This development seemingly exposed the flaws in China’s Covid strategy, which is exactly what was messaged by the US media. The Associated Press article that reported Zhang’s comments added that despite the new policy advice, “the government is sticking with the tried-and-true policy of lockdowns, repeated mass testing of millions of people and a two-week or more quarantine for overseas arrivals…Opening up carries risks, because the country’s success in protecting people from Covid-19 means many don’t have antibodies to fight the virus from previous infection.”

The reality that the AP report papered over — and what virtually all Western media has missed as it swallowed CCP’s Covid narrative whole — is that China’s true Covid strategy wasn’t aimed at containing the virus; it was aimed at containing the narrative. “The Chinese CDC was told how it’s going to go,” a private intelligence analyst with knowledge of the data said. The source explains that the CCP’s methodology of choice is not to flatly deny data or take down reporting wholesale but simply “round the edges” off the story by obfuscating just enough to blunt any alternative narrative from forming.

This new inflection in the Zero Covid narrative, which claimed that Omicron reveals the “limits” of China’s approach, merely served to reinforce the idea that China had successfully contained Covid had up that point. In an article on the limits of Zero Covid in the Omicron era, the BBC credulously noted, “If you adjust for population size, there’s been around three deaths per million people in mainland China, compared with about 3,000 in the US and 2,400 in the UK.”

Even entertaining China’s absurd Zero Covid claims requires suspending basic human logic. Consider the case of Singapore, a country much richer and more advanced than China that was able to drive compliance at least as well. (Though considering the entire country is an urban island, in distinction to China’s vast rural expanses, probably much better.)

According to analyst George Calhoun, official Chinese data put China’s mortality rate 50 times lower than Singapore’s. South Korea — which has a single, permanently closed border which effectively makes it an island — is another standout for Covid success. Yet by Chinese official reporting, South Korea’s Covid mortality would be 73 times higher Covid-19 than China’s.

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Late last year, The Economist published a machine learning study on global Covid-19 under-reporting rates, comparing reported Covid deaths to estimated excess deaths. The study found that it looked like the US under-reported Covid mortality by around 20%, though a number of Western European countries at times over-reported by around 2-3%. The highest rates of under-reported mortality top out at around 1,000% for countries including India, Afghanistan, Venezuela and a handful of others. That is, except for China, which the study estimates to have under-reported mortality by an eye-watering 19,000%.

Looking at China’s official death counts tells an equally surreal story. Like a fairytale princess, China’s total death count was frozen for well over a year from January 25, 2021 until March 21, 2022 at the magical number of 4,636. Prior to that, from April 20, 2020 to January 25, there were four deaths. Taking these numbers at face value, this would make the death rate of the United States, where superior vaccines were distributed with high compliance rates, 800 times higher than China’s.

In the US, we have an old saying about gullibility which goes that if you’re willing to believe some outlandish statement then we have a bridge to sell you (that being the Brooklyn Bridge). If we were to abstract this reality and describe this situation generically to a group of listeners, be they savvy statisticians or plain-thinking journalists, the chances that they would believe these numbers to be real would be next to zero.

And yet, not only have we all believed China’s claims about its Covid “success”, specifically Zero Covid, we’ve built an entire political theory around it. This theory states that while China’s authoritarian system of government certainly has its downsides (human rights and civil liberties and all that), the big upside is that it’s effective. With the pandemic, this reasoning goes, China was naturally somewhat draconian, but ultimately successful. Authoritarianism saves lives, you see.

“China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic,” a WHO report on China’s handling of the pandemic observed. Interestingly, one of the members of the WHO mission that produced the report, epidemiologist Tim Eckmanns, told Science magazine, “I thought there was no way those numbers could be real.” And yet, despite his own disbelief, he believed them to be real.

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In a 2020 column titled “China Got Better. We Got Sicker. Thanks, Trump.” Thomas Friedman touted the wild success of the CCP. “[W]ho can blame the Chinese for gloating? A pandemic that began in Wuhan, and, for now, has been contained in China.” Friedman even allowed for a little number-fudging, writing, “Maybe China’s fibbing. OK — so quadruple its numbers — China still has been vastly better at protecting its people than the United States.”

Friedman never pondered the possibility that he might need to not quadruple China’s numbers but multiply them by 180 or 800 times. The patently ridiculous baseline mortality numbers set by China and validated endlessly by the Western media allowed commentators like Friedman to factor in CCP lying by a factor of four and still be off by an order of magnitude. (Who can blame China for gloating, indeed.)

What’s curious about the narrative that emerged in Western media is that it’s almost exactly the same one that Beijing was (and still is) advancing. While Western observers might think that the CCP’s wanting to “round the edges” of reporting on data would want to do the same regarding the rougher edges of its political approach, that’s incorrect. The CCP’s own messaging used the term “draconian” to describe the measures taken in response to Covid. For us “draconian measures” is harsh criticism; for the CCP it’s self-affirmation.

As egregious as it is, Zero Covid is only one facet of China’s propaganda campaign. Another equally important piece of this puzzle, one that ties Zero Covid to the question of the pandemic’s origin, is the date of the first outbreak. While most of the media has let the question settle comfortably on China’s official story, the reality is much more questionable.

According to China (and some Western experts), the first recorded cases were diagnosed sometime in mid-December 2019, which connects the outbreak of the pandemic to people who visited the now infamous seafood market. But evidence has emerged suggesting that the first outbreak might have emerged as early as November that year that would make the seafood market origin much more difficult (if not impossible) to support.

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The same arsenal of tactics has been deployed, such as disqualifying early cases in China because they didn’t meet an almost impossible criteria — for example, being admitted to hospital and testing positive with a PCR test, which required being admitted to one of the very few hospitals that administered PCR tests in those early days. A key article in Caixin tracking these disqualified early cases was swiftly taken offline with a redirect put in place to the Office of Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission. It cites a statute that calls on Chinese citizens to “fulfil social responsibilities, adhere to correct public opinion orientation and value orientation, promote socialist core values, and publish high-quality information content that is upward and good,” as DRASTIC researcher Gilles Demaneuf documented.

In a way, the CCP can be forgiven its epistemic sins. It was, after all, just doing its job: consolidating power, weaving false narratives, tamping down dissent. What’s more concerning — what is in fact, a four-alarm fire raging deep in an institutional sub-basement — is that the CCP campaign could never have succeeded without Western complicity, and most of all, with the complicity of the American media, broadly construed.

If it weren’t for the fact that China’s false mortality data was presented in Google search results; or that Twitter-verified members of China’s State-Sponsored Media could post without being flagged; or, most glaringly and egregiously, that the legacy press actively spread the mistruths and openly celebrated them, the narrative could never have been built. And even if it had been, it would never have mattered.

“The world is turning its eyes to China, and China is ready,” Xi Jinping said in advance of the great authoritarian spectacle, the Beijing Olympics, which took place when Zero Covid was still the official party line. Xi was right that China was ready, but though the West had turned its eyes to China, it failed to scrutinise it whatsoever.

And what are we to make of the fact that “exploitation” can mean many things at once? If stripper and customer exist in symbiosis, both taking advantage and being taken advantage of all at once, what then? Exploitation can be a means of self-advancement. It can be morally neutral. It can be mutual. It might, in fact, be none of our business.

A recent book, Wanting You to Want Me, examines these questions (among others) through the eyes of the strippers themselves, with photos and first-hand narratives from more than a dozen women who have been — and in some cases, remain — employed in the industry. When I wrote last month about the current glut of stripper-themed literature, which uses the profession as a platform for everything from activist organising to business strategy, I singled out Wanting You To Want Me as compelling, unvarnished, and unique in its willingness to dwell in the self-contradictory nuances of these women’s lives:

“There are no easy answers here, no unified narrative. But there is honesty: about how stripping can be a source of both shame and freedom at the same time, about the diversity of relationships that incubate within the confines of a strip club, about wanting to stop but also not wanting to, about the rapid-onset despair that comes when the fantasy can no longer sustain itself.”

I praised Wanting You to Want Me as a book that doesn’t try to sell anything. It didn’t occur to me, until I heard from one of the women featured in its pages, that it might be exploitive in an entirely different way — not because it was selling something, but because it had stolen something.

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Bex is one of more than a dozen women whose image and words were used in Wanting You to Want Me, but even within the pages of the book, she stands out: ballerina thin, with razor-sharp cheekbones and a wild cascade of loose, brown curls. She has an angular, elegant look that runs counter to the stereotypical image of someone in her industry, and which made her something of a star in high-class Parisian clubs when she first began stripping at the age of 20. In the book, she’s photographed wearing black, lacy lingerie and a pair of black, thigh-high stockings — or, in one case, just the stockings — and a confident, slightly aloof expression on her face. One gets the sense that this is a woman who never feels naked, even when she’s nude.

And yet, she tells me, this book rattled her. It was a level of exposure she wasn’t prepared for, and didn’t agree to.

Bex’s path through the world of stripping is a blast to read about. In Paris she partied with famous footballers; in London, she was based in a slightly dilapidated club, where the changing room doubles as a repository for dysfunctional kitchen appliances. But what matters is that she’s a career stripper, and unlikely to ever do anything else. Partly, it’s that she’s unsuited to office life; partly, it’s that she just likes stripping. “It’s a job you’ll only do well at if you enjoy it on some level,” she says, and Bex has definitely done well.

Bex doesn’t like the term “sex work”, not least because strippers by definition don’t have sex with their clients. The men who frequent strip clubs are paying not for physical intimacy but the fantasy thereof, the thrill of that sexually-charged moment in which something could happen (but never does). “I usually call myself a performer,” she says, and part of that performance is the creation of boundaries. Not just no touching (that cardinal strip club rule), but no sharing, no intimacy, no letting her clients pay their way into her personal life.

“When people have information on you, you’re giving them power,” she explains. “I’m always thinking about doing my job. The minute you start to think that you’re just a friend, you’re having a chat — you’re not. You’re acting.”

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Bex has diligently maintained a separation between the person she is onstage or in a private dance room — who she describes as bossy and dominant — and her whole, vulnerable, slightly eccentric self. But it was the latter person whose words have been reproduced in Wanting You to Want Me, and her willingness to let her guard down stemmed from a sense that the project was informal and extracurricular: the author was someone she knew, a fellow member of London’s relatively small community of strippers, and the interview from which her portions of the book were derived was presented to her as “a casual thing between friends”.

“This sounds really naive now, and it probably was — but I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal,” she says.

Bex’s conviction that she was contributing to something small and frivolous — more like a pamphlet than a hardcover book from a big-name publisher — might have been misplaced, but it was also understandable. She’d done media before, including a radio interview with the BBC, and had a working knowledge of its professional norms: “They just use a couple paragraphs, and you don’t hear much more about it.” Also, perhaps most importantly, these projects typically paid her for her time.

The authors of Wanting You to Want Me did not. Bex’s interview took place at her own home, without remuneration, and caught her at a bad time: it was early 2020, London was going into lockdown, and the sudden loss of income had thrown her into a state of panic. She did the interview, then forgot about it — until two years later, when the book landed on her doorstep.

To write nonfiction is to tell other people’s stories. There’s no getting around this, and it can be fraught, especially when we take it upon ourselves to capture a story that is fascinating and true but not necessarily flattering to the person at its centre. But Wanting You to Want Me arguably goes a step beyond this: when Bex opened the book, she found her interview reproduced more or less verbatim, including some comments she desperately wished she’d had the opportunity to edit.

“I wouldn’t have gone in and nitpicked and changed all of my story,” she says. “I stand by the things that I say. Some of the things I’ve said are outrageous, and that’s fine.”

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What she would have changed were one or two sentences that had the potential to damage her professionally, or to affect her relationship with her colleagues in the club — and she was shocked that the authors hadn’t given her the chance to review her comments before sending them to print. “We all say stupid things, and you don’t expect them to be made permanent. I don’t want anyone to be hurt by something I said that might potentially be on the shelves at Waterstones for years to come.”

That neither authors nor publisher considered giving the women whose stories formed the heart of Wanting You to Want Me a chance to review their comments is perhaps a hazard of the current culture, in which stripping can now serve as a launchpad to greater things: activism, business, journalism, writing. In the book’s introduction, the authors position the project as something at once unprecedented and noble: giving voice to the voiceless, telling the untold, opening the door to a secret, seedy, and oftentimes sad little world of invisible women.

The more stripping comes to seem like a cool accessory — something with which to burnish your resume and make yourself look more interesting than the average MBA-seeker — the easier it is to forget that for women like Bex, stripping is their job. One that requires, among other things, an absolutely iron grip on what you allow other people to see. Without the ability to control what she puts out there, Bex can’t make a living; her depiction in Wanting You to Want Me wrested away that control in a way that threatened to undermine her professionally, that blurred the carefully-crafted boundaries she’d put up between her real life and her life on stage.

That the women they interview needed to return to work after sharing their stories — and that a stripper might have a professional reputation which she needs to preserve in order to stay employed — seems not to have occurred to the authors of book.

“I felt weirdly reduced,” Bex says. “It’s like, here’s a book about strippers. They put a label on it, and it felt so final, this narrow identity. It’s a performance, and it’s a part of my life, but this made it seem like it defined my life.”

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It was also, arguably, something akin to robbery. Having pivoted to online camming during the pandemic, Bex has come to understand that her time, and her stories, can be even more valuable than her body when it comes to earning a living. “Those are the kind of things that people ask me all day long on webcam, and they pay me a lot of money to hear those stories.”

The fact that the authors and publisher of Wanting You To Want Me packaged those same stories into a book without paying the women who shared them — and that the book itself was marketed as some sort of noble, photojournalistic art project to which they should have felt honoured to contribute — felt both deeply exploitive and uniquely demoralising. “This was the first time I got scammed,” she says, “and it was by someone I considered a friend.”

Even more than the book itself, the story of how it came to be highlights the tension inherent to working as a stripper, the precarious balancing act it requires, and the hypocrisy of avowedly pro-sex-work people who manage to dismiss and devalue that work even as they profit from it. A book like Wanting You to Want Me requires hours and hours of interviews — which is to say, hours and hours of time that the women in its pages spent talking about their work for free, when they might have been working. The activists, artists, and media figures who use strippers or sex workers to advance a narrative — and with that narrative, their own interests — may not be engaged in the same type of advantage-taking as the men who pay for their services, but it’s exploitation all the same.

And as for Bex, one gets the sense that this will be the first and last time she allows someone else to leverage her stories for their own self-advancement. The people she’s friends with now, she says, “don’t have an agenda. they’re not trying to write a book about me. They don’t need me for photo shoots. They don’t want me to come along on a political march. They don’t need me to sign a petition.”

And while this experience hasn’t turned her off from stripping, it has led her to guard that part of her life more carefully — not because she’s ashamed of it, but because it belongs to her and nobody else.

For all that, many of us have developed the habit of reading multiple accounts of any given news item, because so often reports are filtered through an ideological lens. There was, for instance, Omar Jimenez’s coverage of protests in Kenosha for CNN, described as “mostly peaceful” in the chyron running under the report in spite of the clearly visible backdrop of burning cars and buildings. Similarly, the BBC was roundly mocked for its description of “largely peaceful” protests in London, in which 27 police officers were injured.

Instinctively, it feels as though these reporters must be peddling these untruths knowingly, perhaps out of a misguided sense of paternalistic responsibility to prevent further discord. But even more troubling is the possibility that they have bought into their own fictions. If one accepts the postmodernist belief that our experiences are solely constructed through the language with which they are expressed, then to describe an event as “largely peaceful” makes it so.

Such blunders are only the more egregious examples of the kind of white lies and misrepresentations we find on an almost daily basis in the national press. Occasionally there is a backlash, such as when the BBC modified the quotation of a rape victim so that her attacker was not misgendered. But on the whole this routine twisting of the truth goes unnoticed. We have grown accustomed to reporters telling us what to think about a story, rather than simply relaying the key facts and leaving us to judge for ourselves.

Even reputable academic journals are willing to jettison inconvenient truths if they better suit their desired reality. When the New England Journal of Medicine argued that “sex designations on birth certificates offer no clinical utility”, few of us were surprised. The Journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry has even produced new guidelines to “minimise the risk of publishing inappropriate or otherwise offensive content”. If the truth hurts, it ought to be avoided.

When journalists, academics and politicians advance a worldview in direct opposition to observable reality, they risk creating what Jürgen Habermas once described as a “legitimation crisis”, by which trust in figures of authority is irreparably depleted. This seems particularly germane given reports this week that the head of the World Health Organisation privately believes that Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. It wasn’t that long ago that the scientific consensus dismissed this as little more than a racist conspiracy theory.

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Throughout the pandemic we saw experts silenced or marginalised if they offered views that deviated from the accepted narrative. YouTube videos that posited the lab-leak theory were removed. An UnHerd interview featuring Professor Karol Sikora was taken offline after he suggested that the virus was likely to “burn out” and that levels of public immunity had been underestimated. Wasn’t this former advisor to the WHO entitled to an opinion?

Meanwhile, experts who peddle “accepted” narratives remain free to indulge in blatant untruths that we are expected to take on trust. In June 2020, more than 1,200 medical practitioners signed a letter arguing that existing restrictions put in place to curb the spread of coronavirus ought not to apply to Black Lives Matter demonstrations. The epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo wrote: “We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus. In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” Are we to believe that the virus would take some time off so long as the protesters’ cause was just?

That figures of authority are so often caught in lies has brought about an erosion of confidence in our institutions. I barely scraped a GCSE in Biology, but when esteemed scientific journals are publishing authors who maintain that “sex is a spectrum”, it gives the false impression that my understanding of the subject is superior to theirs.  Experts appear to have forgotten that the legitimacy of their claims is grounded in evidence and research, not by waving around a doctoral certificate.

Perhaps this is why we are now so familiar with the spectacle of academics humiliating themselves on social media. As Helen Pluckrose once pointed out to me: “It’s a worry when you can’t tell whether the person yelling at you is a 12-year-old whose parents need to take their Twitter account away, or a Professor of Sociology.” While we may laugh at the truculent behaviour of authority figures degrading themselves — this, after all, is the basis of traditional farce — there is a sinister aspect to all of this. When experts are so patently captured by an ideology, they surrender their capacity to think critically. And that’s not good news for any of us.

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In some cases, this deviation from the truth is deliberate and tactical. Consider, for instance, the phenomenon that Peter Boghossian describes as “idea laundering”. The process begins with a moral impulse among certain ideologically driven academics. Journals are founded, papers are published, classes are taught, and before long what was once the vaguest intuition is supported by a body of academic literature. Boghossian offers the example of “Fat Studies”, an area of study which seeks to lend credence to the view that: “the clinical concept of obesity (a medical term) is merely a story we tell ourselves about fat (a descriptive term); it’s not true or false – in this particular case, it’s a story that exists within a social power dynamic that unjustly ascribes authority to medical knowledge.”

What begins as a fanciful theory emerges as “knowledge” through this laundering process.  It explains why a notion as nebulous as “whiteness” is now so widely and uncritically accepted. Ideas that have little basis in reality emerge from universities as de facto truths, and those brave enough to challenge them are quickly and mercilessly subdued. And while most of us are happy to conform for the sake of an easy life, our trust in those institutions supposedly dedicated to the production of knowledge quickly deteriorates.

Scepticism about expertise is important: no human being is infallible or free from bias, however well-qualified. Yet at the same time, we rely on figures in authority with specialist insight for the practical business of living. When journalists begin to conflate truth and fiction, or when academics substitute wishful thinking for empirical knowledge, we are left unmoored from reality. For the sake of our collective sanity, we need to restate the primacy of the truth.

The dominant narrative in the press is that Republicans, or at least a significant cohort of them, were participants in the Senate Watergate Committee’s search for the truth in 1973 and not strictly partisan or obstructionist. This narrative, of course, has enjoyed renewed popularity because of the obvious comparisons between Watergate and the serial high crimes and misdemeanours committed by President Donald Trump.

One question, uttered on June 28, 1973, supposedly exemplified Republicans’ bipartisanship. “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Tennessee Senator Howard Baker famously asked John Dean, President Nixon’s former White House counsel, who was now fessing up to his role as desk officer for the Watergate cover-up. For some reason, the context of Baker’s very first question to Dean has been forgotten. The ambitious senator was not engaged in a bipartisan search for the truth; rather, Baker was creating a firebreak that he hoped would protect Nixon’s presidency against what he realised had been three-and-a-half days of extremely damaging testimony. But there was one very large hole in Dean’s cool and detailed account. His first direct meeting of any consequence with the President had not occurred until February 27, 1973, more than eight months after the June 17th break-in. So while Dean believed he was carrying out the President’s wishes, he could not actually offer direct testimony about what Nixon knew and did in the earliest and most crucial phase of the cover-up.

Baker’s gambit gave every evidence of working — for two weeks. Then, in mid July, White House assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of an extensive, voice-activated tape recording system that promised to resolve what appeared to be an insuperable obstacle: who was telling the truth? As the late Stanley Kutler, the dean of Watergate historians, wrote, “discovery of the tapes undid Baker’s careful handiwork. The tapes made irrelevant his question to John Dean… [Because now] Richard Nixon himself could answer Baker, and in indelible words.”

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Kutler’s observation was an understatement. Baker’s question had transmogrified into a battering ram against Nixon, until he was ultimately forced to give up the tapes, and it was his own words, more than any other single factor, that forced him into a humiliating resignation.

And what Baker did after his strategy backfired should not be forgotten either. He did not give up on his aim of being seen inside the GOP as the senator who saved Nixon’s presidency, a reputation that he hoped would put him head and shoulders above his party rivals for a future presidential run. While the president fought his way through the courts for months, hoping to avoid having to turn the tapes over to the special Watergate prosecutor, Baker and the minority counsel, Fred Thompson (a future Tennessee senator), desperately attempted a rearguard action. They sought to implicate the Central Intelligence Agency in the break-in, rather than the White House and Committee to Re-Elect the President. It was one of the most cynical acts in a scandal brimming with them.

About two weeks before the Senate Watergate Committee released its final report, in mid-July 1974, Baker and Thompson leaked their findings of alleged CIA complicity to the press. They landed with a thud, and were completely forgotten once the president released on August 5 what instantly became known as “the smoking gun” tape: an Oval Office conversation between Nixon and his top aide Bob Haldeman discussing how to use the CIA to impede the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Baker finally had the answer to his question.

Baker’s reputation suffered no lasting damage, in or out of the GOP. When his devastating question was remembered, as it often was, it was taken out of its intended context. And Baker exhibited no abiding impulse to correct the misunderstanding after Nixon’s disgrace was complete. Indeed, as time went on he absolutely welcomed the erroneous interpretation.

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If rose-colored glasses and wishful thinking drive the false narrative about Watergate bipartisanship, the same cannot be said for the driving force behind the other misleading narrative. Here, vested interests, reputations, and a lot of money are at stake.

Philip L. Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post before Katherine Graham of Watergate-era fame, is frequently credited (albeit erroneously) with coining the saying that “journalism is the first rough draft of history.” That phrase is the problem in a nutshell. Those who wrote the first rough draft of Watergate have persisted in doing everything to ensure the first draft is also the final draft, aided enormously by the press writ large, eager to bask in the reflected glory.

The ubiquitous narrative about Watergate is still largely the one laid out in All the President’s Men, the 1974 book by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, which became an eponymous Hollywood blockbuster starring Robert Redford in 1976. As the literary critic Wilfrid Sheed noted, Americans might be getting fuzzy about the details of Watergate, “but at least they remember the movie: a couple of nosy journalists and an informer, wasn’t it?”

No one much noticed the degree to which the book was a product of, and influenced by, a passing fancy at the time, the so-called “New Journalism.” Books in this genre employed literary devices normally considered the domain of novels and put them to work in books that purported to be nonfiction. “Woodstein” exploited their factual authority as journalists while simultaneously enjoying the license granted novelists. The result was a gripping newspaper procedural focused most intensely on the first eight months or so of the scandal — but one that was a very narrow slice of that history and bore only a faint resemblance to what had actually gone on inside the confines of The Washington Post.

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Most notably, All The President’s Men neatly sidestepped the truth that a troika — not a duo — was responsible for the Post’s coverage. Barry Sussman, a city editor who became the special Watergate editor in mid-July 1972, had been indispensable in producing the stories that won the Post a Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, managing editor Howard Simons believed that if any one individual, rather than the paper as a whole, deserved a Pulitzer, it was Sussman, not Woodstein. As Simons told Alan Pakula, director of the feature film, “Barry made acceptable the work of two junior reporters . . . [who] didn’t understand what they had often and couldn’t write it.”

Other principal actors slighted, if not maligned, in Bernstein and Woodward’s fabulistic account were the three federal attorneys assigned to prosecute the Watergate burglars; a slew of FBI agents doing the investigating; and the grand jury empaneled to hear the evidence, issue subpoenaes, and draw up indictments. The Watergate cover-up was not broken by the press, but by the legal pincers these actors built, which inexorably closed in on those who had committed perjury during the January 1973 trial of the burglars or otherwise conspired to obstruct justice. No one has ever conveyed a more balanced account of the press vs. the government’s role than Sandy Smith, a legendary reporter for Time magazine who broke as many important stories about Watergate as anyone in the Washington press corps, including Woodstein. After Nixon’s August 1974 resignation, Smith observed,

There’s a myth that the press did all this, uncovered all the crimes . . . It’s bunk. The press didn’t do it. People forget that the government was investigating all the time. In my material there was less than 2 percent that was truly original investigation. There was an investigation being carried out here. It may have been blocked, bent, botched, or whatever [at times], but it was proceeding. The government investigators found the stuff and gave us something to expose.

Finally, there is one last aspect that tells us more about the false narrative presented in All the President’s Men than any other element in the book. It involves the shadowy figure who became as inseparable from the book as the authors themselves, i.e., Sheed’s informer, aka “Deep Throat,” aka W. Mark Felt, the number two executive at the FBI when the Watergate break-in occurred. From 1974 to 2005, Bernstein and Woodward, wined, dined, and gave lectures for which they were handsomely paid, telling and re-telling stories of their reportorial prowess, with their cultivation of Deep Throat the apex of their Watergate reportage. Both journalists were hailed constantly for their supposed fidelity to their über-secret source. You could remove their fingernails and they still wouldn’t reveal Deep Throat’s identity.

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It was actually a phoney mystery. A wizened, razor-sharp retired newspaper editor named Frank Waldrop, who was said to be “absolutely wired [in] to the FBI”, told the Washingtonian magazine, when asked about the Deep Throat guessing game in the spring of 1974, “Read the February 28 [1973] and March 13 [1973] Nixon presidential transcripts and then try someone like Mark Felt on for size.”

Nonetheless, that Woodstein held fast to their pledge of confidentiality to Deep Throat was widely accepted at face value. And it was true that they had, more or less, abided by all the “deep background” stipulations Felt laid down when he agreed to be a source for newspaper stories. But it was also true that Bernstein and Woodward had glaringly violated these same stipulations when writing their book. The public became aware of Felt’s existence as a source; his instrumentality in the stories; what he told Woodward and when. His words were supposedly quoted verbatim, and information he supplied Woodward was linked to specific Post stories, even exact passages. The only fig leaves left for Felt to hide behind was his risqué code name, after a pornographic film popular at the time, and the fact that he was identified as having worked at an unnamed “executive branch” agency.

Eventually the guessing game grew so popular, but wearying and tedious for the authors, that in 1976, Woodward developed a gambit that relieved the pressure while doing nothing to lessen public interest. Now celebrities in their own right, the duo declared that someday, they were fairly certain, history’s most famous whistleblower would come out of the shadows, claim his just reward by writing a fascinating book, and receive the acclaim that was his due. But until then, they were going to keep their word — unless Deep Throat were to die before publishing his story. No one imagined this was an entirely unilateral decision, just as the decision to include him in the book had been. Felt was already furious over the book’s serial violations of the “deep background” arrangement. He was not asked, and certainly did not agree, to be identified in the event of his death. Yet Woodward and Bernstein acted if this were a signed agreement stowed away in a safe-deposit box.

The dénouement finally occurred in May 2005, when Felt’s family and his lawyer outed him in the pages of Vanity Fair, hoping to cash in on the untold story. Bernstein and Woodward grudgingly admitted that Felt was Deep Throat, and the identification finally allowed for careful analysis about what Felt’s design had been all along — or what the late Christopher Hitchens said “rank[ed] as the single most successful use of the news media by an anonymous unelected official with an agenda of his own.”

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Woodstein had long fostered, of course, their preferred interpretation of Felt’s motive: Deep Throat was a selfless, high-ranking official intent on trying to protect the office of the presidency from a criminal in the person of Richard Nixon. Felt “was trying to protect the office [of the presidency],” they wrote in 1974, “to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” Actor Hal Holbrook’s brooding portrayal of Deep Throat in the film version had then turned Woodstein’s portrait into something indelible.

But then a curious thing happened. In his own 2005 book about Felt, The Secret Man, Woodward backed away from Felt-as-principled whistleblower, and offered a far more pedestrian — and bureaucratic — explanation familiar to anyone who has laboured in the federal government. Felt leaked because he “believed he was protecting the [FBI]” from a corrupt, lawless president. Eventually Woodward reluctantly threw a third element into his admixture of motives: Felt was “disappointed that he did not get the directorship” following the untimely death of J. Edgar Hoover, who had died seven weeks before the break-in.

The sale of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate papers to the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas for $5 million in 2003, however, along with the release of the FBI’s Watergate files, opened the door to an independent assessment. When Woodward’s raw notes from his conversations with Felt were finally opened, none of the above explanations made sense. But a new one did: that Felt’s actions were entirely and only consistent with the “war of the FBI succession,” a no-holds-barred, vicious, internal struggle to succeed Hoover that had been going on for years. Felt leaked not out of pique or bitterness, not to protect the FBI, and not out of any concern over the office of the presidency. His sole aim was to destroy Nixon’s confidence in the acting FBI director, L. Patrick Gray, smear presumed rivals for the job, and steer Nixon toward appointing Felt himself. Richard Nixon was Felt’s only ticket to the directorship and the idea that Deep Throat ever intended to bring the president to ruin was absurd.

It defies belief that two of the most celebrated investigative reporters of their generation did not understand Felt’s true design contemporaneously, or, say, no later than 20 years after Nixon’s resignation. That Bernstein and Woodward still pretend otherwise tells one everything one needs to know about their first rough draft.

It was a fable, almost as self-serving as Felt’s leaks.

“We are proud to welcome Moses Ingram to the Star Wars family and excited for Reva’s story to unfold,” it read, alongside a photo of its newest cast member. “If anyone intends to make her feel in any way unwelcome, we have only one thing to say: we resist.”

And then, just in case you didn’t get the message, there was a follow-up tweet: “There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist.”

Suggesting millions of Star Wars fans are a bunch of racists-in-waiting might seem like a peculiar PR strategy. But if you were to plot the marketing trajectory of Star Wars alongside the fall of traditional journalism, a pattern would begin to emerge.

Today’s predominant mode of cultural engagement began incubating on Tumblr around 2010, spread to mainstream media in the lead-up to America’s 2016 election, and now dominates the entire cultural apparatus up to and including Hollywood itself. It owes much to the 2008 recession, and the mass layoffs in media which fundamentally transformed how news was covered.

Imagine a horde of freshly unemployed veteran writers, alongside new journalism grads, desperately trying to claw out a livelihood in a world where writing had been completely devalued. (It was not unusual, at this time, to be told that the job you were applying for paid not in money but “exposure”.) Gone was the $2-per-word magazine staff writer position; gone was the local shoe-leather reporting job that might launch a lifelong career. Now, a writer’s best option was freelance blogging, churning out listicles and aggregated new stories at $15 a pop — and with a quota, which at some outlets ran as high as 20 posts per day.

The pressure to produce content on such an accelerated timeline spawned a lot of half-arsed, hastily-executed work (“10 Times Brad Pitt’s Butt Made Me Want To Die: A List In GIFs”) but also created a constant scramble for something, anything, to write about. Social media, then in its infancy, was a lifesaver: as a reporter at MTV News, I could curate a quick roundup of Twitter or Tumblr reactions to last night’s Game of Thrones episode in less than 20 minutes, which allowed me to meet my quota while also prioritising more interesting, time-consuming work (for instance, getting a trauma surgeon to assess whether it was actually, medically possible for The Mountain to crush Oberyn Martell’s skull like a grape).

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At the time, this interface between reporters and random posters was both friendly and fully symbiotic: the writers got free content, the posters increased their internet clout. And crucially, nobody took any of it all that seriously; even being cruel could earn you a coveted place in the Celebs Read Mean Tweets roundup on Jimmy Kimmel Live.

But, in 2014, as cash-strapped media outlets chose to prioritise opinion journalism (quick and cheap) over investigative reporting (time-consuming and expensive), the news cycle became increasingly outrage-driven, and our thinking about the type of post that was deemed worthy of coverage changed. The saga of Justine Sacco had recently introduced a hungry populace to the joys of playing hunt-the-racist on Twitter. The US was becoming more tribal, and art, in turn, more political. The ridiculous culture war known as Gamergate consumed the discourse for months on end, as did a massive controversy over the new, all-female Ghostbusters reboot. Liking this movie — even just liking the idea of it — meant you were one of the good guys. Disliking it, on the other hand, marked you as not just a critic, but a Bad Person.

The new Star Wars trilogy, then, was perfectly positioned to become a flashpoint in this newest culture war — a war that directly benefited a media economy in which controversy meant clicks. Its first piece of promotional material could not have been more perfectly designed to provoke the ire of the franchise’s less-enlightened fans: a teaser, released in November 2014, featuring the actor John Boyega dressed as a stormtrooper.

This is not to say that the Star Wars publicity department wanted racists to take aim at the trailer, but given the number of pieces about “racist Star Wars fans” which followed over the next 24 hours, they would also have had to be idiots not to realise they’d stumbled on marketing gold.

At the same time, celebrities had cottoned on to the value of clapping back on social media. Responding to a random dickhead was no longer undignified or beneath them, but the quickest, easiest way to get positive press. So when Boyega made an Instagram post addressing the black stormtrooper controversy, the internet went wild.

A representative post about Boyega’s clapback reveals how easy it was to map this new, slightly sanctimonious mode of media coverage onto the existing social media-based story model. All you needed was a vaguely clickbaity headline (“JOHN BOYEGA SHUT DOWN RACIST ‘STAR WARS’ HATERS WITH FOUR SIMPLE WORDS”), followed by 250 lightly editorialised words about the incident, followed by two embedded tweets showcasing the alleged racism, rounded off with Boyega’s post and a boilerplate link back to the Force Awakens teaser.

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But what it also reveals, in hindsight, is how this mode of coverage blurred the boundaries between identifying a trend and manufacturing one. The two embedded tweets in that piece had a total of 11 retweets between them, suggesting that the sentiment within them were anything but popular. If not for the existing practice of trawling Twitter for “people are saying” stories — and if not for the absurd expectation that journalists should post new material every hour — there would never have been any reason to dig them up. The racist haters would have simply languished in obscurity, their tweets lost to the sands of time.

This would have been a good time for culture writers to step back, both from the quota model of journalism and from its engagement with stupid social media controversies. But this was 2015, which was followed by the year in which progressives abandoned all pretence of being culture war noncombatants and went all-in on sneering contempt. The purest form of this shift is Molly Fitzpatrick’s article, “Angry baby-men hate the new Ghostbusters trailer”.

In hindsight, the “baby-men” article marked a point of no return. The ossified smugness of it, the right-side-of-history certainty, the way that books and movies and television and music now sorted automatically on political grounds into things one ought to be either for or against. By the time the new Ghostbusters was actually released, the criticism of it was not criticism so much as a celebration of its mere existence, so that any assessment of whether it was good or not became entirely irrelevant. (It was, for the record, not good.)

And Star Wars was an opportunity like no other to stick it to the baby-men. It was about strong female characters, and intergalactic diversity, and standing up against the fascist forces of the Trump admi… uh, I mean, the Empire. By the time The Last Jedi came out in December 2017, the American Left had so thoroughly fused its pop culture with its politics that it was no longer possible to discern if the “Resistance” movement people kept referring to was the one with the spaceships, or the one with those ludicrous pink hats. By 2020, every Star Wars news cycle included stories about how the franchise’s forays into diversity continued to infuriate its toxic fanbase.

This brings us back to Obi Wan Kenobi and Moses Ingram, a story whose trajectory is as good an example as any of how Hollywood has learned to leverage this aspect of the discourse. On 22 May, Ingram told The Independent that she’d been warned about racist Star Wars fans by none other than the execs at Lucasfilm, and took a light jab at the lack of diversity in the franchise: “If you’ve got talking droids and aliens but no people of colour, it doesn’t make sense.” The Independent led with that quote, and the interview was dutifully re-reported over the next few days by multiple outlets — under such provocative headlines as “Lucasfilm Warned ‘Obi-Wan’ Star Moses Ingram About Racist ‘Star Wars’ Trolls”. And within a week, Ingram began posting screenshots of abusive messages she’d received on Instagram, including one calling her a “diversity hire”.

From there, it was a short distance to the “don’t be racist” tweet from the official Star Wars account. As of this writing, it has been retweeted upwards of 30,000 times, and dozens of mainstream media outlets from NPR to the Daily Show have run at least one story about it.

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None of this is to say that racist Star Wars fans do not exist. They do; the question is whether they are emboldened, even incentivised, by this continued, bizarre symbiosis with an outrage-driven media that relies on them for content. Consider one of the top citations in these stories, a YouTube video titled “Obi-Wan Series Is Going To Be AWFUL Because It’s Hiding Behind Diversity AGAIN!”, apparently made in response to Ingram’s 22 May comments in the Independent. The video is objectively offensive (the word “darkies” appears in the thumbnail), and the creator, an account named MechaRandom42, seems to specialise in intentionally inflammatory content with an anti-woke bent. But it is content that people mostly don’t watch: within the past month, she has posted multiple videos per week, most of which have paltry view counts in the 1,000-2,000 range.

The official Obi Wan Kenobi trailer posted a month ago by Disney has been viewed 11 million times. The “hiding behind diversity” video, on the other hand, has 13,000 views — the bulk of which came after journalists started citing it in their coverage of the controversy.

Who benefits from this? The trolls do, of course. They’re getting exactly what they want, their status and influence growing with every indignant squawk, every angry celebrity video response. But they’re not the only ones. A media class that makes its living on outrage gets a story that does numbers. Moses Ingram gets an outpouring of support and waves of positive press coverage. The studio execs behind Obi Wan Kenobi get the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from persuading a bunch of impressionable people that the best way to signal their moral correctness is by putting more money in Disney’s pocket. Everybody wins.

Except the art, of course. In a culture that cannot conceive of appreciating something you love unless it’s part of a righteous backlash against the angry baby-men you hate, art loses every time.

Even if you’re not among the account’s 826,000 Twitter followers, its nearly 100,000 Instagram fans, or its 20,000 subscribers on YouTube, its content is ubiquitous. The gimmick is simple: Libs of TikTok offers a collection of reposts from the far-Left internet, lightly editorialised and curated for maximum outrage.

Some of the content promoted by the account is blatantly misleading ragebait, including fabricated claims of sexual predation among schoolteachers or one ludicrous post claiming that an American high school had installed a litterbox in the restroom for students who sexually identified as cats. Some is objectively alarming, at least to parents of school-age children who would prefer their first graders didn’t receive explicit in-class instruction on alternative sexualities and gender identity. Some has the uncomfortable voyeuristic vibe of a freakshow: inviting spectators to gawk and jeer at people who are either very young, or clearly unwell, or both.

What they have in common, though, is virality. Virtually every post on the Libs of TikTok account does numbers, and its curator has a clear talent for picking out stuff that makes conservatives (and even some liberals) smash that retweet button.

Until recently, its curator was anonymous, and unremarkably so. But as the account’s influence over Right-wing political discourse grew — attracting attention from Republican politicians and shoutouts from people like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Megan McCain — the curiosity about who was behind it began to grow, particularly among ideological opponents who found its prominence suspicious. Fast forward to this week, and screenshots began circulating of emails from Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, who claimed to be writing an exposé that would reveal the poster’s identity.

When or whether to respect the right of online provocateurs to remain anonymous (or indeed, if such a right even exists) is a complicated question; much has already been written on whether or not unmasking the Libs of TikTok creator constitutes doxing, or if it’s just journalism. But this story also plays into a broader pattern in which media coverage functions as a sort of punishment — and a way to kneecap ordinary people who rise to prominence outside the walled garden of legacy media.

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Destroying the lives of random citizens by exposing them to a wider, hostile audience is very much a bipartisan enterprise. In one by no means isolated example from the political Right, a Breitbart editor’s coverage of one woman’s distasteful joke about a murdered police officer resulted in so much harassment that she had to flee her home. But the practice feels particularly slimy when such a piece is spearheaded by one of the big legacy outlets. In one standout example, also from the Washington Post, the paper inexplicably blew up the life of a random woman who had worn an offensive Halloween costume to a party two years previous. A year after that, the pseudonymous writer of the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex deleted his entire website after a New York Times reporter threatened to reveal his identity in an upcoming article.

When that piece did run, it contained ugly insinuations that Slate Star Codex was a haven for white supremacists, race scientists, and unapologetic misogyny — an angle that Robby Soave at Reason described as emblematic of “the paper’s increasingly panicky tech coverage”, which sought to tar influential entities in the tech space as “sources of Right-wing disinformation”. (Scott Siskind, who outed himself as the author of Slate Star Codex before the NYT could do it for him, was unsurprised, having been warned that embarrassing the Gray Lady would not go unpunished.)

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There are parallels in the Slate Star Codex story to what happened with Libs of TikTok: just as the rationalist blog became an influential voice among Silicon Valley thought leaders, Libs has developed a presence big enough to shape the public conversation on the American political Right. That power makes the account’s existence newsworthy, but its creator’s identity decidedly less so. The most salient questions about Libs of TikTok centre not on its maker but its message, its role in the discourse: How did this collection of reposts get so big, so fast? What’s in there that so reliably animates the anxieties and anger of the American Right? What do people who like and share these posts have to say about them?

But when the WaPo story ran, it was bizarrely short on the details that made Libs newsworthy. Instead, the woman behind it — a politically unconnected real estate agent and Trump supporter in Brooklyn — was the entire focus of the story.

It’s easy to criticise the hypocrisy of progressive journalists on this front, many of whom are decidedly inconsistent when it comes to preserving the anonymity of online posters, even when said posters gleefully draw negative attention to others. (Compare the praise for Lorenz’s piece to the general tone of the response in 2018 when rumours began circulating in 2018 that journalist Katie Roiphe intended to name the creator of the Shitty Media Men list, an anonymously sourced document containing the names of alleged bad men in New York media.)

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And certainly, publishing the Libs of TikTok creator’s name alongside allegations that she is a purveyor of Covid misinformation and anti-gay hate smacks of attempted cancellation, a desire to see her harassed, fired, professionally and socially destroyed. As with most such allegations, the truth is slightly more complicated, especially when what Lorenz classes as “anti-LGBT sentiment” would be described by some as normal parental concerns about what goes in on their kids’ classrooms — but there’s certainly much about Libs of TikTok, including its penchant for mocking maladjusted teens and the way it plays fast and loose with the word “groomer”, that is unmistakably distasteful. Many have also noted that the piece went the extra mile of not only outing the creator but including a link to her real estate licence, which contained private information including her Brooklyn address.

Yet what seems to animate this controversy isn’t just loathing, but professional envy — the same envy that lurks behind the negative coverage of Slate Star Codex, of Joe Rogan, of the independent journalists launching successful careers on Substack. These independent content creators threaten the monopoly of outlets like the Washington Post over the distribution of information and the setting of public opinion. And they’ve found enormous, organic success, even as the rest of the industry flounders under wage stagnation, dwindling pageviews, round after round of layoffs. Ultimately, it’s hard to know what Libs of TikTok’s greater sin is: being wrong, or being popular.

I have never understood what the issue was with the headline. But then again, I don’t spend my time with Guardian readers or BBC news producers. Frankly, I didn’t care if the Belgrano had nosed into the exclusion zone or not. We needed to kill them before they killed us.

Simplistic, but I imagine the Ukrainians feel pretty much the same today.

To understand where that headline came from, you would have to be sitting in The Sun’s newsroom, back in the spring of 1982. Compared with today it was not just a different world but a different universe.

The fog of cigarette smoke had impregnated the walls, turning them a ghastly yellow. There was the reassuring clatter of typewriters proving the reporters were working. Phones were ringing. (What’s a phone, grandad?) Every time a phone rang there was a chance a reader had stumbled on a story that would bring down a politician or prove Jimmy Savile was a paedo. Those calls were gold-dust. There were plenty of them.

There was alcohol. The reporters would go out for a drink — but for the executives there was plenty of the stuff hidden away from Rupert Murdoch’s prying eyes. Although on one occasion, Murdoch dropped in unexpectedly on editor Sir Larry Lamb (my predecessor) and was “shocked” to see the amount of alcohol being consumed. “They’re drinking out of plant pots up there,” he said.

I remember going to one of Sir Larry’s afternoon conferences where it was clear he had been over-refreshing himself at lunchtime with a bottle or two of his favourite red. Surrounded by his acolytes at his desk (including me) he would, under normal circumstances, pick the story of the day and then hand draw Page One, complete with headline, on a blank piece of paper. Having created his masterpiece, Sir Larry would then pass the paper to the Night Editor who would take it back to the art desk to make it look good.

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Because he was pissed, Sir Larry didn’t draw on the blank page but on his blotting paper. There was silence as we watched this bizarre turn of events. Not realising he had missed the page entirely, Sir Larry then handed the blank page to the Night Editor who, being a brown-noser like me, said “Thank you Larry.”

Today’s HR wallahs (there are more of them than subs these days) would be flat-out with the goings on. There was the time one of the sports journalists returned to the office quite drunk around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, approached a female colleague and asked if it was true her husband was a doctor. When she said yes, he promptly unzipped himself and asked if he might be able to do something about this spot on his penis. Hard to believe, but when the management fired him, the journalists went on strike and eventually the chap was given his job back.

So that was The Sun, then.

It was also hugely successful. The paper was selling well over four million copies a day. Every day. The paper mattered. It had caught the riptide of the Thatcher revolution. Hostile to big state. Hostile to big unions. Pro flogging council houses. Pro big spending on the military.

Along came the Falklands War. There were two routes you could take. There was the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror position. Where is the Falklands? Is there a deal to be done? Can we fight the war without killing anybody?

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Then there was The Sun‘s position. They started it, we shall finish it. Do it to them before they do it to us. The only good Argie was a dead Argie. I inherited that kind of view from my father who had spent five years in a Japanese PoW camp. I hesitate to think what he would make of me owning a Lexus.

At one stage, the Argentine military regime was offering what looked like faux peace talks. The Sun’s response came via the headline: STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA. A classic, it became our catchphrase for the war. 

We decided to put the whole paper on a war footing. News editor Tom Petrie became Commander Petrie for the duration. Reporters were given ranks from private to colonel. I stomped around the newsroom in sergeant major parody referring to colleagues as “horrible little people”.

We invited readers to sponsor Sidewinder missiles. Joyfully it was reported that a missile fired from HMS Invincible with the words “Up Yours Galtieri” (the name of the Junta leader) had brought down an Argentinian plane.

We invented “Sink the Argies” computer games and Page Three girls were given military themes; “All Shipshape and Bristols Fashion.” Upscale stuff. Private Eye produced a mock The Sun with the headline: Kill an Argie, win a Metro. Not a bad idea. At morning conference, we contemplated doing such a competition. Strangely wiser counsel prevailed. That wasn’t always the case.

The Sun journalists were a militant lot, and the day the Belgrano was sunk inevitably they were on strike. But the printers, a bolshie collection of overpaid and underworked half-wits, would allow me to produce the paper and turned a blind eye to a couple of execs giving assistance.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

It must have been around 10 o’clock on that May evening, while sitting on the news desk with assistant editor Wendy Henry, when it was reported that the Belgrano had been sunk. Hit with two torpedoes fired by our submarine, the Conqueror.  

On hearing the news Wendy, an excitable talent, shouted: Gotcha! With headlines I have always found that instinct trumps intelligence. So GOTCHA it was. But as the evening wore on there was a suggestion that all 1,095 Belgrano crew had died in the attack.

Even for a hard-bitten soul like me, that seemed an enormous number, and I changed the headline in later editions to: Did 1,095 Argies die? Murdoch didn’t agree with the change saying he thought it a good headline. In the event 368 died.

Six weeks later, the war had ended. As with Thatcher, the Falklands had been a great success for The Sun. The paper-buying public liked our coverage and rejected the Daily Mirror’s timorous approach. The circulation gap between us grew swiftly to over a million copies a day. The cash, in both sales and advertising, for Murdoch simply crashed through the front door.

So where is The Sun four decades later? The alcohol has gone. The typewriters have gone. The smoke has gone. And most important of all, the circulation has gone. The crying shame is that the collective power and voice of ambitious working-class readers has been lost.

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True, The Sun‘s readers have social media, which to my mind is a joy. But the authority of a newspaper which could reach 12 million readers every day (that’s 12 million “likes”) has been lost for ever.

Supposing such a war happened now, what would the paper’s reaction be? Frankly there is an uncertain note on the trumpet. Even if the North Koreans took the Isle of Wight, I have my doubts they would get angry.

And does it matter what The Sun says in any event?

The paper sells around 500,000-600,000 a day. That’s a guess as Murdoch’s management at News UK refuses to disclose the numbers except to media buyers who in turn have to sign an NDA. It’s true they have a news website, but they try very hard not to cover stories which polarise opinions. They don’t want to upset anybody, which means they don’t please anybody either.

With the death of the print version of The Sun, goes the role of the editor. Clever, laugh-producing or ballsy Page One headlines don’t matter a fig in the online world. Nor does something called a news sense. There is now software which can change the running order of the site depending on the stories the reader is clicking on. 

That all makes complete journalistic (and commercial) sense but sadly, from my perspective, it does mean goodbye to Gotcha and all that. Mind you, the Argies will be delighted.