Donald Trump’s election victory in 2024 should have taught everyone that what has come to be known as “lawfare” — using legal processes to weaken political opponents — doesn’t work politically. But it seems few heeded the warning. Only last week, a similar attempt to bar Marine Le Pen from running in next year’s presidential elections failed after a French appeals court reduced the length of the ban. This is not the end of her legal battles, but it is certain now that she will be a candidate and her popularity remains undimmed.

There are other examples: in Romania, the supreme court banned the far-Right leader Călin Georgescu from taking part in the 2024 presidential elections. In Germany, the CDU wants to deprive Björn Höcke, one of the most high-profile politicians of the far-Right Alternative for Germany, of his fundamental right to vote and stand for elections. In the Netherlands, they went after Geert Wilders. It’s happening everywhere, again and again.

They have learned nothing. Trump bounced back from his legal battles and won the election. Le Pen will be a candidate. It is too early to make any predictions about the next French presidential election. But we can at this point safely conclude that the technocratic coup against Le Pen has failed. It will now be up to the voters to decide. This was not supposed to happen.

The case of Nigel Farage in the UK falls into the same category, though the details differ. Unlike Trump or Le Pen, the Reform UK leader faces neither criminal charges nor a police investigation. Instead, he was being investigated by the House of Commons Committee on Standards after breaching rules by failing to declare a gift. It would almost certainly have recommended a suspension which could have triggered a recall petition. If 10% of voters had signed it, a by-election would automatically have followed.

But by resigning his seat, Farage has short-circuited the procedure that could have led to his removal. If he wins, he may still face an investigation when he returns, though the House of Commons would, at that point, probably not be so stupid as to suspend him, if only to avoid the absurd spectacle of two by-elections in the same constituency within a few weeks of each other.

The media plays an important role in the political campaign against Farage. And its pursuit of Farage is deeply reminiscent of the one against Trump in the two years preceding the 2024 election. Ultimately, though, Trump walked away from his legal troubles and an assassin’s bullet. Farage walked away from a plane crash, and I suspect he will survive the slings and arrows of the British press as well as the onslaught of Count Binface’s jokes. British politics is full of entertaining stunts. But the idea that the Tory, Labour, Green and Lib Dem voters of Clacton will unite and support the bin man is absurd. What does it tell voters about how seriously politics is being taken by the establishment?

What, too, does it tell us about the media’s motivations? I suspect they’re mainly selfish ones. The legacy media owes its existence to closed-shop access arrangements such as the political lobby in the UK, or the White House press corps. In Germany, exclusive access to politicians is organized by a journalists’ club, which organizes all government press conferences. If Friedrich Merz wants to talk to the media, he has to knock on their door. And in the US, legacy media has been one of the biggest losers from the Trump administration. They lost their exclusive access to administration officials as the Trump administration opened up to bloggers and influencers.

More from this author

Count Binface: a serious fool

By Pratinav Anil

Populist leaders do not respect the press cartel. They are creatures of social media. If Farage were to become prime minister, he could decide to discard the political lobby altogether in Westminster. He could instruct his arts minister to allow foreign media organizations take control of UK newspapers and private broadcasters. Without much effort, he could finish them off in a single term. Even if British voters were to get rid of Farage after one term, his successors would almost surely not resurrect the old system. Even if a candidate of the Left in the US were to succeed Trump in early 2029, I would not expect that person to waste political capital on resurrecting long defunct journalist lobbies. Time moves on, and priorities change. No wonder the fourth estate is panicking.

And as consumers of news, we should speak out if the media pack is out for blood, or, as the Germans say, are chasing a pig through the village. This is what is happening to Farage. Sometimes it works: the media successfully got rid of Boris Johnson by persuading gullible Tory MPs to commit electoral suicide and ditch the leader who won them a landslide victory. They dispensed with Keir Starmer in similar circumstances.

I doubt, though, that the campaign against Farage will succeed, because Farage, unlike Johnson and Starmer before him, is in control of his party. His voters don’t care about politically constructed criminal cases or donations. They care about the things that affect them.

And they are right that many politicians simply don’t seem to care about the things that affect them. Yesterday’s men simply cling to mistakes of the past, refusing to learn from them. Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump should have been a cautionary tale. Instead of pursuing him through the courts, the Democrats should have focused on their own campaign, and considered whether Joe Biden was fit to run while there was still an opportunity to find an alternative candidate. But no, the Democrats figured they had it in the bag — just as they did back in 2016. Overconfidence and wishful thinking play a big role in the demise of the center. I see the same mindset again in the UK campaign to rejoin the EU. The Rejoiners are clinging on to the same old failed strategies that sunk the Remain campaign — a false assessment of the economic significance of the single market.

More from this author

Farage's Clacton reckoning

By Simon Heffer

In Germany, the centrist parties that now want to ban the AfD should similarly reflect on why such attempts failed in the past. In 2017, the constitutional court struck what appeared to be a rock-solid case against the Right-wing extremist NPD. Unlike the centrists, though, the AfD learned from the episode and has taken precautions to protect itself against a ban. The chances of a ban are practically zero. And yet, the Left clings on to the same old failing ideas again and again.

Lack of reflection and critical self-examination has a become a defining characteristic of the political center worldwide. And all the while, the center-right, which has traditionally been stronger than the center-left in Europe, is losing support. By creating perma-coalitions with the center-left, they are driving more and more voters to the extremes. They do what they always did. Exactly as Talleyrand said.

The way to solve the political problem is to attempt to address the underlying problems such as deindustrialization and low productivity. Yet centrist policy agendas are full of displacement activities. So instead of focusing on fixing what lies beneath their broken economy, the British establishment is rooting for a man with a bin for a face. Should that strategy fail, if you want to dignify it with such a term, they might even resort to the ultimate, and most desperate, trick to keep Farage out of power — proportional representation. The experience of European countries has been that cynical changes in electoral systems backfire against those who initiate them. The simple reason is that voters, as a group, are not stupid.

Just as Talleyrand’s famous phrase described the failure of the House of Bourbon, it explains the demise of the age of multilateral globalization, the age that the EU represented so fittingly. Rather than confronting economic and political failures that have driven voters elsewhere, politicians simply return to their familiar tactics. Multilateralism is dying not because it was bound to fail, but because its proponents never learned, and never forgot.

And we all know what happened to the Bourbons.

Be it Brittin or someone else, the new DG will face a welter of problems: not only the “metropolitan lens” acknowledged by Davie, nor Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the corporation, but a fundamental crisis of identity for an institution that is nearing its 100th birthday. As media evolves and politics fracture, the role of a state broadcaster becomes ever-more fraught — with the license fee an increasingly sore point for restive voters.

In what direction, then, should a new DG take the BBC? And who — in an ideal world — should that DG be? We put these questions to nine contributors and experts.

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Axe Strictly, ban Rooney and go Republican

Geoff Dyer, writer

I think it was Antonio Gramsci who wrote that the battle for culture had to be the battle for the high ground. That battle is now for cultural ground that is the equivalent of the aptly named Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California, which lies almost 300 feet below sea level. So the BBC should not just raise its standards but alter them. There should be a complete abandonment of ratings as a guide to the type of programs that are made. Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man need to be held up not as relics of a lost golden age but as rallying cries for a brighter (as opposed to intellectually dimmer) future.

All things like Strictly Come Dancing, that baking show and Traitors or whatever it’s called should be axed immediately. David Attenborough is a lovely legend, of course, but it’s time he was put out to pasture along with Clare Balding. Ideas of impartiality should be changed. Reporting on Israel and Palestine should be realigned to take into account the inherent asymmetry of the conflict.

The King’s Speech should no longer be broadcast and the network should become openly republican in its reporting on the appalling spongers and welfare dependents more usually referred to as the Royal Family. Cut all the soul-destroying Christian stuff on Sundays and basically ignore Christmas. Get rid of The Archers and Desert Island Discs. No documentaries fronted by celebrities. No documentaries featuring someone who is “going on a journey” to discover anything. Wayne Rooney’s wide-screen face must never be seen again unless he’s featured in news stories about increasing face-width. News reporting must stop aspiring to cliché. Radio 3 should be unremittingly and unapologetically serious. 

I’ve not given much thought to who might run the BBC but my instinctive feeling is that it should be me.

Back heavyweight programming and appoint Adam Curtis

Sarah Ditum, journalist

The BBC is a creature of 20th-century consensus politics, stranded in the post-consensus world. No wonder it seems to struggle to get anything right. As a feminist, I was on the sharp end of some of its errors about covering the trans issue. But much as it can annoy me, I love the BBC — I’d just like to be able to love it more. I want it to do more of the big stuff, and more of the small stuff. 

By “small stuff” I mean local news: one of the worst calls of the Davie regime was the savaging of local radio, which leaves many places essentially unreported given the demise of local press. The new DG should reverse that as a matter of urgency. If public service means anything, surely it’s this. 

By “big stuff” I mean flagship arts, culture and science documentaries. The BBC’s own podcast data (especially the success of In Our Time) shows that there’s an audience for heavyweight factual shows. Stop treating TV audiences like morons (cough — Civilisations: Rise and Fall — cough) and they might be coaxed back from YouTube. Oh, and more Traitors please.

To undertake this mission, you need someone who knows the BBC but doesn’t venerate it, and who isn’t locked in the media opinion Borg but also isn’t in hock to tedious anti-wokeism. Give it to Adam Curtis: he would absolutely hate it.

Axe online news, open the archive, appoint Cory Doctorow

Aaron Bastani, UnHerd columnist

In the political imagination, spending more money on any public service is progressively-coded. Reform, meanwhile, means more market-centric thinking: private providers, outsourcing, more precarious conditions for staff. 

Such a fatuous binary is why many of our most venerable institutions are failing. “Modernization” is destroying the Royal Mail, while bang-for-buck on higher healthcare spending after 2020 remains limited. 

So, in changing the BBC, and renewing it for the 2030s, let us discard such thinking. Meaningful efficiencies aren’t achieved by infinite salami-slicing, but in making decisive calls on the big questions. Good strategy is as much about what an organization chooses not to do as what it pursues.

So here is my proposal. The BBC should not do online news. Why? Because the corporation should focus on audio-visual broadcast — its core offering. It should produce the best dramas, documentaries and news programs possible. 

What might it do with the money saved? Open up the archive. Every episode of One Foot in the Grave. All 13 episodes of Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation. Films like Threads and The War Game. The first Moon Landing. The corporation should be a repository for the nation’s collective memory, rather than a factory of trivia.

And who to lead the charge as Director-General? Cory Doctorow. Nobody else understands the threat of Big Tech like the visionary Canadian.

Lead by elitist example — and appoint Dominic Sandbrook

Ed West, journalist

Under the West terror, the license fee would be scrapped and a smaller BBC would be funded directly from tax. This is more practical, since many young people have no television anyway, but it would also allow the service to become more explicitly elitist in its cultural tastes.

Too much of the BBC content feels like it’s commissioned and produced by people embarrassed to be intelligent and informed. Its online features service in particular provides inane, simplistic slop, and is an embarrassment.

The BBC’s remit should be to enlighten and inform, to be intellectual but not subversive. Most of all, it should be wholesome. At a time when both fertility rates and book-reading are collapsing, it should be a trusted aide to parents of young children in raising them to have a healthy curiosity about the world. It should be the antidote to the smartphone.

The BBC is there to provide services that commercial broadcasters can’t or won’t, and one such remit should be in the promotion of art for art’s sake. It should devote energy and money to promoting classical music among young people, with televised performances of local orchestras from every town in Britain. Finally, and cost permitting, I’d want all the BBC archives available online.

As for the DG, my semi-serious suggestion would be Dominic Sandbrook, in part because he’s a Tory who is nonetheless fair-minded and not too ideological, and most of all he’s written about the cultural power of British art and appreciates what foreigners like about the country’s image. However, you’d have to pay him more than the five squillion he currently earns from podcasting, and I’d be genuinely upset if The Rest is History ended as a result. Maybe Tom and Dom could do it as a double act.

Abandon the pretense of impartiality

Peter Hitchens, columnist

I once attended a giggly, smug presentation by BBC staffers in which they mocked the idea of such a true BBC revolution. They thought that conservatives such as me wanted them to become a kind of Fox News, sucking up to Rupert Murdoch and presenting the news with lots of right-wing adjectives. They had no idea of the methods they themselves use — simple omission of what they dislike, the subtly curled lip, the change of tone of voice, the use of verbs like “claim” and “insist” to devalue the statements of those they despised, to express biases they regard as normal thought. They had no idea that third-wave feminism, or support for mass immigration, or general enthusiasm for divorce, abortion, comprehensive state schools, or a belief that crime is a disease caused by social problems, are actual contentious positions. If they encounter anyone who does not hold them, he or she is dismissed because he or she is not merely wrong but wicked.

I know all this in detail because for years I have been mounting a small social experiment. As a national newspaper columnist, I can criticize the BBC in front of a large audience. But every so often the BBC does something so outrageously wrong that I make a formal complaint, through its official system. This is a minor skill, requiring some experience and persistence. Many, who do not understand it, totally waste their time. The Corporation protects itself with a spongy bureaucratic layer, operated by the service company Capita, which absorbs most such complaints. It is only when you complain about Capita’s (almost invariably) dismissive responses that you actually deal with the Corporation, and its grandly-named Executive Complaints Unit.

Very occasionally, the ECU has to concede, but only ever on a (usually tiny) matter of fact. It then does very little to right the wrong, merely placing a notice on its website. Most who saw or heard the error will never know it happened. But where biased opinion is concerned, it simply does not give an inch. Right up there in its exalted suite of offices, the ECU cannot see the problem. It cannot. It is not that it does not recognize the legitimacy of another view, though it does not. It is that it does not recognize the existence of that other view.  

I can tell you what a new Director-General could do about that. He or she would abandon the pretense of impartiality altogether. He or she would free all those staff who now give us their allegedly impartial opinions on Iran, Nigel Farage, assisted suicide or migration to express (as I do) their actual views. Presenters of current affairs, I think, should be obliged to do so, such is their power over the national conversation. So should those who commission drama, perhaps the most influential form of propaganda there is, because it does not look like propaganda. Their party affiliations, if they have them, should remain private.

Nobody should be in any way penalized for this new openness. But it would immediately be so obvious that the BBC speaks for only one part of the nation that these revelations should compel the urgent recruitment of men and women who sympathize with the other part.

And this is where my scheme fails. For where are these people? Which schools, which universities, are producing Christian conservatives, defenders of lifelong marriage, historically literate patriots, supporters of selective rigorous education, believers in the due punishment of responsible persons who prey on their neighbors?

They don’t exist. The BBC, alas, is the Revolutionary Guard Corps of our post-1960s Cultural Revolution, and its power has helped, for decades, to suppress and marginalize the very people it needs most. 

Return to serious programming

Andrew Graham-Dixon, art historian

It’s bleeding obvious that they should bring back BBC4 and start making a few serious programs about interesting subjects, especially given that such programs cost virtually nothing to produce by comparison with most of what does get made and shown: one big drama or season of Strictly would fund 100 years of decent documentaries.

But there is really no point pontificating about what the BBC should or should not do. As David Attenborough kindly said to me many years ago, “You should never worry about what happens at the BBC: it is run by mad children.”

Create ‘watercooler moments’

Deborah Cohen, former BBC journalist 

The BBC needs to be brave. I say this who has worked as a both staff and freelance reporter across current affairs and Newsnight for the BBC for 15 years – on some of the most contentious issues in our time, including Covid, Brexit and gender. It’s one of the toughest places to work, with constant scrutiny and criticism that can be personal and at times, coordinated. 

When you’re under attack — and some of it deserved — the instinct is to retreat and to play it safe. But in my experience the biggest impact in its journalism is when it doesn’t. I’ve seen policy and opinions change because of journalism done properly.

That only happens when you follow the evidence or story without fear or favor — even, and especially, when the subject is polarizing. It means asking the tough questions, irrespective of the backlash, and not bowing to pressure to conform and succumb to groupthink. 

The BBC is unique and is a global standard. We lose it at our peril. Its role is to bring complex, difficult stories to life in a way that helps people understand what’s actually at stake.

Today’s information environment is increasingly saturated with low-quality, AI-generated content, where it’s increasingly difficult to tell what’s real and what’s manipulated. In many instances we won’t know what political or commercial interests content represents. This means trust is everything and this is built on accuracy, identity, knowing who is telling you something and why.

To do that, the BBC has to own its stories. Too often, internal competition and silos mean that stories are treated as belonging to programs or departments rather than to the organization as a whole. The result is that opportunities are missed and other outlets step in and take ownership. That needs to change. When the BBC has a story, it should feel like a BBC story carried across platforms in different formats, developed properly and given the space it needs to land.

Part of the problem is structural. There is no longer an obvious home for the kind of investigations that Newsnight used to lead. Too often, the length of a program dictates the shape of the story, rather than the other way around. Digital platforms remove that constraint by offering the chance to tell stories at the right length. The BBC should be using them far more deliberately as a core part of its investigative identity to target different audiences. And crucially, the BBC shouldn’t wait for another outlet to report something before deciding it’s a “BBC story.” It should be setting the agenda not following it.

Take the Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere documentary on Netflix. It filled my social media and podcast feed for days and continues to be discussed. It shows there is still a huge appetite for journalism that creates those “watercooler moments” again. Audience surveys suggest there’s appetite for documentaries. 

But there’s another role too. We are living in a slurry of comment and opinion. The BBC should be a guide through that showing where the evidence lies and what is contested and why.

And it must stay impartial and visibly independent. As the lines blur elsewhere between content and commerce, whether that’s in the realm of LLMs or in the world of podcasts, and where sponsorship and editorial are increasingly intertwined, the BBC should stand apart. It should be the place people go when they want information free from financial conflicts of interest, a place where content doesn’t come with affiliate codes. 

Finally, the BBC needs to think seriously about diversity. Whose perspectives are understood instinctively, and whose are missed. If the BBC is to serve the whole country, it has to reflect the whole country: not just culturally, but socially and economically too. My particular specialism (health) is filled with white middle-class men. Just over a year ago I taught at City University (now City St George’s) and students lamented the lack of women and regional accents. 

Ultimately, bravery in journalism isn’t just about what you cover. It’s about who you are willing to be.

Let the new DG take risks

Steven Barnett, professor of communications

Who would want to lead an institution that is hated by most of the British press, infuriates the alt-right keyboard warriors (cheered on by Trump and Musk), and has just announced another round of cuts after losing a third of its revenue in 15 years?

Weirdly, this is precisely the time that a new leader with vision and dynamism can make their mark. Disinformation is rife, streaming content is dominated by mid-Atlantic fare aimed at global markets, local journalism’s failing business model is leaving millions in ignorance about their own communities, and the political environment is suddenly benign. 

This is the moment to think creatively about how the BBC can bring public service values into the platform era, fight disinformation, invigorate local journalism, promote British creative talent, and drive investment in the creative industries across the regions. 

Who could do it? Any of the frontrunners — Charlotte Moore, Jay Hunt, Alex Mahon, Jane Turton – have the experience and energy. They would need a senior journalist as a deputy overseeing news output (James Harding?). They need a new governance structure that excludes political influence (no more Robbie Gibb fiascos). 

And they need a financial settlement that recognizes the BBC’s unique contribution to the UK’s economic, democratic and cultural welfare.

Immediately overhaul the complaints system

Robin Aitken, former BBC journalist

Dear Mr Brittin — if you are to be the new DG — as you settle in, can I offer some friendly advice?

Of the five Directors-General since 2000, four have left under a cloud: you can be different if you make restoring the BBC’s disastrous loss of trust your priority. Department for Culture, Media and Sport research in 2025 found that 52% didn’t believe the BBC to be impartial; if you acknowledge this and commit to rectifying it, you can be the reformer the Corporation needs.

Having been a director of the Guardian’s board is a disadvantage; right-wing voters will need reassurance that you are not “just another BBC leftie”. One thing you should do immediately is overhaul the complaints system. Between 2017 and 2025 the BBC received 2,275 387 complaints — more than 70% of them about impartiality. All complaints are initially handled internally and most are summarily dealt with; only 400 were upheld — that’s 0.0176%. An implausibly low figure. The system is a fraud; it must be replaced by an independent body staffed by people who are not Corporation stooges. That would show you are serious about impartiality.

Another thing; do not treat your critics as enemies; not all of us want the BBC destroyed – we want it to live up to its promises. Is that too much to ask?

Ideas such as: innocent until proven guilty; the independence of the police force and prosecutors from political pressure and public hysteria; the skepticism of our lively media that will question, rather than swallow, party lines. Epstein mania has swept all these checks and balances aside. Of course, questions of due process and the proper functioning of institutions don’t sell newspapers. But they are more important than ever when the mob decides to pitchfork its victims.

Of particular concern is the hasty arrest of both Mountbatten Windsor and Mandelson under the vague statute of “misfeasance in public office”. This common law offense is notorious among legal scholars for being poorly defined: the Law Commission recently dedicated a whole report to it, concluding that clarity is lacking both around the definition of what constitutes a public office, and what constitutes the “recklessness or willfulness” required to prove criminality. It is not clear, for example, that the largely ceremonial role of UK Trade Envoy that Andrew held even counts as a position of public trust. It’s a woolly law and therefore easy to abuse; the Government had already tabled new legislation to replace it.

In recent years, the statute has been generally used (in 92% of cases) for police and prison officers who have been found in flagrant sexual or financial wrongdoing. In only four convictions out of the 191 since 2014 was the law deployed against senior officials — and no politician has ever been prosecuted under it. In 2008, Damian Green was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office after a civil servant leaked documents to him for political purposes, but the DPP at the time (a certain Keir Starmer) dropped the case as not passing the required threshold for criminality. It’s an unprecedented use of a bad law, and it just happened twice in the space of a week.

We might ask, too, why either man had to be arrested at all. Surely a discreet interview with police could have been arranged with Mountbatten Windsor instead of a theatrical arrest at 8am at his home? As for Mandelson, he maintains that such an interview had already been agreed for the week commencing 9 March, but the police suddenly arrived asserting that an emergency arrest was required on the basis of new information passed to them that he was about to abscond to the British Virgin Islands.

Suggested reading

The hypocrisy of the Epstein panic

By Kathleen Stock

Alongside the implausibility of this suggestion, and the fact that the UK has a full extradition treaty with the BVI in any case, the police claimed that this information had been passed to them via the Lord Speaker — a detail that Lord Forsyth vehemently denies. So who did provide them with this false information, bringing about a public arrest that would provide humiliating photographs for the media and a confirmation in the mind of the public that Mandelson had somehow met his comeuppance? The proper process had somehow been hacked.

Even more grave are the implications of dumping vast troves of private correspondence and truncated notes by investigators into the public domain, as happened with Epstein’s emails. Day by day, innocent lives are being upended as the media discovers a new intriguing name among the cache; careers are ended on the flimsiest of pretexts, as companies and institutions abandon anyone with the remotest connection with the scandal; wild theories about supposed code words have flooded the internet and deposed rationality. The thrill of glimpsing how the rich and powerful correspond privately with each other may make good copy, but it is not justice. If ever we needed a reminder that the flip side of free speech is a right to privacy, it was surely this. Without privacy, there is no freedom, and everybody will be a little more fearful about writing to friends or associates after this.

This massive release of private emails prompted  another concerning development: in both the Mountbatten Windsor and Mandelson case, the British state is deploying what you might call the Al Capone strategy. The American mobster was never convicted of the murders and gangsterism for which he was notorious, but instead was imprisoned for tax evasion. Most people in the UK by now, having been saturated in media coverage connecting both characters to the “convicted paedophile/sex offender” Jeffrey Epstein, will have made up their minds that both men are guilty by association of some kind of collusion in some kind of sex crime. That’s the “real” taint that is propelling these investigations.

But this is where the Al Capone analogy breaks down: Capone really was a mobster. But there has yet to emerge any firm evidence of sexual wrongdoing on Mountbatten Windsor’s part, and for Mandelson it is not even seriously alleged. Context-free photographs of hanging out on Epstein’s island with young women are not proof of anything at all, nor is settling out of court, nor are suggestive private emails between friends, no matter how distasteful they may sound.

Suggested reading

How the police lost control of London

By Mary Harrington

Instead, the Al Capone approach risks degrading the normal standards of proof for the lesser crime in order to deliver a politically convenient satiation of the wider public anger. Indeed,  there is already the sense that both men have been found guilty of something — notwithstanding the fact that neither has been convicted of anything. But what crime are they supposed to have committed, exactly?

In the case of Mountbatten Windsor, sharing details of his forthcoming trips as UK trade envoy to Epstein and his associates in order to set up meetings would not be particularly surprising or intriguing were it not accompanied by the stench of scandal shrouding Jeffrey Epstein. If all that emerges after this inevitably long, drawn out investigation, is the tawdry reality — and one that we already know — that Andrew had bad judgment in friends and deployed those connections to do business deals, it is neither new nor illegal. It is certainly not enough to provoke a constitutional crisis, with special acts of parliament to remove him from the line of succession. Labour minister Chris Bryant may be right that the former Prince is a “rude, arrogant and entitled man”, as he said in the Commons yesterday: but so what? If we arrested every politician or royal who fell under that category, how many would be left?

Meanwhile, the most serious claims against Mandelson are that he showed no loyalty to the government he served in and shared privileged government information for personal financial gain. Forwarding emails (even non-secure ones) originally addressed to the prime minister to powerful friends, apparently to show how useful you are, is no doubt unedifying. The breezy, disloyal indiscretions in the emails are deeply embarrassing, and would probably have constituted a sackable offense were he still in post. But the fact that Mandelson was indiscreet about the goings on in government, or that he said mean things about Gordon Brown, is hardly news — just ask any political journalist of the past 30 years who delighted in his briefings.

Things obviously get more serious should financial gain be shown. If indeed there were multiple payments of $25,000 from Epstein to Mandelson, that would demand explanation. But let’s apply a dose of reality: most of the indiscretions that have so far emerged would have been mildly interesting, titillating even, to an investor like Epstein. For now, though, there has been no smoking gun to indicate corruption. Most of Mandelson’s “revelations” were widely commented on in the media at the time. The most serious among them would seem to be the theoretically investible insight, confirmed by email by Mandelson to Epstein, that the €500 billion euro bailout would be announced that evening, 9 May 2010. Epstein emails: “sources tell me 500 b euro bailout, almost complete”, and Mandelson replies: “sd be announced tonight.“

Cavalier, sailing close to the wind, but hardly a big scoop — Epstein already had the information, as did thousands of others. The terms of the imminent deal had been discussed on the front cover of the Sunday Telegraph the previous morning, and economic correspondents across Europe were tracking the progress of the talks throughout the day. The day before, at a summit of all 26 EU finance ministers, the terms and timing of the euro bailout had been breathlessly reported on, and the UK had refused to take part. Each of those European teams, with their staff and civil servants and accompanying journalists, would have known as much or more than the outgoing UK Business Secretary. Of course, there may yet be revelations that prove serious wrongdoing. But what has so far emerged is pretty weak tea.

A world in which due process is bent in service of political panics, supercharged by an increasingly deranged social media, is a less just one. Both Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and Peter Mandelson have been hung out to dry by their own teams (respectively the Royal family and the Labour party) who have their own agenda, fearful for their own survival. The two men have no allies left. This is precisely when a sober-minded media, police and justice system should be the last line of defense. Right now, they are nowhere to be found.

The actors have changed since then and so have their methods. What is unchanged is the idea that political power is about the control of the media. This is why the US and the EU have been engaged in a raging dispute over social media regulation and content moderation since JD Vance criticized the Europeans at last year’s Munich Security Conference for suppressing free speech.

Last week, the EU told TikTok it must become less addictive to its users or else face heavy fines. In December, the EU imposed a fine of €120 million on X for failing to moderate its content as required by the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) like X, Facebook or TikTok are obligated to employ fact checkers and post community notices to highlight fake news. In France, failing to do so counts as a criminal offense. A French prosecutor has recently summoned Elon Musk to a hearing in Paris. Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of Telegram, was arrested upon landing in France in August 2024.

The Europeans have totally misjudged what is going on. For the Trump administration, European censorship rules of US social media is the single biggest issue in transatlantic relations. Donald Trump and the hard-Right in Europe owe their ascent to digital media. The ability to bypass the oligopoly of the legacy print and broadcasting media was critical to Trump’s two election victories. The EU’s old establishment parties are fighting a desperate battle to keep digital forces at bay. Just look at what’s happened to the venerable Washington Post. In 2017, when Trump came to power for the first time, the paper gave itself the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, a cry of despair. Now, it’s fired 300 journalists. The decline of the traditional media and the rise of the MAGA movement are linked.

In continental Europe and the UK, the old media oligopoly is more robust than in the US, but it is much weaker than it used to be, and is getting weaker every year. By and large, the political establishment still controls the legacy media. The legacy media, though, is losing control of the narrative.

This is the context in which the DSA should be understood. It forces large social media companies to issue DSA-compliant community guidelines to which users must agree. It does this with the help of so-called “trusted flaggers”, which are often NGOs and are nominated by national governments. One such organization is HateAid, a German group which was recently subjected to US sanctions. The trusted flaggers act as the internet’s truth commissars, identifying what they perceive to be violations of the rules. They directly alert the platform, and the European Commission monitors whether the company reacts to the warnings and can impose penalties as it did against X.

Washington is now preparing to respond. The FT reported last week that a senior state department official, Sarah Rogers, met with Right-wing think tanks in Europe to discuss funding to spread the MAGA gospel or, as she put it, American values. At its core this US-EU dispute is about the diffusion of MAGA political themes in Europe. Think tanks and civil society organizations play an important role in the public discourse. In Europe, they are mostly on the Left.

That story chimes with the leak late last year of a draft version of the administration’s National Security Strategy. The final, official version was already hostile towards the Europeans. It talked about civilizational erasure, and criticized transnational bodies — meaning the EU — which are “transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition”. The earlier draft went further, though, containing a passage in which the US committed itself to pry countries away from EU membership. While that was not included in the final version, Rogers’s comments suggest that this is indeed the policy.

The Americans have other instruments at their disposal. Trump could impose his favorite instrument: tariffs. He could do so even if the Supreme Court were to rule against the legality of his Liberation Day tariffs. Retaliatory tariffs against countries that discriminate against companies fall into a different category.

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The companies themselves might push back. EU legislation applies only to companies and their subsidiaries with a physical residence in the EU. X or Meta might close down their European offices, forgoing some revenue in the process. That might be a price worth paying to safeguard an otherwise lucrative business model. The EU does not have alternative providers.

European voters might also rebel against the bloc. With its data protection legislation, AI and crypto regulation, the Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act, the EU has built a kind of Luddite wall against 21st-century technologies, most of which originate in the US. The idea of Europe as a museum or a tourist destination may be charming; it is not, however, a sustainable economic model. The more the Commission decouples from modern technologies and services, the more unsustainable its strategy becomes.

This political battle is about agenda-setting and control. It is not really about free speech — that is a straw-man debate. It is true that the Europeans are restricting the spread of Right-wing content and turning people into criminals for posting a tweet. But Trump’s America is not exactly a bastion of free speech either. Last year, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University, was arrested and earmarked for deportation for writing an article in which she criticized her university for how it handled pro-Palestinian protests. She was held in a detention camp until a judge ordered her immediate release. Marco Rubio said at the time: “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.” The US is in no position to teach the Europeans about free speech.

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Philip Graham, the previous owner of The Washington Post, once called journalism “the first rough draft of history”. As historians know only too well, historical drafts often get completely rewritten over time. What appears true today is often revealed as false tomorrow. The idea that we can put somebody in charge of the truth is absurd. Yet it is no less absurd than the attempt to restrict foreign students in the US to write articles in student newspapers.

The reason why the EU will lose this battle is straightforward and has nothing to do with free speech. It will lose because the US is the senior partner in the bilateral relationship. It is Europe’s tragedy that it made itself reliant for its defense and technology on somebody with whom it no longer shares its basic values.

The DSA is a rebellion, but it falls into the category of failed putsches. It recalls the Spanish military’s attempted seizing of the Spanish parliament in 1981. The putsch failed because the junta did not control the narrative. It ended after only 18 hours when King Juan Carlos I went on national TV to denounce the putschists and ordered them to go home.

Forty-four years later, the Europeans no longer have such power, and they won’t get it back.

Ukraine’s political leaders and population remain, understandably, far more cautious. Zelensky cannot easily accept a settlement that might cement the loss of vast swathes of his country in exchange for little more than a temporary reprieve from Russian attack. Europe’s leaders are likewise treading carefully. But the greatest hold-out remains Putin. If anyone thought that the spectacle of Putin’s welcome in Alaska, which brought the leader out from several years in the political cold, would persuade the Russian President to agree to peace, they may be in for disappointment. Putin appears set on pursuing the war against Ukraine and playing diplomatic hardball.

Compared to the excitable commentary that has resounded across the West, the Kremlin’s public response to the weekend’s events has been remarkably muted. Scoring an invitation to Alaska was certainly a coup, and pictures of American soldiers rolling out the red carpet for Putin were received with delight on pro-Kremlin social media channels. However, a bland statement released by the Kremlin on 19 August mentioned only that Russia was “continuing to make progress on a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis”. While Trump seems to think one grand photo-op with the leaders of Kyiv and Moscow will conjure peace, Putin is committing, as ever, to almost nothing at all.

Meanwhile, Putin’s mouthpieces are working hard to dampen expectations at home of a quick and easy deal. Where the White House speaks of a trilateral summit, Yuri Ushakov, one of Putin’s most senior foreign policy advisers, mentioned only the possibility of “raising the level of representatives of the parties”. This would mean that more rounds of lower-level talks, akin to earlier gatherings in Istanbul or Saudi Arabia that saw few concrete changes, would have to precede any grand summit.

Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s veteran foreign minister, who always chooses his words carefully, used a television appearance yesterday to remind viewers that: “the Ukrainian Constitution retains the obligation of the state to fully ensure the rights of Russians.” An official Kremlin statement said much the same: “without respect for the security of Russia and the full rights of Russians in Ukraine, there can be no talk of any long-term agreements.” These comments, which are being repeated across dozens of television channels and hundreds of social media feeds, echo the justifications Putin offered when he launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By repeating them now, Lavrov and his diplomatic peers are making clear that the Kremlin is not on the verge of compromise. Russia will not be hurried by Trump, Zelensky, or anyone else.

These noises are being echoed in the massive, state-controlled Russian media landscape, where unlike on Trump’s feeds, the emphasis is on complexity. On Tuesday, Izvestiya, Russia’s newspaper of record, ran a lengthy explainer that twisted Trump’s statement that the remaining issues aren’t “overly complex” to suggest that the issues are “complex” — a way of shifting attention away from the excitement in Washington and back towards the grinding reality of diplomacy.

These complex issues — questions of language, minority rights, Nato, and EU membership — will not, Russians are told, be resolved in multilateral forums with Zelensky and European leaders. The Russians remember all too well the failed Minsk agreements, which aimed to halt fighting in the east of Ukraine in 2014-15. Laboriously negotiated by Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany over months, two separate agreements failed to stop the fighting. The Minsk process became — in Moscow’s eyes — a cause of the current invasion: the West, goes the Russian narrative, was only ever interested in helping Ukraine continue to attack “Russians” on its own territory.

The Russian media has a lowly opinion of Europe’s leaders, who are seen to be obsessing over irrelevant details and making impossible demands. Aleksandr Kots, one of Russia’s leading war correspondents, described Monday’s Washington DC meeting bluntly: “The Europeans have proven their absolute uselessness.” Zelensky fares no better. He remains, in Russian state media, the illegitimate head of a “Kiev regime” who has put off elections in Ukraine and only holds power due to what is portrayed as the illegal Maidan “coup”. Dmitry Medvedev, ever one for a fiery turn of phrase, dismisses him on social media as a “buffoon”; others declare that he is trapped in a diplomatic “dead end”. These comments rocket between social and traditional media and vice versa, filling Russians’ minds with the same idea.

The only dealmaker Russian commentators are interested in is Trump. He has been cast as a decisive leader who can talk straight with Putin and put Europe in its place. State outlets reveled in reports that the American President had “harshly rebuffed” European leaders’ ceasefire proposals during their meetings in Washington. For Russia’s commentators, Monday’s meeting was a distraction from the real action: negotiations between Trump and Putin.

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Yet any admiration for Trump is tempered by the widespread belief that he will easily be outwitted by Putin. Pro-Kremlin journalist Aleksandr Yunashev warned on Telegram that a Putin-Zelensky summit “on any terms does not correspond to our interests, but we do not plan to close this window of opportunity”. Trump, he reminded readers, still wants to sell weapons to Ukraine and has a record of flip-flops and about-turns. Yunashev thus suggests that Moscow is wary of Trump, but will string him along — because, unlike Europe’s divided, ineffectual, and indecisive leaders, Trump can supposedly deliver what Putin wants.

Scroll through Russian Telegram channels and the message is clear: Putin is masterminding the entire negotiation process. He is outfoxing Trump, running circles around the hapless Europeans, and reducing Zelensky to an illegitimate spectator. Little surprise that some Russian social media users believe that Putin is “laughing at the plans of all the people who might try to make a fool of him”.

The propagandists insist that Russia is making great gains in its offensive in Eastern Ukraine. Breakthroughs, whether real or exaggerated, are trumpeted as proof that Moscow has the upper hand, even as the Russian economy stutters and army recruitment barely keeps pace with casualties. The more land Putin holds when a summit with Zelensky eventually happens, the more he can claim in any territorial deal. In fact, he’s used this tactic before, back in 2015, when Russian forces pushed to seize the Ukrainian settlement of Debaltseve even as the Minsk II ceasefire was being finalized — and briefly continued that push even after the deal was struck. In recent weeks, Russian officials have repeatedly reiterated their maximalist war goals, which would leave Ukraine not controlled by Moscow but in a quasi-dismembered state ripe for the economic and political taking. There is no sign of a sea change after the weekend’s public diplomacy.

The Kremlin, in short, is telling two stories to two different audiences. Putin tells Trump that the peace negotiations are serious, that the Kremlin is ready to make progress, and that Russia may even agree to Trump’s grand peacemaking summit with Zelensky. Meanwhile, Russian media is telling citizens to trust the President’s plan: if the Russian people endure further conflict, then the Kremlin will deliver them territory, protection, self-respect, and a seat at the global top table. Most of all, though, the Kremlin is promising that Zelensky will be brought to a summit with Putin not to negotiate but to submit to a humiliating peace deal.

The presenter has not heard from his mother, Mahin, since the start of June’s 12-day war with Israel. He suspects she is being detained. What is certain is that Iranian officials have told Khalili that if he ever wants to see his wife Mahsa again, he must return to the land of his birth. For a high-profile opposition broadcaster like him, that is effectively a death sentence, or anyway guarantees a lengthy spell in jail.

Khalili is not alone. Our investigation shows his struggle is part of a wider campaign of intimidation against Iranian journalists working in Britain, one that has reached unprecedented levels since last month’s conflict. Alongside Khalili’s colleagues at Manoto, the satellite channel where he works, Iran’s targets include presenters and reporters at both BBC Persian and the UK-based news channel Iran International.

With its leadership in shambles and its nuclear weapons program derailed, the Iranian regime is clearly in trouble. That makes controlling the media narrative more urgent than ever, especially as channels like Manoto have become a popular focus for dissident views. It all speaks to a government willing to do anything to survive — even as its opponents remain uncowed despite the personal costs.

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Omid Khalili has lived in Britain since 1999, when he was 16, and has been a host at Manoto since it launched 14 years ago. The channel dovetails current affairs with culture and entertainment, and is clearly popular, boasting perhaps 40 million regular viewers worldwide, 34 million of them inside Iran. The channel’s Instagram alone has been viewed some two billion times.

Khalili himself is most famous for Omid/A.M, an extended phone-in that provides a unique platform for Iranians to describe the hardships of life in the Islamic Republic. Drawing callers from across society — from rural poverty to swish north Tehran — viewers risk their safety every time they call in.

The government, for its part, has long tried to suppress Omid/A.M. “As soon as one number starts being used,” Khalili says, “the regime tries to block it, so we just put another one on the screen. Every day we have as many numbers as we need set up and ready to go.”

The war raised the stakes yet further. Such was the volume of calls from Iran — despite the regime’s attempts to restrict communications, up to 15,000 a day — that Manoto extended Khalili’s slot from two to five or six hours, and increased its frequency from five to seven days a week. Worse still from the regime’s perspective, some callers openly welcomed Israeli and US airstrikes, hoping they would hasten the government’s demise. When Donald Trump imposed a ceasefire last week, some bemoaned the fact he was not letting Israel “finish the job”.

With these tensions in mind, Khalili has long had a target on his back. As far back as 2022, three years into their marriage, Khalili’s Iranian-born wife visited their shared homeland. But when she arrived, officials confiscated her passport. Accusing her husband of being “brainwashed by Zionists”, they told Mahsa that she would only be freed if she helped convince Omid to meet them in Turkey or Dubai. “She agreed,” Khalili says, “because she had no choice.”

On her return to Britain, regime officials started calling and emailing — but Mahsa ignored them. In April 2025, however, her brother phoned to say their mother was seriously ill, and that if Mahsa wanted to see her again, she had to travel to Tehran. “I tried to convince her not to go, but I couldn’t,” Khalili says. “She’s her mum’s only daughter.” 

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His fears were justified. Once Mahsa arrived, a well-dressed man confronted her, confiscating her passport and saying he would be in touch. Three days later, she was summoned to a meeting, which was then postponed and rearranged several times: apparently to increase her stress. Finally, two weeks after landing in Tehran, Mahsa was interrogated at an office in the city center. Now, the regime’s demand was that if she wanted to leave the country, Omid must meet security officials in Iran. 

This, they told Mahsa, was “for your husband’s own good”. They added a further threat: if he did not return, she might be investigated and tried for unspecified crimes, despite not being a journalist herself. For the time being, she was not under arrest. But she would be closely watched, and was banned from leaving Tehran. 

As ill-luck would have it, Khalili’s parents and sister had also been in Iran for several weeks, visiting other family. Now, they too faced the same threat, and could only return to Britain if the presenter came to Iran. “If you really love your son,” officials told his mother, “convince him to come here”. 

That is easier said than done, and not just because of Khalili’s politics. In December 2020, the dissident reporter Ruholla Zam was executed after being lured from his home in France to a supposed interview with an anti-regime cleric in Iraq, where he was abducted and smuggled across the border by Iranian agents. Last year, Reza Valizadeh, an Iranian-American journalist, was jailed for 10 years for “collaborating with a hostile government” — despite being promised safe passage to visit his family. 

For the moment, then, Khalili continues to present Omid/A.M as usual. Yet with the regime humiliated, and its own unpopularity increasingly hard to hide, his case is far from unique. 

Since the war with Israel began, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) have threatened numerous London-based journalists, as well as their families in Iran. Their message is stark: if the reporters do not resign their jobs, and post pro-regime statements on social media, both journalists and their relatives would be deemed mohareb. Translated as “enemies of God”, the Islamic Republic punishes this crime by death. 

Iran International, another London broadcaster, is a particular focus here — hardly surprising given, like Manoto, it also enjoys an Iranian audience in the tens of millions. 

As with Khalili, moreover, the regime’s threats are deeply personal. Called by her father in the Islamic Republic, one prominent Iran International presenter was told that he, her mother and her brother had all been detained. Audible in the background was an IRGC official dictating a “script” for the call: the usual warning that if the presenter did not resign and publicly back the regime, her family would be punished. 

Such challenges are hardly new. In 2023, after all, Iran International was forced to temporarily close its London offices in the face of IRGC plots. But, says its spokesman Adam Baillie, these threats have increased over recent weeks. It’s hard to disagree: though the family of that first Iran International presenter has been freed for the moment, another hasn’t heard from their relatives in almost a fortnight. For their part, BBC Persian staff say they have received similar threats.

There are signs, moreover, that as pressure on the regime continues to grow, state oppression does too. Last week, Iran’s parliament passed a bill to criminalize “unlicensed electronic communication tools” such as Starlink, which enabled Iranians to communicate freely with each other and the outside world. 

The law also introduces jail terms for those involved with media outlets deemed to “spread fear, divide the public, or undermine national security” — such as Manoto. “The regime is seeking to further limit public access to independent news and information during this crucial time,” say Kayvan and Marjan Abbassi, the channel’s directors. “The targeting of international journalists  is part of a broader effort to silence critical voices.”

All the while, Khalili himself continues to suffer. “Most nights I don’t go home but stay with friends, because I miss my family so much,” he says. “I can’t bear being in our bedroom, seeing my wife’s dresses and her shoes, knowing what she’s going through.”

Not that the presenter plans to give up. Beyond sticking to his daily presenting schedule, he has even asked Mahsa to divorce him — hoping, at least, to free her from the regime’s clutches. “I can’t let the Islamic Republic tell me what to do,” he says. “Iranians are fighting a war, a war for our country.” Fair enough. But as Omid Khalili knows better than most, all wars have victims.

Even with my love of melodrama, I cannot sustain such histrionics. While it’s enjoyable to momentarily inhabit the caricature of the Andrew Doyle that exists in the minds of my detractors, the truth is far less exciting. On a recent appearance on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, I let it be known that I am leaving the United Kingdom to work with the actor and comedian Rob Schneider on a new production company called No Apologies Media. Some of my friends have assumed that I am flouncing away out of a desperate conviction that all is lost. The reality is a little more nuanced.

While I do not believe that we live under tyranny, there are serious threats to liberty that ought to be addressed. Many members of the ruling class have scant regard for freedom of speech, as evidenced by the existence of hate speech laws, the recording of “non-crime hate incidents”, draconian jail terms meted out for offensive social media posts and continued calls for online censorship. These are not the hallmarks of an authentically free country, but one in which the authoritarian instinct has not been successfully tamed. As for the artistic industries, they are now similarly beholden to an ideology that demands self-censorship and punishes nonconformity. For creatives, this means finding ways to work within a system that is antagonistic to genuine free expression.

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We often hear practitioners in the arts claiming that “cancel culture is a myth” and that “nobody is being censored”. This is an easy claim to make if your views are naturally in lockstep with the prevailing orthodoxies of the time, but it does suggest a degree of solipsism. The energy it must take to studiously ignore the continual stream of reported cases of artists being cancelled would be sufficient to keep the Large Hadron Collider running indefinitely.

Like many of those with unfashionable views, I have been dragged unexpectedly into the culture war. Whereas I once made my living solely from writing plays, musicals and performing stand-up comedy, in recent years I have found myself drawn to punditry. I have hosted a weekly show called Free Speech Nation on GB News for the last three years, written numerous articles and two books in defence of liberal values, and satirised the worst excesses of culture warriors through my satirical character Titania McGrath.

But while I feel a compulsion to address the ongoing threats to free speech in our culture, and recognise the importance of challenging a journalistic monoculture, I do miss working in the creative field. It is my hope that relocating to Arizona to work with Rob will bring greater opportunities to focus on writing and producing comedy and drama. Rob’s commitment to freedom of speech is absolute and uncompromising. Under the aegis of his new company, I’ve already begun writing a sitcom with Graham Linehan and Martin Gourlay which we hope to be filming early next year. In addition, we have plans for other television projects with a focus on political and social commentary. This culture war isn’t over yet.

It’s quite the team. And it goes without saying that Graham is one of the foremost comedy writers of our times. If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who claims that cancel culture doesn’t exist, it might be worth asking how it is that the creator of hit sitcoms such as Father Ted and The IT Crowd has been unable to work in the UK television industry for six years simply for airing his opinions. You won’t get a coherent answer, but it’ll be entertaining to watch the attempt.

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For myself, I’ve never been cancelled. One could even accuse me of finding a way to capitalise on my heterodox perspectives, given that much of my career has depended upon me expressing my views openly and satirising the intolerance of those who would rather I shut up. Yet isn’t it strange that a commitment to freedom of speech, individual autonomy, and equal rights to all irrespective of immutable characteristics, should be considered “heterodox” at all?

Rather than facing cancellation, I have experienced what Helen Dale has described as the “silo effect”. Although most of my political views would traditionally be described as “Left-wing”, my stance on the culture war has meant that I have been pigeonholed as being on the Right. So while I do not hold allegiance to any ideology, the insistence that I must be classified with one particular “side” means that my employment prospects will always be limited. The digital crèche of social media, with its insistence on political tribalism, binary thinking and purity spirals, has infected the mainstream. For many commentators, it’s now a matter of “you’re either with us or against us”.

The first time I became aware of an opportunity missed due to ideological factors was when a senior member of staff at the Soho Theatre in London told me candidly that I had been taken off the shortlist for a new playwriting scheme because I was white and male. Years later, when I taught stand-up courses at the Soho Theatre for up-and-coming comedians, I was informed that my contract could not be renewed because one of the members of the group felt “unsafe” after reading a joke I had tweeted. This impact for me was negligible — I didn’t rely on the work financially and was only continuing out of a sense of loyalty — but it did concern me that a leading theatre had such a casual disregard for the importance of artistic freedom.

A career in the creative arts should not be contingent on toeing any specific ideological line, but such incidents are now, unfortunately, the norm. The groupthink that currently predominates in theatre, film, television, comedy, publishing and all other branches of the arts has catalysed some promising pushback. The choreographer Rosie Kay and arts producer Denise Fahmy have established “Freedom in the Arts”, a project specifically aimed at tackling these restrictive conditions. One of their mission statements is “to protect freedom of expression and make sure that the arts are the place where difficult ideas can be addressed, explored and discussed”. What should be a prerequisite is now an ideal that we must struggle to reclaim.

In the current climate, artists are expected to be activists, to ensure that their work promotes the approved message. In other words, conformity is being demanded of those whose vocation ought to make them the most freethinking. When art is expected to be didactic and propagandistic, very little of interest will be produced. Rather than tailor their output to the whims of prissy moralists, artists should be aspiring to William Blake’s precept: “Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”.

That is not to say that creatives cannot fall in line with intersectional dogma if they so choose, but we have seen how the arts quickly become enervated when this is the default expectation. Widespread self-censorship is inevitable when commissions are conditional on whether they reinforce voguish political trends. This does not mean that there are not exceptionally talented artists currently producing good work, but it does mean that their output is often sanitised.

Of course, the true artistic geniuses — those who emerge once or twice in a generation — can always find a way to play the game. There’s a very good reason why Shakespeare’s masterful narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are preceded by dull and dispensable panegyrics to his patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Michelangelo’s talents were so unquestionable that he was given licence to create explicitly erotic imagery for his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. When the Papal Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained that his nudes were more fitting for a bathhouse, Michelangelo painted the naked figure of Minos in the underworld with Biagio’s face, and for good measure added donkey’s ears and a snake biting his genitals.

We can’t all be Michelangelo. For us lesser mortals, we have to find a way to muddle along as best we can in an industry that expects us to be sheep to the establishment shepherds. I have no idea what my move to America will bring, but it is my hope to find a creative climate in which all this tribalistic nonsense is considered irrelevant. If nothing else, it’ll be an adventure.

Three men behind three desks in three near-identical formats, espousing near-identical views. It shouldn’t matter much what this clique has to say about the presidency. But it does. Though Trump is usually held up as the pinnacle of politics merging with the entertainment industry, the truth is that the liberal side got there well ahead, thanks to the merging of current affairs and comedy that has characterised the late-night TV show since the Nineties. These hosts don’t speak to the nation, but they do speak to — and for — an influential slice of the Democratic establishment. Right now, they seem determined to use their influence to ensure that only the wrong questions get asked.

Crucially, the late-night caucus has declared itself opposed to any introspection on whether the Democrats were hurt by their lurch into identity politics. On this, the numbers are very obvious: it’s a yes. Kamala Harris’s campaign attempted to speak to black, latina/latino (not latinx) and women voters as blocs, and these efforts failed to engage sufficiently. Worse, Harris’s past statements in support of a maximalist version of trans rights came back to haunt her badly during the campaign.

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One of the most effective spots run by the Trump campaign simply showed Harris in 2019, asserting her support for taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for prisoners. It also referenced her backing for male athletes in girls’ high-school sports. It ended with the punchy slogan: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” One analysis said it produced a 2.7 swing towards Trump in voters who viewed it. Bad enough that this underlined Harris’s association with a deeply unpopular cause. Worse, in an election where the economy was of prime importance, it reminded voters that they would be picking up the cheque for these values.

The undeniable salience of the trans issue means that this became the first line of defensiveness for the late-night shows. During his show Last Week Tonight, Oliver fumed that “it was frustrating to see the Harris campaign failed to formulate a response” on gender, “especially because it’s pretty easy to do”. Meyers was somehow even more dismissive: “Anyone suggesting Democrats could win elections by throwing trans people under the bus, let me just say: fuck off.”

Of course, the late-night hosts haven’t always held faultlessly liberal opinions. Back in 2013, both Stewart and Colbert were taken to task for jokes about “tranny hookers” and unconvincing transvestites. But over the last 10 years, all of them have fallen in line with the activist position on bathrooms, sports and child transition. In 2018, Colbert (then performing as himself rather than the Stephen Colbert character) confidently told his audience “gender is clearly a spectrum, we know this”. In 2022, Stewart made an episode of his Apple TV show The Problem With Jon Stewart that credulously repeated activist talking points about child transition.

Oliver also joined the trans cause. In 2015, he announced that fears about predatory men exploiting gender identity were “like dragon rustling or space bestiality… Terrible, but it doesn’t really happen.” (Inevitably, it has happened.) And the same Meyers produced a segment that was hailed for “tearing apart trans myths”. All along, the late-night host ideology has held that there is no practical issue with gender self-ID, and that only the most antediluvian would claim otherwise. That position has now been put in front of the electorate and shown to be a liability, but the men who’ve spent a decade making glib jokes on the matter aren’t ready to admit that they got this wrong.

Oliver’s post-election monologue was at least willing to accuse the Harris camp of missteps — although he claimed the problem was not in their muddled and unpopular policies, but rather one of messaging. “As we’ve discussed before, there are vanishingly few trans girls competing in high schools anywhere,” he spluttered. “It is very weird for you to be so focused on this subject.” The actual biggest concern for girls in sport was not male competitors, but “the creepy assistant volleyball coach who keeps liking their posts on fucking Instagram”.

As political comms goes, this is hardly a masterclass. “This isn’t happening, it doesn’t matter, you’re weird for caring and by the way your daughter is probably being groomed by someone else anyway” seems perfectly calibrated to antagonise not assuage. But the late-night TV host doesn’t have to think about persuasion. His job is to flatter and gratify the people who watch him. It was “easy” for Oliver to win over his audience because they already agreed with him.

Meyers delivered this rousing peroration: “If you’re choosing this moment to scapegoat and demonise vulnerable people, rather than aim your criticism at the powerful elites and moneyed interests who paved the way for the return of Trump and stand to benefit from his second term, you’re way off. Instead of blaming marginalised people, maybe look inward, take some accountability.” It’s a laudable sentiment, until you remember who he was actually speaking to here.

It’s not the audience — either at home or in the studio — who are being enjoined to “look inward, take some accountability”. Almost everyone listening to Meyers already agrees with him: this is a polemic for the faithful. The effect is to reassure everyone watching that they don’t, in fact, need to engage in any reflection at all: all accountability can be directed outwards. The audience rewarded him with a warm bath of clapter.

“Clapter” according to Tina Fey is “when you do a political joke and people go, ‘Woo-hoo’. It means they sort of approve but didn’t really like it that much.” She gives credit for the coinage to, surprisingly, Meyers (then on SNL with Fey). And she also pointed to late-night TV hosts as particular culprits, name-checking The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Later she said she hadn’t meant to single it out, but it wasn’t an unfair comment, because The Daily Show is probably the single most influential force in the history of clapter.

Since 1996, The Daily Show had been hosted by Stewart (he left in 2015 and returned this year). It offered fact-dense political satire with an explicitly Left-wing bent, and became a refuge for Democrats in the wilderness of the George W. Bush presidency. The liberal cause was out in the cold politically, but it still had cultural clout. “It would be no overstatement to say that, in the pre-Obama years that followed, the leader of Democratic resistance was Jon Stewart, and he was holding rallies weeknights at 11 p.m Eastern on Comedy Central,” wrote Devin Gordon in a 2022 profile of Stewart.

It’s hard to exaggerate how important Stewart was to an audience that was in danger of feeling utterly defeated by their times. The Daily Show offered a still point of intelligence in the churn of a dumb world, and the relief of laughter at the absurdity of the free world being governed by (imagine!) George W Bush. Stewart’s style — clever but not lofty, funny but still serious, charming but also forensic — presaged Obama’s own urbane presentation.

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Not that Stewart would want to embrace such responsibility. His work, he has said, is “pleasant, it’s a distraction… but ultimately feckless”. This feels not entirely honest. As a clapter purveyor, he got to choose when he was playing the clown and when he was playing the legislator. Each role gave cover to the other. Stewart is conflicted about his legacy now. In the years after he first stepped down from The Daily Show, he’s said, “almost everything that I believed and advocated for didn’t come to pass, and probably got worse”.

Perhaps his mistake was believing that satire had any power beyond the destructive. It seems far healthier to take the approach of Peter Cook, who liked to say that he modelled his club The Establishment on “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”. The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is for them to start to believe in the myth of their own importance.

Stewart couldn’t change politics, but he did change entertainment. Without him, there would probably be no Meyers, or at least not the Meyers that exists now (he has said that his version of late-night TV owes a direct debt to The Daily Show). There would almost certainly be no Oliver or Colbert, since both of them got their big breaks on The Daily Show during Stewart’s tenure — Oliver in the role of British correspondent, and Colbert playing a parody version of a Right-wing broadcaster called (confusingly) Stephen Colbert.

This was a time when the Right-wing media in America was dominated by figures who were both emotionally unhinged and factually unencumbered (Glenn Beck, for example). Colbert skewered them so brilliantly that some of his phrases are now embedded in the language. In 2004, he came up with “truthiness” to denote something that feels true without being, in point of fact, true. And in 2006, he delivered the immortal line “reality has a well-known liberal bias” (a twist on the habitual Right-wing complaint of liberal bias in the media) while roasting George W. Bush at the White House correspondents dinner.

These jokes stuck because they named something that was instantly recognisable. The Right, which was then engaged in its flirtation with the Tea Party, had a whole host of quarrels with actuality — from the mysterious failure of WMD to materialise in Iraq, to the denial of man-made global warming, to the bizarre revival of creationism. Maybe it simply was the case that the Left was dealing with reality while the Right dealt in wishful thinking. Pointing that out and laughing seemed a worthwhile enterprise. Meanwhile, comedians who didn’t fit so comfortably into the Left-liberal consensus dominating TV started to explore new mediums such as podcasts: The Joe Rogan Experience, launched in 2009.

Superiority feeds complacency. When the world you deal in can be contained safely within the borders of a TV screen, it’s easy to begin to believe that you really do have all the answers — especially when you have a tame audience constantly affirming that you’re all on the right side of history together. As Oliver said, in a recent segment on Robert F Kennedy Jr, “it does show just how easy it is to reel people in when you’re spouting self-assured bullshit on an unchallenged platform”. Presumably, this was never intended as a self-own, but it perfectly describes the situation of the late-night host, grown flabby on endless audience affirmation untempered by responsibility.

Is it really a surprise that, as political comedy stopped even notionally attempting to be funny, politics in America was overtaken by Trump, who treats his rallies like stand-up gigs? Trump was a gift to late night in the Obama years: a foe with all the belligerence and bizarreness that had characterised the best targets of the George W Bush government. The late-night shows thought he was safe to promote to the level of unofficial opposition, because they couldn’t imagine anyone taking him seriously. They had lost contact with the part of the country that did.

The late-night shows don’t have the force they used to have. The biggest broadcasting moment of this presidential election was Trump going on Rogan’s podcast and spitballing about becoming a “whale psychiatrist”: the alternative media is just the media now, and it’s more spectacularly absurd than anything Colbert imagined. Even those, like me, who are depressed at the prospect of another Trump term have to admit that this is a lot more entertaining than being hectored by a man at a desk.

The next generation of liberal media will probably be born the same way the Republican media was, out of the glare of the TV lights, where you have to do more than turn on the APPLAUSE sign to bring your audience with you. “The resistance” isn’t on NBC, CBS, HBO or Comedy Central. All you’ll find there are some has-beens working their tired schtick, telling a shrinking circle of people feel-good untruths with pauses for applause. Jesters should never be confused with moral authorities.

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.

“Listen to the scientists, support masks,” Biden said at a campaign rally, four years ago, berating Trump for not wearing a mask after he had caught Covid. “Support a mask mandate nationwide,” Biden thundered to cheers and adulation. His campaign message captured a “follow the science” sentiment among Left-leaning American voters who derided anyone questioning mask effectiveness with the label “anti-mask”. This, despite a smattering of articles in Scientific American, Wired, New York Magazine and The Atlantic reporting that scientific studies found masks didn’t seem to stop viruses.

The debate over mask effectiveness took an odd turn last year when ardent mask advocate, Zeynep Tufekci, wrote a New York Times essay claiming “the science is clear that masks work”. Tufekci’s piece denigrated and belittled a scientific review by the prestigious medical nonprofit, Cochrane, for concluding that the evidence is “uncertain”.

Shortly after Tufekci published her essay, Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, dashed out a statement, to assure mask advocates that Cochrane would update the review’s language. Cochrane reviews are widely considered as the “gold standard” for high‐quality information to inform medicine, and their process is laborious, with multiple rounds of internal checks and expert peer review. Having Cochrane’s head make a personal pronouncement about a published review is unprecedented — akin to having the executive editor of The New York Times write an essay expressing personal opinions about one of the paper’s own deep-dive investigations.

The incident also marked an odd point in the timeline of mask use. Before the pandemic, few, if any, prominent organisations promoted masks to stop influenza or other respiratory viruses. As the WHO concluded in their 2019 pandemic preparedness plan: “There have been a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission.” So, it was not surprising that both Tufekci’s claims “masks work” and Karla Soares-Weiser’s allegations that something was wrong with the Cochrane mask review were later found themselves to have no real evidence.

Earlier this year, Soares-Weiser issued another statement, this time explaining the mask review was fine and no changes would be made. Despite the 180, damage to Cochrane’s mask review had already been done. Google sends you straight to Tufekci’s New York Times essay alleging problems in the Cochrane review.

But why did Soares-Weiser change her mind?

I have discovered, through hundreds of emails provided to me by freedom of information requests and a Cochrane whistleblower, that Tufekci bumped Soares-Weiser into making the statement against Cochrane’s own mask review — a move that landed like a grenade inside the organisation.

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While Soares-Weiser runs Cochrane, scientists with expertise in each specific subject matter write and edit the reviews. When she rushed out her statement complaining about the mask review, the review authors charged that Cochrane had thrown science under the bus by working with “controversial writer” Zeynep Tufekci; meanwhile, the editor of the mask review reminded Cochrane’s leadership that changes were only being considered because of “intense media coverage and criticism”, not because there were any problems in the review’s science. “I had a very challenging meeting with the [governing board] yesterday,” Soares-Weiser wrote a few days afterwards. “I am holding on, stressed, but OK.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Because the attack by Soares-Weiser and Cochrane’s leadership on their own mask review is illustrative of how media and political pressure undermined and suppressed inconvenient scientific conclusions during the pandemic — and are still attempting to do so. The incident also raises questions about media ethics and whether Cochrane’s leadership is still fit for purpose.

When Cochrane published their 2023 mask review, it was the seventh iteration of a process that began 18 years previously. Back in 2006, Cochrane researchers raked through the scientific literature to see if they could determine what interventions could halt the spread of viruses. They found no good evidence that masks work. The scientists then updated their review in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2020.

With all six updates, each time scouring any new peer-reviewed studies, Cochrane researchers concluded the same: there is no good scientific evidence that masks work to control viruses. And each time, the scientific community yawned. Because until the Covid pandemic, nobody had conceived of a political movement to advocate for masks. Not even Zeynep Tufekci.

“Don’t worry if you cannot find masks,” Tufekci wrote in a February 2020 article for Scientific American. “For non–health care people, washing your hands often, using alcohol-based hand-sanitiser liberally and learning not to touch your face are the most important clinically-proven interventions there are.” Promoting the article on X, Tufekci reiterated this point: “Clinical studies show hand-washing is the crucial step not masks.”

But the following month, a New York Times media reporter praised Tufekci for reversing her former opinion in a 1 March tweetstorm. This was followed by a 17 March essay for The New York Times that convinced the CDC to alter federal guidance and advise Americans to mask.

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What makes this all alarming is that Tufekci is an academic sociologist, with no training in medicine or public health. And yet, she managed to alter public health policy with a bunch of tweets and an essay followed, two months later, by a co-authored scientific preprint that promoted mask mandates. “We recommend that public officials and governments strongly encourage the use of widespread face masks in public, including the use of appropriate regulation,” it said.

The study’s lead author is Jeremy Howard, a mask advocate and Australian software entrepreneur, who, like Tufekci, has no training in public health or medicine. The review was later published in a medical journal and remains the only article I could find that Tufekci has published in the scientific literature on masks.

Despite such a thin publishing record in the scientific literature, the Raleigh News & Observer (an influential paper among academics) anointed Tufekci a Covid media hero who had challenged the medical and public health establishment and got the facts right — but with essays, not science. “Instead of conducting lab experiments related to Covid-19, she used her platform on Twitter and in the opinion sections of Scientific American, The Atlantic and The New York Times to inform the public with practical advice about what to do and why.”

In retrospect, it’s hard to read this article — celebrating an academic for doing science by essay — and not wonder if it’s a satirical piece for The Onion: “Monkey Solves Grand Unified Theory of Physics in a Single Tweet.” Nonetheless, Tufekci played along with the gag, amazed at her magical ability to solve complex scientific problems without doing any actual science — just writing essays.

“I never thought in a million years I’d be writing something that basically said the World Health Organization and CDC and medical establishment in the United States and Europe are wrong,” she told the paper. But one tiny obstacle stood between Tufekci and full acceptance of mask mandates: Cochrane.

When Cochrane released their mask update in January 2023, which again said the efficacy of masks was uncertain, critics of pandemic policies naturally used these scientific conclusions to cast doubt on the mask advocates. “Mask mandates were a bust,” wrote New York Times columnist Brett Stephens, citing an interview by Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane mask review. “Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right.”

Tufekci’s rise to public prominence is tied closely to her mask advocacy. Reading this column in The New York Times, the most prominent paper in the country, and where she also worked, must have been irksome for her. Three days after the Stephens column, Tufekci emailed Cochrane for an interview. But rather than contacting Jefferson or any of the scientists who authored the review, Tufekci went straight to Michael Brown, one of Cochrane’s editors. She also asked if he would introduce her to Cochrane editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, to which Brown agreed.

Some days later, Karla Soares-Weiser emailed a Cochrane official that she had been “back and forth with NYT about the mask review”, asking for help responding to questions. “I’m navigating a difficult situation,” Soares-Weiser emailed. Tufekci meanwhile, had contacted Jefferson for comment, but he ignored her.

The very following day, the Times published Tufekci’s “masks work” essay. Given the way American journalism works, the piece had most likely been written and edited before she had contacted Jefferson the night before for comment. Although 12 different scientists had been involved in writing and researching the Cochrane mask review, Zeynep singled out Jefferson. She named him several times in her essay for making alleged false statements about the pandemic. Hours later, Cochrane rushed out Soares-Weiser’s statement, and then apologised to the review authors. “We hoped to inform you all before publication but have been blindsided by the NYT and have scrabbled to upload our statement,” Cochrane emailed the review authors.

This did not go down well with the authors. “I will not speak for the others but am deeply distressed by this course of events which have occurred without our knowledge,” replied Jon Conly, a professor and former head of the department of medicine at the University of Calgary. He insisted that Cochrane had thrown the review authors under the bus. “Very naive to think you and the [editor in chief Soares-Weiser] spoke to the media at NYTs (without informing us) and would trust them and that they would not immediately publish what you said, especially with this woman who is well known as a controversial writer.”

“There was no intention to ‘throw you or anyone under the bus’,” Brown responded, “since I would be throwing myself under the bus as the sign-off editor.” He added that he had told Tufekci that he stood by the review and had asked her to contact the review authors for their statements.

Conly confirmed to me later that Tufekci — who did not respond to repeated requests for comment — never contacted him, even though he is named as the review’s corresponding author, who Tufekci should have contacted for comment. “Not sure who Tufekci would have corresponded with to find any of the authors who would have agreed with her,” Conly said.

As I have seen from internal correspondence, Cochrane’s editors then began discussing how to manage blowback from Soares Weiser’s statement. Brown reminded them the update used the same language from 2020 and that revisions were now being suggested because Cochrane was flinching from media critics, not because the science was wrong. “Although I agree that the proposed changes to the [summary] add clarity, it was only under intense media coverage and criticism that these revisions were suggested,” Brown wrote.

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Seeking another angle to quell criticism of Soares-Weiser’s statement, Lisa Bero, a professor medicine at the University of Colorado who serves as Cochrane ethics advisor, suggested that Cochrane publish comments being submitted by outsiders that were also critical of the mask review. “That should be published as soon as possible (following screening for libel or profanity),” Bero emailed. “It is important for readers to know that criticism has not just come through the media, but through the formal channels that we have.”

But according to Conly, the review had already undergone extensive, detailed peer review. “If the editor-in-chief and ethics officer were colluding to find criticism afterwards,” he told me, “that would appear to be unethical.”

Meanwhile, Soares-Weiser’s statement and Tufekci’s article were having a significant effect outside the organisation, spurring several news articles as well as ridicule of the mask authors on social media. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of several books on pandemics, Laurie Garret, accused the mask authors of fraud. “[T]hese bozos have undermined public faith in [masks] & biz/govt willingness to promote use,” she posted on X. (It is notable that, prior to the pandemic, Garrett posted on X in 2018 that masks don’t work for influenza and other respiratory viruses. “We have also known for 100+ years that masks do no good.”)

The argument was even reverberating through politics. Testifying in her final appearance before Congress, CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky, cited Soares-Weiser’s statement, falsely stating that Cochrane had “retracted” the mask review. Congressional staff were forced to correct her testimony: “The lack of trust in public health officials is becoming an enormous problem,” a congressional staffer later wrote.

Word of Soares-Weiser’s actions even reached the highest levels of the British government. That summer, while she was in London for a Cochrane event, an MP invited her to Parliament’s Portcullis House to explain her statement. However, according to a staffer in Parliament, Soares-Weiser dodged the invite and never appeared.

Although he was noted prominently in the “masks work” essay, Cochrane’s Michael Brown told me the Times had engaged in a lot of of “spinning” of his comments and he hadn’t been aware that Tufekci had campaigned for mask mandates, nor that she had published a review whose conclusions contradicted those of Cochrane. In her initial email to Brown, Tufekci had highlighted her ostensibly scientific background, introducing herself as both a New York Times columnist and an academic with a background in statistics and causal inference, and an interest in scientific reviews. “I use and participate in reviews myself (I’m writing one in my own field soon) and thus am familiar with many of the challenges and issues.”

This is something of an embellishment of Tufekci’s bona fides. According to Google Scholar, she has published no academic articles this year and the only one she published in all of 2023 was an opinion piece in Nature. As for the review article Tufekci had pointed to, it has never appeared.

“I’m a trusting person,” Brown told me, explaining that he had never looked up Tufekci’s history before speaking with her. “She’s definitely more of a journalist than a scientist. I didn’t agree with her, the way she then spun it: masks work.”

“The bottom line is that [our] review was well-done,” Brown said. As for the proposed changes to review’s language, Brown explained that the summary language had been written by Cochrane staff reporting to Karla Soares-Weiser, not Tom Jefferson and the other review authors.

“She sort of got caught in the crossfire,” Brown said of Soares-Weiser, adding that colleagues pressured her because they didn’t like the conclusions that there is no evidence masks work. “Which is really hard for her, for someone in her position as editor in chief.”

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Brown made his views on the science clear last September when he emailed the organiser of a talk he was giving that masks “do not make a major impact at the community level when promoted as a public health intervention”. He also told me that a recent scientific review in the Annals of Internal Medicine complemented the findings of Cochrane. “In the end, the conclusions were the same.”

But while Cochrane has ceased attacking its own mask review, The New York Times continues to promote the “masks work” narrative — despite evidence to the contrary. Last May, the paper ran an essay by Tulane University’s John M. Barry. In his piece, Barry wrote: “Masks present a much simpler question. They work. We’ve known they work since 1917, when they helped protect soldiers from a measles epidemic.”

And yet, we know this is not true. Even Barry does. As he wrote his bestselling tome, The Great Influenza: “The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could.”

But as has become clear, and as Brown confirmed in our conversation, masks are no longer about science: “Instead of just talking about the science, it became a political thing. And people fell on one side or the other,” he said. “And they said some things, and then they have to back up what they’ve said previously. And they’re just digging a hole deeper and deeper.”

What The New York Times did was to embrace a scientific opinion — masks work! — and then defend that notion like a divine ruling — ignoring contrary evidence and attacking researchers such as Tom Jefferson who have spent decades toiling away on a once-obscure topic. “This is what the future holds,” Jefferson told me. “It’s an upside-down world. It’s the death of science.”

A recent article in The Telegraph, warning of “the ‘perfect storm’ turning teenagers into terrorists”, is a case in point. The opening few paragraphs focus on Joe Metcalfe, a white neo-Nazi from Haworth, West Yorkshire, who had plotted to kill Muslims in an attack modelled on the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand in 2019.“The acne-afflicted teenager,” we are told, “is part of a growing phenomenon of teenage terror offenders in Britain, with 2023 seeing a new record of 42 under-18s arrested.” The report also singles out the case of another white teen, albeit one who converted to Islam and planned to attack non-Muslims at the Isle of Wight music festival in July 2022.

The subliminal message conveyed here is that indigenous British white boys are not all right, but rather are potentially far-Right— a message that news outlets have been pushing ad infinitum for the past few years. Drill down into the actual data on Britain’s convicted teen terrorists, however, and you will find a different and less politically convenient story. According to a report published last November by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, between January 2016 and October 2023, 43 individuals in England and Wales were convicted of terrorism offences they committed as minors. The majority were far-Right (25), while 16 were jihadi and two had no clear or known ideological motivation. All except one — Safaa Boular, who was jailed for life for her role in an Isis-inspired plot to attack the British Museum — were male. The youngest was just 13. (The authors of the report, Hannah Rose and Gina Vale, have posted their dataset here.)

More striking, though, was the fact that none of the 43 had managed to commit an act of terrorist violence, none had procured a firearm and only one had come close to making a workable explosive device. Indeed, most were not, in fact, terrorists at all, but were instead the online fanboys of terrorism: they had downloaded, disseminated or created terrorist content on the internet — and a few had done a combination of all three. These are all offences under UK terrorism legislation and are punishable by up to 15 years’ imprisonment. One of the teens, a neo-Nazi from west London, had made a poster inciting violence against Prince Harry, calling him “race traitor” on account of his marriage to Meghan Markle. Another, a Muslim from Sutton Coldfield, had set up a “mujahdeen channel” on Telegram, where he gave a lesson on how to make a Molotov cocktail and offered advice on how to travel to Syria to join the jihad there.

The data cast an illuminating light on the ideology of the offenders, but you need to probe further to understand its implications. Of the 43 teenagers in Rose and Vale’s dataset, 13 — almost a third — were convicted of preparation of terrorist acts, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. And of those 13, seven had sought to join jihadi groups in war zones in the Middle East and North Africa, but were stopped by counter-terrorism police, while eight had unsuccessfully plotted to carry out terrorist acts in the UK. Among that last group, five were far-Right and three were jihadi.

Rose and Vale acknowledge that the “more serious” terrorism offences “were more common among Islamist individuals”, but they don’t enlarge on this point, although they make it clear that of the eight who plotted terrorist violence, the two who came closest to succeeding were jihadi-inspired. “While the extreme Right-wing teenage plotters outnumber Islamists in our dataset,” they write, “it is interesting to note that two planned large-scale Islamist attacks could meet the threshold of ‘late stage’ disruption after months of research and reconnaissance.”

It is also interesting to note that Rose and Vale’s dataset would look very different had they gone further back to the declaration of the Isis caliphate in mid-2014, giving them a decade-long perspective. That dataset would have included Shamima Begum and her two now deceased schoolmates, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, and the other Bethnal Green schoolgirl who apparently inspired all three, Sharmeena Begum. It would have also included Talha Asmal, 17, who travelled from Dewsbury to Iraq to join Isis and in June 2015 carried out a suicide bombing there. And it would have included many other teenage boys who made the same dismal life-choices as Asmal. It would, in short, have produced an overwhelming statistical disproportion between jihadists and the far-Right and further cemented the impression that British teenagers who embrace jihad are far more dangerous than those who engage in far-Right terror fandoms in their bedrooms.

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Another striking detail is that there are no incels among the 43 convicted teens. I point this out because while incel culture has reportedly “gone mainstream” in UK schools, no British schoolboy until now has been convicted of incel-related terrorism offences in this country. Given the enormous gaslighting around this issue of late, and the even bigger public and private digital-training-grift that parasitically engorges on it, the conspicuous absence of incels in the data is more than noteworthy.

A yet further striking detail is that of the 43 offenders, 13 had been referred at least once to Prevent, the UK’s counter-radicalisation programme, which, according to William Shawcross’s review last year, is excessively focused on Right-wing extremism, despite 80% of live police investigations involving Islamist plots. Prevent’s defenders insist that the scheme has stopped countless young people from engaging in extremism, but it’s impossible to empirically demonstrate this, given that we can’t know how their lives would have turned out had they not received support from Prevent. What we do know, however, is that a significant number who had received such support went on to commit terrorism offences. In one revealing section, Rose and Vale quote one of the teens as boasting: “I just had a two-hour conversation with a coconut mozlem which works with the government…He tried to ‘deradicalise’ me…They think we’re gunna stop following the haqq [truth] out of fear of them or of ignorance.”

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Looking at the cold data, then, the overwhelming picture that emerges is not of dangerous masterminds, but of chaotic and cretinous loners immersed in an infantile online demi-monde of gore, murder fandom and sectarian hatred. Many grew up in troubled families and suffer from mental health problems, particularly autism. And while they were all vigorously invested in their ideological beliefs, their ability to competently act on them was, as Rose and Vale moderately put it, “less clear-cut”. Joe Metcalfe, for example, would have been a more serious proposition had he known how to drive: his plot came to a pitiful end when he stole his dad’s car and crashed it into a fence. Another far-Right plotter from Rugby was similarly ham-fisted, prompting the judge at his trial to describe his attack-planning as “inept”.

None of this means that teenage extremists are not a potential threat, and Rose and Vale are rightly determined to dispel the idea that they have no agency and were led astray by mysterious “online groomers”. The recent stabbing of an Assyrian bishop by a 16-year-old boy in Sydney testifies to this: he survived the attack, but his right eye didn’t.

The attack was revealing in other ways, too. Bishop Emmanuel has apparently forgiven his attacker, which is his right to do of course, while a spokesperson for the attacker’s family has relayed to the media that the teen had “anger management” problems and is a devout Muslim without being “fanatical”. Here we can see the inverse of today’s extremism panic, where the temptation is to pretend that it’s not happening at all, or that it’s only happening among those sketchy white kids.

The Head of the UK’s Counter Terrorism Policing, Matt Jukes, recently told a journalist that, when he first started his career in counter-terrorism 25 years ago, the dominant foes were organised groups such as al-Qaeda, whereas today the threat-picture looks very different: “One in five of the people we arrest [today] is a child… principally boys,” he said, adding that some were as young as 11 and that much of his work is now taken up with liaising less with MI5 and more with child and adolescent mental health services, schools and colleges.

Counter Terrorism Policing, in other words, has become an ancillary of Britain’s already over-bloated and ever-expanding therapeutic state. This is alarming for all sorts of reasons. Not only does it risk stigmatising the young people who come within its remit, but it also diverts resources away from investigating threats that are far more serious than that posed by acne-ridden teenagers in their bedrooms.

In recent months, people who lost their jobs amid this or that spasm of ideological intolerance have begun to reappear in places where they would have been previously blackballed, telling stories that sound like modern-day versions of The Crucible, except much stupider. The memoir of #MeToo hero Christine Blasey Ford was released last week to surprisingly little fanfare, while a NYMag exposé of womanising podcaster Andrew Huberman — which only a few years ago might have resulted in the boycotting and deplatforming of the man in question — made barely a dent in the discourse. Brands that went all in on social justice are now quietly — and in some cases, desperately — distancing themselves from the excesses of the era. Even the painfully hip young progressives who run Biden’s social-media channels have stopped using inane terms like Latinx, and resumed posting like normal people, or close enough.

And yet, there is also a sense that we cannot pull back from the edge, particularly in the rarefied spaces where high culture is made. Consider this month’s imbroglio at the literary journal Guernica, which lost virtually all its volunteer staff in a wave of mass resignations following the publication of an essay by writer and translator Joanna Chen. Titled “From the Edges of a Broken World”, it described Chen’s complicated and conflicted relationship with her adopted country of Israel — to which she immigrated at the age of 16 after the death of her brother — in the wake of the October 7 attacks that left 1,400 people dead, and the retaliatory bombing by Israel which augmented that number by tens of thousands more. Within days of the essay’s publication, Guernica‘s co-publisher and nearly a dozen editors announced that they were resigning in objection, accusing Chen of trying to “soften the violence of colonialism and genocide”. The magazine unpublished the essay with apologies, although apologies for what remains unclear; a “more fulsome explanation” for the retraction was promised but has yet to appear, and the magazine’s website has not been updated in weeks.

It’s hard to understand how someone could read Chen’s words and see a woman who is “speaking for power”, and blind to the plight of the Palestinians, let alone defending genocide. “There is a limit to which the human soul can stomach atrocities and keep going,” she writes, in a paragraph that mentions both the October 7 slaughter by Hamas terrorists and the ongoing massacre in Gaza. The essay, which has since been republished by Washington Monthly, is interspersed with lines of poetry by Palestinian writers, people Chen knows personally from having translated their work, and also describes her ongoing work as a volunteer driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals. But of course, most of the essay’s fiercest critics didn’t read it, at least not comprehensively — and of course, not reading it was exactly what they wanted everyone else to do. That’s the thing about censors: they don’t really care what you’re saying. They just want to stop you from saying it.

In truth, the most interesting thing about Guernica‘s collapse is how familiar its contours seem. The substance of the controversy changes, but its shape remains the same. There was the cherry-picking of one allegedly offensive line — in this case, Chen grimacing as a friend tried to comfort her children by describing the sounds of rocket fire as “good booms” — which was then repeated ad nauseam, like a magic password that allowed critics to condemn the essay while bypassing any actual engagement with its content. A search for the phrase “good booms” on X is an illuminating, if depressing, reminder that what you cannot bring yourself to read charitably you will also inevitably struggle to comprehend — and that even the most literate among us are not above pretending, for the sake of tribal signalling, to have the intellectual capacity of a turnip.

But of course, this was just step one; eventually, and particularly if a backlash has begun to brew, the censors will pivot to a litany of secondary indictments: a lack of oversight by the editor (“A rigorous editorial process might have produced something worth reading!”), an error in the publication process (“Only one editor saw it!”), the quality of the censored work (“It’s not even good!”).

For those of us who come to these debates based on a sincere and principled commitment to free expression, this rhetorical barrage is disorienting; it’s like being invited to a scrimmage only to find your opponent repeatedly picking up the goalposts and carrying them all over the field, jeering at you over their shoulders for wanting to play in the first place. It would be almost hilariously bewildering, if it weren’t so damned bleak. The journal editors who are supposed to be the custodians of the literature that allows us to know ourselves, our world, and each other — people who spend their lives bewailing the dangers of book bans from the Right — become a pack of sneering authoritarian bullies when confronted by work that dares to empathise with anyone but their chosen side. The artists who are supposed to be our truth-tellers, our rule-breakers, whine that a story wasn’t subject to proper editorial process, like a snotty bureaucrat sending you to the back of the line because you didn’t properly fill out Section 320A of Form 981 at the DMV.

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It doesn’t matter if the story was good; it doesn’t even matter what the story was about. Anyone who cares about art, and especially the ones who care about it enough to make it, knows this for the cringing, callow conformity it is. It is — or at least, it should be — utterly beneath us.

A common criticism of Israel is that, in its treatment of the Palestinians, the country has become the thing it once hated. This seems too facile to adequately describe the complexities of a conflict thousands of years old, in which all parties involved have suffered, and struggled, and spilled the blood of others as surely as others have spilled their own. But it could perhaps describe the current state of the arts in America, in this moment of absolute hegemony by the Left in every place where culture is produced — and in which the flag of the progressive cause can be found literally flying over everything from corporate headquarters to the White House.

We call this a “culture war”, but in truth, it feels like that war has been over for some time, and that the Guernica controversy is just the latest flex by a regime that has been in power for over a decade. Consider how long we’ve lived in thrall to the shrieking, puritan mode of cultural critique first advanced on the Your Fave Is Problematic Tumblr. Consider how long we’ve been policing books and films for “harmful tropes”, or obsessing about the racial makeup of the Oscar nominees. Consider that it was 2017 when progressive folk hero Roxane Gay effectively torpedoed HBO’s Confederate, an alternate-history drama led by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, by calling it “slavery fanfiction” in the pages of the New York Times.

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I often think about Confederate. Who knows: maybe the concept was, if not slavery fanfiction, too flawed to pull off. Maybe it would have been in truly bad taste. But maybe it would have been interesting, or provocative, or even great — and we’ll never know.

This, too, is the thing about censorship: at its worst, it isn’t just about one book, one film, one painting going up in flames. At its worst, it yanks the paintbrush from the artist’s hand before he’s painted a single stroke, all for fear of what he might create. It’s why, even now, it still seems so strange and terrible to me that so many of these avid censors are often artists themselves. The one-time counterculturalists who overthrew the scolds of the Moral Majority, ascending into power through the sheer audacity of their art, their stories, their songs — how long did it take before these same people started using their newfound influence to silence the voices of the artists they didn’t like? A year? Five years? Was it always going to be thus?

Maybe. What matters, I think, is that we are fully living on the other side of that moment, and have been for a while. The spasms of the past few years, whatever you want to call them — wokeness, cancel culture, something else — were not a power struggle, but the aftermath of one: the part where the winner shows his strength and supremacy by stamping his boot on the faces of the losers, not forever, but certainly until everyone knows exactly who’s in charge.

Seen this way, what happened at Guernica is simply what has been happening. Not a revolt from below, but a reminder from above of who holds the power, the influence, and the censor’s pen in their hot little hands. That Guernica has published nothing since the meltdown over Chen’s essay seems less like accidental fallout, and more like things going exactly as planned.

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.

There was little doubt that the former president wasn’t going to dominate the rural state. But the rush to declare him the victor — in violation of policies that prohibit such calls before the polls close — was a blatant attempt to soak up the election night audience.

This followed another departure from traditional editorial practices when MSNBC and CNN refused to screen Trump’s victory speech. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, casting herself and her network as defenders of the republic, justified the unusual decision with typical, exaggerated commentary. Maddow said her network would suffer by “knowingly broadcasting untrue things”. The Iowa primary heralded “democracy falling to an authoritarian and potentially fascist form of government”. For his part, Jake Tapper of CNN suggested his network had to shield viewers from “anti-immigrant rhetoric”.

Trump responded in kind. “NBC and CNN refused to air my victory speech,” he said at a rally in New Hampshire the following day. “Think of it — because they are crooked. They’re dishonest, and frankly, they should have their licenses or whatever they have taken away.”

And with that, election season has started, along with the outrage cycle from which both Trump and legacy media reap mutual benefit. The more media outlets lean into partisan anti-Trump coverage, the more gleefully he campaigns against the media as a biased institution.

It’s a pattern that first took shape nine years ago, when Trump launched his campaign with a series of inflammatory statements. Mexican migrants are rapists! Ban all Muslim immigration! Why can’t I call women “fat pigs, slobs, and disgusting animals”? The extreme remarks rolled on.

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In response, the media abandoned objectivity. Journalists inserted themselves into the story, often challenging Trump directly and darkly warning readers to oppose him. The New York Times and Washington Post broke tradition and used the words “lie” and “liar” on their splash to describe a presidential candidate. The media used any opportunity to present Trump in a negative light. MSNBC, despite its supposed rule against broadcasting falsehoods, reported salacious stories casting Trump as a Russian intelligence asset. The press pitted itself against the candidate. While popular on cable television, this approach is very much divorced from journalism that seeks to understand why voters were attracted to his message on trade, his unorthodox opposition to foreign military interventions, or the anger he mobilised against establishment elites.

Trump, for his part, embraced this approach, even encouraging his supporters to jeer the assembled journalists at his campaign rallies. “I think the political press is among the most dishonest people that I have ever met,” Trump would say, to be met with uproarious applause.

All decorum gone, the clashes drove record viewership and unprecedented profits for media corporations. Meanwhile, the endless anti-Trump headlines in the liberal media only made his point about bias, while also keeping him right at the heart of every story.

The profit dynamic was significant. In 2015, Les Moonves, then-chief of CBS News, was giddy with the Trump-driven audience. “Looking ahead,” he told investors, “the presidential election is right around the corner and, thank God, the rancour has already begun.” On another call, Moonves claimed the carnivalesque campaign was fueling “pretty phenomenal” political advertising revenue. “Go Donald! Keep getting out there!” he chuckled, according to a recording of the call.

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The Washington Post and New Yorker enjoyed record circulation. MSNBC and CNN also claimed unprecedented viewership, finally outflanking Fox News, as each network competed for an audience hungry for Trump controversies — some of which, like the “Steele Dossier”, were outright fabrications. “The heightened political climate continues to benefit CNN,” John Martin, head of Turner, told the Financial Times.

Even the New York Times had a “Trump Bump”. Mark Thompson, then the Times’s chief executive, celebrated a continued revenue spike well after the campaign ended, as coverage of “exceptional news events, including the firing of James Comey”, helped add 109,000 new digital customers.

But with Biden came the Trump slump. The Washington Post lost nearly a third of its digital audience, and last October announced large cutbacks to its workforce. Viewership rates are down at all the major cable and television networks with NBC and MSNBC, just last week, reported yet another round of layoffs.

No wonder, then, that the anti-Trump narrative is rearing its head again. The Iowa coverage already points to what lies ahead, as Trump is described as a “psychopathic criminal” and his entire base built on a “cult of personality”. The media will again do battle in an attempt to prevent the former president from returning to the White House.

Paradoxically, though, this is bound to help, not hinder Trump’s campaign. In 2016, journalists were so distracted by the latest Trump Tweet that they paid no heed to the electorate, its deep frustration at the establishment and its longing for a change agent.

But such are the incentives, outlets are bound to overplay their hand again. The professional and financial advantages are such that non-partisan journalism is forgotten. The media will cast themselves as defenders of democracy and joust with Trump and his campaign, little realising that their crusade will lead him straight back to the White House.

Israel, he told them, was deliberately targeting children with banned weapons: “The primary target of the bombing was people’s residential homes,” he claimed at one point, the footage of which was later uploaded to The Guardian’s website. “And we started seeing phosphorus burns. By day four or five, half of my operating list, which was around 10 to 12 cases every day… were children. At one night in al-Ahli hospital, I performed amputations on six children.”

Describing him as “softly-spoken”, a Sky News correspondent repeated his claim that a rocket which hit the al-Ahli was not fired by Palestinian terrorists, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. “There was no smell of fuel,” Abu-Sittah was quoted as saying. “You’d think that a missile that was destined for Tel Aviv would be full of fuel.” The channel also repeated the doctor’s insistence that al-Shifa — another of the hospitals where he worked — was not a Hamas command centre, a claim which contradicts recent Israeli findings. “At no stage did I see any [Hamas terrorists] — at no stage did I see even armed policemen — at Shifa hospital.”

The BBC, meanwhile, conducted its own interview with Abu-Sittah after the press conference, in which he outlined the “overwhelming sense of guilt” he felt towards “the patients that still need my help”. The exclusive interview came days after one of the broadcaster’s reporters — Sanaa Khouri, a Beirut-based religious affairs correspondent — tweeted of him: “One might say, ‘Give this hero a Nobel Prize,’ but nah, his name is much bigger and more iconic than any prize now. God bless you, Dr Ghassan. Thanks for showing us there is still good out in this monstrous world.”

Elsewhere, The Telegraph’s report highlighted that, “throughout his time in Gaza, Prof Abu-Sittah provided regular updates to The Telegraph”, and described how he performed “six amputations in one night”. An interview with the Daily Mail a week after Hamas’s attack detailed how he “has been operating night and day ever since” his arrival on 9 October.

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Amid the fog of war, such first-hand accounts are rare — and for good reason: they are extremely hard to verify. And on this front, it seems much of the UK media has not told the entirety of Dr Abu-Sittah’s story.

Abu-Sittah, according to his website, specialises in treatments such as facelifts and chin augmentation. He works out of two clinics in Britain and describes himself as a “Consultant Reconstructive & Aesthetic Plastic Surgeon”. He is not, however, on the “specialist register”, according to the General Medical Council (GMC).

Nor does Abu-Sittah seem to be the impartial observer portrayed by many in the media. His social media is filled with messages which appeared to be broadly supportive of Hamas’s attack on Israel. The day after October 7, as he was already making his way to Gaza via Egypt, he retweeted a number of posts sympathetic to the terror group. “For the native, objectivity is always directed against him,” said one. Another read: “We know Israel is going to kill us anyways. We are starving, we are being besieged, we are being dispossessed, we are being displaced. We know all of this. Israel is going to kill us anyways. Israel wants us kneeling… So why not fight back and die in dignity?” In the following weeks, he has retweeted a post comparing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler and another which described Israel as “a child killer regime”.

And this was far from the first time he has expressed such views. Three years ago, he wept as he eulogised Maher Al-Yamani, a founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is designated a terrorist organisation in the US and EU, but not the UK. “This is our only comfort: that even when Maher leaves, the Israelis will be afraid of Maher,” Abu-Sittah told a ceremony in Beirut commemorating the first anniversary of his death.

It’s safe to say that none of this appeared in the majority of recent news reports about his experience in Gaza. Nor, for that matter, has his family history.

While Ghassan Abu-Sittah was born in Kuwait in 1969, his father, Salman, grew up in Be’er-Sheva, an Israeli city in what was then Mandatory Palestine. During the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, his family left their home and became refugees in the Gaza Strip, before moving to Egypt where he graduated from Cairo University and eventually moved to the UK.

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Israel is turning into Lebanon

By Ben Judah

Since then, Salman has dedicated much of his life to pushing for the controversial “right of return” of Palestinians to the land which is now Israel. He has called Israelis “ghetto-dwellers in Europe who came to take our land”, described the founding of the state of Israel as “exactly like Nazi Germany occupying France”, and claimed the country had “set up detention and forced labour camps for the Palestinians”. His comparison of Israel to Nazis did not prevent him from being invited to lecture at the University of Edinburgh to mark the centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine.

None of this is to say that Ghassan has no medical training. He was educated at the New English School in Kuwait and then studied medicine at the University of Glasgow. According to his LinkedIn page, he has undertaken a number of fellowships at leading hospitals, including Great Ormond Street and the Royal London Hospital. In 2011, he took up a job as a craniofacial, plastic and reconstructive surgeon at the American University of Beirut Medical Center in Lebanon. During that time, according to his own websites, he continued to work as “a war surgeon in conflict zones including Iraq, South Lebanon and Gaza”. While the university did not respond to a request for comment, in 2020, he seems to have returned to the UK, where he re-registered back with the GMC after a nine-year hiatus and opened up his cosmetic surgery practice.

Today, his biography on his website states that he is an “honorary senior clinical lecturer at the Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College”. It also claims that “he serves on the board of directors of INARA, a charity dedicated to providing reconstructive surgery to war injured children in the Middle East”. INARA, however, is not registered as a charity. It is a limited company whose accounts are so overdue that it was issued with a notice for compulsory strike off by Companies House on 28 November. Although he does have a previous association with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, his directorship was terminated on 18 October.

Like his father, Dr Abu-Sittah’s interest in Gaza and Israel is long-held. As far back as 2003, a documentary — A Palestinian’s Return To Gaza — was made about his work in Gazan hospitals. In it, he described how he had first visited the strip as part of a UN-sponsored medical programme, taking “six months leave from my job as a surgeon in the UK”. “When I operated on patients in Gaza, I was filled with an overwhelming sense that these bodies were violated for political ends by something that was inhuman and was designed to dehumanise their bodies,” he said. Six years later, in a blog post co-written for the since-closed Lancet Global Health, he claimed that Israel was testing “new particle weapons” in Gaza. The blog was later taken down because of unspecified factual inaccuracies.

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It was on 18 October — the day after a rocket landed in the car park of the al-Ahli hospital — that Dr Abu-Sittah, who had travelled to Gaza with Medecins Sans Frontières, officially captured the Western media’s attention. With Hamas claiming it was the result of an Israeli attack which had killed 500, he appeared at the centre of a press conference on the hospital site surrounded by rubble and body bags. “We were performing surgery at the Baptist hospital when a strong explosion occurred and the ceiling fell on the operating room,” he said. “This is a massacre.” Even today, with Western governments and Human Rights Watch claiming it was most likely caused by a misfired rocket inside Gaza hitting the hospital’s car park, rather than the building itself, he still insists it was an Israeli attack.

While in Gaza, he also reported that counter-terrorist police officers had visited his family at his home in London. He later told BBC Newsnight that his wife had been questioned about why he had travelled to the Palestinian territory and who paid for his ticket. “I think it’s a brutal attempt at harassment and silencing us,” he said. When asked yesterday whether that investigation was closed, the Metropolitan Police stated that it does not comment on queries relating to named individuals and whether they may, or may not, form part of any counter terrorism investigation.

At around the same time that UnHerd started making enquiries of Abu-Sittah, an in-conversation event with him at The Palestine Festival of Literature in London, scheduled for Wednesday, was cancelled. “Due to emergency circumstances Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta [sic] is no longer able to do tomorrow night’s event in London,” its organisers said.

Last night, a statement from his lawyers said: “Professor Abu-Sittah’s lawyers declined to comment in detail, save to say that any allegations of dishonesty, misrepresenting his expertise or supporting terrorism are totally false and defamatory.”

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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The media is spreading bad trans science

By Jesse Singal

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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Journalism is being eaten alive by opinion

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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.

Postman was a cultural and media critic who wrote prophetically about the dangers of technology, and, more importantly, how it shapes society. That the book emerged from a talk he gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984 only gives it greater piquancy. There has never been a time in my political consciousness where people weren’t bloviating about the (either imminent or established) arrival of authoritarianism. And as far as reliable ways of spotting a bore go, hearing someone pronounce that our world is “Orwellian” is pretty much a failsafe.

This is because, unlike most cliches, it is self-evidently untrue. Apart from anything else, we in the West are hardwired to reject overt signs of totalitarianism. The Second World War is pretty much our only large-scale, and obviously righteous, military victory for about a century, and any form of governance that comes adorned with jackboots — physical or metaphorical — will be resisted. Our self-image depends on it.

Postman gets this. He envisages a future emerging not from the pages of 1984, but Brave New World. While Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley feared that there would be no reason to do so. Postman argued, using TV as his example (which is, very loosely speaking, his version of Huxley’s soothing, happiness-producing drug “soma”), that this is where things were headed: not enslavement by the state, but by our own appetites. His genius was to understand this fact during the Cold War, when the USSR offered a genuine authoritarian alternative; and to lay out exactly why and how it might emerge.

Like many media theorists, Postman understood how news “content” does not exist in the public consciousness independently of its medium. Stuff — wars, births, marriages, bank collapses and so on — obviously still happens. “[But] lacking a technology to advertise them,” he argues, “people could not attend to them, could not include them in their daily business. Such information simply could not exist as part of the content of culture.” This idea — that there is a content called “the news of the day” — was, he continues, entirely created by the telegraph (and since amplified by newer media), which made it possible to move “information over vast spaces at incredible speed”. Crucially, without a medium to create its form, the “news of the day” does not exist. “Our tools, our language, our media,” he writes, “[are what] create the content of our culture.”

It was the nature of this content that bothered Postman. For him, the city that had come to symbolise the United States was now Las Vegas, a place “entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment”. Politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce had been “transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business”.

In his day, with Ronald Reagan as President, he understood that the most adept — and often most entertaining — public performers were no longer professional entertainers but its abnormally attractive and well-groomed TV anchors and, more perniciously, its politicians. On TV, which is to say in the public consciousness, the credibility of the teller, and not what he or she was saying, had become the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. This naturally benefited a professional actor such as Reagan, while those who couldn’t perform suffered. As for Richard Nixon, it wasn’t that he was a liar that gave him a reputation for shiftiness throughout his career (before it imploded with Watergate). Kennedy lied lots, too. It was that Nixon looked like a liar.

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In this kind of world, when “the credibility of a politician is not determined by whether or not they are lying, but by how well their performances generate a sense of verisimilitude”, the outcome is all too familiar: a leader like Donald Trump, or the useless and sinister Jeremy Corbyn, a first-class dullard and fanatic, who his supporters nonetheless saw as “authentic”.

Yet, Postman noted, truth is always “intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the ‘truth’ is a kind of cultural prejudice.” Imagine the Chancellor rapping the budget or a newsreader announcing the Queen’s death via a haiku. Truth is only ever a “product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented”. When those techniques become a “stylised dramatic performance that has been staged to entertain”, much that is serious is lost. Even worse is when what is serious needs to become a “stylised dramatic performance” in order to be heard.

This is a pretty apt description of the state of contemporary public discourse. People blame social media for this: its privileging of emotion over fact, the chaos of its global multiplicity of voices, and its desperate need for clicks and shares has, they argue, rendered the public sphere a vast digital circus. But, in truth, it really started with the introduction of the 24-hour news cycle. Suddenly, the facts relayed by a single presenter was no longer enough. Rolling hours needed to be padded out with “analysis” and “debate”, meaning the jabbering, gesticulating and haranguing chorus of experts, pundits and other entertainers that this involved.

After this, the step to the present moment was a small one. And what has suffered is, above all, the written word, and the qualities of concentration needed to engage with it. It is a fallacy that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; the car is not merely a fast horse. TV and social media have not amplified literate culture but attacked it. We began with Facebook and its statuses, which allowed you to write several paragraphs of content; then came Twitter with its 140 characters (which swelled to 180 and now, who knows?) and then Instagram, which privileges the visual over the written; followed by TikTok which sees anything beyond the most basic written description as a distraction.

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What Postman wrote about 40 years ago is reaching its most mature expression yet. Public life has morphed into entertainment; the image subverts the written word; and there is so much information that we are unable to discern truth from lies. Huxley talked about a “vast descent into triviality”, but this is an unfair description of our public sphere. The appetite for the subjects I cover, from Ukraine to Iran, is large. But why read a book on Ukraine when you can watch a two-minute TikTok “explainer” on it? We still want the serious, but we want it to come packaged in trivial ways, which is far, far worse. Believe me, you can’t explain Ukraine in two minutes.

What Huxley got right was “man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction”. As Postman observed, when we think about propaganda we generally consider only two possibilities: that it might be true or it might be false. What has happened is something different: “the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant”. The truth is rarely concealed; it is lost amid trivia. We are not prisoners of the state, “but of our own endless desire for the superficial and inconsequential”.

Orwell wrote that if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. Well, almost 40 years on from Amusing Ourselves to Death, the picture of the future is here: imagine a human face, scrolling through a phone, its features settled into a contented spasticity — forever.

Whether Carlson makes this face strategically is hard to say; it’s certainly a fortuitous way for someone in this line of work to look, but is it also just how he looks, generally. He got a lot of mileage out of it when he was the primetime poster boy at Fox News, monologuing on such matters of national importance as the gender identity of the green M&M. And he’s working it to great effect in his new interview with Larry Sinclair, a man who has spent the past 15 years alleging that he once engaged in a drug-fuelled homosexual liaison, in a Comfort Inn, with the then-not-yet-President Barack Obama.

“What was Obama like on crack?” Carlson asks, and then pulls the trademark face while Sinclair meanders through an answer. It’s a neat trick. The pundit’s new self-produced show on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is a lower-budget affair than the Fox News position from which he was fired in April; it doesn’t allow for such technical flourishes as a chyron. But he doesn’t need one: Carlson’s expression alone creates the impression of a subtextual thought bubble floating invisibly somewhere above his head: Do you believe this shit?

Full disclosure: I, for one, do not believe this shit. It’s not just Sinclair’s less-than-credible history, which includes multiple convictions for fraud and forgery, or the lie detector test he voluntarily took and summarily failed back in 2008 when he first levelled his allegations. It’s that the substance of Sinclair’s claims is wildly out of keeping with virtually everything we know about Obama, if not in terms of moral goodness, then certainly in terms of his ambition. Even Obama’s fiercest critics would surely concede that a man who structured his entire personal and professional life around making himself electable was unlikely, as a married state senator at the very start of a long-desired and painstakingly planned-for political career, to risk it all for the sake of $250 worth of cocaine and a blowjob.

But more importantly, does Tucker Carlson believe it? It’s not unreasonable to be a little bit cynical on this front. There is, arguably, a burgeoning effort afoot by certain members of the media to take Barack Obama down a peg, retroactively tarnishing his presidential legacy as well as his reputation for being a paragon of moral uprightness. Obama’s continued presence in Washington has been raising eyebrows among conservatives from basically the moment he left office, and some have begun to openly speculate that he’s acting as a sort of puppet master to the addled senior citizen currently occupying the White House.

And of course, there’s the matter of Carlson’s own integrity. Like many American media personalities, he does not necessarily believe all the words that come out of his mouth on camera. Among the revelations that preceded his ousting from Fox were text messages in which he privately contradicted his on-camera stances on Donald Trump and the 2020 election, which he publicly described as a “scam”. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he texted a producer in the days after the election had been called for Biden. “I hate him passionately.”

In this case, though, there’s a peculiar twist. Carlson has chosen to platform Sinclair’s allegations, which he describes as “obviously true” — but his ultimate contention is that the substance of the allegations doesn’t even matter.

“You know, in 2008 it became really clear that Barack Obama had been having sex with men, and smoking crack,” Carlson told podcast host Adam Carolla on a recent episode of his eponymous show. “It’s not gonna change the world that Barack Obama likes dudes… I’m just saying, the amount of lying in the media about it was unbelievable. People knew this was true! And it was quite obviously true at the time, and people who covered the campaign didn’t say anything about it because they didn’t want to lose access to the campaign.”

It’s intriguing to realise that as far as Carlson is concerned, the real story — and the most interesting thing about this sordid tale of crack-smoking and secret gay sex — is what it reveals about the relationship between media and government. What’s also intriguing is that this is the one area in which Carlson has something that sort of resembles a point.

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Unlike the #MeToo-era allegations that sank the Senate candidacy of Roy Moore (or, for that matter, the ones that could have caused considerable trouble for Joe Biden in his run for president), Sinclair’s story does not appear to have ever been rigorously investigated by the media. The few stories to even mention Sinclair’s existence also summarily dismissed him as a kook and a criminal — and while journalists’ incuriosity at the time may be understandable (not least because Sinclair is, in fact, a kook and a criminal), it has also ironically created the sense that there might be something there. Conspiracy theories flourish in the dark, which is why even the most ludicrous ones (like, say, the notion that Obama looked on while his personal chef drowned in Martha’s Vineyard) are often worth taking the time to debunk. If journalists had seriously looked into this story back in 2008, and exposed it for the flimsy pile of nonsense it surely is, there would be no intrigue or mystery still swirling around it today.

Alas, there is — and Tucker Carlson knows it. For him, the salacious content of Sinclair’s allegations is essentially irrelevant; if anything, it’s just icing on the cake, a good old-fashioned sex scandal to titillate the senses and besmirch the character of an especially revered elder statesman. The real story, the one that Carlson is not only offering this week but has also been selling in various forms for a decade, is that a cabal of elite power brokers have conspired for 15 years to deprive you — yes, you — of the knowledge that these allegations even exist. It’s the cultivation of what Matthew Teague calls “a conspiracy of knowing”, the sense of being offered a glimpse of the secrets that a faceless, nameless They aren’t telling you.

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Even if Carlson doesn’t believe Sinclair, he does seem to believe this: that the allure of forbidden knowledge is so exciting that it renders moot any question of whether that knowledge is true. This is what Carlson’s critics miss when they condemn him for giving airtime to such a sordid, unverified story (even Elon Musk had doubts as to the newsworthiness of the interview), or point to it as further evidence of how far Tucker has fallen since his days at Fox. Carlson’s transformation from hacky pundit to tabloid bottom-feeder is a salacious bit of gossip in its own right, but is it the real story? Or is it about something bigger: power, and the question of who is in thrall to whom?

With the imprimatur of a Fox News primetime spot, Carlson could claim to be a bold truth-teller, the rare insider who would give it to you straight and make you feel lucky to get it. Without it, he’s just another guy trying to spin — and sell — a story. It’s a tale of audience capture as old as time; one minute you’re riding high as a media industry insider, the next you’re hawking virility supplements and shouting about gay frogs. Carlson isn’t quite there yet, but the altered symbiosis between him and his audience makes it all but inevitable. He isn’t doing this because it’s what he wants. He’s doing it because it’s what you want.

And in this, he’s not alone. In a world where a subscription-based model of journalism blurs the line between consumer and customer, entertainment takes precedence over information more often than not, and journalism evolves from a truth-seeking enterprise into a bias-stroking device. And as long as people believe that the news should make them feel good, and their enemies look bad — and as long as any attempt to inject truth or nuance is met with threats of revolt — we have a future full of many, many more Larry Sinclairs to look forward to.

Ever since the cancellation of the Sussexes’ Spotify deal, it’s been unclear what they’d pivot to next. A Kardashians-style reality show? A wellness empire, à la Gwyneth Paltrow? A high-profile divorce with all the sordid trimmings (and, for Harry, perhaps a sheepish return to the royal fold)? But this week, the next chapter of the Harry and Meghan saga was finally revealed: the pair has purchased the screen rights to Meet Me at the Lake, the New York Times bestselling romance novel by Carley Fortune, with the intention of turning the story into an original film for Netflix.

In many ways, this is a logical next step for the couple — especially for Meghan, given her pre-marriage Hollywood career. The path from acting to producing is well-trodden in the film industry, and has been a particular boon for mid-career actresses who want to pivot away from being in front of the camera. Mila Kunis, Reese Witherspoon and Margot Robbie have all become powerhouse producers, with a sixth sense for finding under-the-radar content that’s ripe for adaptation.

And yet, within minutes of the announcement dropping, a negative narrative had solidified. Far from an unremarkable or even savvy move in an industry one of them already had strong ties to, this development was presented as just another example of the couple’s desperation to stay relevant (“Harry and Meghan ‘buy film rights’ to romance novel to ‘revive media careers’”) as well as their eternal depthless narcissism (“Six ways the book ‘bought by Harry and Meghan’ mirrors events in their lives”). Us Weekly quoted an “insider” who seemed to confirm the personal connection: “The story really spoke to the Sussexes and has a lot of parallels to their own life. Harry and Meghan both think it’s the perfect choice.”

But even if we take at face value the alleged and much-discussed similarities between this book and their lives (and more on that in a minute), this all seems fine. I am no particular fan of the Meghan and Harry Post-Royal Tour de Victimhood, now in its third year, but the fact remains that they do have a Netflix deal, and they have to do something with it. Channelling their efforts into scripted media, for a platform full of ridiculous but compulsively watchable romantic fare, is as worthy a project as any. Unless you were hoping to see the couple’s relationship with Netflix implode in the same spectacular fashion as their Spotify one, it’s difficult to see the issue here, let alone be outraged by it.

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But there’s the rub. Weren’t some people clearly hoping for exactly this? At some point, the public sentiment surrounding the Sussexes curdled from curiosity into contempt, from critiquing their various choices to finding fault with every single one of them. This phenomenon was arguably visible long before their exit from the royal family — as Buzzfeed noted in 2020, the British press had, for years, been chastising Meghan and Harry for the very same behaviours that earned Will and Kate effusive praise. Looking back, it’s hard not to notice how thoroughly Meghan in particular was villainised. Everything she did, from touching her pregnant stomach (“Virtue signaling, as though the rest of us barren harridans deserve to burn alive in our cars”) to eating avocados (“a fruit linked to water shortages, illegal deforestation and all round general environmental devastation”) became evidence of her innately terrible character.

With Megxit, there was her ultra-memeable complaint that “not many people have asked if I’m ok”, and then came the Oprah interview, which was met with nothing short of fury. And while even the couple’s fiercest critics used to concede that whatever else you thought of the Sussexes, they did seem to be really and truly in love, that goodwill has lately vanished amid recent rumours of marital discord; now, every step Meghan takes outside her home without Harry is suspicious.

And when it comes to their latest project, every jab reads like the living embodiment of that joke about how, once you hate someone, even the most innocuous things they do begin to seem obscene and infuriating. (“Look at that bitch eating chicken. Why you eating chicken, bitch?!”)

Obviously, scapegoating people has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of time; obviously, there’s a certain amount of fun to be had in ganging up to hate on someone who has been deemed an acceptable target. But the feeding frenzy surrounding Harry and Meghan’s every move reveals the problem with this: not that it’s cruel (although it is that, too), but that being maximally uncharitable has a way of making you stupid.

Which brings us back to the much-hyped similarities between Meet Me at the Lake and the lives of the couple who want to adapt it, which have been foundational to the media coverage of this project, for better and for worse. Having actually read the book, I regret to say that these alleged parallels are absolute baloney, and that any attempt to make this into an example of Meghan and Harry’s desire to make everything about themselves is utterly contrived. The nadir of this is probably the allegation that one of the eerie commonalities between truth and fiction is, and I am not making this up, that the characters in the book at one point drink martinis together: “The Times previously reported that Harry’s favourite drink is a beer — while Meghan loves a martini or two.” Look at that bitch, drinking a martini. Why you drinking a martini, bitch?!

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At this point, it’s hard not to be at least a little sympathetic to Harry’s insistence that he and Meghan have been treated uniquely unfairly by the media, even if the specifics of his complaints tend to err on the side of absurdity. Yes, the couple often behave like a pair of entitled jackasses, but they’re also invariably assigned the role of jackass whether they’re acting like this or not. Of course, it’s easy to understand how a narrative like this becomes so ubiquitous. It’s not even sinister: the people writing these articles have a job to do, and that job is to explain why any of us should devote a single brain cell to the continued, stateside saga of the former Sussexes. And the best way to do that, in a media landscape fuelled by outrage, is to convince people that there’s something bigger happening here than a pair of rich people making a lucrative investment that is basically guaranteed to pay out.

But the truth is that, with the possible exception of its Toronto setting, Meet Me at the Lake has no real parallels to Meghan and Harry’s own meet cute. It’s just a well-written romance that effectively employs all the usual tropes and has inspired an avid fanbase, which pretty much guarantees that any movie based on the story becomes a massive success — any of which would be more than enough reason for a pair of savvy producers to snap it up.

For all these reasons, I expect that Meet Me at the Lake will do well onscreen. It has all the upmarket Hallmark vibes of The Notebook with the sass of a Nineties rom-com: a little sweet, a little spicy, and just enough will-they-or-won’t-they tension to make the ending satisfying. But as for what it says about Meghan and Harry, it’s nothing all that exciting, and it’s something we already knew: they may be a couple of dilettantes when it comes to podcasting or memoir or documentary, but they’ve always had a talent for knowing what a good love story looks like.

I had joined the paper’s staff around the turn of the century as a trainee journalist, progressing to social affairs reporter, senior writer, leader writer and, most recently, weekly columnist. For the most part, my views aligned with the paper’s superego, which fluctuates between soft Left and small “l” liberal. And there was always space for dissent, even when my opinions sharply diverged from The Age consensus — more on that soon.

About two years ago, my harmonious relationship with the paper began to deteriorate. The tension reached its climax last week when the editor, Patrick Elligett, sacked me as a columnist. The breakdown in trust was down to one issue: gender-identity politics, the trans debate — or severe lack thereof.

My dismissal was linked to a feature I wrote on youth gender transition that had been commissioned by a previous editor, Gay Alcorn, and which Elligett had refused to run. In response, I told Elligett that I intended to publish the piece on my new Substack and would disclose that he rejected it. He looked uncomfortable, but said The Age would take it on the chin.

And so, early this month I published the feature, announcing to the world that if they wanted to know why the piece was rejected, they would have to ask Elligett himself. A standing army of gender sceptics on Twitter did just that, under the hashtag “gutless” . This can’t have been pleasant for Elligett. But he attributed the sacking to another remark in my launch statement where I flagged that in future posts I’d be writing on gender-identity politics more broadly, “without the copy being rendered unreadable by a committee of woke journalists redacting words they deem incendiary, such as ‘male’”. Elligett responded: “Obviously we can’t have our columnists publicly disparaging the publication like that so we won’t be commissioning further columns from you.”

In the piece he refused to publish, I discussed the growing debate around “affirming” care for children and teens in gender distress, and the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. While the controversy attracts regular coverage in Australia’s Murdoch-owned press, it remains taboo in the progressive media, where the “no-debate”, “the science is settled” mantras are consistently reinforced by stories of young people blossoming post-transition. The worst offender is the ABC, Australia’s equivalent of the BBC. The public broadcaster has even been rebuked by its own Media Watch programme for failing to report on the closure of the NHS’s scandal-hit gender clinic for children in England and Wales, the Tavistock; and for its partnership with Australia’s Stonewall equivalent, Acon, on the grounds it could lead to “perceptions of bias in coverage, or bias itself”.

Yet here’s the interesting part: Elligett said very little to me about my piece, other than that it was “good”. We had discussed it in late March, about a fortnight after Melbourne’s Let Women Speak rally, which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis and which I had attended out of professional curiosity. The problem, he said, was not the piece, but its author: me.

He said I had nailed my colours to the mast on trans issues, so my byline would create a perception of bias. I said I had no firm view on paediatric transition. (You don’t have to believe in unicorns to see the affirmation model as an attempt to save kids from life-crippling distress and stigma.) He said that, nonetheless, publishing the piece under my name would damage the reputation of “the masthead”.

Let me attempt a translation: I had been pegged as a “Terf”, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a category into which many a reality-based woman, or indeed man, self-identifies. And this meant I was considered partisan where a veneer of neutrality was required.

I’m sad about what’s happened; as I know Elligett is, too. In writing this piece, I’m not seeking vengeance or vindication. Nor is this a “woe-is-me” story. On the contrary: I’m hugely grateful to the people I worked with. They saved me from howlers, and fixed my sloppy prose and wobbly reasoning more times than I care to admit.

But I feel a sense of obligation to commit to the historical record yet another account of a newsroom buckling under the challenge of gender-identity ideology: the belief system that deems “male” and “female” as more a state of mind than of body, and casts even the most gentle questioning of the doctrine tantamount to bigotry.

In this, I can’t help but be reminded of Hadley Freeman’s fate, save that she left The Guardian voluntarily. She started there at around the same time I started at The Age. Like Freeman, I’m a veteran Left-leaning campaigner for the rights of sexual minorities. Like Freeman, the main tension I found myself navigating in my early years in the newsroom involved Israel. Like her, I’m Jewish and a Zionist. As a leader writer, I was sometimes asked if I was sure I could write “objectively” on Israel and Palestine. As with Freeman, the odd colleague would lecture me about what I should and should not consider to be antisemitism.

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But as a columnist, I found no issue off-limits. Sure, sometimes an editor would disagree with me. Some had little appetite for edgy, post-9/11 critiques of the Left’s accommodation of political Islam. And most merely tolerated my regular meltdowns about government funding of private schools; they didn’t relish the blowback from the well-resourced private school lobby, or, indeed, from the great many Age readers who sent their kids to posh schools. I’m also yet to live down effectively backing the US invasion of Iraq long after the original liberal hawks had issued their mea culpas. Still, in no universe could I have predicted that ground zero of the culture wars would be the definition of a woman as an adult human female.

My first foray into the transgender debate was in February 2021 when Readings, Australia’s largest independent bookseller, apologised for having hosted an event three years earlier with Julie Bindel, the British radical feminist. This was a post-facto cancellation. In my column, I affirmed both sides of the discussion. “Each is mighty and indivisible,” I wrote. I saw the fight between the subjective (gender identity) and the objective (embodied sex) — a bit like how Amos Oz saw the fight between Israel and the Palestinians as a war between “two rights”.

My piece was well-received, but mostly ignored. Recently on Twitter I saw someone cite the column as evidence I’d once belonged to the #BeKind brigade, which was a bit harsh. I still subscribe to the views I expressed; to even speak of a conflict of rights is to acknowledge there are, in fact, two legitimate sides. I not only accept that trans people “exist”, but also that their right to dignity and equal opportunity requires the rest of us to affirm their identities to the greatest possible extent, at least in so far as the affirmation doesn’t undermine others’ sex-based rights. When these two rights conflict, it’s surely the job of governments to ethically adjudicate between the competing interests.

But gradually it dawned on me that Labor governments around Australia weren’t just failing to adjudicate between conflicting rights — they proudly disavowed a conflict even existed. “Anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman,” said Queensland’s Minister for Women and then Attorney General, in May, to the widespread indifference of the media.

Then, a year ago, Rohan Leppert, a senior member of the Victorian Greens, inadvertently laid bare the serious ructions in his party over trans issues. Members were calling for Leppert to be disciplined after comments he made in a private Facebook group came to light; shockingly reasonable comments, needless to say, about the affirmative care model, the state’s sledgehammer conversion-therapy laws and the conflict over single-sex spaces. Should I have held back?

I filed a column in which I defended Leppert’s views and his right to express them. The editing process was hell. I had referred to the pressure on women to cede their spaces to “males who have not medically transitioned”. Intense pressure from an unknown number of journalists further down the food chain saw the word “males” become “people” in the final copy. Hence the crack that got me sacked.

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This was my first encounter with the self-appointed queer caucus. As to how many journalists sit on it, I’ve heard conflicting accounts. Less than a handful of zealots. Everyone aged under 30. Half the newsroom, when putsch comes to shove. The article ran under the headline “Trans rights shouldn’t automatically trump the rights of other groups”. This one got noticed.

The response to the piece was overwhelmingly rapturous, if only for the sheer relief that a Lefty journalist was saying the usually unsayable. But on Twitter, transactivists and their allies made chopped liver of me. I had interviewed two of these activists for my as-yet-unpublished paediatric transition story. They redacted their interviews, claiming — falsely — that I had deceived them about the story’s angle. (I would later learn that two female candidates for the Animal Justice Party in Australia’s upcoming federal election were ordered to undergo re-education after sharing or “liking” the column on social media. They resigned instead.)

A formal complaint was made about the piece to the industry body, the Press Council. It’s a frequent tactic of the trans lobby, aimed at keeping the progressive media on message. By contrast, it isn’t too exercised about Sky News and the Murdoch empire running “anti-trans” stories; in fact, such coverage helps them deter principled critics of the transactivist agenda who fear playing into the hands of “the Right”.

The Age began desperately hawking space on its opinion page for a “pro-trans” piece to “balance” mine. The transactivists refused: I was beyond the pale, too hateful to be savaged with intellectual argument. Ultimately, the takedown fell to the “Victorian Commissioner for LGBTIQ+ Communities”, in his words, “a young, queer Wiradjuri cis-man”. He accused me of creating a false divide “between women’s rights and the rights of trans people”, but didn’t explain why the divide was false. Nor did he address the concerns of “L”s within his remit who believe he’s sold out their interests to the “T”s.

In August, I learned that a detransitioner in Sydney — who had had testosterone treatment, as well as a mastectomy and hysterectomy before re-identifying with her birth sex — was suing her psychiatrist for negligence. The Age and stablemate The Sydney Morning Herald were keen on the story. Once again, the editing process was hell. This time, transactivist talking points appeared suddenly in my copy: “Trans groups say that the highlighting of those who de-transition is part of a campaign by anti-trans activists to de-legitimise gender dysphoria.”

Hilariously, they couldn’t even get their propaganda talking points right. Almost no one denies that gender dysphoria is a thing; they had meant to say “de-legitimise trans identity”. My critics were themselves trying to de-legitimise a straightforward report about a legal case, not to mention the testimony of a traumatised woman.

After I pointed this out, the lines were removed and the story ran on the front page. The following day, the mood in the newsroom was described to me as “edgy”. The day after that, the paper published a letter to the editor accusing me of “transphobic rhetoric.” This was a bit much. It was one thing to be called a transphobe on Twitter; quite another to read the accusation in my own paper. I raised the matter with the editor, who apologised, citing a breakdown in internal processes.

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Before learning of the detransitioner’s case, I’d filed an entertaining column about Scotland appointing a bloke as its inaugural “period dignity officer”, his stated ambition to make menstrual products available to “anyone of any gender”. The column, being trans-adjacent, was spiked. I was told I couldn’t violate the church-and-state divide between commentary and reporting; I had started reporting on trans issues so now I couldn’t commentate on them.

The editors were, in part, trying to save me from myself. I was told they didn’t want me to end up “a Suzanne Moore” — a reference to The Guardian columnist martyred after her colleagues waged a campaign against “transphobic” content. And yet, just as The Guardian had done, The Age invited an LGBTQI+ organisation to address the newsroom about avoiding “harm” in their reporting on trans issues.

I went on sulk leave.

On my return, by which time Elligett had taken over as editor, I found the de facto gag order still in force. The state of Queensland was ushering through Parliament a gender self-ID bill similar to Scotland’s Gender Recognition Act, at roughly the same time that a doomed Nicola Sturgeon was tying herself in knots over whether a two-time trans-identified rapist — initially housed in the female prison estate, post-conviction — was “a woman”. (The bill was passed last week to the usual triumphal reporting.)

Similar legislation. Identical propaganda lines. And here, also, violent sex offenders were being sent to female prisons. I was told no. There was no “news trigger”.

But the mother of all news triggers came in March, when Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker, the British women’s rights campaigner widely credited for popularising the term “adult human female” to define a woman, staged a Let Women Speak rally in Melbourne

I was — still am — looking to write a book on gender-identity politics in Australia. I thought the rally might yield a dynamic narrative, what we journalists call “colour”. I got colour all right: armed and mounted police several columns deep, two frontlines of counter-protestors of varying and bewildering political tendencies, and neo-Nazi gatecrashers performing a Sieg Heil on the steps of Parliament.

The Age published a very fair report in the immediate aftermath. But among the newsroom editors, a clear “line” took root: Parker was clearly linked with “far-Right” groups — the black-clad neo-Nazis had turned up to “protect” her. Never mind that in the week before the rally, far-Left groups had plastered the city with posters urging the comrades to turn up and fight the “far-Right”. Never mind that such rhetoric lures neo-Nazis to the scene just as flies are lured to shit.

Having been at the scene of a huge story, I pushed to write an op-ed on the rally. I explained to the editors that I was incensed at the response of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, whose pro-trans government was the primary target of the protestors’ anger. The women who came to speak came from all walks of life: Christian conservatives, butch dykes, Jewish Leftists, disaffected Greens, health workers, women in hijab.

But in the rally’s aftermath, Andrews tweeted: “Anti-trans activists gathered to spread hate. And on the steps of our Parliament, some of them performed a Nazi salute.” I told the day’s op-ed editor that, in saying this, Andrews had at best slurred the women as hateful bigots; at worst, he’d conflated them with the neo-Nazis. “Well, that’s your interpretation,” the editor responded.

Frankly, I’m happy the column didn’t run: the pressure to describe Parker as associated with the “far-Right” strained the logic and the tone. (And, oh, it also happened to be wrong.) The piece wasn’t good enough, I was told. There were too many holes. The timing was wrong. I had glossed over “the Nazis’” appearance. “And then,” the editor said, “you have these… paragraphs of Terf rhetoric.” I think we both knew there would be no coming back from that moment.

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The shockwaves from the rally were felt in the Liberal Party, the Greens and Melbourne University, bringing repercussions for many of the women who had attended and, I’m sure, for plenty who didn’t. By the time Parker arrived in Auckland, the ugly rest is history: her dousing in tomato juice, the slack policing and crowd surge, a woman in her 70s punched in the face. The placards reading “Suck My Dick” and “Get off our land, CUNT!” This — apparently — is what progressivism looks like in the 21st century.

After Elligett said he wouldn’t run my piece on paediatric transition, it became clear that I could neither report nor commentate on the trans issue, even as it made headline news day after day. When Barry Humphries died, for instance, I was told I was allowed to write about his cancel-culture controversy with the Melbourne Comedy Festival — so long as I didn’t focus on the anti-trans comments that had prompted his cancellation.

In the end, like Freeman, I felt I could no longer write about anything that viscerally mattered to me. Hoping against hope, I pitched a column that would advocate for nationalising the education system. That weekend, half the Saturday magazine was a paid advertisement for the private school sector.

My mood darkened. I went on sulk leave. Indefinitely, as it turns out.

My last column for the paper was pegged to Mother’s Day. It tackled the female body and ageing, the intergenerational feminist struggle. I wrote about Victoria Smith’s book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women, and how it had “radicalised” me. Smith speaks for us middle-aged Gen Xers; how it’s now our turn to wear the age-old slur of “hag”, “witch”, or a contemporary variant such as “Karen.” There’s another slur I could have used, one that Smith writes about at length in her book: “Terf.” But I knew I had to leave that word out.

On one occasion, I was part of a picket line and was kicked on the shin by a police officer, who I suppose was only doing his job. A few days later, being a firm believer in preaching to the unconverted, I gave a talk on socialism to the sixth form at Eton, and entered the classroom limping. I told the boys that I had been kicked on a picket line by a copper and they laughed politely, assuming that I was joking. Presumably they believed neither that the police could be violent nor that Oxford dons could be picketers. By this point, the clickings had begun to sound like a pair of mad castanets.

I took to chatting to the silent listener at the other end of the line, asking whether it was true that spies were trained to kill with a matchbox and why they had allowed MI5 to be run for some years by a Soviet agent. Was this really the way to protect us from socialist slavery?

These one-sided conversations were rather like prayer. They were addressed to an immensely powerful, almost omniscient being who had the power to inflict torture on you, but also who may or may not have existed and whose reality one had to take on faith. It is said that one such professional eavesdropper resigned from the service in protest at being required to spend his days listening to the phone conversations between a well-known British Leftist and his seven-year-old daughter. The Leftist in question also had regular political discussions over the phone with a friend throughout the Seventies; a few years later, since neither of them could remember what they had said, they considered asking M15 for transcripts.

Finally, I got to meet a couple of spooks face to face, though probably not those who were bugging my phone. Two men claiming to be journalists turned up at my door and began to quiz me about a Left-wing group of which I was then a member. When I made to shut the door on the pair, one of them dangled before my eyes a highly confidential document I had written for the group and foolishly entrusted to the post.

One of these men might well have been a journalist, but the other almost certainly wasn’t. Burly and slow of speech, he looked more like a detective, and seemed remarkably well-informed about the history of Marxism. He was particularly interested in discovering the exact doctrinal differences between my group and a rival outfit on a highly technical issue in Marxist economics, and before long the two of us had launched into a deep scholarly discussion of these matters, full of erudite allusions and elaborate digressions, while the “real journalist” stared miserably at his notebook and waited for it to stop.

When I congratulated the disguised cop, a touch sarcastically, on his impressive knowledge of these issues, he muttered that he had been studying them for 20 years. It was poignant to imagine him joining the police as a young man eager to chase criminals through docklands and council estates and instead being given a pile of volumes by Lenin and Trotsky and told to work his way through them. Maybe that’s what took him 20 years. But he had clearly developed some zest for the subject, and after a while I began to wonder whether he might not make a suitable recruit to our group. Should I ask him to call back by himself sometime later? There would be dangers of course in recruiting a police officer, but not because he would act as an infiltrator and report everything back to his masters. After all, we had an infiltrator already, who was faithfully reporting everything the group said or did to the authorities.

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The liberal complacency of Martin Amis

By Terry Eagleton

It was proving impossible, however, to establish who this fifth columnist was. There would be private conversations between three or four senior members of the organisation, all of whom would probably have sacrificed their lives to the cause, and who were already in the process of sacrificing their partners, children, finances, leisure time and sanity to it. Yet whatever had been said among them still managed to reach the ears of the police. In the end, the villain turned out to be a young man who was unrivalled for his devotion to the socialist cause but also unrivalled for the fact that he had a criminal record as a paedophile and was being blackmailed over it by the police.

While I was dealing with the phone-tapping, I was also receiving the kind of letters which most people in the public eye are likely to attract. In fact, I received one only the other day, from someone claiming to know that I was an undercover Colonel in the Israeli Defence Force, and that he would reveal this secret to the world unless I placed a rather large amount of money in his bank account. Another correspondent sent me a letter to be passed on to my relatives to let them know that I had been killed in a camp for political prisoners in Columbia. It isn’t clear how the writer expected me to forward this news to my family from six feet under the soil. He added in a rather nonchalant postscript that his girlfriend had been killed in the camp as well.

Other letters continue to arrive from people claiming to be distant relatives or even illegitimate children of mine, all of them sadly reporting that they are in financial distress. In fact, the slightest association with me seems to spell disaster for people’s material well-being. Perhaps on account of some family curse, my second and third cousins are afflicted without exception with dire poverty, while alleged sons and daughters are prevented from working by incurable medical conditions. A benign Nature, however, has so ordered human affairs that people who write this stuff almost all have the same kind of handwriting — huge, erratic, flamboyant — so that you are braced for what lies within by the address on the envelope.

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Why doesn't King Charles like me?

By Terry Eagleton

Since my days of political activism now lie mostly behind me, my phone has resumed its normal behaviour — or so I thought. About a year ago, however, I rang a friend in Zurich only for her to hear the whole conversation played back as she was putting down the phone. This, I imagine, is more cock-up than conspiracy; someone had forgotten to switch something off. Or there was simply some kind of glitch, as the new head of my old Oxford college suggested to me. The fact that he was previously the director of GCHQ doesn’t inspire me with absolute faith in this hypothesis.

My tutor at Cambridge was a recruiter for this underworld. From time to time, some third-year undergraduate notable for combining high intelligence with athletic prowess, a rare enough synthesis, would disappear into what was euphemistically called the Foreign Office, where he was no doubt trained in how to kill people with a matchbox. My tutor never tried to recruit me, given that he was aware of my politics, but he did have a go at my room-mate, who was both clever and sturdy. The conversation went like this:

Tutor: What are you thinking of doing after Cambridge?
Room-mate: I really don’t know, sir.
Tutor: Have you considered espionage?
Room-mate (chucking at what he took to be a joke): I suppose that might be a bit dangerous.
Tutor (unsmiling): Yes, it would.

The young get old and revolutions end up eating their own: and the death of the flagship Vice News Tonight show and drastic downsizing of the Vice News platform, just days after the closing of Buzzfeed News, heralds the closing of the era when the New York new media giants bestrode the news world like strutting conquerors. With the heavily indebted Vice empire reportedly circling on the edge of bankruptcy, and struggling to find a buyer, the media landscape of the 2010s already looks like history. As Ben Judah observed: “The early 2010s were a moment where Buzzfeed News and Vice News gave you the impression you didn’t have to do journalism like the New York Times or the BBC. Them shuttering is telling us, actually, there’s only the way they do it at the New York Times and the BBC.”

Back then, the world looked very different. When the Vice News channel launched on YouTube in 2014, its parent company’s reputation for achingly arch and semi-ironically offensive content aimed at jaded hipsters caused legacy broadcasters to scoff at the idea of their cocky, inexperienced journalists challenging them on their own turf. Within months, their laughter stopped: networks such as the BBC and CNN were now terrified that Vice held the key to the future of news. Vice News went where no one else would go, gaining access to the most difficult stories, and throwing itself into the thickest action with studied indifference. Young people, who had always been disregarded as news consumers, were enraptured by the hard-edged, thrilling content from the worst places on earth; elderly execs and money men threw sponsorship at the company in an attempt to capture some of the magic for their own ailing brands. The future of news was young and online, and there was no going back.

Historians of the craft of newsgathering will record that Vice News changed the visual grammar of the medium. By marrying a cinematic visual style with the tempo and immediacy of breaking stories, and pioneering the use of handheld DSLR cameras, Vice News re-aestheticised TV news. And by having its young reporters talk casually to the audience, like friends, in the middle of the world’s worst chaos, the old world of buttoned-up correspondents stiffly lecturing the camera suddenly looked like a relic from the age of black and white. But while the big networks quickly learned to copy Vice’s style to the point it has become the norm, the fundamental challenge of all news broadcasting — how to make the most difficult and expensive content on earth pay for itself — had still not been solved. In the end, it was all a mirage.

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By Aris Roussinos

As is the nature of the trade, it was always a source of pride, and of glittering awards, to obtain better combat footage than anyone else: always getting closer to the action, dancing at the edge of death like a gladiator in the amphitheatre for the audience’s thrill and delectation. The highest word of praise from an exec was “gnarly”. But what neither fans nor critics of what they saw as our recklessness understood was that the “bang-bang” was merely a vehicle with which to smuggle in serious analytical reportage of poorly-understood conflicts and revolutions. Vice’s central insight was that if you framed the story right, and shot it well enough, you could persuade teens and early twentysomethings to watch in-depth explorations of Syrian rebel justice systems, or the intricacies of South Sudan’s civil war. Middle-aged execs from traditional networks had always claimed young people didn’t care about granular detail, or distant wars in Africa: but this (apart from stories about drugs) was always by far the most popular content, judging from YouTube views and comments. The audience never demands dumbing-down: viewers want nuance, shades of grey, and moral ambiguity. They want to see the world as it is, not as it ought to be.

While the rewards in the early days were mismatched to the risk, the degree of experience offered to young journalists was unrivalled, a huge draw to those with an adventurous streak. Journalists at the beginning of their careers were given access to stories the networks reserved for their hardened veterans, and repaid that trust with a fervid dedication to their craft. I was a green 31-year-old reporter when I started, with only the Libyan war, Tunisian revolution and a strange months-long sojourn with tribal rebels in Sudan under my belt. Vice gave me the freedom to follow the Malian army into bloody battle against jihadist rebels, experience the Egyptian coup from the Islamist side, return to Syria over and over again during the course of the war and follow the Isis story from their initially underplayed rise to their final desert gotterdammerung.

And like Isis, Vice was a 2010s phenomenon that wrongly thought it could take on the giants and win. Perhaps that strange kinship between the decade’s two great disruptors is why Vice News was the only western network Isis let embed with them in Syria and Iraq. This isn’t as wild as it sounds – Isis watched us and we watched them. As the Syria reporter for years, focusing on Isis, I watched the terrorist group copy Vice’s style in their videos as Very Online western millennials took over their output, syncing cinematic DSLR footage with hypnotic music and thrilling action sequences.

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Young Western Isis fighters and social media influencers were constantly messaging me on Twitter, critiquing my films, and either asking me to join them or threatening to kidnap and behead me next time I deployed. I have the unusual distinction, as a legacy of my time at Vice News, of having featured in three Isis videos, twice using extracts from my films, and once combat footage of them shooting (unbeknown to them at the time) at my Landcruiser. Isis won the video battle: they had the resources of a state behind them, a demonic desire to shock and horrify, and could orchestrate combat for the cameras. But ultimately neither could maintain their exponential growth beyond the 2010s: both had dramatically overestimated their chance of taking over the world.

Careering skyward after their Isis scoop, Vice upped the sponsorship stakes with a deal to make HBO a prestigious nightly news series: and when the new network execs came in to run the show, Vice purged the young and idealistic journalists who had risked their lives to win the hipster bible journalistic credibility. Friends and colleagues who had risked their lives to produce groundbreaking coverage from Ukraine, Syria and the Central African Republic were let go with a lack of sentiment unusual even by the standards of America’s media industry. Vice News gave Vice the credibility to raise money from investors to furiously expand the rest of its brand, but the newsgathering itself was too expensive to sustain. For a while, Vice was making money, but little went to the journalists who originally built the brand.

Even still, the common online narrative that the glossier “new Vice” was a paltry shadow of “old Vice” is hard to maintain. Under the new regime, journalists were paid well, and professional security advisors were brought in to ensure the company never paid the toll in deaths that other networks gossiped were just about to happen. In any case, Vice News’s most sustained string of awards came under the new management, and some of the work from Syria that I am most proud of came under the nightly HBO banner, along with my only Emmy. Even up to the very end, long after the now-greying old hands like me had moved out to pasture, Vice News’s coverage of conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen and Ukraine outclassed the world’s biggest networks, raking in awards: Vice News Tonight closes with more Emmy nominations than any of its big name rivals for five years running.

Perhaps what really destroyed Vice News’s hope of making TV news into a profitable industry was the rise of Trump. The political polarisation of American life after 2016 saw viewers drift away from whatever interest they showed in confusing wars in far-off places for an obsession with their own internal conflict. The legacy cable networks such as CNN, MSNBC and Fox revived their ailing fortunes through a constant focus on the Trump reality show, and the rest of the world retreated back into obscurity — unless it could be viewed through Trump’s prism. As the online world polarised, Vice’s original YouTube fanbase, which skewed young male and often hard Right, vocally resented the radically progressive orientation of much of the company’s new output.

At the same time every publication from the New York Times to Teen Vogue began speaking in the same voice, Vice no longer sounded distinct. The punk magazine-turned-megabrand had gone corporate, and now sounded like any other American corporation, only more so. Vice, which had won acclaim for dispassionately showing viewers how the world really is, now looked excessively concerned with its own virtue. As American society polarised, Vice could never fully capture the newly divided, inward-looking zeitgeist – stunts like reading the entire Mueller Report live on air for four hours didn’t possess quite the same old magic. HBO switched its patronage to newer, DC insider platforms such as Axios, showing the world as viewed from the top down, not the bottom up, and Vice News moved to new and less lucrative deals on smaller cable networks. While the quality of foreign coverage remained high, and awards kept piling up, the ambition dwindled. Vice had set out to conquer the legacy broadcasters, but found itself reliant on their largesse to keep the show on the road.

For a few short years, Vice News looked like it had found the secret to making news pay by showing viewers the world as it really is, far from Western capitals, rubbing viewers’ noses in the darkness of reality. But news is expensive and talk is cheap: we have reverted to an era of talking heads and studio debates, where perhaps only state broadcasters have the funding and desire to present their chosen images of reality to the outside world, with all that implies. Bored young men who want to see brutal images of combat can now get their kicks watching Ukraine snuff clips on Twitter. For good or ill — I still can’t decide — working for Vice News over seven years forcefully reshaped my worldview, by confronting my original impeccably liberal assumptions about how the world worked with constant immersion in the hard reality of tribal, religious and ethnic conflict. Young and idealistic, I thought I could change the world: instead the world changed me.

But as my old colleague, Vice News’ former Latin America bureau chief and chronicler of Mexico’s bloody internal conflict Daniel Hernandez wrote in an elegy on Twitter, “It was truly about going to countries that ‘didn’t matter’, diving into gnarly security situations — it’s a miracle no one — for conflict reporting in Syria, Ukraine, Mexico, Venezuela … Just a wild, idealistic time. Honored to have been there at its birth.” Vice News was the future, once. If even they can’t make hard foreign news pay, then perhaps it has no future.

The interview went viral in 2012. And the final line, shortly after it was uttered, became culturally ubiquitous, particularly on social media where it proliferated as a reaction GIF — it was also, crucially, the subject of a fierce debate about whether its popularity was racist. Did we love Sweet Brown for her story and her screen presence, or was it because she was a walking, talking stereotype of the archetypal sassy black woman?

That debate has waxed, waned and evolved over the years, but the one thing it stubbornly refuses to do is die. Five years after Sweet Brown’s original interview, it was given new weight with the coining of a phrase. In a Teen Vogue essay, Lauren Michele Jackson described the act of non-black people using reaction GIFs featuring black Americans as “digital blackface”. And so, a trend was born: The New York Times weighed in, followed by The Guardian, followed by the mommy bloggers and the service journalists. Just when it seemed like the internet had squeezed the concept dry, it returned again, last weekend, in the form of a clickbaity banner on the front page of CNN: “What’s ‘digital blackface’? And why is it wrong when White people use it?”

For those who remember this argument in its original iteration, the immediate reaction is probably best encapsulated by a meme from the pre-social internet — not one of the ones that allegedly constitutes digital blackface, but the one from Mean Girls, in which an enraged Regina George hisses: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” We do not need to do this again. This argument was transparent, racebaiting, outrage fodder even when it was new; now, it is all of that and tired.

If anything, the notion that, as CNN’s John Blake insists, employing reaction GIFs featuring black people represents “one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism” is illustrative of just how badly the discourse is foundering in the wake of the massive racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. All that momentum, all that money, all those marches and protests and pleas for real change end up being squandered again and again on luxury beliefs: galaxy-brained takes that circulate like wildfire among members of the coastal media class while being utterly bewildering to any normal person. The absurdity of Blake’s argument seems obvious even for those who think America is a long way from being a post-racial paradise. This is a country where black citizens remain underrepresented in key positions of power, and disproportionately suffer from poverty and violence. How terminally online must one be to think that the “most insidious” form of racism comes in the form of some 60-year-old Facebook grandma in Des Moines who feels that her emotions are best represented by a GIF of Stanley from The Office rolling his eyes?

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But then, one gets the sense that no one does think this. Not even the people who are earning a living — or at least, a few hundred freelance dollars a pop — by arguing as much. Every writer who tackles this topic has dutifully attempted to connect the mimetic phenomenon of reaction GIFs to the atrocious (and happily defunct) practice of minstrel shows featuring performers in actual blackface. But given the integrated state of contemporary society, and the substantive difference between posting a video of a black cultural icon and doing a mocking impression of one yourself, that’s a tough argument to sell.

Often, those recycling it don’t even seem to be trying. Women’s Health claims that using the wrong reaction GIFs isn’t just upstream from minstrelsy, but also from murder: “[As] it has been proven throughout U.S. history, a Black man can be killed for demonstrating aggression, confusion, or even indifference. Popular GIFs of Kanye West looking serious, Nick Young with question marks around his face, and others, show Black men expressing themselves which, while technically be harmless [sic], can oftentimes be fatal.”

This isn’t just unpersuasive; it’s practically incoherent. Does anyone believe this argument? Does anyone even believe that the writer believed it? The whole enterprise feels so convictionless, more like a simulation of an opinion than the real thing.

If anything, the concept of “digital blackface” reads like an attempt to meme more racism into existence by claiming that it’s already everywhere. Like the too-credulous coverage of outrageous hate crimes that turn out to be hoaxes, stories about the hidden racism of reaction GIFs suggest the need for constant vigilance, which in turn fuels perpetual mistrust. The overarching narrative, as I wrote last year, is one of a deep and roiling river of racial conflict running beneath the surface of American society. The moral of the story is that we can only ever relate to each other through the lens of power, privilege, resentment, and loathing — that, as Robin DiAngelo instructs, there can be no question of racism’s presence in any given interaction, only of how the racism manifests.

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It’s a pessimistic and profoundly superstitious mode of thinking — racism, the devil lurking in every room — and one that has spawned a particularly fervent adherence among millennial white women, for whom self-help and self-hatred have always been inextricably intertwined. Blake’s essay quotes a young woman named Elizabeth Halford who narrates her use of reaction GIFs with the ecstasy of the confessing sinner: “I’ve appropriated Black trauma as punchlines and peeled their faces off to put on my own and say what I can’t say, to make you laugh, or just because it went viral.”

It’s hard to imagine who or what is served by this confession, apart from Halford’s masochism. It is also hard to imagine that any GIF could represent a greater affront to black people than the idea that selecting said GIF is akin to peeling their faces off.

But more discouraging than the pessimism (and bizarre Hannibal Lecter comparisons) inherent to this worldview is its racism — and not the insidious, subtle kind. The original Teen Vogue essay introducing the concept of digital blackface bemoaned that “black reaction GIFs have become so widespread that they’ve practically become synonymous with just reaction GIFs”, as if the ubiquitous presence of black people in American culture is a bad thing.

Blake’s CNN piece calls out specific, seminal memes: an outraged Tyra Banks on America’s Next Top Model shouting, “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”, or Michael Jordan crying at his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Maybe these are “black reaction GIFs”, in that they are reaction GIFs featuring black people. But surely what they capture is something bigger. These are American celebrities. This is American culture.

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But lately, an impulse has found a regrettable level of validation in American media, academia, and cultural institutions — an impulse to fracture and resegregate society along racial lines. American colleges hold exclusive, separate graduation ceremonies that segregate students by racial background. Lizzo, a multiple Grammy winner and one of the most famous musicians in the country, is forced to defend herself against allegations that her music is too popular among white people. An influencer goes viral for urging white moviegoers to stay away from the new Black Panther movie. Media institutions fret over race-matching the authors of book, theatre, and film reviews to the content they’re critiquing.

All of this is great, of course, if you have an economic stake in keeping Americans at each other’s throats. But for the rest of us, it only fuels polarisation and mistrust. The most incisive response to the latest “digital blackface” article came from Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, who tweeted: “This stupid article is important in only one way: it illustrates that, as actual racism continues to decline, new varieties will simply be invented/’promoted’ and used to make us fight one another.”

In a diverse, thriving, integrated society that includes people of multivariate backgrounds, of course non-black citizens are going to engage with, appreciate, and relate to cultural products created by their black countrymen — and vice versa. Not only could it not be otherwise — culture, in our highly mimetic species, has long proven itself impossible to contain — but isn’t it what we want? The popularity of these GIFs stems from the fact that they represent events, emotions, and cultural touch points that millions of people recognise and relate to; in many cases, they speak to something not just specifically American but deeply human. That something like the Crying Jordan meme has become a global visual shorthand for conveying our feelings — the fact that people of every age, shape, colour and creed feel represented by the raw emotion captured there — should be seen as a triumph of common humanity over identity category. It is, at the population level, exactly what an inclusive society should strive for.

In this context, it seems not just absurd but grotesque for our national news media to argue that we should wall off these memes from the American mainstream, or make it so fraught for non-black people to engage with them that it becomes effectively taboo. The idea that black culture, whether it’s memes or music or slang or style, needs to be kept separate for its own protection is indistinguishable in practice from the racist ghettoisation that once sidelined black artists and athletes from the mainstream, lest they pollute the spaces where white people gathered. At its root is the notion that black culture is not American culture, that black people are somehow other. And, well, you know, there’s a word (and a GIF) for that.

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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How the New York Times rewrites history

By Ashley Rindsberg

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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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.

That, after all, was the destiny of perhaps the most famous British astrologer of the 20th century: Mystic Meg, who died last week. Known as Meg Markova, but born Margaret Anne Lake, she became so identified with the power to predict the future that “Mystic Meg” passed into everyday language as a byword for prognostication.

It might be tempting to imagine that the modern age is so secular, scientific and disenchanted there is no modern-day role for a magician other than popular entertainer. How else to describe the “asparamancer”, who foretold the death of the second Queen Elizabeth last year in a pattern of falling asparagus spears?

But if you think there are no sorcerers left, you are looking in the wrong places. In fact, thanks at least partly to John Dee, it’s more accurate to say his inheritors now rule the world.

Whether or not you believe there’s anything paranormal “out there”, a great many studies affirm that most of the time when we notice patterns, we’re not conscious of doing so; what can feel like a “hunch” or “intuition” is really just our own powers of unconscious observation trying to get our attention. In this light, one way of understanding the many traditions of “reading” fortunes — whether in Tarot cards, the flight patterns of birds, tea leaves in a cup or the entrails of animals — is as a means of accessing some of these buried powers of pattern recognition, and allowing less conscious and sometimes more accurate observations to inform our conscious choices.

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Dee himself used an obsidian mirror of Aztec origin, supported on wax discs inscribed with arcane symbols. He and the alchemist and medium Edward Kelley would gaze into its black, reflective surface, where they reported seeing visions of angels; these were reflected in numerous manuscripts, which form the basis of the Enochian system of magic. Their occult legacy has endured, from the 17th-century politician Elias Ashmole to the 20th-century British occultist and “father of modern Satanism” Aleister Crowley and beyond.

But this is hardly Dee’s only contribution. In the Elizabethan age, “natural science” and “occult science” were seen as intertwined — also seen in the mystical but proto-scientific study of alchemy. Dee epitomised this rich and strange Elizabethan brew of the material and magical, pursuing “thinges Supernaturall, æternall, & Diuine” alongside and often blended with mathematics, cartography and natural philosophy (and possibly also espionage, as the original “007”).

Dee stands alongside Francis Bacon as one of the founding figures of modern science — and the modern world in general. For two of his proposals helped lay the foundations for the age that followed: first, creating a national library accessible to anyone, and second, expanding Britain’s holdings into a “British Empire”, a term he’s credited with coining. While he didn’t live to see either come to full fruition, this vision of mass literacy and expansionary, extractive capitalism were key foundations of the Age of Enlightenment.

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This was in full swing two centuries after Dee’s appointment as court magician. But as this world blossomed, in the process (as Dee envisaged) vastly enriching Britain’s wealth and power, so the “natural” aspect of the alchemical sciences came to dominate — even as the “occult” aspect lost status. Thus as Dee’s political vision was realised, his black “spirit mirror” remained in circulation — but as a curiosity, having passed through multiple hands into the collection of Augustan writer, art historian and Whig politician Horace Walpole.

Walpole was 56 in 1773, when Dee finally got his wish and the British Library was founded. That same year, too, Walpole denounced the immense inflows of wealth from the East India Company’s colonial depredations in India, deploring the “sink of Indian wealth” that he saw as turning Britain into a “gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation without principles, genius, character or allies”.

But did Dr Dee really “see” things in his black mirror? Was he a fraud, seeking only to befuddle the gullible? Was Mystic Meg only pretending to entertain the crowds?

It is true that in the flurry of affectionate recent articles commemorating the passing of Mystic Meg, there’s a conspicuous lack of efforts to tally up the hit-rate of her predictions on the National Lottery Show every week. But viewers loved her anyway: the theatrics, the crystal ball, the pendulum and the sometimes extraordinarily specific suggestions such that a woman named Pat or Cathy would win with a ticket bought at 6pm (which did not, in fact, happen).

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Nor have any of the other predictions made last year by “asparamancer” Jemima Packington come true. Boris Johnson hasn’t returned as PM; Princess Anne is not Duchess of Edinburgh; Prince William hasn’t been made Prince Regent. And the jury is still out on whether Ukraine will defeat Russia.

Even so, enough people found enough resonance to sustain Mystic Meg’s legend, such as the lorry driver who recently remembered gratefully sticking his ticket into the cab copy of the Yellow Pages on her advice, and then winning £15 million. And even if such stories have a touch of back-rationalisation about them, those who point to the patchy hit-rate of popular fortune-tellers to dismiss the power of pattern recognition as mumbo-jumbo don’t understand its real power.

The “libraries and colonialism” Age of Enlightenment in turn laid the foundations for the “digital libraries and post-colonialism” Age of Information we now inhabit. And in this world, you would only dress up your intuition (patchy or otherwise) with a breathy voice and the aesthetics of a Victorian medium if your preferred field was weekend telly and the tabloid press. What, though, if you were a figure more like John Dee — political éminence grise, global traveller, possibly spy? In that case, you’d want the kind of authority that gets you taken seriously by people with real power.

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Let’s say you wanted the modern equivalent of a royal charter today, for your powers of pattern recognition, and to offer those powers to guide the modern-day kings and princes in areas of unfathomable complexity, where decisions can make or break fortunes. You wouldn’t use hexagrams or chanting or the power of fear and the uncanny. Such a practice wouldn’t refer to angels, spirits or occult forces, either.

We live in the age that succeeded and built upon the one of science, exploration and British Empire that Dee inaugurated: that is, the American Empire. And in this era, someone who wanted the ear of those with real power would be far more likely to borrow the authority afforded by the exoteric side of Dee’s interests: the field now known just as “science”. Instead of sigils, it would use more mundane symbols to give substance to intuition. Users might call it “data-driven decision-making”.

And nor would such a person bother to learn abstruse tables of Enochian symbols or inscribe wax discs with elaborate symbols, if they wanted to use languages to shape reality. Other arcane languages are now routinely in use, coding the algorithmic trading engines that power the roiling back-and-forth of global finance, and the social media platforms that serve as giant, distorting scrying-mirrors for our collective souls.

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Should such an individual want to intervene more directly in these ebbs and flows of reality-shaping meaning, he might, for example, in the wake of a crucial tech-sector investment bank’s failure, take to Twitter and whip up investor panic or (according to some) try to incite bank runs so as to force a government bailout.

In other words, were John Dee alive today he wouldn’t be Mystic Meg. Her role was more akin to what I do: dabbling in pattern recognition, in service as much to entertainment as anything more solemn. Dee’s real inheritors, meanwhile, eschew overt “mystic” symbolism to hide in plain sight, in metropolitan skyscrapers and first-class business lounges. Nor do they stare at the images conjured on a blank piece of obsidian supported by a disc of wax inscribed with mysterious symbols. Instead they (and in fact most of us) spend much of our time staring at messages conjured on a blank surface powered by a tiny chip of silicone covered with mysterious symbols. Which is completely different.

Is this sorcery? Well, not exactly. I dare say the financiers, coders and economists conjuring in realms of pure meaning would (at least in public) vehemently reject the idea that they’re communing with anything beyond the exoteric world. Others, though, increasingly treat the voice behind the silicone mirror explicitly as an entity (or entities), with agency and unknown intentions.

Mystic Meg epitomised an age, and a culture, in which those with unusual powers of pattern recognition were more often than not perfectly happy not to be taken seriously. But in ways we’re only just beginning to grasp, this more innocent age is succeeded by a much more eerie one. And here, as in the age of Dr Dee, the natural and occult sciences are once again unnervingly intertwined.

Over two decades later, the flaws in Holbrooke’s grandiose plan for a global propaganda war directed from Washington are glaringly obvious. At the heart of Holbrooke’s conception of what became known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT) was the idea that the crucial post-9/11 battles would be won or lost not in physical locations in Afghanistan and Iraq but rather inside the heads of ordinary Muslims. The truth was that bin Laden and his terrorists understood their target audience far better than the White House, the CIA and the FBI ever could or did. Yet bizarrely, the dream of controlling reality through semiotic and technical means remains current in Washington and other Western capitals, even as the battlefields of the Middle East have gone silent. What started out as a way to fight a far-away foe has quietly metastasised into a totalitarian fantasy of endless warfare against the erroneous thoughts and feelings of ordinary citizens closer to home.

The idea of “information warfare” was born in the Seventies, when Pentagon war colleges began to take notice of the role played by so-called information operations in Soviet military planning, particularly in promoting third-world insurgencies. In 1991, American military planners included a heavy “information operations” (IO) component in the first Gulf War, which, despite featuring large set-piece tank battles in the desert, was widely labelled “the first information war”. In American military doctrine, IO was defined as a toolbox of capabilities consisting of computer network operations, electronic warfare, operational security, psychological operations, and deception. It was these capabilities, merged with high-flown Cold War rhetoric about freedom and democracy, that Holbrooke, President George W. Bush and others imagined would ultimately win the war against Al Qaeda.

America’s withdrawal of its military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan under Barack Obama left many with a less optimistic view of US IO capabilities. “Many analysts have concluded that the new media conditions are tilted in favour of non-state actors, such as insurgent militias or terrorist groups,” wrote Amy Zalman, an expert who frequently consulted for the Pentagon. “When information is restricted, the remaining void is quickly filled with conspiracy theories and distorted facts. These theories balloon and proliferate with startling speed, because it is so cheap and easy for most of us to access the means of digital communication.”

Yet the failure of the American war in Iraq, launched 20 years ago this month, and the seeming futility of IO efforts when confronted with the ungovernable spaces opened up by the internet and mobile phones, only seemed to strengthen the Pentagon’s underlying belief in the fusion of information operations (IO) and counter-terror (CT) tactics as the future of modern warfare. “In cognitive warfare, the human mind becomes the battlefield,” summarised an article in The Nato Review in May 2021. “The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes and influences individual and group beliefs and behaviours to favour an aggressor’s tactical or strategic objectives. In its extreme form, it has the potential to fracture and fragment an entire society, so that it no longer has the collective will to resist an adversary’s intentions.”

A key turning point in transforming these tactics from a war-fighting technique to a new theory of Western governance happened quietly a decade ago, when large-scale spying on US citizens by the NSA was licensed by the Obama White House. Documents leaked in 2013 by Edward Snowden alerted the public to a series of domestic spying programmes, as well as the fact that the NSA was routinely mining social media platforms to build profiles on Americans without judicial review. While the NSA had previously been required to stop searching the contact chain of a foreign target when it reached a US citizen, a change in policy allowed intelligence services to continue tracing the online contacts of Americans so long as there was a “foreign intelligence” purpose to justify the snooping.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, hints of further centralised US government surveillance activities using private technology companies began to emerge. The Obama administration routinely spied on reporters by monitoring their private telephone records and using that information to issue subpoenas to force them to reveal their sources. In 2014, Twitter filed a suit against the US Department of Justice and the FBI, stating that it had been served FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrants to collect the electronic communications of its users. Some of these efforts were apparently focused on the Obama administration’s attempts to sell the Iran Deal, the centrepiece of his second term.

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Twitter’s lawsuit, which asked the court for permission to release a public report containing the precise number of warrants it had been served, was filed by Perkins Coie, the prominent Democratic Party-aligned DC law firm. The firm’s lead attorney in the case was a former DOJ cybersecurity expert named Michael Sussmann. Then-FBI General Counsel James Baker, who was friends with Sussman, refused Twitter’s request. Crucially, the entire cast of characters involved — including Obama, Twitter, the FBI, Perkins Coie, James Baker and Michael Sussman — would soon play important roles in a startling expansion of the US government’s nascent efforts to wage information warfare against its own citizens.

The device by which this transformation was effectuated was the so-called Russiagate conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that Donald Trump had been handed the White House by agents of Vladimir Putin. Even if the evidence for Russiagate was often only legible to true believers on social media, who often sounded like characters in a Philip K. Dick novel, its function in Washington was entirely practical. By identifying Trump as an extension of Putin, the Russiagate theory neatly transformed a foreign threat into a domestic one — thereby legitimising all-out warfare by the Washington establishment against a President that many believed to be a dangerous lunatic.

Russiagate began when Perkins Coie, then employed by Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, paid a company called Fusion GPS, run by an ex-journalist named Glenn Simpson, to produce a dossier of dubious reports under the by-line of a British ex-spy named Christopher Steele. Before leaving office, Obama ordered his spy chief John Brennan to draft an official assessment claiming that the Steele dossier was real — and that Putin had helped put Trump in the White House. Obama then signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, targeting Putin, and by extension Trump.

If the Global War on Terror was founded on a profound misapprehension of America’s ability to control how other people interpret reality, Obama’s war on foreign propaganda and disinformation was founded on an outright lie that was kept alive for years by a pliant media addicted to taking handouts from nameless operatives who waged information warfare against their political enemies — and a majority of the country. “The Russian intervention was essentially a hijacking — of American companies like Facebook and Twitter,” a typical 2018 feature in The New York Times falsely asserted. The extent of the “massive fraud” that had occurred on social media platforms suggested a “plausible case that Mr Putin succeeded in delivering the presidency to his admirer, Mr Trump”. Yet according to exhaustive investigations by Robert Mueller and the US Department of Justice, the only fraud that occurred was the promotion by every normative authority and publication in the county of a hallucinatory conspiracy theory that allowed the DC establishment to bring the GWOT back home and use it an instrument to control the American public.

In the autumn of 2017, the FBI increased its leverage over the content of social media by establishing the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations” through “strategic engagement with US technology companies”. The Department of Homeland Security set up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to serve a similar purpose. Together, these and similar nodes in other agencies helped knit together US intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organisations into a single warfare behemoth whose job it was to “secure” the US information environment. And since “Russia” equalled Trump, stopping “Russian disinformation” meant censoring Trump, his supporters, and anyone else opposed to the bureaucratic takeover of domestic communications infrastructure.

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CISA’s censorship of Twitter, which is now a matter of public record, provides one example of how the new public-private information warfare partnerships worked. One such partnership was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a censorship consortium consisting of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a DC-based company made up of former national security officials and employed by the Senate Intelligence Committee. According to the recent Twitter files dump, CISA regularly censored information by filing requests with EIP, which relayed them to Twitter, Facebook, and other tech companies.

By this point, Twitter had given up suing the US government. In fact, James Baker, the former FBI chief counsel who had refused to allow Twitter to spill the beans on the US government’s use of its platform, and then authorised the FISA warrant that laid the basis for Russiagate, was now Twitter’s own in-house lawyer — one of at least a dozen former FBI and intelligence community operatives working to actively promote censorship policies based on a conspiracy theory that the platform’s own internal metrics showed was a lie.

In pressuring technology companies to do their bidding, the US security bureaucracy and its external allies in the Democratic Party and anti-Trump circles utilised two key levers of power. The first was the threat to regulate digital monopolies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. The second was to label the technology companies that had supposedly been leveraged by Putin as national security threats. Both these tactics relied on the wording of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a law originally intended to punish the distribution of child pornography, which exempted Google and Facebook from libel and other claims for which publishers of newspapers, magazines and other editorial products remained liable — on the theory that tech platforms were not publishers.

Monopoly platforms such as Google and Facebook were now caught in a bind. Facing potentially ruinous regulation, and at risk of being labelled national security threats, the platforms were prohibited from engaging in editorial decision-making that would turn their shiny liability-free monopolies into ordinary publishing pumpkins under the terms of Section 230 of the CDA. What the technology companies needed, in other words, was an external authority that would make editorial decisions for them, on a basis that would be acceptable to Democrats and national security bureaucrats.

Enter the fact-checkers. As a profession, fact-checking was once a minor ornament of the grand edifice of mid-20th-century American journalism. As that edifice collapsed in the face of competition from internet platforms, which hoovered up all their advertising dollars, fact-checkers began to replace actual journalists. Between 1990 and 2017, US newspapers lost more than a quarter of a million jobs, a decline of more than half. Meanwhile, between 2014 and June 2021, the number of fact-checking organisations in the US — employing mostly freelance workers with no particular qualifications or prior experience — rose from 44 to 341, an increase of nearly 800%, the vast bulk of that rise having been funded in order to support the false assertion that “foreign disinformation” had swung the 2016 election in favour of Trump.

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The virtues of Twitter

By Kathleen Stock

On November 17, 2016, an organisation called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) published an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company’s acceptance of $150,000 in Russian-linked ads supposedly resulted in Trump’s victory. “We would be glad to engage with you about how your editors could spot and debunk fake claims,” the IFCN suggested on behalf of the 20 fact-checking organisations belonging to its network. The following month, Facebook announced that the IFCN would be its main partner in fact-checking all claims made on the world’s largest social media platform.

The IFCN was launched in 2015 as a division of the Poynter Institute, a media non-profit. Initial funders of the IFCN included the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The partisan nature of “fact-checking” activity provided by the IFCN and its partners and similar agglomerations was not hard to spot: analysis from 2018 of fact-checks by the Associated Press found that 94% were made on Republican and conservative statements. The new “fact-checking” system allowed the major internet platforms to keep their monopolies, at the price of binding them to the Democratic Party and the DC bureaucracy.

The pandemic only tightened the elite nexus between bureaucrats, the Democratic Party, and technology companies in the attempt to make information safe for Americans. In February 2020, for example, The Washington Post denounced Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton for promoting a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” that Covid-19 had escaped from a Chinese lab in Wuhan. In May 2020, the Post’s head “fact-checker”, Glenn Kessler, a member of the IFCN advisory board, said it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a laboratory. The head of the FBI, Cristopher Wray, has now acknowledged that scenario as likely. Heretical information on the failure of lockdowns in halting transmission of Covid and the regressive inefficiency of masking children in schools was treated the same way, skewing public opinion in favour of bureaucratically convenient falsehoods and radically decreasing public trust in doctors and public-health authorities.

In October of 2020, the new domestic information security complex showed its overt partisan political purpose by massively censoring news reports about the contents of the hard drive of a computer belonging to Hunter Biden while his father was running for the presidency. In addition to lurid footage of Hunter Biden smoking crack and having sex with prostitutes, the hard drive, which had turned up in a Delaware repair shop, contained politically-damning information about business dealings between the Biden family, including Joe Biden, and companies with ties to the governments and spy services of China and Ukraine. It was, in other words, a huge political story of the type that decides elections — except very few Americans saw it in time. When they did see it, they were told that the story was a fake, the likely product of a Russian disinformation campaign.

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At Facebook, Andy Stone, once the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee press secretary, explained that the reduction of Facebook’s “distribution” of the article would go into place while it was looked over by Facebook’s “third party fact checking partners”. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, and his top attorney, Vijaya Gadde, kept the article from being shared on their website on the grounds that the material potentially constituted an invasion of Hunter Biden’s privacy. Meanwhile, the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content.

The FBI unit designated to coordinate with social media companies during the 2020 election was the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was led by agent Elvis Chan and corresponded with Twitter and other tech companies to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering. Chan openly pushed the theory that the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian disinformation operation” — a theory underwritten by an open letter signed by no fewer than 50 distinguished US intelligence officials. Yet former head of site security Yoel Roth, himself an impeccable leftist, claimed to have found little evidence of Russian activity on Twitter. According to Roth, the FBI primed him to attribute reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop to a Russian hacking operation. Needless to say, the FBI’s reports — and subsequent “disinformation” claims — were disinformation invented by the FBI, which had been in possession of the laptop for nearly a year and therefore knew the material on the Bidens to be authentic.

Donald Trump may indeed be a dangerous lunatic, or simply a crackpot — but the attempt to “secure” the US information environment from his supposedly malign influence has proven to be far more destructive than anything Trump actually did as President. As our brains were turned into battlefields by political operatives and government bureaucrats, using their power over private companies to manipulate and censor information in the service of what they regarded to be publicly beneficial falsehoods, it is hardly surprising that public confidence in the American press has fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded. Only 16% of American adults in a recent Gallup poll expressed “a great deal” of confidence in the information they receive from newspapers, with 11% expressing similar levels of confidence in what they see on television. Among Republicans, the number expressing confidence in newspapers is 5%. This decline in confidence has no parallel in any other Western country. Americans, it turned out, were no more susceptible to domestic information operations than Muslims were in the Middle East two decades earlier.

Now America, just like Afghanistan and Iraq, must face the challenge of how to govern a country in which trust has been comprehensively shattered, and all that is left is a landscape of endless information operations run by warring tribes who define their opponents as “insurrectionists” and “terrorists”. None of these efforts to define reality seem likely to do much to promote social peace in the US, any more than they succeeded in bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East. Twenty years later, it would appear that bin Laden’s paradoxical understanding of asymmetric warfare was right: the most powerful weapon against the West is the West.

But, as Big Brother Watch revealed on Sunday, the activities of these units went far beyond refuting claims such as “gargling warm water cures Covid”. The Counter Disinformation Unit, first used in 2019 to monitor potential interference in elections, was intended to combat deliberately misleading online content. In March 2020, however, its scope was extended to include misinformation and to work even more closely with social media platforms. This may not be an official censorship regime — departments have a hotline to these platforms to ask that material is removed — but it is a very easy way for the Government to reduce the spread of posts it disapproves of.

Based in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the CDU has also been active in relation to COP26 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Freedom of Information requests and questions from MPs have failed to discover its budget or how many people it employs. The Big Brother Watch report has, however, identified a number of contracts with firms which specialise in using AI and automated systems to detect “harmful and illegal content” online.

During the first months of the pandemic, both medical theories and government policies were highly contested. Epidemiologist Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of Sage, criticised lockdowns as a policy response to Covid as early as August 2020, while a number of experts openly disagreed over the assumptions underlying the computer models used to make policy decisions, including the Imperial College model used to justify the first national lockdown in March 2020. Nevertheless, public questioning of Covid policies, or close examination of the scientific evidence, was enough to earn an appearance on the weekly CDU report. Conservative MP David Davis was among those cited as “critical of the Government” after he questioned, on Twitter and in the Daily Telegraph, the mathematical reasoning of the Imperial model.

Similarly, when vaccines against Covid were created, the CDU worked to counter a number of falsehoods, including the conspiracy that they make people (especially those from ethnic minorities) infertile, or the fanciful idea that they would turn people into monkeys. But the CDU didn’t stop there. Included in its file on “vaccine sceptics”, for instance, were many who objected not to vaccines, but to policy measures such as vaccine passports or mandated vaccination for care workers. Here, a matter of public debate was deemed beyond discussion — and turned into a target of countermeasures by a state unit that is not even subject to scrutiny by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee.

Nor is the CDU the only unit engaged in this kind of narrative-management. The Cabinet Office has its own Rapid Response Unit (RRU), set up in 2018 and focused since 2020 on rebutting or removing (via social media platforms) “false and misleading narratives” about coronavirus. It monitors both social and traditional media, reporting on engagement with narratives and countering (or suppressing) those it deems harmful.

The RRU also uses media monitoring services which can report on audience demographics as well as content and sentiment analysis. Even sharing news articles critical of government Covid policies was enough to get an RRU flag. The Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, for example, appeared in RRU analysis, after voicing concerns about the effectiveness of localised restrictions. Expert criticism of data used in public briefings, personal testimonies of the impact of anti-Covid restrictions, and even jokes about the complexity of travel rules, were all included on RRU lists. Here, the scope of RRU activities goes far beyond false information to include opinions that question or contradict government policies. Again, it’s hard to see this as misinformation, let alone disinformation.

Yet for the Government, this was war. According to a whistleblower from the 77th Brigade, normally the British Army’s cyber-warfare unit, extra personnel were recruited to monitor social media for keywords — ostensibly looking for accounts that might be foreign agents spreading disinformation, but with no measures in place to ensure they were “not being directed at the UK population”.

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The whistleblower claims that screenshots of social media posts were collected and sent to the Cabinet Office. “We learned… that the Government were very keen on hearing what the public thought about their Covid-19 response and how scared people were,” said “AB”. “However, these posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated — it was simply fear and domestic dissent.”

The UK is not the only country to invoke the spectre of disinformation to seek to control public conversations. Greece passed a law against spreading false information in 2021, with a penalty of five years in prison, while Malaysia used emergency powers to pass a “fake news” law imposing jail terms for anyone spreading “wholly or partly false” information about either the pandemic or the state of emergency itself. Elsewhere, Turkey passed a law in October last year which threatens those who spread misleading news with prison, and social media platforms with fines for failure to remove content or disclose a user’s identity. Arrests have already been made.

But, as the wide-ranging activities of the UK’s CDU, the RRU and even the 77th Brigade reveal, allowing governments to define what counts as disinformation and misinformation is a slippery slope. As they extend their powers beyond falsifiable facts to policy debates, and even narratives, there is no limit to who can find themselves under scrutiny.

Throughout the pandemic the Government displayed a woeful lack of trust in the population to make sensible decisions, to act in a public-spirited manner, and to understand complex and changing information about a novel disease. Suppression of dissent and discussion is a symptom of that low opinion of the public. It’s the same paternalism that suffuses the Online Safety Bill: the politicians offering to keep us safe online by requiring technology companies to exercise a poorly defined “duty of care” are the same politicians working with those same companies to remove critics of its policies from the public square.

Government departments cracking down on false coronavirus information to protect us from dangerous falsehoods and malicious conspiracy theories? Don’t take their word for it. It’s Fake News.

A “lolcow”, for those who don’t know, is a derogatory, very online term for someone who gains notoriety via attention-seeking behaviour, combined with imperviousness to criticism and lack of self-awareness. And 28 years ago, in 1995, in an emerging world of 24-hour news cycles and ever-hungrier tabloids, Harry’s mother became the first true lolcow. She also set the bar for media oversharing, in the notorious Martin Bashir interview that tipped her from remote, paparazzi-hounded royal to press-courting celebrity megastar. Here, Diana coyly dropped bombshell after bombshell of juicy gossip for the media, interspersed with soft-voiced woe about how awful it was that the media wanted to know everything about her.

In Spare, Harry has followed decisively in her footsteps, producing more than 400 pages of such painfully needy oversharing that every page of airport-novel prose cries out for a hug. And it does so while conveying a queasy sense of squinting through the curtains at some sordid domestic scene. Reading it left me bemused at how the people around this clearly unhappy man could have encouraged him – or at least not stopped him – over-sharing to quite such a degree.

But why do it? Why subject yourself to the hostility and humiliation that anyone could predict would follow these revelations? To a significant extent, the opportunity to lolcow himself in this way is not of Harry’s choosing. Rather, the larger context is the fact that this outdoorsy, obviously basically well-meaning-but-emotionally-mixed-up midwit was not born a prince in (as a wag observed on Twitter) an age where he could perish heroically in some ill-advised charge against Prussian cavalry. Rather, he had a prominent role thrust upon him, unasked, from birth, in an age that has made commodifying ourselves a centrepiece of culture and commerce alike.

I expected to feel exasperation and perhaps distaste reading what has by now been exhaustively trailed in every newspaper as a bombshell tell-all memoir of the notoriously private Royal Family. But I was surprised to find myself feeling deeply sorry for the Duke of Sussex. And if Spare has this unexpected effect, it’s less because it reveals him – as he presents himself – to be the innocent victim of persecutory tabloids and conniving courtiers. Rather, it’s in demonstrating just how ill-equipped he is, by temperament, to navigate the impossible choices with which fate has afflicted him.

In the decades since Diana’s death, ever greater swathes of the human soul have been redirected from human relationships to commercial exploitation. Celebrity culture is perhaps the most well-established and pervasive of such dynamics. It commodifies two other core features of our emotional landscapes, redirecting them from intimacy to profit: the social roles of gossip, and of self-disclosure. As our daily lives grow ever more atomised, we depend more and more on synthetic gossip about celebrities we don’t really know to fill the gaps in our personal “village” and provide fodder for its water-cooler conversations.

If gossip helps to oil the wheels of conversation, so too does self-disclosure. When we share something personal in a conversation, it invites an answering disclosure from the other. Over time, such disclosures create trust and intimacy. And the power of modern celebrity status comes from just such self-disclosures, but delivered asymmetrically: instead of forming part of an interpersonal exchange, the “celebrity” feeds gobbets of gossip to the publicity machine, in exchange for validation, money, or other opportunities.

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Prince Harry's Faustian bargain

By Darran Anderson

Even within my modest platform, I’m conscious of this dynamic. Nothing elicits positive feedback in a column like a juicy personal anecdote. And there is always the temptation to go ever further, spilling more and more of yourself out for consumption by strangers until the result — in some quarters — becomes a kind of pornography of the self.

I can only guess at what relentless press scrutiny — which Harry calls the “fishbowl” — would feel like for someone accustomed to it at such immense scale, since childhood. Or, indeed, how such an individual might feel about the fact that its hunger was partly responsible for his own mother’s death. But if Spare depicts being endlessly “papped” as a living nightmare, it’s also in the nature of Faustian bargains, as Darran Anderson noted yesterday, to offer power as well as a horrible price. It is, after all, a function of Harry’s public profile that anyone cares about his childhood or inner life at all. And if Harry laments the way media scrutiny ruins relationship after relationship for him, he doesn’t seem able to imagine simply opting out altogether. It’s not beyond the wit of man to imagine disappearing altogether; wildly famous celebrities sometimes succeed in doing so. Instead, though, Spare recounts him rejecting an offered position as Governor-General of Bermuda, which he interprets as a plot by Camilla to get him out of the way. Well, yes, but doesn’t he want to be out of the way?

But it really doesn’t seem to just be Harry who wants to be both private, and yet also public. As Spare convincingly (if perhaps unintentionally) reveals, the entire Crown is in hock to the same bargain. At one point Harry recounts being berated by his father for taking legal action against the press, because (as Harry reports a courtier putting it) “one has to have a relationship with the press”. If Spare is to be believed, Charles tells him repeatedly just to ignore the tabloids — while playing the press like a fiddle, sometimes at the expense of his own sons, via carefully-managed leaks.

Harry’s explanation of his father’s behaviour in turn sheds light on his own tragic path to lolcow-dom. After a youth “deprived of love”, Harry speculates, Charles is “dangerously, compulsively drawn” to the “elixir” offered by the media. If Spare is at all accurate, this could apply just as well to Harry. But perhaps what damns Harry, unlike his father, to a tragic fate as lolcow is simply that he’s not very good at managing the balance between disclosure and self-protection, probably because he’s simply not cold-blooded enough. A lolcow is, in essence, someone who isn’t very good at playing the game of calculated self-disclosure; that’s Harry, to a T.

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He clearly understands how avid the machine is for anything relatable. In one genuinely poignant passage, he recounts reaching for his father’s hand at the Balmoral gates, after Diana’s death, and how that gesture set off a barrage of clicking cameras: the media machine capturing an intimate moment, so it could be sold to the public. “I’d given them exactly what they wanted,” he says. “Emotion. Drama. Pain.”

But giving the public its fix of emotion, drama and pain shades over into lolcow behaviour at the point where sharing becomes a toxic cycle. In Harry’s description, at the gates of Balmoral, the cameras were weapons: “They fired and fired and fired.” And yet some go back for more nonetheless. For intimate self-disclosure to strangers rarely produces just empathy. While you may get a measure of this (and Harry has plenty of supporters) you’ll also get objectification, mockery, and further demands for personal details. Then, still needy, and still craving love and validation, those with lolcow tendencies will respond by further disclosure, thus provoking ever more objectification and so on.

My sense of the Duke of Sussex is that, unlike more cold-blooded and self-disciplined operators, he has spent his life since that moment in Balmoral reaching out again and again for a metaphorical hand-hold, only to receive in return another barrage of photography. So he’s given in, and attempted what he calls “honesty” — which is to say, flinging every personal detail into the maw of the machine at once, presumably in the hope that this will finally make the great mass of strangers like him.

Without ever leaving the same studiedly bland, tabloid-register prose, the book lurches between accounts of travel and action, grotesquely over-personal revelations, including about family members who doubtless never consented to be thus exposed, and strangely platitudinous passages of introspection. The cumulative impression is of someone who put his own personality into storage, and bought a replacement one in IKEA.

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What beggars belief is the sheer level of neediness implied by such a wince-inducing level of self-exposure. But it’s hardly difficult to grasp why he should be so needy: his mother’s death haunts almost every page of Spare. He describes Diana as “light”, and reminisces about “Her devastating smile, her vulnerable eyes, her childlike love of movies and music and clothes and sweets – and us. Oh, how she loved us.”

But one twist in this heartbreak is never acknowledged. For if Harry describes the boys at his prep school as “abandoned children”, and we may infer that he considers himself abandoned, by her death, he doesn’t acknowledge that — regardless of how much she loved him — in truth his mother abandoned him before she died. “My mother legendarily said there were three people in her marriage,” he writes. “But her maths was off. She left Willy and me out of the equation.” And indeed she did, divorcing Charles and leaving her two sons behind with him, while she jetted off to beach resorts.

Unable to tip his mother off her pedestal, though, Harry recounts a youth spent seeking maternal warmth wherever it might be scrounged. Spare is full of what a therapist later tells him are “surrogate mums”: school matrons, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and Teej, an older friend. Meanwhile the sainted Diana can do no wrong.

Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t berate him for vulnerabilities and cognitive dissonances he has, to such a great extent, inherited from her. For Spare also reveals just how far Harry is his mother’s son. He has inherited her fear of the dark, he says, “along with her nose, her blue eyes, her love of people, her hatred of smugness and fakery and all things posh”. But he seems to have followed her footsteps in more ambivalent ways, too. Spare is already as much of a voyeuristic sensation as she was. And it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Diana rationalising her own prioritisation of personal feeling over tradition and obligation much as Harry does, as part of “living in truth”.

Harry talks about fearing “a repeat of history, another untimely death like the one that had rocked this family to its core 23 years earlier”. The clear implication is that he is afraid Meghan might die in a car crash just like his mother. But my sense is that if anyone is in danger, it is Harry. For if he has inherited Diana’s nose, we may infer from Spare that he has also inherited her cocktail of vulnerability, emotional reasoning, and (shall we say) below-average analytic capacity that, combined with unasked-for levels of public scrutiny, has sealed his fate as Prince Lolcow.

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Spare left me feeling genuine compassion for Harry, mingled with a queasy sense of shame for this tawdry era. Another time and culture might have afforded a man such as he an honourable life of leadership, even heroism. Instead, the 21st century has turned him into a broken reciter of Hallmark-tier therapy platitudes, hell-bent on strip-mining what’s left of public affection for him in fruitless pursuit of the empathy he clearly craves.

Arise, then, Prince Lolcow. For your own sake, please buy a few thousand acres somewhere remote, and devote yourself to something healthy and practical such as cattle farming. If you don’t, the media machine whose empathy you so self-destructively crave will continue farming you. And eventually it will grow tired of you, and torture you to death.