Two small words, Truth and Trust, are obsessing me in this post-whatever age
Maria Ressa’s outstanding book How To Stand Up to a Dictator was written about Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, whose daughter Sara is in the middle of being impeached as vice-president. Maria and her fellow female journalists at Rappler had to undergo the slings and digital arrows of trying to hold the powerful accountable, with troll farms and public pronouncements turning people against the truth.
Truth and its cousin, Trust, are so important in the new digital world. Jamie Susskind, a qualified barrister who is on first-name terms with the Rule of Law, has written a couple of books about this new Digital Republic, one of which was praised for its chunky bibliography; his brother Daniel, who would have been a classmate of mine had we not gone to rival schools just North of London, has received plaudits for his ‘reckoning’ on the concept of economic growth, which has fascinated him at an academic and policy level. I remember Daniel doing some magic tricks as a teenager; now, with plaudits from former Prime Ministers, he’s hoping to work some magic of a different kind.
And then there’s the USA, to which the whole world is gripped; never mind Dallas or M*A*S*H, Seinfeld or Friends, Succession or whatever this year’s hottest show is, Trump II: This Time It’s Worse is the sitcom of the ages. This series has a fun new character: a nasty billionaire with a passion for space exploration, electric cars and also autocracy.
We’re supposed to be scared and distracted, especially those of us with family in the country, and trust the media to mediate, as they have always done. It’s not particularly optimal that Fox News, assorted online gobsheets and the recently freed Steve Bannon, who invented Bannoning aka ‘flooding the zone’, are all working hard to spread the Trump message. Nor is it great that progressive voices are choosing their words carefully: it saddens me to thank that Seth Meyers is earning a living on NBC, the very same network which turned Trump from a tabloid star into a TV star with a catchphrase: ‘Make America Great Again’. I mean, ‘You’re Fired’.
What worries me greatly is the silencing of journalists and big media organisations. Why has Amazon earmarked $40m to do an Imelda Marcos-style portrait of Melania, mother of Barron Trump, a freshman at New York University? Why has Meta told its Facebook users to do their own fact-checking? Why did Reddit act to stop criticism, stating publicly that ‘debate and dissent’ is good but threats are not, of the hired goons who acted on behalf of DOGE aka the Elon department of state? Maybe the threats need to be coded or, as per Nigel Farage, asked in a jokey ‘Whhhhat’s all that about?’ manner.
If you are paid to report the truth objectively and fairly, you cannot be cowed by the people on whom you are reporting. It did not surprise me to learn that in the early years of Nazism, Hitler rapidly took measures to shut down the free and Jewish-owned press, with journalists of all stripes fleeing the country which was now hostile to Jews, communists and anyone who wasn’t Aryan enough. Are the tech bros the new Goebbelses, controlling the message and making it impossible to challenge power (whhhhat’s all that about)?
There is a reason the resignation of Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes made the news after her cartoon was spiked. Although it was foreseeable to know that painting the ultimate owner of her paper as a man in thrall to Trump, next to Mickey Mouse and Mark Zuckerberg, it still smacked of censorship, or at the very least extreme caution. Rupert Murdoch, before his company Fox News paid a gargantuan fine rather than go to court to say that they not defame Dominion voting systems, the truth of which of course is made moot by the settlement, gave another of his axioms which I have not forgotten since: ‘It’s not red or blue; it’s green’.
This means that he, as well as Musk, Zuckerberg and Farage, can change shapes and colour to suit the mood. Words don’t matter; money does. Piers Morgan congratulated Trump on his accession to the throne – sorry, the presidency – four years after flipping the bird after the Capitol riots of January 6 2021. Morgan, who has been employed variously by ITV, CNN and Talk TV, is now an independent entity and, in spite of everything, helped newspapers sell copies and TV channels gain viewers. He is also a very, very rich man, even though the commentator George Monbiot wrote in 2023 that his rise was ‘one of the abiding mysteries of public life’ (whhhhat’s all that about?).
Like Murdoch, Morgan showed his hand back in 1999 when he admitted that he sought to ‘ingratiate’ himself with ‘newspaper owners, potential newspaper owners and billionaires’. Morgan claims, in spite of a court case stating the opposite, he ‘neither hacked a phone nor told anyone to hack a phone’ while editor of the News of the World (before he was 30) and the Daily Mirror, a job he lost after publishing faked photos of Iraqi prisoners. He then headed to Britain’s Got Talent, where he was present to witness the rise of the Susan Boyle phenomenon.
Morgan turns 60 years old at the end of March, and I would genuinely love to be at that birthday party or be there when he opens his cards. Which old Fleet Street legends will pay homage to a man who in 2008 won the seventh season of the US Celebrity Apprentice, beating off his fellow Hydra team members Lennox Lewis, Gene Simmons and the guy who played Big Pussy in the Sopranos? Morgan now hosts Uncensored on his Youtube channel, free of any broadcaster or even requirements for balance; he is more Andrew Tate than Andrew Marr (whhhhat’s all that about?).
The show, sponsored by an American jewellery broker (‘get up to $15,000 in free silver’), has recently included interviews with Ukraine president Vlodymyr Zelensky and, in Riyadh, Tucker Carlson, respectively Putin’s foe and the man who was, to Morgan, ‘licking’ the Russian leader somewhere I can’t write because you might be eating. Before his fall from grace, Carlson was the top TV pundit in the USA with a nightly show on Fox News; watching clips of the interview where Morgan and Carlson met for the first time is like the celebrated Spiderman meme. Indeed, both got to question one another for their respective channels.
Both men are successful in monetising the attention of a global audience, and I do wonder if history will be kind to them. They quack like journalists, talking to people in power and communicating to an audience, but they are at heart entertainers. In a world where news is a marketplace, they are the fearless truth-tellers, and their audience trusts them.
It also helps the powerful people that voters are watching Morgan or Carlson; better them, than reading Maria Ressa on Duterte, or Carole Cadwalladr on Brexit-backing businessmen, or journalists reporting on Hitler in 1934. Ah, no; they couldn’t do that, because their employers had fled.
The fewer journalists there are, the likelier that the powerful can write history themselves, rather than be written about.