Lily Cole: Welcome to Who Cares Wins, with me Lily Cole.
David Attenborough: We do have a universal language and those of us that are working in it have a responsibility thus.
Alan Rusbridger: There’s a very dangerous situation in media ownership at the moment. So in a sense in the days when you owned a newspaper to make lots of money, that was a kind of, sort of clean motive if you like, but now you've got a situation where nobody really owns a newspaper to make money. So then you have to ask, well, if it's not money that they want, what is it?
Vanessa Nakate:I know that society normalises certain things and yet they are not OK. So I have learned to be that kind of person who will speak if I notice that something is wrong.
Carole Cadwalladr: And this was the sort of most extraordinary thing to me when I started trying to research it, is that there was absolutely nothing to research because everything from 2016 disappeared into a black hole, because it is, you know, it's this sort of, it's like being in your own reality show essentially, your social media feed, in that it's only directed at you.
Rutger Bregman: So how do you change the world? Well, maybe it starts with telling different stories.
Lily Cole: At the heart of every issue that intersects with the environment you find contradictions tensions and divergent perspectives, and these issues are complex and changing. Most of us want a happy life and a healthy planet. But many people have different ideas about the right way to travel towards it. In this new podcast series, I'll be sharing parts of my research from my book Who Cares Wins, interviewing some of the leading and conflicting voices in contemporary debates, such as technology, food, gender, politics and looking at how they intersect with our environment.
I see myself a bit like sellotape, ribbon or string holding together divergent voices and sort of asking, ‘who cares who wins?’
In the last episode of this podcast, I found myself reflecting on the fact that all of our guests, from politicians working in the heart of government to activists rebelling against the government, all champion the essential need for public will in order to see serious action on climate change. Which brings us onto the question of how do we shape public will, and the media's role in doing that.
Does the media give us an accurate representation of our world? How is the media landscape shifting under the influence of digital? Is social media a powerful tool for bringing the truth to light? Or is it undermining our democracy itself? Would it be better if we simply read less news? These are some of the questions I'll be exploring in this week's episode.
Arguably no one represents the power of the media to bring attention to the environment better than broadcaster David Attenborough, who has been bringing the natural world to the eyes and ears of millions through his work in television and radio for nearly 70 years. I spoke with him about the role of television at this time.
David Attenborough: I mean the problems that we are facing, the really important things can only be helped by people who weald great power, which in most democracies is politicians and politicians have to be convinced that this is a serious problem.
I mean, it's easy enough for those of us who are concerned with it, we can certainly grind our axe, but they've got to worry about their votes. This is a democracy they have and so you have to convince not only politicians, but also the electorate.
Lily Cole: Do you feel that people are finally waking up or do you feel disappointed it's taking so long?
DA: I have to say that when I started talking about this sort of thing quite a long time ago, I mean, 20 years ago I made programs which were saying, look, the planet’s in danger, we’ve got to look at it. At that time I'd dare say people thought, is he right? I mean, but now I think it's much more serious than that. I mean, I think that it is more recognised that the world really is facing a crisis. I think it's quite true. It's a truism and a cliche, but you know, people say, well, people won't care for something they don't love or don't know anything about. And we have a paradox at the moment and that is that never before in history have so many people been divorced from nature.
So that means over half the human population of the world is cut off to a greater or lesser degree from the planet. But the paradox is that actually they can be better informed than they ever were. Television has bought the world, the natural world into the living room with everybody. And it's not just, it's not just penguins or birds of paradise. I mean, in responsible hands, television networks can bring everybody everywhere, aware of every corner of this planet.
There is one form of communication with people at all levels everywhere can appreciate. It’s quite remarkable because it's a strange abstraction. It's a two dimensional version of reality. And so we do have a universal language and those of us who are working in it, have a responsibility thus.
LC: Attenborough’s work has played a critical role in expanding the environmental consciousness in recent years, reminding us of the beauty and wonder of the natural world, but also the threats its faces. But what about less visual media? What about old fashioned black and white print?
I spoke to Alan Rusbridger, former editor in chief of the Guardian, and now a principal at Oxford university where he chairs the Reuters Institute for the study of journalism.
LC: You’ve been the editor of the Guardian for, how many years were you there?
Alan Rusbridger: I was 20 years there.
LC: 20 years, wow. Well, how do you feel that mainstream media has changed in recent decades? Do you feel like it has changed? Do you see any issues with the way the media is reporting for example, on issues like climate change?
AR: Well I think it is changing. You could argue that it's been too slow to realise the sort of enormity of what's going on. One of the things that's changed is that, of course anybody can be a media critic. If anybody gets anything wrong or anybody doesn't like anything, they can say so immediately and powerfully and so the sort of stranglehold on opinion and news has been taken away from mainstream media.
And I think the most responsive bits of mainstream media are realising that the world has changed, that they have to change with it. So for instance, on climate change, I think there was a particularly bleak period where mainstream media was missing the story or actively subverting or twisting or distorting that story. But it’s harder and harder to do now, when you got millions of eyes watching you and challenging.
LC: Did you see recently Extinction Rebellion’s action of disrupting the printing presses in the UK? I mean, hard to miss. I’m interested in what you made of their action, but also I'm interested in what you think about their arguments behind the action i.e. that the UK media is too much of a monopoly and it's owned by people with business interests that then conflict with the responsibility to tell the truth.
AR: Well, I thought in the end, their actions were self-defeating because they managed to turn this into a story that looked as though they were about suppressing free speech. It felt to me like a bit of an own goal, but at the heart of it, it's a perfectly reasonable critique to make of a lot of mainstream media; that they haven't covered climate change with the seriousness that it deserves or that they have actively sought to distort or mislead people about it.
Now that leads on to perfectly reasonable questions about, well, who’s ‘they’? Is this proprietors, is this editors, is this fear of upsetting advertisers? I mean, it seems to me that there's a natural questions to ask because some of the coverage of climate change has been really bad. So, you know, I understand their anger. Whether it was actually sensible to prevent media from appearing, I rather doubt.
LC: And do you think that there are any issues in terms of like monopolies of media ownership globally and in the UK?
AR: There’s a very dangerous situation in media ownership at the moment. So in a sense in the days when you owned a newspaper to make lots of money, that was a kind of, sort of clean motive if you like. But now you've got a situation where nobody really owns a newspaper to make money. So then you have to ask, well, if it's not money that they want, what is it?
You then get into a very sort of complicated area. I think in this country, Rupert Murdoch owns too much media, same is definitely true in Australia. And when we did the phone hacking scandal on the Guardian, exposing the behaviour of the Murdoch press, that was extremely alarming because it was clear how many people, not just in the media, but in the police and in politics and regulators, were frightened of that man. And he had built up too big a chunk of power in this country. Where I'm with Extinction Rebellion is to say, these are absolutely legitimate questions to be asking and on some of these questions, I think I would trust them more than some of the people who own, edit and write about climate change.
LC: The mainstream media has been massively disrupted in recent years by the emergence of social media. Even David Attenborough just joined Instagram. I met Ugandan youth activist, Vanessa Nakate at Arctic base camp in Davos earlier this year, where climate scientists gathered to bring their research to the World Economic Forum. After doing a press conference with four other white youth activists, a photograph of the event was published by a major news agency, cropping Vanessa out. Vanessa and other youth activists, such as Greta Thunburg used their social media platforms to give their own account of the event.
Vanessa Nakate: I remember going to Davos, it was a completely different experience. This was an opportunity for me to talk about the challenges that people are facing in regards to climate change. And there were around a hundred journalists or more in the room. So it was a great opportunity to tell my story. Unfortunately, I ended up being cropped out by a news company when they shared and posted an article. And I wasn't included as one of the activists at the press conference.
That situation changed a lot of things because I remember asking them why I had been cropped out. It caused a massive outrage on social media, from different parts of the world. From that experience, I feel like a lot has changed in my life. It has made me a really strong activist and I'm really not afraid to speak. I know that society normalises certain things and yet they are not okay. So I have learned to be that kind of person who will speak if I notice that something is wrong.
LC: Yeah, I remember when that happened with a photograph, it was the associated press, I think. And I read a really beautiful caption I think you put, or a quote you put, which you said you didn't just erase a person, you erased a continent. And how did you draw attention to what they had done?
VN: Well, it was through my social media platform, because I got to see the article on Twitter and I retweeted it with a comment asking why I had been cropped. And honestly, I didn't know how viral it would get. So it also showed a certain form of social media being helpful, in putting out there the challenges that people face. So I use my social media, specifically twitter to question them and this attracted many people, many youth activists who came in support of what had happened and who spoke against it.
LC: I noticed you have two different accounts as well on twitter, an activist organisations, One Million Activist Stories, and the Rise Up movement. Could you maybe tell me a little bit about those?
VN: Well, about the Rise Up movement, it’s an organisation that I created to basically to help amplify the stories of what is happening in Africa and different stories about us activists, and also provide solutions that we know that can work to the climate crisis. And then with the One Million Activist Stories, we've been sharing different stories of different people, regardless of the activism that they are doing, so that we get to amplify their voices and for the world to get to know their work that they're doing and how they can support them.
I believe social media has been a great tool. Of course, it comes with its negative issues because the trolls are always out there to attack. But then the bigger picture is that it has been helpful in pushing my activism, in telling my story and also in interacting and working together with other activists to demand for action.
LC: So social media clearly has the potential for positive disruption and communication. Yet with it has come a series of new and more complex challenges for our media landscape, from smart advertising and data manipulation, fake news, mass surveillance, bots, media monopolies on an unprecedented scale and filter bubbles that drive polarisation.
Social media offers a funfair mirror to our collective consciousness, which in turn distorts our ability to have a healthy democracy. I first came across the work of Cambridge Analytica many years ago when I was setting up my own social network. As a tool that allowed you to target people based on their psychology, I found it pretty scary, and I wasn't surprised a few years later when the investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr spoke out about how Cambridge Analytica had been used by platforms like Facebook to distort international elections.
Carole Cadwalladr: So what happened is that Cambridge Analytica employed this psychologist at Cambridge university, this a guy called Aleksandr Kogan, who changed his name, his name at that point, he changed it to Dr. Spectre, which is this kind of bizarre extra detail in the story. Anyway, Aleksandr Kogan, he developed this app, which was a personality quiz and Cambridge Analytica paid a couple of hundred thousand people to take this personality quiz. And at the end of the quiz, they had to tick the box and that gave Kogan access to all, not just their data, so it gave access for them to have all of their data, everything they’d ever sort of seen and shared and liked, and even their private messages on Facebook. And it enabled them to take all of their friend's data as well.
So from just a couple of hundred thousand people taking that quiz, they actually harvested 87 million people's Facebook accounts from around the world. So it's this massive, massive invasion of privacy. And then that data was used to create the psychological profiles of people. So you could sort of match up people's personality types, according to what they had sort of seen and liked and shared on Facebook and then those personality profiles, they, from that they built these algorithms and they used that to target people, for Trump, in the US election on Facebook. A Facebook employee was embedded at Project Alamo inside the Trump campaign where Cambridge Analytica was also embedded.
And the other thing we've seen as well as this creepy and disturbing alignment between Trump and Zuckerberg in that there's been these sort of secret meetings. There are these private dinners that Trump and Zuckerberg have had at the white house that were only revealed months down the line. That's Cambridge Analytica and Alexander Nix, and a whole host of other people have always denied that these psychological profiles were used in the Trump campaign.
What was really amazing was that Channel Four news got hold of the entire database that the Republican party had in 2016. So they've got every single American’s voter file. It's sort of this amazing trove of information that every single voter and that included the Cambridge Analytica psychological profiles of all of these voters. And what they showed was that they showed how Facebook was used by the Trump campaign to target individual ads at black and minority voters to try to persuade them not to vote. It's there. The evidence is there. The psychographic profiles are in there. Whether it worked or not, or how it worked is, you can still argue that if you want, but you can't argue that it wasn't used by the Trump campaign because we know that it was.
LC: And also other elections internationally, right?
CC: We don’t even know. I mean the number of elections that Cambridge Analytica worked in is still, has never been sort of like totally nailed down, but it was hundreds.
LC: Yeah, I remember in your Ted talk, reflecting on the impact of social networks on the 2016 elections, this line that was, and I might get this slight wrong, but it was something like - it’s not about right or left, Brexit or no Brexit. It's about whether we will be able to have a free and fair election ever again - .
CC: I am just one of many people who have been trying to sound this alarm bell. In 2016, that wasn't just a warning, that actually happened. The US election was actually subverted and it was actually Facebook that enabled that. There is just reams of evidence that was provided by the FBI about how that happened, how Russia did that.
And the fact is, is that Facebook has, all that happened is it said sorry. That is all that happened. It was never held to account. It's never had to deal with the consequences of that. There's never been a proper shake up at that company, which was required to address the problem and to ensure that it had the national security systems in place. The FTC in America, the Federal Trade Commission, it announced this absolutely record-breaking fine. It find Facebook $5 billion because of the Cambridge Analytica data breach, which we'd exposed and Facebook's share price actually went up that day. It was this extraordinary thing. And that's because you know what, what’s $5 billion to a company like Facebook. It’s nothing, it’s is pocket change.
So, you know, the share price went up because it was like, this means nothing. And we are here four years on. We're four weeks away to this, a new election, when already it is happening again. Already, the vote is being undermined. We can, this misinformation and disinformation about voting is flooding the platform and the most egregious thing is that Facebook does have policies. It has policies about incitement to violence, for example, but it just doesn't enforce them.
LC: It is correct that Donald Trump Jr. had put up a post on the platform calling for kind of armed militias to guard the polling stations? Is that correct?
CC: That’s right. It's this terrifying thing. It's sort of like this idea of Poll Watchers who essentially are militias who have been encouraged to show up at the polling stations to intimidate voters. This is all happening inside these closed groups on Facebook that these militias are being organised. And then what we know is that people are being radicalised, still being radicalised by the Facebook algorithm.
LC: When I was researching it for my book, you know, I fact checked it last year before it went to print, I don't know if it's changed, but Facebook specifically excluded the third party kind of fact checking of political ads. Like it allows third party fact checking, if I remember right, of other types of ads, I mean, heaven forbid you post half a nipple and it will be censored, but political ads don't have to be fact checked. Is that still the case?
CC: Yeah, exactly, that’s nail on head Lily. And there's this extraordinary clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asking Mark Zuckerberg about that in a congressional hearing. And, you know, he doesn't blink, he just says Facebook has another policy.
LC: With Cambridge Analytica, you also, the government really struggled to see the political ads i.e. to get out of Facebook evidence of what the ads were, the political ads that were being shown to people. So it wasn't even an awareness of what people were seeing.
CC: During the Brexit referendum, that the whole point is, I mean, this is the sort of most extraordinary thing to me when I started trying to research it, is there was absolutely nothing to research because everything from 2016 disappeared into a black hole. Because it is, you know, it's this sort of, it's like being in your own reality show essentially, your social media feed in that it's only directed at you.
It was totally totally un-transparent. And this is the thing which still completely infuriates me, is that we still have no idea of what happened on Facebook’s platform during the EU referendum. And Mark Zuckerberg refused to come to Britain to be questioned by MPs about that. There has been no access whatsoever for academics to be able to understand what happened. All of that evidence just disappeared down a black hole.
The only thing we saw is that parliament eventually forced Facebook to handover the ads of one of the campaigns that, just one of the campaigns, so the official Vote Leave campaign. And even that was totally extraordinary because we just saw it was lie, after lie, after lie, after lie. That Turkey is joining the EU, that staying in the European Union will endanger polar bears. The social media output they put, were putting out, in the last two days before the referendum, we now know was illegal and the money spent in those last 48 hours was this illegal overpayment.
They admitted that and all that happened with some poxy fine. This is massive, massive, massive electoral fraud. It’s the biggest electoral fraud in this country for more than a century and nothing happened. Nobody was held to account. And more than that, most people in this country fundamentally do not understand that. They don't even know about it because a lot to do with the fact actually that the BBC failed to understand it themselves, failed to report it correctly. And the whole thing was swept under the carpet.
LC: Do you feel that Twitter have responded in a more responsible way, or what are your thoughts on Twitter's role in this?
CC: I think Twitter is responding in a more responsible way and it also is just less impactful.
LC: Do you think that misinformation on this platform is impacting the understanding of climate change?
CC: There was this sort of amazing moment for me, right at the beginning of my reporting on Cambridge Analytica. So it was like about three days after my first article on Cambridge Analytica came out and I had got this prearranged story that I was doing in States. I was going to Denver to go to Al Gore’s Climate crisis organisation. And that, what they do is they train people. They do these sort of climate training camps, where they train people from all around the world to go out to their communities and to tell people about climate change.
And what was amazing, so I had this sort of like, I had this brief interview, pre-interview with him at that. I told him about the story I had just done and how it was all about Robert Mercer, who was funding Cambridge Analytica and this crazy stuff I’d uncovered. And what was so fascinating is that he sort of said, “well, of course I know all about Robert Mercer. He's been funding climate denial for the last 10 years.” And he said it was, there was no way of combating it online. And so this was why they decided that the only way that they can have an impact was to talk to people. So they were focusing all of their efforts on this idea if you talk to one individual and you convince one individual in person, and then they go out and they talk to other individuals, this was the only thing way that you could really combat what was going on online, was to take it into the real world like this, because the information space had become so toxic.
And what we've seen is this linear progression because the climate denial people learned the trick from the smoking lobby. So it’s this idea that you don't have to prove the science wrong, you just have to create this uncertainty. And that's gone from smoking to climate to politics.
LC: Many people feel that Facebook's response to the controversy surrounding the 2016 elections has been weak. Whereas Twitter decided to ban all political advertising and remove posts from prominent politicians if they break their code of conduct, Facebook have continued to defend their position, not banning political advertising, not fact checking political advertising and not hiding politician’s posts, even if they break their terms of use, and for example, incite violence.
The big concession Facebook has made has been to set up an oversight board of 40 very distinguished members, including the former prime minister of Denmark, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and several constitutional law experts. The board they say is supposed to act as a kind of Supreme Court with the power to override decisions made by the networks, moderators and influence policy.
Alan Rusbridger is a member of the new board and spoke to me about it.
LC: First and foremost, on a kind of pragmatic level, would you maybe explain your role at the Facebook oversight board? What is the actual remit? Does Facebook propose cases or do you guys propose cases?
Alan Rusbridger: Facebook propose cases. We can propose cases and users can propose cases. So it's like a kind of Supreme Court. We can give instructions, which Facebook has said they will always implement. And then there are broader policy questions, which Facebook can come to us and say, we're having difficulty with these kind of cases on this kind of issue. Could you help us think through that.
And then they're not bound to accept our judgment on that though I think it would look odd if they paid no attention to what we were saying. They have said they will make the changes that we suggest, those sorts of straightforward take down issues that are obliged to do what we say. But on more sort of broad policy stuff, they will listen to us, but they haven't said that they will automatically implement what we say.
LC: In your mind what are the biggest challenges you see in the opportunities to solve them in terms of the way that Facebook and other companies like them are operating right now?
AR: I think it's an incredibly fascinating moment in the development of social media. So you have 2 billion people using Facebook and some of it is wonderful. Some of it is awful. Some of it needs to be protected. Some of it needs to be taken down and suppressed. Now, how you do that at the scale that things are now happening is a really difficult thing to solve. So part of it is being done by machines. Part of it's being done by human beings. And I think anybody who has ever given any thought to free speech issues knows how difficult it is to sort out these questions and who gets to decide.
And then some people would like to jump straight to regulation. But I think you have to sort of pause and think, well, what does that mean? Does that mean President Erdoğan gets to regulate the Turkish Facebook, Putin regulates Russian Facebook? Is that a good idea? And I think there's some skepticism about the idea of self-regulation.
So this idea of saying, well, look, a halfway house is to have a group of independent people who have had some experience in free speech and human rights issues, to take some of the most crucial decisions is quite an imaginative thing to be doing, I think.
LC: And is there any appetite to challenge the fundamental business model of the company, if you feel that that is causing some of the other issues?
AR: It’s been interesting seeing my colleagues, you know, some of them who've got judicial backgrounds, some of them who've got human rights backgrounds, legal backgrounds, journalistic backgrounds, but none of them I think has come into this because they love Facebook. And in fact, a few of them have been quite marked critics of Facebook in the past.
So in hearing the cases we've thought of so far, the last thing on our mind is, is this going to damage Facebook commercially or not? I mean, I think we think, well, that's not our role. If what we're proposing damages Facebook commercially that's Facebook's lookout. We will just say what we think is right.
LC: I asked that because it seems to me that the very business model of social media platforms, of being free to users, but therefore, almost wholly dependent on advertisers, is one of the root causes of a lot of the other issues that we've had, whether it's the platform’s designed to get as much of users time as possible or filter bubbles because you're, the algorithms are designed to make you see content you'd like, or the fact that arguably a lot of the political advertising that's been done through social networks hasn't been fact-checked or moderated in a way that one might hope. So, I just wondered if you agree with any of those more fundamental issues.
AR: Yeah. That is one of the things that people criticise Facebook for. And I think that's fair criticism. I mean Facebook are not the only people, obviously there are, there's a lot of traditional media that have gone on to largely free model, which is subsidised by advertising. Whether that's going to work or not, we don't know. I think we have to sort of get going, win trust all round, and then if at some point we need to start saying, look, we need to understand better your algorithm, I think it would be quite difficult for Facebook to say that's none of your business.
LC: Carol Cadwalladr is not convinced. A few days before we spoke she launched an alternative shadow board named the Real Facebook Oversight Board. I asked her first and foremost, what she thought about Facebook's official board.
Carol Cadwalladr: There’s obviously, there's some really amazing people on it, very authoritative in their field. And I mean, essentially, I just wish them the best of luck because I think any attempt to bring any kind of like scrutiny on Facebook has to be welcomed.
LC: Why did you feel compelled to set up the shadow board, the Real Facebook Oversight Board as you named it?
CC: What possible way is there to hold Facebook to account? You know, that is the fundamental question and there isn't one. And when Stop Hate for Profit launched, we had a lot of conversations with people involved in that, and were thinking about, well, how can we do this? So this was when the boycott of advertisers who were using Facebook launched. And, you know, it's just such a critical thing because without advertising, there is no Facebook, you know, this is the money supply. So it was a really, really interesting and important moment this summer.
But they made these demands and nothing happened. And nothing happened because there's nothing to fall. You know, it's not enough that just even that, you know, these huge, huge companies saying, no, we're not going to advertise on Facebook wasn't enough.
So anyway, it was at that point that we started, I started, we started thinking about this idea of a sort of Brains Trust who would support them in their aims. And at that moment, we remembered about the oversight board, which, you know, had been announced with this great fanfare and then had done absolutely nothing. So had this idea for a Real Facebook Oversight Board. Essentially, it was this idea, it was this sort of punk act of subversion, I suppose, to appropriate their terminology and their structure, but to make it properly independent, to make it properly transparent and to make it not on Facebook's terms.
And it’s very much an emergency response because a lot of the people who understand this technology best are really, really seriously alarmed at the way that Facebook is already being used to subvert and undermine the US election. It’s going to be a really different election from other US elections because of mail in voting, there’s not going to be a result on the night in this way, because the result in certain States is going to be delayed. And during that period of uncertainty, these really key experts who came to the Real Facebook Oversight Board, really worry about what will happen during that period and the way that Facebook could be used to incite violence.
And the consequences of that are kind of terrifying, not just for America, but for the world. And I hope that the Real Facebook Oversight Board just gives some additional leverage. It's going to increase the pressure on Facebook, it’s going to make their job easier, I hope. And I think also when we've already seen it have an impact, various things that happened behind the scenes. But the fact is that Facebook came out on the day that we were launching The Real Facebook Oversight Board, they did this massive press push to go, ‘Oh, actually we are launching ahead of the election. It's okay.’
And then during the press conference we had two days ago, whilst it was going on, they conceded one of the first key demands of the Real Facebook Oversight Board. They've said that they will not allow political ads that seek to de-legitimise the election results before it has been announced. So that's a step forward, but it doesn't address everything else, which isn't a political ad.
LC: Can you tell us about some of the people on the Real Facebook Oversight Board and what came out of the first meeting?
CC: There’s some really incredible people who have agreed to be on it. So Shoshana Zuboff, for example, who's the author of Surveillance Capitalism, people like Rashad Robinson who's the president of Color of Change, Derek Johnson who's another one, he’s an NAACP, which is, I think it's the oldest and largest civil rights group in America.
Then there's people like Yaël Eisenstat, she’s the former Head of Election integrity for political ads at Facebook. She’s really sounding the warning bell about the danger that Facebook poses to the US election. Plus these sort of other incredible voices like Timothy Snyder, who's this historian who's been cataloging the ways, how authoritarian governments arise. And he sees us in this dangerous historical moment.
And then one of the most compelling voices who sort of slightly freaked me out in a way, Larry Tribe is this, he's one of the most important constitutional scholars in America, and he spoke right at the very start of opening of the board, and he said, this is the most important project I've been involved in, in my 50 year career at the law. And he said, what we're seeing is already, it’s a coup d’état in progress and it is being aided and facilitated by Facebook.
I get all this crap for, like, she's not a journalist, she's an activist. And it worried me for quite a long time. And then I just thought sod it, I responded by going, yeah, I'm an activist for the truth, so kill me. But now actually I respond by thinking, yeah, you know, I am a journalist, but I am also a person. I am a citizen and I am not going to sit here whilst you can see democracy being blown up essentially.
LC: So it's, you know, scary stuff in a world of misinformation. How do we get more informed? Who do we believe? Is the world really falling apart? Is progress actually being under reported? Is climate change being underreported? Are there any signs of hope for journalism and how we might collectively understand our situation?
Alan told me about a few movements that he thinks we can look to to find our way through.
Alan Rusbridger: So if society cannot work without truthful and accurate and reliable information, evidence-based information, and if the business model for providing that is collapsing, then what do you do? And what I think we're describing is a public service. That's classically something that society needs, but that can't be financed through a traditional business model. And I see all kinds of interesting initiatives around the world, including philanthropy, including tax breaks, including people registering themselves as charities or as social enterprises, which say, look, our mission is the provision of truthful and reliable information on things that matter. And we're not there to make a profit, but you know, that society needs us. I think we will see a move to that kind of model and that gives me some hope, because I think actually that's why most people go into journalism, to do that kind of thing.
LC: I’ve been quite interested in Steven Pinker's arguments, I don’t know if you've followed his work much, where he argues that whilst in many ways, we've socially progressed in the last few decades, the picture of the world painted by the media has largely gotten more and more dystopian. I would say climate change and environmental coverage is probably an exception to that rule, but by and large, social things have gotten better and we under report them because we over report on all the things going wrong in the world.
And that has potentially negative consequences on people's mental health. And there is a small, but promising counter movement towards solutions journalism looking at solutions and the good things going on in life. Do you have any thoughts on that? Do you feel like the news is sometimes a bit too negative?
AR: I think it's a really interesting, important subject. Journalists are almost genetically programmed to look for things that are exceptional and in a way bad. So when things are going well, that is sort of classically not something that journalists tune into. I remember we once did our little column at the bottom of the leader column in the Guardian, in which, just called ‘In Praise Of’ because I thought we should be positive about things. And we would always have our leader meetings and we would discuss the terrible things going on in Africa and the middle East. And then I'd say, okay, so what are we going to praise today? Well, it's huge, terrible silence. And it was very hard to get journalists to think that, that was just not how they were programmed.
LC: The Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman is more optimistic about the state of the world and offers a radical proposal. In his new book, Humankind, Rutger concludes with 10 pieces of advice, including a key one, avoid the news.
Rutger Bregman : If you look at the past 10 years, I think there's a lot of reason for hope, because so many ideas that used to be dismissed just five or six years ago, have now become quite mainstream, you know, whether we're talking about taxing the rich or whether we talk about universal basic income, or also about, I think, a bit more hopeful to mystic view of human nature. The tide is really turning. My short summary would be that cynicism is out and hope is in.
LC: Why do you think that the negative news and salacious stories have tended to sell better?
RB: I'd focus on two things. In the first place human beings have this negativity bias. So we tend to focus more on the negative than on the positive. Evil is stronger than good. The good can win though with an overwhelming force of majority, but evil is stronger, you know, it just makes a bigger impression on us.
I mean, we've all experienced that in our own lives. If you get, I mean, I experienced this like, you get a hundred compliments on Twitter, like, Oh great book, or a nice review, blah, blah, blah. And that's nice. And then this one nasty piece of criticism, and that's the thing that keeps bugging you and that keeps you up at night.
So I guess it's sort of, the news really feeds into that. That it sort of triggers this negativity bias over and over again. So if you watch a lot of the news, at the end of the day, you'll have a very cynical and depressed world view. There's even a term for this in psychology. They call it Mean Wolf syndrome.
It's a strange thing. You know, if the news would be invented today and sort of the health authorities would have to decide whether they can sort of allow this product that we call the news on the market. And they would look at the side effects. It will probably say, no, no, no, this is way too dangerous. You know, it causes anxiety and feelings of depression and cynicism, etc. Now this is not good for our society. You know, we're not going to allow this. But here we are, 90% of the population consumes it. And that's the one important reason.
There's one other thing I was thinking about, it's sort of this negative worldview is also in the interest of those in power. So, if you have an hierarchical society is in the interest of those at the top, for the rest of the population to believe that most people can't be trusted because that legitimises their power. Now, if most people are pretty decent then maybe we don't need them anymore.
LC: What are the ways that we can try and change the narrative around what a human is? So we might see some impacts in politics.
RB: I think that in the end, we are the stories that we tell ourselves. And for centuries, for millennia, even we've been telling each other really cynical stories. It's I think at the heart of our capitalist system today, we have to design our companies in the marketplace, etc, around that idea that people are selfish.
And so, yeah, we, we sort of become the stories that we tell ourselves these, these can become self fulfilling prophecies that's so deeply embedded in our culture. That goes back all the way to the ancient Greeks. That you find with the Christian Church fathers, you know, the concept of original sin, for example, basically the same idea.
You find it with Enlightenment philosophers. So how do you change the world? Well, maybe it starts with telling different stories.
LC Well, that was a head fuck of an episode wasn't it? Sorry. And I didn't even get into how the digital landscape has empowered the rise of modern surveillance states with whistleblowers like Edward Snowden revealing that intelligence agencies have been tapping into the vast amounts of personal data that tech companies trade in.
Hmm, I must admit, I definitely feel better when I read less news, but we need some news, right? And unless we also moderate our social media and digital intake, it is hard to control the news we receive. As Carol says, understanding the influence of the digital information sphere isn't about being left or right, or choosing political sides. It's about respecting the truth required for democracy to function. It's about resisting manipulation.
As we discussed in the first few episodes of this podcast, through conscious consumerism, we have the ability every day to express our political voice through our buying choices. With the media, this relationship is more complex because most of these platforms are free, but conscious consumption is just as important.
We're not paying for these services with our money. We're paying with our time, our attention, our eyeballs, our data, our privacy. Campaigns like Stop Hate for Profit show the role that businesses and advertisers can play in pushing back against these trends. Employees reacting inside companies have a lot of leverage power. Brave activists, whistleblowers, lawyers and journalists are trying to improve standards. And it may be that we see political actions in years to come to regulate tech giants.
Personally I decided a few years ago to go on social media diet, not abstaining completely, but being more mindful about how much I use these platforms and the impact on my thinking. Traditional media, social media, the Facebook Oversight Board, the Real Facebook Oversight Board, reading the news, not reading the news; who wins? Or maybe there is no winner, and that's the point. There's something to learn from all sides.
Indeed it's kind of meta, right? Because I'm arguing that the news needs to be representative of more voices and not get lost in filter bubbles. And indeed, that's what this podcast is trying to do.
You can hear more from David Attenborough,Carol Cadwalladr, Rutger Bregmanand many others in my book, Who Cares Wins, which is out now in hardback, e-book and audio book. Join me next time on this podcast where I'm going to be exploring the concept of growth.