Welcome to hardtalk. Im stephen sackur. The covid 19 pandemic is a test of Global Public health systems. It also a profound challenge to our media and information networks. It also presents a profound challenge to our media and information networks. Look online and you will find fact and fa kery locked in mortal combat on the dangers of the disease, the efficacy of lockdowns and the safety of the vaccines. My guest today is alan rusbridger, former editor of the guardian and now a member of facebooks supervisory Oversight Board. How do we ensure fact prevails overfiction . Alan rusbridger, welcome to hardtalk. Pleased to be here. Your latest book, news and how to use it, is subtitled what to believe in a fake news world. Do you believe we are living in a fake news world . I think we are. We are living in an age of complete information chaos and all of the surveys of trust show that the media is doing very badly. People dont know what to believe any longer, who to believe and who to trust. But to call it a fake news world surely to undermine the importance of so many different Media Organisations and journalists of integrity right around the world who are continuing to do what they have always done that is, to bear witness, to report accurately and truthfully and to give their viewers, listeners and readers a picture of what is happening in the world today. I think actually its the opposite. It is really trying to emphasise the importance ofjournalism at its best as a method of understanding the world and getting out the truth, but the problem is that survey after survey shows that people dont really trust journalism any more than other forms of communication. We are living in a world now in which the monopoly on news that people used to have when they had a Printing Press or a broadcasting studio is now shared between the 4 billion people on the planet who can now broadcast and publish. Journalism is in some trouble just at the point where you think, or you would have thought, people would be flooding to the safe harbour of a craft or a profession that they know they can trust. Well, that of course brings me to the covid 19 pandemic and the way information is flowing around the world as to the realities, the dangers of the virus itself, the nature of governmental including itself, the nature of governmental responses including lockdowns as we currently live in the united kingdom, and of course the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. Are you suggesting that on all of these measures news and information flows are now toxified in some way . Well, we have to accept that people of course many journalists are doing a wonderfuljob in the middle of this. I think its almost the first time in manyjournalists lives where they realise that what they write or broadcast can be a matter of life and death, and many have risen to that challenge really well. But, again, if you look at the surveys of who people are turning to and who they are trusting, it is not clear to me thatjournalism is trusted as much as it should be, and i make the point of writing in the book, i was trying to examine why that is, to try to explain to readers whyjournalism at its best deserves to be trusted, but also to try and make journalists themselves think a bit more deeply about the reasons for lack of trust, and there are many of them. The book is fascinating, and you write it as a sort of glossary with keywords that matter to the future of journalism. To be honest with you, when you get to the letter c, i cant remember whether you alight upon the word censorship or not, but either way in your view is censorship what is required right now to detoxify the well of journalism, particularly when it comes to the arguments and discussions about covid 19 . Is censorship what you want . No. You would be amazed to learn im not in favour of censorship. I am a very Old Fashioned liberal. I am withjohn stuart mill, the philosopher who argued a long time ago that the best response to argument was more argument. I think censorship is very dangerous because it just gives rise to suspicion. Why are these views being suppressed 7 i am in favour of meeting argument with more argument, of bringing as many facts and arguments out into the open so that those can be had out in the open, and where there is falsity, it can be confronted with fact. I am very mindful that having edited a National Newspaper in the uk for two decades you are currently sitting on the so called Oversight Board of facebook. We can discuss that in detail later, butjust right now on the question of what is put out on facebook, you are saying you are not in favour of removing, that is, censoring messages put out on the worlds most influential social media site, which for example sometimes suggests that the vaccine is deeply dangerous to people or on other occasions that lockdowns dont work and are being manipulated by governments around the world to damage the peoples interest. This sort of message on facebook should not be removed, shouldnt it . I think you have to look at each case on its merits. I am part of a panel that is looking at the covid case at the moment. I probably shouldnt talk about that, but looking at that you are in this world of looking at protecting free speech, looking at who is speaking rather than with what kind of authority and how actionable it is. I think if somebody is out there saying inject bleach into your arms, thats going to cure you or swallow domestos, that is clearly dangerous and crazy and that is going to endanger people. If it is people that we know are lockdown sceptics who are making the argument that lockdowns dont work or that you want herd immunity, i think i am in favour of allowing those to remain up, possibly with warnings, possibly with the tools that facebook have and other social media platforms that can suppress the veracity of those kind of messages but i think if you dont then what you are going to do is suppress those arguments into places like whatsapp where they cant be seen and they cant be confronted. It is difficult because the very notion an Oversight Board will sound to some people somewhat paternalistic. You know, the whole idea of the internet in a way was to level out information flows, to make them much less top down, make them more egalitarian in a way. And then when we learn that facebook is so worried about information flows and false information that it has to have people like you, members of the media establishment, sit on an Oversight Board and declare what facebook should and should not take down, it maybe sounds like the spirit of the internet is being lost. The people who created facebook and other media companies, modern media companies, Interactive Media companies, are mostly engineers and they are obviously brilliant engineers who have done an astonishing job of building their platforms but simultaneously they have unleashed human life in digitalform. So human life is wonderful and awful, dangerous and exhilarating. There are wonderful things around digital media, but there are some things that are hate filled and dangerous. I think it is probably a good thing that a Media Company has said to people notjust from the media but from the law, from human rights backgrounds, from academia, would you help us think about these issues . Because they are highly complex. We know that the battle for freedom of speech in this country in britain has taken 300 years and they are highly complex issues, these balancing issues between free speech and possible harms, so the reason ijoined this board is it seems to me the most important task to help the engineers think through the model, ethical, legal and free speech perspectives that are involved in what facebook is doing. It is difficult for me to condense the ideas in your book about the future of news into just a few simple sentences. I dont want to do you an injustice but when you write in the book for example about the brexit phenomenon in the uk and the triumph of donald trump in the 2016 election and the nature of his presidency as well, you make it plain that in your view there is a real problem that many people voted, expressed their democratic will, based on what you described as false information. At some points you suggest it was almost a form of brainwashing. It could be that on both of those issues, the rise of trump and brexit, you just disagree with the democratic outcome. I was no longer editing when brexit happened but i knew as a reader what i wanted. If you are going to go to people and ask them to make a direct vote, you want them to be as well informed as possible. It seems to me obvious that what a newspaper or a broadcasting organisations function is to give both sides of the argument, you equip them with the information they need to know in order to vote. Almost the last thing that matters is what your opinion as a newspaper owner or editor or proprietor is. I am not against of course people saying this is my opinion on how you should vote, but in fact a lot of the British Press did exactly the opposite. They started by saying this is how you should vote, this is what you believe, we wont give two sides of the argument and a lot of the front pages particularly towards the end became hectoring, menacing, bullying and all of this stuff about threatening mps who disagreed, all thejudges who were suddenly the enemies of the people. That seemed to me a real perversion of what news should be. If i may interrupt for a second, i guess my point is you are saying constantly this is a story or problem about journalism. I am saying maybe it is just an evolving democracy and that voices that havent been heard before are now being heard. People who felt voiceless before, some of whom, many of whom frankly are rather attracted to donald trump, in the uk maybe rather attracted to brexit, they are getting traction now and they are able to express their views via twitter, facebook and many other social media platforms in a way that they havent been able to do before. And you, if i may say so, a liberal elite, an established media elite who didnt really have to Pay Attention to those voices in the past, now will have to do. Yes, and of course i am totally in favour of that and there is lots of evidence that people are consulting many more sources than they did in the past. I am merely making a point about the position that journalism is to have in the future. Of course im arguing from a position in which i think journalists are essential. I think it is essential to have people in society who can say, this happened, that didnt happen, this is true, this isnt true, because in a world of information tales where you have no idea what is true and what isnt true and who you can trust, then societies become unworkable. Im not blaming the brexit result. That is not the way i would have voted myself, but i am saying that if News Organisations want to regain that kind of trust they are probably going to have to think about the environment in which they work on the 21st century, which is very different from the 20th century. Yes. You have had a long journalistic career. Even longer than mine. Do you think there ever was in your lifetime a golden age when the public really did invest huge amounts of trust in journalists . Well for a start they didnt have any option. That was one of the things when i began my career where if you owned a Printing Press or a broadcasting studio you more or less had a monopoly on what people consumed. That is a different point, that isnt about trust, that is about monopolistic access to the reader, listener or viewer, but there is a different point about trust. In the past, did people invest trust in what they read . It is about trust because if you had no other sources, those were the only sources that you had and the evidence seems to be that people did invest News Organisations with more trust. Now, of course, as youve said, they have multiple sources. They can check the version that they are reading on twitter or elsewhere. That has led to a quite startling kind of trust, not only in News Organisations but institutions more generally. Quite stark decline in trust. I want to talk about newspapers because you oversaw the most remarkable period in change in the newspaper business, and you were a pioneer of developing the guardian as an online brand it has become a Major International news brand thanks to its online presence. But its sales, and all newspaper sales, the literal paper copy, they are flailing and dying, and they will indeed terminally die very soon, iwould imagine. Does that matter . I dont think it matters whether you consume your newspaper on a mobile phone or a tablet or a computer or in print. I think it really does matter that newspapers or News Organisations themselves survive, they have an institutional importance and strength and role in developing the craft ofjournalism, so i think newspapers have no option but to do what the guardian did, which was to accept the fate of print was extremely time limited and try to do their best to navigate the new world of digital. Many newspapers are clearly not surviving, we have seen many go bust, but in particular we have seen a massive financial crisis in the local newspaper industry, in the united kingdom, many other parts of the world, very markedly in the United States as well. Does that really matter, that people seem to not really, if one can judge from their user habits, value local news as they used to . It couldnt matter more in my opinion, and maybe afterfour years of donald trump, in which youve had a president who has almost gone out of his way to say there is no such thing as truth, objective truth, you ought to believe me more than you believe one of the best newspapers in the world, the new york times. You have got this world in which we dont know who to believe, and it really matters that local communities, all communities have a way of knowing what is true and what isnt true, otherwise it cant work. We can see this in covid at the moment. If you dont believe there is a crisis then the government will have a real job in persuading people that their responses are right. Thats the dress rehearsal for Climate Change if you like. Of course local news matters, all news matters, and i suppose the book is a sort of plea for trying to regain the methods of trust that would lead people back to news that should be trusted, but we have to accept that journalism itself has got some way, some things about the way that is done that they have to fix. Maybe the entire landscape is evolving and you are not evolving with it. There is an element of you, and you are quite open about it, that is telling people that metaphorically, they have to eat their greens, they have to consume local news about planning and council meetings, and local political stand offs, because it is good for them and it is good for accountability and democracy, even if, frankly, many people find it utterly boring. Well, thats always been a function of Good Journalism i think, eat your greens, that bit. If we believe, as i do, that we are facing a crisis in climate, that is going to affect our children, grandchildren, in quite a short time span, it is the duty of journalists to keep reporting that, even if people dont want to read it very much. But how do you engage them and how to make sure they trust what you were saying . These are two elements that really matter for the future, engagement and trust. How do you rebuild it . The engagement bit, its whatjournalist should do, journalists need to work out how to dramatically, graphically, and repeatedly write about Climate Change that will grab the attention of the reader. In terms of trust, it all comes down to in the 21st century, transparency, it is no longer to say that i am a journalist, believe me, i work for this title, believe me. I am terribly interested when you look on these days, the best people on twitter, they dont expect you to believe them, they say here is my proposition, here is my screenshot, here is my link, if i have got it wrong, please tell me, i will correct it, im prepared to have that argument in public. These are 21st century techniques of trust, and im afraid theyre very different from how a lot ofjournalists of a certain age or mindset still work. One of the ironies, or possible ironies of your career, is that having spent so long in newspapers, believing in what newspapers do, you are now being paid by facebook, one of the worlds biggest social media operators, to sit on their Oversight Board, and in a sense give a fig leaf of accountability and transparency to a company which remains highly secretive about its core operations, about its algorithms, the way it uses data and personal information and privacy. Do you worry that you are being used . Of course. One of the conditions forjoining this board is that facebook have agreed to implement all our decisions. But your decisions, if i may interrupt, they are all about specific cases as you have just said to me, specific cases about covid information, about the use of nudity online, or anything else, i mean they are important, im not belittling them, but they are not what really matters about the public and facebook. What really matters there is the way in which facebook, without our knowledge, in so many different ways, monetises us and our personal behaviours. And we have no way of knowing how they do it, and your Oversight Committee is not going to be able to delve one inch into that. Step back a bit. What you have is a giant Media Organisation, probably the most powerful Media Organisation in the world at the moment, inviting in, if you like, a Supreme Court of people and saying we will obey your instructions about these highly inflammatory and important matters to do with freedom of speech and hate speech and incitement of violence and nudity and public health, and that is, i mean i cant think of a News Organisation that has done that, or had the humility to do that to. I agree with you where i think our role is limited, but i think what i hope will happen is that once we have started publishing ourjudgements, we might be in a good position to have a conversation with facebook and ask if we can start looking at other aspects of how you run this company. Im not disagreeing that it would be preferable in time to get, for instance, inside the algorithm and understand how that works. Interesting, you would like to get inside the algorithm. 0n the wider political point, in the United States we see efforts to change the so called section 230 of the Us Communications law, which safeguards facebook from being regarded as a publisher very good news for facebook, but us politicians are trying to change that, the eu is trying to take them on on the monopolistic aspects of corporations, in australia, corporations want facebook to pay for news. As a journalist, are you supporting all of these different efforts to rein in facebook . Of course. This is like gutenberg, like gutenberg on speed. There was a cataclysm on society after someone worked out a way to print books when monks had previously been hand writing them, and we have got that to the power of a billion now, so of course there will be problems as society rearranges itself, and my only caution is to say look, stop demanding that everyone does this by next tuesday, because otherwise we will not get good results, and if youre going to do the incredibly difficult work of balancing the freedom of expression that facebook represents at its best, with minimising the harms, with a kind of organisation that we dont even know how to describe, we have not yet agreed whether it is a platform or a publisher, and that whole section 230 debate, so we are dealing with something vast and immensely complex, and it will not be solved overnight, and it shouldnt be, because we would make bad mistakes if you did. It seems to me that all of your messages about information chaos are going to require the next generation of internet and media users to be much more internet and information literate, if they are to navigate through the chaos. Do you see signs that the next generation will be literate in that way . Well notjustjournalists but society more broadly. I think everyone will have to play that role. I would like to see internet literacy, Information Literacy taught in schools because i think by the time you are 16 or 17, you are going to have to do play a part in deciding how you think, what you think is true, who you think you can trust, and individual citizens and their choices about what they retweet or what they share or what they suppress are going to be really important because this is all at such a scale that its great having an Oversight Board, but in the end, each of us will have to bear our responsibility, and they will have to begin with a programme of media literacy, probably from a very early age. Alan rusbridger, fascinating to talk to you, thank you very much forjoining me on hardtalk. Good to be here. Hello there. Thursday was a really cold day in the midlands where the fog persisted. And its cold widely at the moment, of course, were got a widespread frost, and again, for many parts of the country, it could be quite icy out there as well. And in some areas, we are seeing some more sleet and snow falling. So, its a real mixture, some quite tricky conditions early in the morning, a wintry mixture. Weve got most of the patchy fog now across the south east of england by this stage. But with sleet and snow falling mainly across wales and Northern England, theres going to be a covering of snow for many, there could be even more than that over the pennines. A dry but icy start for Northern Ireland, and indeed for much of scotland, but a covering of snow for northern and eastern areas, the more persistent snow shouldve moved southwards by this stage, and the wintry showers that we are left with will soon fade away, so its going to turn dry and sunny for scotland and indeed for Northern Ireland. More cloud, though, for england and wales, again, a mixture of rain, sleet and mainly hill snow for Northern England and wales. A few wintry showers around elsewhere, and the fog will be lifting through the morning. A cold day wherever you are, temperatures, again, only 1 4 celsius. And as we head into the weekend, its going to be really cold start on saturday morning. A widespread quite sharp frost as well, some fog around in the morning across southern england to slowly lift, but otherwise england and wales looks dry and sunny. For scotland and Northern Ireland, the cloud will tend to increase as the winds pick up, and well see some wetter weather arriving in the north west of scotland. But another cold day, those temperatures in the afternoon, 2 4 degrees for many areas. The wetter weather thats coming into the north west on that second weather front there, and that will slip its way southwards on saturday night, but weaken. But we are left with more cloud across the northern half of the uk. Still some patches of fog in southern england. Southern areas, though, seeing a bright but cold day. More cloud for Northern England, Northern Ireland and scotland in particular, some further damp weather coming back in to Western Areas of scotland. Here, it should be a bit milder. And generally, those temperatures a degree or so higher on sunday. Things are going to get milder for many of us as we head into next week, as the winds come in from the atlantic. Notice that colder air still across parts of scotland, so there is the threat of some snow here. But generally, next week, looks much milder, but there will be some rain and some stronger winds as well. This is bbc news. Im Lewis Vaughan jones, with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. Donald trump finally issues a statement, saying he condemns the storming of the us capitol by his supporters. To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay. Joe biden says wednesdays events in washington mark one of the darkest days in us history, and hes blaming donald trump. The past four years, weve had a president whos made his co nte m pt a president whos made his contempt for our democracy, constitution, the rule of law, clear in everything he has done