The Solutionists live with Alan Rusbridger

<p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>So it’s 2011, and Alan Rusbridger is in an almost-deserted hotel in Libya.</p> <p>Alan writes, “It is very eerie walking down the deserted corridors, past empty bedrooms to my own. In the echoing downstairs lobby there's a Czech-made Petrof grand piano that has seen better days. I run my fingers over the keys, several of which are stuck.”</p> <p>Let me give you the context. Libya is in the middle of a civil war, and one of the Guardian's best Middle East reporters is missing. Meanwhile, Julian Assange is making life hell for the paper's then Editor-in-Chief, but Alan's made himself a promise he will learn Chopin's most famous solo piano piece, even if he has to practice on a busted hotel piano in a warehouse. I think there's something poetic about putting your phone down in a moment like that, even just for a few minutes, to connect with yourself, with music and with history. In that way, it's perhaps something we all daydream about more and more often in our modern media environment that seems increasingly chaotic and confusing. So let's see if we can find some music in the current madness.</p> <p>Alan Rusbridger was editor in chief of The Guardian from 1995 to 2015, overseeing enormous stories like Edward Snowden revealing mass surveillance by the US government; the News of the World phone hacking scandal; and the saga of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.</p> <p>Alan now edits and writes for Prospect magazine, out of the UK, and he's also a member of Meta's Oversight Board, a group of experts from around the world that exercises independent judgment and makes binding decisions on what content should be allowed on Facebook and Instagram.</p> <p>So Alan, you've been in the news business for decades now, but especially in the last few years, you've been thinking and writing a lot about the news business and its impact on democracy. You wrote a book called 'Breaking News' in 2018 about the destructive impact of technology on journalism. A few things have happened since 2018. Do you think things are getting any better? How optimistic are you?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Broadly? No, all the trends that I was writing about in 2018 have been accentuated, so the economic basis for journalism has got worse. I'm sure we're going to talk about owners and the kind of people that want to buy media and how they're behaving. And social media, which, you know, I've always been a social media optimist, and I think, unlike a lot of journalists who just didn't want anything to do with it, from the start, I liked a lot about social media. I like less about it now I think that the great promise that held out, has gone, and then we've got this wave of populism, which almost deliberately sets out to discredit journalism, and I think it's doing quite successfully. So I mean, I'm sure we'll find some shards of optimism in our talk, but I think the general trend has not been good.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>So let's get close to home. One of the great symbols of the changing of the guard of the media world is Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News and News Corporation, which in Australia, includes The Australian and Sydney's Daily Telegraph. Rupert Murdoch, globally, still wields enormous power, possibly the only media baron who can get Donald Trump on the phone, can get Anthony Albanese on the phone, but there's been extraordinary reporting in recent weeks about his empire being at risk because of in fighting around the family trust. In a way, he's last of the old style media barons. How do you think that's going to play out? And what would the demise of News Corp and Murdoch mean for news as we consume it?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Well, in a way, it's rather sad story. I think if Murdoch had retired at a normal age, given up around the age of 70, his obituaries would have been much more positive than they will be when he does die, because a lot of bad things have happened that last 25 years.</p> <p>You know, the phone hacking scandal, which has cost him nearly a billion pounds and counting. There was the Fox-Dominion scandal, which was really about the whole character and style and dishonesty of the company, the way that he's run it. And so on and so forth. So, you know, a lot of bad things have happened in the last 20 years, and now we have this rather pathetic side, I think, of somebody trying to control the company from beyond the grave. I mean, we've all lived with proprietors who have been desperate to exert their power in while alive. But I don't think we've ever seen a press proprietor who has tried to remake a family trust so that the company that he's created continues in one political conservative position after he's died, and to do that at the cost of a terrible breach in your the relationship with your kids is sort of unimaginable to most people. So it's, I mean, of course, anyone who's watched Succession as a piece of entertainment drama will be gruesomely fascinated by the details that have emerged, but you can't help feeling this as a sad ending to a remarkable career.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>When you look at the impact that he still clearly has over the Australian newspaper business, in particular, over key Fleet Street titles, over Fox News – to what extent do you think it's Rupert Murdoch himself who's the special source on that execution and that, irrespective of if it's Lachlan or someone else who's running the business, it just isn't the same without Rupert, exercising that sense of fierce control over what this company stands for?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>It's, it's him. You can't get away from it. He has set the ethical tone, the political tone, the commercial tone of that company. And you know the very fact that you know the two most prominent contenders for the job, Lachlan and James, his sons, are completely different in political outlook and in what they would like to do with that company, shows you that actually it all comes up to him at the top, and he's run the company in a very unique way.</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>I mean, for instance, during the phone hacking scandal, you know, his son was at the top of the operation in London, but underneath was a woman called Rebecca Brooks, who was, who Murdoch is very loyal to, very fond of – her position became intolerable. She left, was paid something like 10 million pounds in a payoff. She stood trial, she was acquitted, and then Murdoch rehired her.</p> <p>Well, I can't think of a company in the world where somebody who had overseen ethical catastrophe within the company, would then be rehired, but that's the way that he runs the company, and so in the end, you have to say it's all him.</p> <p>Do you think, you know it's interesting, if you look at The New York Times reporting in particular on that case, I mean, the case in Nevada, Murdoch saying that he has to keep control of this trust, and passed it on to Lachlan because of the unique contribution it's making to a conservative voice in global media. Is there something in the critique that says mainstream media is too often or so often liberal and left-leaning, and it's Murdoch that's been providing the counterweight to that prevailing view?</p> <p>I find that a picture that is difficult to recognise, really. I mean in the UK certainly, when we came to the Brexit referendum, which was probably the most consequential decision that Brits had to make since the last war, that was overwhelmingly two to one conservative papers against remaining papers, Brexit papers. So you've got The Mail, you've got The Express, you've got The Telegraph as well as the Murdoch papers. So this idea that it's a sort of sea of liberalism, and that Murdoch is the lone character who is putting the other point of view. It just has an old water I mean, in the last week, and I'm sure we're going to come on and talk about this, we've got the new, well, not so new owner of The Washington Post, essentially saying he wants to turn his paper into something more like the Wall Street Journal, which is a Murdoch paper. So to claim that these are the warriors who are holding back a tide of liberal content, I think it just doesn't hold up.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>And where do you think Murdoch fits now. You've got that circumstance where Elon Musk seems to be camping in the White House. You've seen what Mark Zuckerberg is doing as well. We'll talk more about him and Jeff Bezos, as you suggested. Do you think Murdoch is still as influential on this American president and on American policymaking as he once was given the new proprietors who were influential?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>There was a remarkable picture about three weeks ago, within the first week of Trump's second presidency, of Trump sitting behind his big desk signing executive orders, and therein the corner of the room was Rupert Murdoch in a suit and trainers. And you think, what's what's he doing there? He's 93, he claims to have given up his newspaper, his media empire, the control of it. And so I think the answer is, he is, he's obsessed. He knows he's going to the grave sooner rather than later, because he's just very old, and he's still clinging on. So I think it's not the same as at his peak, but it's still there.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>Reflecting on some of these media barons, I mean, and Australia had not just Murdoch, but the Packer family and the Fairfax family. Media was their dominant business, less so for Murdoch now, or more diverse now, but for a lot of time media barons, they were running big media entities, particularly news entities. Those who are influential now, you've got just Bezos, who bought the Washington Post, but he's the billionaire owner of Amazon. You've got Elon Musk with all his businesses, but only Twitter. You've got Zuckerberg as well, more dominant around his media outlet. How do you compare the impact now of these, particularly the technology companies around politics, compared to the influence of the old media barons?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Well they're all very different. I mean, the obvious thing is scale that Murdoch's Times newspaper in Britain sells about a million; doesn't sell. He reaches about a million people a day, but Elon Musk's platform reaches about 300 million people a day, and Zuckerberg's platform reaches about 2.5 billion people a day, so that the scale of what's going on has shifted enormously.</p> <p>Zuckerberg is a strange character in that he's not really interested. I mean, he's taken, he's really taken news off Facebook. So he his influence is not direct in the sense that it is with Murdoch and Musk.</p> <p>And Musk, there's never been a creature like him. I mean, there's never been a press owner who's actually inside the White House, who is keeping up a running commentary almost by the hour, and who is in total control of the speech of 300 million people, and is using it, he is speaking. When he speaks, he speaks to an audience of 200 million people that there's nothing in history that comes close to the power of these news – new guys – and Bezos is different too.</p> <p>You know, Bezos was for about five or six years, rather a good owner of The Washington Post, and kept out of it. And I think it can only be fear that is now motivating him to try and essentially neuter the voice of a great newspaper.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>Bezos has said that on the opinion pages of The Washington Post though they'll only carry views that are supportive of personal liberties and free markets, which is even further than The Washington Post; than The Wall Street Journal does. The Wall Street Journal may have an ideological position on its op-ed page, but it actually does encourage debate and discussion and discourse there. Do you think the Bezos approach through that and also, I suppose the decision some months ago to at the 11th hour, pull the editorial in support of Kamala Harris – does it fundamentally erode the strength of that masthead? And are you pessimistic about the future of The Washington Post under that kind of ownership now?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>I'm afraid so. It's a kind of anti-journalistic thing to do. I mean, I'm not sure what has qualified Bezos to think that he can run a newspaper better than the people who are already running it, or better than journalists. And this idea that he will have comment pages, but they can only really have commentary that coincides with his broad economic political vision is pathetic, really, because it excludes, it deliberately excludes so much rich argument that a paper should have, a paper, should be argumentative and surprising and challenging, and just to read pieces that are in favour of free markets and individual liberty is so, so strange. </p> <p>I mean, what Trump is doing, Trump is doing on tariffs, is not exactly to do with free markets. Does that mean that Bezos would never allow any criticism of Donald Trump? I mean, in the wake of the extraordinary showdown between Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office, I turned to The Washington Post to see how they would handle it, and for about 24 hours, you could see they didn't know how to handle it. There was just no meaningful commentary there at all. As of this morning, there's a rather stomach churning piece which just attacks Zelensky and said he's got it all wrong and one piece attacking Trump, but, but the moment you've got a proprietor who's sort of issuing edicts like that, you completely disempower the staff.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>Tell us what it's like to be on the Meta Oversight Board, and why did you accept the invitation to join it, and has your role on that board evolved over time as meta has changed in recent years?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Well, the reason I joined, as I said at the beginning, I rather like most social media, and I think it's an incredibly important force in the world, and it affects the speech of literally billions of people. And the one thing that we've learned about speech through the centuries is that you don't want governments anywhere near controlling the speech of people. And I would say you don't want Mark Zuckerberg controlling the speech of people. So if it's not to be Mark Zuckerberg, and it's not to be governments that sort of is inviting a group of people who are independent of either to try and make choices about really difficult things. It's almost like a sort of taking a class in philosophy. Sometimes there are 21 of us. We're around the world. We've come from a variety of backgrounds, and we're dealing with the limits of speech. Should there be any limits to speech? What are the likely consequences of hateful, bullying, violent speech, pornography, blasphemy, protection of children, political speech? And so each one of the cases we take is is fascinating, and matters obliged to do what we say. So if we say it was a mistake to leave that up, take it down, they will do that. And alternatively, if they took something down and it should we say, actually, you should, you should have kept it up. Ditto, and those, those should be that should have presidential value. So they then say, well, look that that case is like the one that they judged on. And we could also do policy papers where we say, you're getting this wrong, or you should be running the company in a different way. I think it's been really interesting and valuable.</p> <p> On January 7th, I think it was Mark Zuckerberg then announced a series of sweeping changes to the way that they were going to think about that moderation of content. And you've got some crazy people now in around the White House who think, literally, that any attempt at moderation is censorship. So Zuckerberg has got a decision, because 95% of Facebook users don't live in America, and we know that half Americans don't believe that Trump. Don't agree with Trump, so Zuckerberg is going to have to decide whether to change his entire governance of his this incredible thing that he's built in order to suit 2.5% of the users. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>Do you think it's likely that one day you'll just open the email and find the Oversight Board is no more?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>I think, I think that's entirely possible. I think it would be short sighted, because there is this thing called the rest of the world, and certainly in Europe, and I think probably in Australia, people are, well – I know in Australia, people are saying, actually, we do have to place guardrails around content, and we do expect the companies to be in some sense, responsible for what they're publishing. So in Europe, you have the potential of enormous fines for Facebook if they can't prove that they have got systems in place. So if they're going to just scrap all the systems, then Europe's going to come after them. And I think that could trigger, you know, a big standoff between Trump, who will then reach for his tariffs. So it's not a small story.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>Yeah. Just on the tech bros. One of the things is, they do project as tech bros. You know, Zuckerberg himself has kind of done over his style and his personality brand, and you yourself, has written about Zuckerberg's manliness obsession. What's all that about?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>I don't know. It was this gruesome three hour podcast with Joe Rogan, in which they spent the first 20 minutes, 30 minutes comparing neck size and how you pump up your neck size in order to be more manly. And then there was a bizarre sequence where they spent about 40 minutes discussing how to shoot a pig, and whether it was better to shoot a pig with a gun or with a bow and arrow, and Zuckerberg was trying to do all this sort of banter as though he had actually been out there shooting pigs with bows and arrows. And it sort of feeds into this sort of white masculinity Andrew Tate style. I mean, a lot of it just doesn't feel very normal.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>Well, the podcast here has reached an interesting dividing point. We could go into pig shooting versus with a bow and arrow or a rifle, or we can get on to other matters. Let's move on to other matters. Green shoots, you know, we've got Substack newsletters, we've got phenomenal growth in podcasting as a sector, specialist reporting, hyper local content. Are you confident that in this era of vastly fragmented media, great content is still being produced, and audiences can find it, and there's a pathway to monetisation around some of these?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Yes. Yes and no, I think, I mean, yes, there are still great journalists doing great journalism, and there are new forms of journalism. We're doing one right now, podcasting, which, you know, wasn't really a thing 20 years ago and now is a huge, huge industry, and is fascinating in terms of depths and context, you know, we will be talking for about 45 minutes. The average slot on the Today program of the BBC is about two and a half minutes. So you can, you can explore subjects in much greater depth. Nothing, nothing not to like about it. </p> <p>Substack is, I love. And you've got, increasingly, writers who had very prestigious posts elsewhere. And I'm thinking Paul, someone like Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist, walked out of The New York Times because he wanted the freedom to write more freely on Substack. I imagine, you know, there'll be a few people walking out of The Post. I mean, the difficulty with Substack is I, you know, I will pay for two Substacks, three Substacks. I don't want to pay for 20 Substacks, because that would become really, really expensive. And also, when you're a Substack writer, you're entirely on your own. And that experience that you and I had, Mark, when you were at the ABC and I was at The Guardian, that we would stand behind a writer and defend stories or defend opinion pieces, they're very much on their own there, and I just can't see how that is resilient – editorially or financially, but let's praise it while it's there.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>One of the interesting things that's happened in the UK is the purchase, or the the Tortoise Media signing a deal to buy The Observer. You know, this UK digital startup, part of the slow media movement moving in on one of the iconic titles of Fleet Street. What do you make of that deal? And do you think we'll see other deals like that over time?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>It's a classic disruptive move, isn't it? So you have these very august institutions and in the current economic technological climate, it doesn't take much for the for the disruptor to come in and disrupt. So The Observer, which I've got great fondness for, has been around 200 and something years, was nested within the Guardian but I think, to put it kindly, found it difficult to create a separate identity, because it sailed under the Guardian identity and lost a bit of money, not – I think we had got losses down within control. And along comes James and says, Look, I'll take it off your hands. I can give it a new afresh, this identity.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>– James Harding who used to run the BBC news</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>– Yeah, used to run the BBC News. He was editor at the time, still Murdoch sacked him. He said, Look, I've got 15 million pounds, and let's make a go of it that I think the reason it became such a hot potato is because behind the Guardian is an endowment of 1.3 billion pounds. And if you're an Observer journalist who thought, I can go work for James Harding, who's got 15 million, or I can stay where I've got with my 1.3 billion, and let's hope that it succeeds. James is a very good editor. Tortoise is a good thing, but I suspect they will burn through the money, and they will find it harder to get subscribers than they say they will, and that could be put the Observer in jeopardy. So, you know –</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>– So an opportunity, but the vulnerability is enhanced as well.</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Yeah. I mean, they face the classic problem that everybody has faced, that you can have 100,000 people who buy the paper, if you say, well, actually, we want you to pay for a digital subscription instead. That's a very hard negotiation to do. I mean, let's hope you can do it.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>I think if you speak to journalists, you know they can be pretty worried about AI tools, and what AI tools can mean to the future of journalism and over time, whether you can train these instruments to write perfectly credible stories, which will be valued by the readership. But I've heard you speak, in a sense, more optimistically about what AI can do to fill some of the gaps that exist around journalism today. How do you think through the AI challenge and opportunity?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Well I think clearly there are ethical and practical difficulties. And you know the number one rule is, I think you have to be transparent with the audience and say, tell them whether they're reading the work of a human being or a machine, but much of the work that that I used to do, and anybody who went to work on a local newspaper 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago, you would be covering all the bodies that exercised power or spent our money. So you'd be looking at the police, the health service, you'd be in all the courts, you'd be in all the council meetings. You'd be looking at the planning inquiries, blah, blah, blah, or there would always be a reporter in the room, and those days have gone because the advertising that paid for those reporters has now gone elsewhere. So you've got democracy that is operating in darkness, and people have begun to start suggesting that actually an organization like the ABC or the BBC could be the spine where you had every every meeting or court or planning authority would be recorded and would have an AI transcript produced, and possibly go further than that and and start generating stories. Now, of course, you'd have to be really sure that that AI was. Not hallucinating, making mistakes. You might want to check every word that goes in. But to have that, that enormous database of everything, everywhere, being recorded and being searchable would be an astonishing thing. So I think you know, in 1020, years time, I would be amazed if AI wasn't a really, really powerful tool in in for journalists to use.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>One of the challenges that the media faces is that it's, you know, they're great public institutions, but trust in institutions are declining everywhere, trust in government, trust in universities, like the one we're in now, trust in media organisations. How do we rebuild trust in the media?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>It's such a complicated question. I was reading there's a little start up called Semafor, and it comes in my email every Monday morning, run by Ben Smith, who used to run Buzzfeed and Semafor had a series of charts this morning, which shows for the first time ever, more Americans don't, positively don't trust the media than do. So it's an all-time low in trust in media, but this has been a declining pattern for decades now, and the response of journalists has generally been to shrug as though it's got nothing to do with them or their art. And I think the problem is that even after 200 years, let's say journalism as a craft, is 200 years old. There are things that we can't agree we just haven't discussed or thought about deeply enough. So very fundamental thing, if you train for journalism school in America, you will be taught that objectivity is the most important thing that you come completely as a blank sheet of paper to any story, and you will never display any prejudice. If you go to any British journalism school, you're likely to be taught that objectivity is a phantasm. It can't exist that we're all human beings who bring our prejudices to bear in the choices that we make the stories. Well, that's two completely different ways of expressing the art of journalism, and I think that readers can sniff this, readers and viewers, and what they keep saying is that we don't want comment mixed with news. And yet, in an awful lot of news organisations, comment and news are almost intermingled. And so I think that's one of the main reasons for distrust. I mean, in that same story this morning, Mark Thompson, who used to run the BBC and now run CNN, was trying to be sort of breezy about it and saying, well, you know, want my readers to be my views to be distrustful, which I think is a bit sort of too clever by half. Yeah, because actually, what we're talking about is a catastrophic loss of trust at the very time when we're swimming in disinformation, misinformation. And I think there needs to be a very fundamental conversation amongst journalists about how we get back to this craft. We should be able to say to people, we have a craft of getting near the truth. We have a craft for getting at facts. It's a toolkit, and we are the people who can do it. And the fact that fewer and fewer people believe that now is really dangerous.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>You're involved with the Reuters Institute for the Study of journalism. And you know, one of their recent reports has said that interest in news is declining and news avoidance is increasing. It might just be our background is in news and journalism. I think you could say the world has never been more extraordinary and more fascinating, and the news has ever been, never been more important. So what do you attribute to that decline of interest in news and the increase in news avoidance?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>It's certainly measurable. So the guys who wrote that report for Reuters can, it's bit like trust. You can see usage of news falling off, and there are a number of reasons. I think one is distrust. I will go and find sources of news. Which might be my friends on Facebook or Reddit or wherever, because I trust them more than I trust conventional news. A lot of it is that the news is so terrible, you know, I mean, for a long time I was following, there's a photographer in Gaza called Motaz Azaiza who, whose pictures were just, I mean, shattering, and he had a following of 17 million. So he was probably the most famous journalist in the world at that point. But boy, did you need a strong stomach to look at it. In so, you know, and I think Ukraine is the same; climate change. There's evidence that says that people are terrified by the thought of climate change. They can't really bear to read about it, because they think, I don't know what I can do about it. So I think there are many reasons behind it. And, you know, people are coming up, you know, some of this format, you know, if you do a great TikTok and can explain something in a minute, in a really punchy way, that's a very valuable thing to be able to do. And then there are, for instance, in climate change, there are people who say, Well, we must, we must stop terrifying people. So let's change our approach to writing about climate change or broadcasting about climate change. Let's give people hope and solutions about how we're going to solve this, because people cannot bear to be frightened by it. So I think it's a variety of approaches.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>And if you are editing a big newspaper again, would you have a strategy to how to get people interested in those stories, interested in news again?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Well, I did this big campaign. I wasn't a big one for campaigns when I was running The Guardian, because I think, you know, again, you get this blurring of comment and fact. But we did do campaign called 'Keep it in the ground', and the thought of that was to try and get readers who we knew were switching off reading about climate change to feel that they could do something. And the whole strategy was to take the most polluting companies and for readers to try and do personal divestment from it. And it was quite an interesting campaign, because I think we thought it was a bit, we sort of thought of it was a bit like tobacco or arms or apartheid. You know, this was, these were moral cases. And in fact, it was taken up by the Governor of the Bank of England who said, actually, it's right that there's so much oil and gas that we've already got out of the ground that we can't burn and still stay safe, that it's going to become an economic question about what economists know as stranded assets. So it was a campaign that actually had a huge effect, and it was, it was a way of trying to think, well, what can we do about climate change that will get people to read because we know they're not reading it. And I think probably you have to a bit more imagination about different techniques and ways of engaging these viewers and readers who can't bear to think about some of this stuff.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>We're almost at the end of time. But I just want to go back to some of the biggest stories you ran when you were editing The Guardian, WikiLeaks. As Julian Assange is back in Australia, back on Australian soil, after spending nearly seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and five years in Belmarsh prison. Do you think Assange can now consider himself a free man?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Yeah, yeah. I think in the sense that nobody's going to lock him up again or persecute him, I think he's done his time. I don't know what the future will hold for him or how people will see him. I think journalists were very cavalier about the way that he was treated and the threat that if they went for him, they would then go for us, I think, was not a connection that people made. And I think there is a breed of journalists who defines journalism so narrowly, and they weren't willing to admit that that Julian was in some sense as a journalist, not in all senses, but in some sense as a journalist. And so they weren't willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with him in this really quite important battle, which was really trying to criminalise certain sorts of reporting.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>And Edward Snowden is a similar figure, though, from the US, and after revealing the mass surveillance of citizens by his government, he fled the country. He ended up in Russia, where you met with him, and he's lived there ever since. Do you ever see a world where Snowden can one day move around freely again?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>Well, it's sort of rather weird that the person that Donald Trump has put in charge of national security, Tulsi Gabbard, in her confirmation hearings, she was challenged two or three times to denounce Edward Snowden, and she wouldn't. And there is a kind of sort of libertarian, you know, a lot of the supports of Snowden came from the right, not from the left, where you think it was being more likely to come because of the libertarian rights, fear of the state and their powers over the individual so, I mean, history could surprise us. It could be something else happened last week, which was that the UK Government demanded of Apple that they needed access to the iCloud and Apple products through a, you know, a back door that would essentially render encryption meaningless. And Donald Trump was asked about this and said, that's the kind of thing that goes on in China. So the these, these ideas of of the state's power to keep us under surveillance. I think weirdly, might, he might get a better hearing from Trump than he would would have done from Biden or Obama.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>About the state's power to keep us under surveillance. Finally, the huge story where you identified the media's power to keep us under surveillance through the phone hacking story, truly a shocking revelation at its industrial scale around the morality and the ethics of media and big traditional media companies. Do you think the world has changed since those stories have been written, and do you think people can have greater confidence in the ethics and morality of traditional media organisations as they go about their work now, in a post phone hacking world?</p> <p>ALAN RUSBRIDGER</p> <p>I would be surprised if there was mass criminality going on inside newsrooms nowadays in the way that there was, and it wasn't just the Murdoch organisation. It had become endemic and a complete disregard for people's privacy. It was, it was like, if you worked in one of those newsrooms, there was no such thing as privacy. So I think that has changed. I think the system of regulation that was set up after Levison has proved to be pretty feeble, like the system that existed before. And that sort of moment where people stopped going to Rupert Murdoch's parties, it was he sort of suddenly people thought, Oh, my God, this is what we always knew. And there's the real sense of fear amongst the police, politicians, regulators, other journalists, MPs, they they didn't want to go near that man and his organisation, quite rightly, because they knew that this was, this was a vicious organisation that would take them down. And what's come out in the paperwork of these hearings that I think now will not go ahead because Murdoch got the money to buy the silence of these people. But we can see in the paperwork allegations that MPs who were questioning Murdoch, you suddenly got a tail on you. People would start bugging you on your phones. And so that sort of sense of impunity. What can I say? People have started going to roof at Murdoch's parties again, you know? So the, I think the criminality has stopped, but the impunity in the impunity is still there.</p> <p>MARK SCOTT</p> <p>You've been listening to Alan Rusbridger, the editor of Prospect magazine, who's joined me in conversation here at the Great Hall at the University of Sydney. Will you thank Alan for joining us today?</p> <p>This has been a live recording for The Solutionists, a podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset Studios. Our thanks to Heidi Atkins and her team for their technical support today.</p>