Meet the Solutionists, with Mark Scott

Social media is now an inextricable part of our lives. It provides many social goods: connection to friends and family; more touchpoints to the world previously available only via mass media.

Yet the initial promise that social media might support democracy is souring, as increasing amounts of misinformation and disinformation flourish on these platforms.

With distrust in both legacy media and social media on the rise, how do we stay informed and maintain a civil society?

Alan Rusbridger is deeply interested in this question. Long-time editor-in-chief of The Guardian UK and current editor of Prospect Magazine, his achievements span traditional print media as well as The Guardian’s transition to a digital-first newspaper. A supporter of social media from its earliest days, Alan also serves on Meta’s Advisory Group.

On a recent visit to Australia, Alan discussed nothing less than media and the future of democracy with Mark Scott in a live event at the University of Sydney.

Mark Scott  00:01

This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for tens of thousands of years. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Mark Scott  00:29

It's 2011. Newspaper editor Alan Rusbridger is in an almost deserted hotel in Libya, and he writes it's very eerie walking down the deserted corridors in the echoing lobby, there's a check made grand piano that's seen better days. I run my fingers over the keys, several of which are stuck. Let me give you the context. Libya is in the midst of a civil war. Alan's the Editor in Chief at The Guardian and one of his best Middle East reporters is missing. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is making life hell for the newspaper too, 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 war zone. I think there's something poetic about putting down your phone in a moment like this, even just for a few minutes, to connect with yourself, with music and with history. It's something I think about more often as our modern media environment gets increasingly confused and confusing.

Mark Scott  01:56

Alan Rusbridger was Editor in Chief of The Guardian for two decades, editing breaking stories like Edward Snowden revealing mass surveillance by the US government and the News of the World phone packing scandal. Alan now edits Prospect Magazine in the UK, and he's a member of Meta’s oversight board, a group that makes decisions on what content should be allowed on Facebook and Instagram. Alan Rusbridger joined me recently at a special live event at the University of Sydney, and in this conversation, we talk about where the news business is headed in the future and what it means for truth and democracy.

Mark Scott  02:43

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 it’s 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?

Alan Rusbridger  03:09

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 it 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.

Mark Scott  04:08

So let's get close to home. One of the great symbols of the changing of the garden the media world is Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News and News Corporation, which in Australia includes the Australian and the 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 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'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?

Alan Rusbridger  04:56

Well, in a way, it's rather sad story. I think if Murdoch had retired as a normal age, given up around the age of 70, is 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. 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 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 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 or 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.

Mark Scott  06:44

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.

Alan Rusbridger  07:19

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. 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 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. Well, I can't think of a company in the world where somebody who had overseen an 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.

Mark Scott  08:41

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 Lauchlan 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.

Alan Rusbridger  09:17

I find that a picture that is difficult to recognise, really. I mean, in the UK certainly, you know, 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, it's. 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 the 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.

Mark Scott  10:24

Reflecting on some of these Media Barons 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, the 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 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?

Alan Rusbridger  11:18

Well, they’re all very different. I mean, the obvious thing is scale. 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 day, and Zuckerberg platform reaches about 2.5 billion people a day, so that the scale of what's going on has shifted enormously. 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 with Murdoch and Musk. 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 our running commentary almost by the hour, and who is in total control of the speech of 300 million people, and he's using it. He's speaking. When he speaks, he speaks to an audience of 200 million people. So there's nothing in history that comes close to the power of these new guys and Bezos is different too. 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.

Mark Scott  13:01

Bezos has said that on the opinion pages of The Washington Post, 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?

Alan Rusbridger  13:47

I'm afraid, sir, 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 are 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 and political vision as pathetic really, because 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 strange. I mean, what 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. I mean, there was just no meaningful commentary there at all. The moment you've got a proprietor who's sort of issuing edicts like that, you completely disempower the staff.

Mark Scott  15:14

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 matter has changed in recent years?

Alan Rusbridger  15:30

Well, the reason I joined, as I said at the beginning, I'd 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 fascinating, and Meta is obliged to do what we say. So if we say it was a mistake to leave that up, take it down, that they will do that. And alternatively, if they took something down and it should, we'd say, actually, you should. You should have kept it up. Ditto, and those, those should be, that should have precedential value. So they then say, well, look, 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. On January the seventh, 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 or 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 agree with Trump. So Zuckerberg is going to have to decide whether to change his entire governance of 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.

Mark Scott  18:08

Do you think it's likely that one day you'll just open the email and find the oversight board is no more?

Alan Rusbridger  18:13

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, it's not a small story.

Mark Scott  19:12

Yeah, just on the tech bros one, 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 accession. What's all that about?

Alan Rusbridger  19:33

I don't know. There 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.

Mark Scott  20:23

Well, we 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?

Alan Rusbridger  21:04

Yes, yes, and no, I think, I mean, yes, there's, 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 it is fascinating in terms of depths and contexts. We'll be talking 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. 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 there'll be a few people walking out of The Post. I mean, the difficulty with with Substack is, 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.

Mark Scott  22:50

I think if you speak to journalists, 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?

Alan Rusbridger  23:24

Well, I think clearly there are ethical and practical difficulties, and 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 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, 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 organisation like the ABC or the BBC could be the spine where you had every meeting or court or planning authority would be recorded and would have an AI transcript produced. And possibly go further than that and start generating stories. Now, of course, you'd have to be really sure that AI was not hallucinating or making mistakes. You might want to check every word that goes in, but to have that enormous database of everything everywhere being recorded and being searchable would be an astonishing thing. So, I think, you know, in 10, 20 years time, I would be amazed if AI wasn't a really, really powerful tool for journalists to use.

Mark Scott  25:14

One of the challenges that the media faces is, 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 organisation. How do we rebuild trust in the media?

Alan Rusbridger  25:35

It's such a complicated question. I was reading, there's a little start up called Sematore, and it comes in my email every Monday morning, run by Ben Smith, who used to run BuzzFeed and Sematore 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 swilling 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.

Mark Scott  28:35

You're involved with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and 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?

Alan Rusbridger  29:05

It's certainly measurable. So the guys who wrote that report for Reuters, Ken, 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, for a long time I was following there's a photographer in Gaza called Motaz Azaiza, whose picture, 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, 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 it is format. You know, if you do a great Tiktok and can explain something in a minute, in a 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.

Mark Scott  30:58

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?

Alan Rusbridger  31:10

Well, I did this big campaign. I wasn't a big one for campaigns when I was running The Guardian, because I think 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, No, actually, it's right that there's, 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 known 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.

Mark Scott  32:42

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 is Julian Assange is 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?

Alan Rusbridger  33:06

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 there is a breed of journalists who defines journalism so narrowly, and they weren't willing to admit 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.

Mark Scott  33:59

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?

Alan Rusbridger  34:21

Well, it's sort of rather weird that the person that Donald Trump has put in charge of national security at 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 would be 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, which was that the UK Government demanded of Apple that they needed access to the iCloud and the 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 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.

Mark Scott  35:35

Too, 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?

Alan Rusbridger  36:16

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 Leveson 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, 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 didn't want to go near that man and his organisation, quite rightly, because they knew that 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's got the money to buy the silence of these people. But we can see in the paperwork allegations that MPs, the MPs who were questioning Murdoch, you suddenly got a tail on your people would start bugging on your phones, and so that sort of sense of impunity. What can I say? People started going to roof at Murdoch's parties again, you know? So the, I think the criminality has stopped, but the impunity is still there.

Mark Scott  38:06

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?

Mark Scott  38:23

That's Alan Russ Bridger, the Editor of Prospect magazine. Alan joined me for a live conversation in the Great Hall at the University of Sydney. If you enjoyed hearing about the intersection of media, technology and democracy, you'll also like my conversation with Lenore Taylor, the Editor of The Guardian in Australia.

Lenore Taylor  38:44

They've always been content farms. People sort of just flooding the internet with information dressed up as news, but with AI, the ability to do that is just infinite.

Mark Scott  38:56

You can find that episode on the solutionist website and in your podcast feed. Now, the Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney produced by Deadset Studios. Our particular thanks to Heidi Atkins and her team for their technical support for this live recording.

The Solutionists is podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. 

This episode was produced by Liam Riordan with sound design by Jeremy Wilmot. Supervising producer is Andrea Ho. Executive editors are Kellie Riordan, Jen Peterson-Ward, and Mark Scott. Strategist is Ann Chesterman. Thanks to the technical staff at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room.

This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.